Blogs from Transilvania, Romania, Europe - page 36

The second leg of this trip was Transylvania. We planned to fly into Bucharest and take a train to the central city of Transylvania, Brasov. Our flight to Romania was quick and easy but crowded and tight. We bought tickets from Istanbul to Bucharest Romania on Blue Air, one of the small budget airlines that are everywhere in Europe. The plane was clean and on time; of course our knees were jammed into the seat in front of us but you get what you pay for. Cost: about $100 round trip each. There are 2 airports in Bucharest, the main is Otopeni and the 2nd is called Baneasa, which is used by charters and a couple of other small airlines. Once there, we decided to get some information before blindly jumping into the first taxi. When ... read more

Two festivals Chris: Taking a break from our increasingly full schedules, Alecia and I speant the last two weekends visiting two very different festivals. The first was the Rosia Montana Fan Fest to raise awareness about a proposed mining project and the second was the Homorodalmas Barlangfestival (read Almas Cave fest in the little village where Agora works). Rosia Montana: The Project: the Rosia Montana minig project proposal aims to put Europe’s largest open pit, cyanide extraction, gold mine in place of a mountain in the western carpathians. There has been a gold mine there since Roman times but the extraction techniques proved too costly and the mine was pretty much closed several years ago. There is a Canadian corporation who would like to come in now and use the practice of cyanide leaching to extract ... read more

The easy answer is that he never existed but I did find out about a very disturbing character called Vlad Dracul Tepes who had the nasty habit of sticking people on spikes and leaving them to die a slow and painful death. Dracul is derived from "son of the dragon" and Tepes means "impaler", thus you get the charming name of Vlad the Impaler, son of the Dragon. This bloodlust led to the myth of the Vampire Lord we all know as Count Dracula. Sadly this was one of the main reasons why I chose to visit Transylvania but after seeing a number of towns and their surroundings I can easily say that this area has far far more to offer than vampire myths and haunted castles. Before traveling to Transylvania I spent a few days ... read more

We are now real volunteers! After 10 weeks of training, Alecia and I swore in (upon the constitution, we vowed to “protect America against all threats foreign and domestic” “so help us God” - which was interesting) at the Tomas Caragiu theater in Ploiesti. In attendance were the Mayor, gazdas, newspapers, radio and 3 national TV stations. The American Ambassador is usually in tow but he was working on a state visit in Washington. Opening the state visit, maybe making US headlines though probably not, Bush addressed the Romanian president as the Prime Minister, someone the Romanian Pres. hates… Swear in was quite nice though personally a bit stressful as I had been elected to speak as representative of the non-english teachers, in both Romanian and English. 3.5 minutes of Romanian was a bit of a ... read more

When I came into the office on Friday, someone had brought us an injured white stork (the kind that sits on chimneys and brings babies). Why? Because we are an environmental organization of course. We were supposed to go to Almas, the village where we are doing rural tourism work, but instead we speant the day with Storky. Feeding it, making a bed in our closet, trying to find a sanctuary, medicating… it was interesting so I thought I would share some pictures. If anyone has a better name than Storky, feel free to email. The stork is doing better, up and walking around today and has even escaped a few times. It does not look like it will be able to fly to Africa this winter though so we are still looking for a home. ... read more