  The talk is a brief overview of what we recently learned about excited
hadronic matter from heavy ion collisions. The central issue is that the
systems produced do exhibit macroscopic behavior, it flows and we start getting
some idea about its effective Equation of State (EoS). More specifically, we
concentrate on elliptic flow, from SPS to RHIC energies, as well as on particle
composition and fluctuations. Note that a pressure and the rate of fluctuation
relaxation (discussed at the end) are ultimately a measure of a collision rate
in the system we would like to understand.
