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Published: April 3rd 2012
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The Danube
Well there's a river. I might've appreciated this more if I'd had my only ID form at the time... Well it's been a few weeks since I updated this, and mercifully, Robbie's much better at uploading Fotos than I am, so now I've got about a million pictures to pull on for this update. Anyways, the past few weeks have been idly spent in Belgium, which is mercifully less interesting, and therefore less taxing on my writing skills. Short answer? I wrote a paper, and slept in sunlight for a weeks, it's been pretty good. So after Bulgaria, what happened (I know you're all keen to ? Well:
Welcome to Romania! Say goodbye to your passport! Romania and Bulgaria rest outside the Schengen zone, and are accorded a special status in the EU slightly higher than "leper" but this meant we had to actually get our passes stamped when we crossed the Danube by train. Normally this wouldn't be a problem but the trip from VT to a city in Romania called Brasov lasted something like 14 hours (strangely nostalgic as our train moved a pace that would've annoyed even the most geriatric of senior drivers. The Danube came at the halfway point, and border security took the passports for maybe half an hour before we reached
Brasov
Oh look, happier times. the Romanian side. In short, we all had a minor panic attack. The thing is, they didn't have anything to scan it with on the train, so they read off our numbers and marched out with them. We were all a little relieved when they finally came back in the end, though that didn't really make missing our connection by ten minutes any more fun. We got into Brasov at something like 11 at night, and promptly passed out.
I want to suck your tourist money! Blah! Being in Wallachia, it seemed wrong to miss out on the castles and what have you in the region, so we made a trip out to what was supposedly Dracula's castle. I say supposedly, because the actual place is a pile of rubble. That tends to happen when people finally get around to smoking a despot out of power for the third time. Funnily enough, Vlad Dracul's reputation is far more mixed here than it is in the west. Did he impale people? Sure, I think the technical term is "by the carload lot", but he was also trapped in a relentless war with the Ottoman empire, and as
This works
Suitably ominous right? Hard to see how a white castle can look menacing, but that's Romania for you it turns out, even hardened Janissaries lose their collective shit when they spot their entire predecessor's army impaled according to rank on their border. Throw in some angry nobles and the man had a full plate, and in spite of an uncanny Terminator-like (maybe Vampire-like?) ability to come back from defeat he was finally overthrown and killed. The castle Bram Stoker based his novel off of is still readily accessible, so this is where we went. It's rather pretty, but it's also fair to say the entire local economy is based on parting fools from their money. Mercifully we took a public bus there, and timed things alright for our return. All told, we saw something like four castles on this leg of the trip, the region had a little problem with invading Turks back in the day after all.
Hollywood's got nothing on this. Brasov was cute, not the least of which because of the ridiculous Hollywood style lettering plopped on the mountain above town (a rebranding was in order, the old town name was a variant of "Stalin"). We used a cable car to get up, and then owing to a combination of Matus
D'aw...
Evolution of the Cutest finding heights disagreeable and our collective cheapness we opted to walk down. We might've spent two hours at the summit just hanging out and discovering that jeans are perfect sledding gear if you don't mind a cold butt. Still, after a while we were all a little cold and hungry, so we started our descent. Did I mention this was meant a network of zig zagging paths covered in anywhere from six inches to a foot of ice and snow? Probably should've mentioned that. Somehow it still felt safer coming down than the ascent in the world's most communist cable car. Towards the end we gave into temptation and took the fast root down, gravity's good for that.
Welcome to Bucharest. Enjoy dramatic Romanian Poetry? The last leg of the trip meant staying in Romania's capital, which was...well it was something alright. My personal jury is still out on whether or not it was fun. I will say straight off that our housing was literally just in some guy named Constantin's apartment (he lives with his mother), so I can safely say I spent time in Eastern Bloc housing. This also proved annoying later when I
Oh.
I wasn't really kidding, this thing's huge. tried to get home on St. Patrick's day at 3 AM (cookie cutter housing blocks look the same), but c'est la vie. Much more interesting was another monument to human stupidity and hubris, Ceausescu's presidential palace still stands in the middle of the city. After taking a tour of the place (the tour guide turned off the lights after we left each room to save money) it was easy to be floored by the size of it. After a moment, it became even easier to suffer an aneurism brought upon by the sheer insanity of the project. I'll never get over a photo of historic churches being literally picked up and "wheeled" wholesale to another spot in the city to make room. Alongside Romania's tear-proof plastic money this was probably my favorite discovery of the place. Well, either that or a visit to a Romanian concert which just turned out to be a pianist and a woman reciting Romanian poems. Did mention how dangerous two hours of that can be to one's health? The building was pretty, the tickets cheap, but after half an hour I was playing verbal mad libs with the woman on stage (she mouthed "exploding donkey",
Concert hall
Note to self, Poetry can be pretty, but only if you know what the hell they're saying. I swear). Still, looking back on it I'm quite happy with the whole trip. I think the short answer would be to call it one hell of a week, and the longer answer's resting above this sentence.
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