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Published: April 3rd 2007
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We had a wonderful couple of weeks in Romania as you can probably tell by our inability to choose between the photos we have taken (sorry I know there are a lot for this one!) First stop Bucharest what a random city it is! It is Chisinau's grown up prettier sister! By that there are amazing Parisian avenues, albeit a little rough around the edges, but there are also blocks and blocks of communist concrete disasters. It was once called the Paris of the east, a claim made by most of the Eastern European cities we have visited, but after the war Nicolae Ceausescu decided to flatten a fifth of the city to build the ‘Palace of the People’ and a whole area of the city in the social realist style. This sits next to the historic centre which has really great beer halls, cobbled streets etc… The whole of Bucharest is covered in roads and car parks so while it is very pretty in parts it was a difficult place to wander around and get a really good feel for!
Transylvania
The Romania’s have so far been up there with Lithuanians and Moldavians as the friendliest people
we have met on the journey. On the train up to Brasov we had old ladies blabbering at us trying to tell jokes and kissing some American girls off our train and wishing them a good journey! - No Babuskings here too! The old people are a lot more chilled! The journey from Bucharest to Brasov was great - firstly the train puts the Trans-Pennine express to shame it was clean (Even the toilet), fast, quality, but to be fair it was an Intercity so not all the trains are like this. The scenery was unbelievable too. The train passed through pine tree covered mountains, it even snowed during the journey and the flakes were huge and the forests were covered in snow. Thankfully though Brasov was warm and sunny!
Brasov is a little medieval town in Transylvania which although it’s full of tourists it has not succome to selling Dracula based merchandise at every shop you pass. The main reason why tourists stop in Brasov in such huge numbers is that it is nearby the famous Bran Castle the home of Dracula, but the bloke (Vlad Dracul) who the book was based on probably never went there! Vlad
Dracul (or Vlad the impaler) was a nice guy who ordered stakes to be put through the stomach of his enemies and left them to bleed to death!
We spent Easter weekend in Sighisoara, our next stop on the Dracula route! We arrived in Sighsoara after a gorgeous train ride from Brasov- Transylvania is just undulating hills covered with amazing hilltop fortresses and citadels! Sighisoara is the birthplace of the REAL Count Dracula and is therefore inundated with tourists. Sighisoara in itself was well worth the visit a perfectly preserved citadel surrounded by hills and farms.
We had a wonderful few days here walking out into the surrounding countryside and lounging around taking in the views in the sunshine. It so beautiful here dirt tracks out of the city, guys in carts, wells in everyone’s gardens, amazing countryside all around. Easter Sunday was particularly great as the night before crowds of people walked through the streets with lit candles signing on there way to church, in the dimly lit cobbled streets it was such a beautiful place and took my mind off not having any Easter eggs to enjoy the next day!
Maramures
We always knew that
Dracula
The man himself! our visit north to Sighet would be a little crazy. Maramures dubbed the land that time forgot by all the guide books is a region of Romania where peasant life and culture is still alive and kicking. It was a nine hour journey from Sighisoara and so when we changed trains half way through the journey just at the edge of the Transylvania region of Romania we chose a compartment with just one old woman in it so we have more space and relax. As soon as we got on she was all smiles - Romanians are great like that they are very sociable. She was very nice and friendly although she insisted in talking in Romanian to us for the whole journey, we could not really understand a word she was saying but she gave me the window seat so I could admire the view. As the train set off she still carried on talking to us in Romanian which became more and more embarrassing as she would speak very slowly and look at me and then Lee trying to make us understand! When we got our guidebook out though it soon became clear that she had an ulterior
motive for chatting to us as she kept pointing to the words "private room" and “city centre” and was obviously offering us a room to which we pointed to reservation!! She was off at the next stop though so the painful attempts at communication could finally stop!
Sighet as we realized very quickly was very different to the places we had visited before. We were stared at literally everywhere we went, as soon as we went in a cafe everyone would stop their conversations to look at us!! There was also a great difference between people actually from Sighet which was a town and those from the surrounding rural villages. Randomly amongst reasonably normally dressed people were women of all ages wearing colourful headscarfs and men wearing strange hats. It was a real mix of old and new!
We visited a couple of the surrounding villages and walked past people still ploughing with horses or oxen, the friendliness continued even here- men riding on a horse and cart would wave to us as we walked past and one old lady (similar to the incident on the train) tried to have a little chat with us as we walked
from one village to another! In Sapanta was the so called "Merry Cemetery". It is a cemetery with elaborate colourful wooden gravestones each depicting the person who they belonged to doing something they would do day to day for example a man with a tractor or a woman in the kitchen that type of thing. They apparently also had humorous anecdotes about the life of the person which we of course could not read (this lack of Romanian was a constant problem!) It was a pretty strange feeling to find a normally morbid place uplifting but it celebrated life and was so beautiful would had to love it.
On our last night we went for a little goodbye to Romania drink in one of those places where we were stared at for at least the first ten minutes after arriving! After we had finished our drink we were considering leaving when the barmaid put 2 drinks in front of us to which we protested that we didn’t want another but as it turned out a group of people at the other side of the room had bought them for us! Surely this only happens to pretty girls in films
Our Mate
This is the lady we were having a chat to- she was on her way to do some ploughing!! we were thinking!! We got chatting to them to say thank you, they were all local but all working in various countries around the EU, spoke several languages and only got to come home for a few weeks a year! It was a class way to finish Romania because the people have been the best thing about here
Sorry about the length of this one... I hope you are not all asleep by now!
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