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To be fair, before I started this trip I had no idea about Brasov or anything regarding what there could be to do here or in the area. That is the joy of hostels - somebody says something and you go. Interestingly enough, that means that you end up meeting the same people over and over again in the hostels, but that's a good time, too. Also, in the interests of full disclosure, I am not now, nor have I ever been a sweet transvestite from Transsexual Transylvania.
So, Brasov, great little town. It looks like it should look. It is also a great base of operations for going and seeing all of Transylvania, particularly the local castles and Sighisoara, Vlad Tepis's birthplace.
Sunday, May 18th:
Up relatively early this morning to jump on the train to Brasov with my new Peace-Corps buddies, Micah and Crystal. They had to go get tickets, which ended up being separate from each other, and while we tried to sit as a group at first, that quickly went to hell. I myself had to move about 3 times. Eventually we all got there and departed to our separate hostels (which ended up being roughly
2 minute walks away), and decided to reconvene when we figured out what to do that afternoon.
I checked in and spoke with my slightly crazy, yet fun, Romanian hostel-keeper. Apart from being a bit too overbearing and pushy about some things, she was very friendly and eager to help. Also in the hostel was an Aussie named Mick, who I had met in Veliko Turnova, and I got the scoop on the town from him. Well, we knew that Bran Castle would be the only one open tomorrow, but had hoped to get to Peles, which is supposed to be a spectacularly gorgeous palace built by a king, this afternoon as it would be closed tomorrow. Well, we had missed the tour run by our hostels and would not have been able to make the bus to the palace before the last group was let in, which was roughly an hour later. So I spoke with Micah and Crystal and we decided to head into town and check the place out.
Brasov is an absolutely adorable little town that looks like what it is - an old, medieval, Transylvanian town that was once the major trade center of the
Carpathians
Crossing into Transylvaniaarea. It was actually founded by Saxon merchants invited in by the King of Hungary back a few hundred years ago. There is even a cute little synagogue near the southern wall of the city. The three of us grabbed lunch at a touristy, but good, Italian place just off the main square and got to know each other a bit better (they were already well-acquainted, of course, but I got in on the action, so to speak) - it turns out that Crystal volunteers with women’s issues in Veliko Turnova, where I had just been. From there we wandered around town, checking out the sights and pretty much covering every square inch of the central part of the city. The place is tiny, so it wasn’t particularly hard. Just off the main square, the town has a large, black church that looks very ominous on the outside, but is said to be beautiful on the inside (it will be open tomorrow, so I will know then). The real challenge came when we decided to hit the hills on the western side of town.
The eastern side of the city has a very tall hill with a big BRASOV sign
that mimics the HOLLYWOOD sign in LA, but to the west are lower hills with a citadel and 2 towers, one black the other white (known creatively as the “White Tower” and the “Black Tower”). Well, it took a little hiking through the woods, but we made it to the citadel without any real trouble. The citadel is somewhat unimpressive, though we did stumble on a bride having photos taken in a side-room to the banquet hall, and while it is well-preserved, the surrounding hill has been allowed to become overgrown and you really can’t see the city all that well. From there we decided to finish our loop off to the South with the 2 towers. This was remarkably difficult. Neither map we had offered any inclination of how to get there, despite the fact that both towers and the citadel were on the maps. I eventually had to get directions in Italian from a very nice family in a churchyard. We made it, and the towers offered great views of the city. Definitely worth the hike through a very sketchy neighborhood and getting completely disoriented for about half and hour.
Having noticed that Romania seems to be the
Fair
Country Fair in Brasov teenage make-out in public capital of the world, we all made a bet on the number of couples we would see making out by the time we got back to the hostel. Interestingly enough, I took the low end and won the 1-Leu bet off each of them. We grabbed a drink back in the main square and headed off in our separate directions to meet again tomorrow morning for the tour to Bran that my hostel was running.
After a quick call to the parents to check in with dad on how Grandma Elaine’s funeral was and how everyone was holding up on the other side of the world, I sat back and did a bit of reading. Then 2 English guys walked in; they had just topped 10,000km on their car of their road trip they began a few weeks earlier. The three of us decided to head out to celebrate the milestone with some Romanian food around the corner. Good place, and cheap. We tried a bit of the local drink, which was advertised as Schnapps, but was frighteningly close to Slivovitz (probably just the Romanian version), had a few more beers and called it a night.
Monday, May 19th:
Up and ready to go for the bus from the hostel to Bran Castle when it opens at 9:00am today. The hostel is a good place, but the shower had no door, making the floor a bit wet when I got out. I’m surprised they wouldn’t fix that, as I couldn’t be the only one to get the floor wet showering.
Micah and Crystal had walked over from their hostel and we three were geared up to go. Just one problem…it opens at noon, not nine on Mondays during the summer. Apparently, the driver knew this last night, but nobody decided to mention this to th3 6 of us who were set to take the tour this morning. Because of the delay, the three of us decided to hit the little synagogue and the Black Church and then head back over after breakfast.
