Citadel of Sighisoara

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Woke up around 7am and we were somewhere in Romania. The old lady in my compartment was on her way to Bucharest to visit her mother. She was German and spoke a little English, plus lots of Romanian and Italian. We managed to communicate though and she told me a few stories about Romania, and taught me a few Romanian words (boo-nah-dee-ma-naat-za = “good morning”, boo-nah-zee-wah = “good afternoon”, boo-nah-zeh-rah = “good evening”).

All of a sudden the door to the compartment ripped open and instead of seeing a cop or soldier or someone wanting to mug us, there was a strange looking girl about 8 years old standing there in a t-shirt and jeans cut off at her knees. She started saying something that I couldn’t understand and pulled up the legs of her jeans. I instantly felt sick. Both her legs from a couple of inches above her knees to mid way down her shins were covered in bad burns scars. I mean bad, looked like melted cheese, and went right around her legs.

The old lady turned to face the window and dug out a note from her purse and gave it to the girl, saying something I couldn’t understand and waving her away. Now I’ve seen a lot of videos on the internet of people hurting themselves and things, but the only ones that made me feel like I did when I saw that girl’s legs were decapitation videos from Iraq. It was truly sickening. This was the time I saw the mutilation the gypsies did to their kids and it wouldn’t be the last. More on that later.

The train arrived in Sighisoara around 10am and off I got. Now is when I started feeling very out of place. Ethnic Romanians have a look to them; they have slightly dark skin, dark hair, dark eyes, have a look to their faces. I stand out like dogs balls compared to them even if I was dressed exactly the same, let alone with my backpack wandering around like an idiot trying to make heads or tails of any signage.

Skirted around more gypsy kids begging at the station and found my way to the hostel (Nathan’s Villa Hostel) which was about 150m down the road to the right. The place seemed pretty good but empty, apparently there had been a fair few people the night before and they had all moved on towards Hungary that morning. There was one other person there, some strange French guy who I didn’t bother hanging around to talk to, I had some brekkie (which just consisted of what I would find to be the standard Romanian stale bread and shit coloured and flavoured “spread”) then headed to see the citadel.

As I walked from the hostel to the citadel I saw one of the many hundreds of thousands of stray dogs in Romania walk across a footbridge, turn right and walk along the footpath to the pedestrian crossing 30m away, which it used to cross the road, then turned left and walked back 30m to go down a street. Smart buggers.

Sighisoara isn’t a big town, about 30000 people. It’s mainly nestled in a small valley below the citadel, which has a commanding view over the surrounding area. Beautiful in an old school, historical kind of way. I don’t know, might be something you get sick of but it’s nice to visit. I was amazed along at the way at the houses that some people lived in, roofs falling in or walls crumbling. And it’s just normal for them.

The citadel was amazing, just had this fantastic atmosphere to it. Going up through the gate, under the clock tower I was thinking how it would’ve been back in the days when Vlad III was born here. I had read about people still living there but didn’t realise to what extent they did. Most of the citadel is houses as I expected but there is also a couple of schools up at the top of the hill. Theres a few shops for the tourists and a museum in the clock tower, and “Casca Dracula”, a restaurant in the house where Vlad III Dracula was supposedly born. I had heard it was a bit of a tourist trap but I just had to go in.

Just got a beer and started talking to the barman in there, Dani. He showed me the painting that had been uncovered of Vlad II Dracul and talked about Romania in general, tourism, politics, corruption, Dracula. I got a few insights into how frustrated a lot of younger people are in Romania, frustrated from the hangover from communism where the “old school” are still in control of a lot of things and the status quo has been maintained, there isn’t the great move forward that they expected once they got the communists out of power. They want to either succeed or fail on their own two feet, and not be influenced by who they do or don’t know.

While we were talking some old bloke wandered in and Dani told him off and shooed him out. Then about 5 minutes later another old bloke walked in and Dani was very different, speaking softly, getting him a drink, etc. the old bloke only a couple of sips then left, and Dani told me that old man was the former communist head of security for the whole area.
Me: “Still an important man?”
Dani: “Still very important and powerful. If he wanted to, he could have me disappear.”

Dani then told me how the town is pretty much run by 5 men, what they say goes. And that meant he was stuck between a rock and a hard place. He had a job and he was happy for that. But if he asked for a pay rise he would be fired, and he wouldn’t be able to get another job somewhere else in town because whichever of the other four men that owned that business would say “no, you work for him (his former boss)” and won’t hire him. So he would have to move to another town, and uproot his family. Not something anyone wants to do.

He said what Romania needed was another Vlad to come to power and deal with it all. He told me how Vlad would put a gold cup down near some water for people to use and no one would take it because they knew it wasn’t theirs and they would be killed for taking it. There were no shades of grey with old Vlad. And that’s what Dani said is needed in Romania now - clear out the corruption and old school links, a generational change.

(Later when I was in England I saw some British MP doing a tour of Romania after he was invited to have a look following some derogatory remarks he made about them joining the EU. And they showed him in the restaurant talking to Dani, who was making the most of the chance and seemed to be putting forward a vigorous argument )

Dani wasn’t the only person to have these thoughts on fixing the current situation. I wandered around the narrow streets a bit and climbed up the famous, supposedly haunted stairs to the top of the hill. Man what a climb, very long and very steep. The kiddies climbing up and down those stairs to go to the schools at the top wouldn’t be able to turn into little porkers like in Australia. And there was kids heading down the stairs at around 1pm, I thought they were going home for lunch but I later found out they would’ve been going home for the day. Apparently there aren’t enough places in schools for all the kids so they do it in 2 shifts starting from 7am, then another from 12:30pm.

At the top of the hill are two schools and as I wandered around (getting a few looks from the kids who were trying to hide to have a smoke) I looked down on the rest of the citadel and town below that and felt like it could quite easily be hundreds of years ago. It was fantastic.

Had a look in the church up at the top as well and ended up having a talk to the man working there as well, who had pretty much the same views as Dani. You really get the feeling that if they were “unleashed” this country would start taking huge strides forward. He also told me a bit more about the gypsies, how they live and things are structured like the Mafia, with the money people make getting passed up the tree and the top blokes driving Mercedes and things, and some common tricks they play to rip people off, etc, got some good tips. He told me some more stories about them mutilating kids like I had seen on the train, other ways included cutting off hands, breaking legs so they limp, etc. apparently there has been a bit of crackdown on it of late and a lot of parents that were doing this to their kids have been put in jail. And they still have their traditions like cooking on the ground outside, and living with all the animals inside the house.

I had been planning to stay overnight in Sighisoara but seriously, it is a small country town and once you have checked out the citadel there’s not much more to see. Also the hostel was pretty dead, there was only one other person there as the rest of the people that had been there the night before had left that day, and the guestbook was saying that the best bar in town was in the hostel. And that one guest was a weird French bloke.

When I bought my ticket to Brasov there was an old gypsy bloke sitting in the back of the ticket booth area (not really an office, more like an undercover area) and as soon as I bought my ticket he whistled and all the little kids that had been playing came over and tried to block my path, putting their hands out wanting money. As I had been advised, I just shook my head and continued walking. And the little buggers ran around and stood in front of me again, so I had to keep walking around them and they kept running around, until I got back to the main road. I went to the hostel and packed my stuff then headed back to the train station. Now is when more fun began.

When I got to the train platform there was a train boarding. There had been some announcements in Romanian but there was no signage to say what train was going where - not even in Romanian. So I asked a cop (who looked like he could be Bernard’s brother) on the platform by showing him my ticket and he points to the train currently boarding then as I start moving towards it he grabs me and shakes his head and says some other name, then points to the empty platform and says “Brasov”, then to the number 1 under “wagen” on my ticket and points down towards the other end of the platform.

So I walk down the platform to where the front will be and wait. The train turns up and as I go to get on it a conductor that is walking past looks at my ticket and nods, and motions for me to get on, but then the cops yells something at me and grabs my backpack and pulls me off the stairs.

Perhaps here I should make the note that the “platforms” in Romania & Ukraine aren’t really platforms, they are just the areas around different train lines - you still have to climb up all the stairs to get onto the train. He points towards the other end of the train counting “uno, duo, …, …, quince” on his fingers so I figure he means wagon 5 but as I’m running down the platform the doors are about to close so I jump up the next stairs and into the door as the train starts moving.

I stand up and walk in to the carriage and look out the window to see the cop pointing at me as I go past with one hand and motioning towards the end of the train with his other hand. A lady in the carriage I was in spoke English and I asked her what the hell my ticket means and she said “just stay here, no cares, there’s lot of seats”.

She was right. The conductor just came through and didn’t care. Which is sweet because this looks like first class - for 8 Euro? I have no idea, the girl at the ticket office said “302 lei - about 8 Euro” but then at the ticket booth when I actually bought the ticket I was charged 30.2 something. I got no idea really, seems they have 2 different currencies and one is worth 1000 times the other one. At first the ticket booth lady told me 1695 but fuck knows what drugs she was on.

Turning up at Brasov was a bit of a shambles. I had just done it spur of the moment and so had no map, only the address of a supposedly pretty good hostel. Stupidly I said no thanks to the old bloke that meets backpackers at the train station and puts them into home stays (he is mentioned in LP even) and caught a bus to the old centre of town with the help of a man at the bus stop. He looked at the address I had written down, thought about it for a minute then said “bus 4, 6 stops, cross road, cross park, cross road, Republic St, walk down 10 mins, see that street”. He was spot on too for Republic St but I didn’t make it all the way to the hostel’s road.

At the old square I was checking a map I had bought (with help from someone passing by) when a girl and her dad approached me, offering a room. Turns out they ran like a B&B thing right across the road, at the square. It was expensive, but having a room to myself was good and it was in a great location.

Had dinner at a restaurant, a traditional Romanian meal called “salmate”, which was pork and rice rolls with cabbage similar to sauerkraut and some fluffy, rice-based thing. Nothing fancy but filled the hole in my stomach. Had a chat with the staff there as it wasn’t too busy, they were very friendly and once again optimistic for Romania’s future. After dinner I went for a quick walk around then to bed for an early night. I was feeling a lot more relaxed about getting the camera out now, was still being wary of anyone looking like a gypsy though.

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