The shul was nice on the outside, but absolutely stunning on the inside. I’m sure there isn’t much of a Jewish community still there in Brasov, but there are outside agencies supporting and patronizing the place, trying to keep it up as a memory to the formerly large Jewish populations of Southern Transylvania.
Narrow Street
Micah and Crystal on "the world's narrowest street" The Black Church was a much more imposing structure, as is always the case. While the outside is very plain and straightforward, the inside is open and light and airy and beautiful. After the two houses of worship, I had thought I lost my adapter and spent the next hour trying to hunt one down with no luck, finally accepting that Budapest would certainly have one. Next we were back to the hostel, where we had to wait and wait, passing even the time where we should have left, until the driver was ready to set off.
Bran, like Brasov, looks like you think it should look. Though Vlad “the Impaler” Tepis (the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula) has no real connection with the place, it oozes a Dracula feel. It has the courtyard with the well, low ceilings, sits ominously on a wooded hill with a curvy path leading up to it - it’s perfect. It offers a wonderful feel of what it would have been like to live in such a time and place, too, as even though the owners and builders would have been very wealthy, the rooms and ceiling are low and cramped. I nearly hit
my head on every doorway. There is also a little market below the castle with some great smoked cheese.
Got back to the hostel and said my farewells to Micah and Crystal, wishing them both the best with the remainder of their time in Bulgaria with the Peace Corps. When I got in, I see three of the Aussies from Veliko Trunova. They had broken off from the larger group and headed this way on their own, and had been traveling about a day behind me. We caught up a little and compared notes on Bucharest and what was to do here in Brasov, and they headed off to explore the town. I was a bit tired and hung in for a while to chat with the hostel mates who were sitting around. As always, lots of Aussies and Brits with a few Americans thrown in for good measure. Brasov is an interesting place, as people pass through it from all directions.
Eventually, a few of us decided to head back out to that Romanian place for dinner tonight. I had decided I wanted to see the bears on the excursions they organize every night (Mick had said it was
fun), so I was a bit crunched for time, but decided to go along. Heading out of the hostel, I saw Paul, and Aussie who had also been in the hostel with me in Bucharest.
Dinner was again very good and I raced back to the hostel just in time to wait for the driver to decide it was dark enough to go out for the bears. So the trip was me and the 3 Aussies traveling together. It was interesting...mostly sad, but interesting, too. It was just brown bears, more cubs than adults, eating from trash cans, living off the waste of the university on the edge of town. The best fun of it came from the cops, who were out in force to try to prevent people from taking pictures. We played cat-and-mouse with them the whole time, going from one spot to another and back again. One even grabbed me and warned me about taking flash pictures - really just trying to scare somebody.
Back from bear watching and over to the restaurant where some of the same people, and others, were still having some beers at the table. I saw Paul sitting a few away on
his own, told him to come over, and the whole lot of us chatted and drank for the next few hours.
Tuesday, May 20th:
Woke up this morning at 4:30am with my face leaking. Allergies had hit me really, really hard, and I just laid there miserably for the next few hours until I got up and showered. The joy, however, of a hostel is that while I had no drugs for it, nearly everyone else had something or other, from eye drops from one of the English guys, to major-strength allergy pills from a Tasmanian girl, I was covered. So after breakfast, and deciding not to wear my contacts for a few days, I headed off for the train to Sighisoara, the birthplace of Vlad Tepis.
It was a quick ride up there, and convenient, too, as it is on the night-train route to Budapest, my next stop. Very cool, very little town. You get into the station and walk past this old Eastern Orthodox church, then over a stream by way of a foot-bridge. In front of you is the hill on which the older, fortified area of town is built. I made my way up there
Rock
I couldn't have said it any better myself and got to checking it out. The first real landmark is the very cool, medieval, fortified clock tower that commands the walk up to the acropolis. Heading through the tower and into the heart of town, I came upon exactly what I was hoping for: a somewhat dirty, gravelly grid of roads and paths around a town that seems not to have really changed architecturally in over half a millennium. I also found the house where Tepis was born and live the first 3 years of his life…it’s now a very over-priced touristy restaurant…I went in and had a cake and coke just for shits and giggles.
I spent the rest of the daylight hours wandering around town, both the upper part and the newer part down hill. The most interesting thing I found, though, was the church at the very highest point on the hill. Not only does it have the only crypt in Transylvania (odd, I know, for the home of Dracula), but one of the tombstones in the church has the name of G-d in Hebrew on it. I asked the caretaker and said it was actually a fairly common practice among the local Christians, possibly because
of the large number of Jews in the area during the Middle Ages.
After seeing town, I grabbed a bite to eat, caught up on backing up my pictures and waited for the train to Budapest.
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