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Published: August 22nd 2007
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Bran Castle
Not Dracula's castle, but it does look the part. Our next stop was Romania, where we would briefly stop in Bucharest the capital before heading to Transylvania for a few days.
Just over the border from Bulgaria we crossed the Danube (Again!). Throughout this trip we have met up with this immense river many times, it is like a recurring event in our European travels. First we crossed it in Germany on the way to Prague, then down to Bratislava where we met up with it again and took a boat up it to Vienna. At that point we said goodbye to it for well over a month, and then we met up again in Belgrade. Here in Romania we see the river swollen in size, on the last of its journey to the sea. We still have to visit it once more on our trip, and that is in Hungary, but more on that later.
Bucharest is a very interesting city, great gothic looking buildings, all looking spooky with their rundown exteriors, droopy roofs and mandatory old ladies hanging out the windows cackling and watching people walking below. While the streets and buildings showed great architecture and details, what grabbed our attention was how everything looked so
Peoples Palace
The huge palace, despite the grand building, the park next to it was in a terrible state. run down and dirty. Parks were not looked after, with just grass and the occasional wild dog (Bucharest has a large population of stray dogs, estimated up to 200,000 of them, the PC name for them these days is Community Dogs).
In contrast to the appearance of the city, all the Romanians we met were lovely, very friendly and talkative, despite this we still kept our guard up when walking around late at night and for good reason it turned out.
While walking back to the hostel after spending the evening in a Shisha Bar, we ran into some of another ethnic group common in Romania, Gypsies. Three young girls about 13 approached us and did the usual asking for money, we did the usual shaking of our heads and continued on. But I noticed that they were following us and more of a worry I noticed that one of the girls was scoping out my pockets. Then they were on us, one distracting me, begging and trying to get into my pockets, the other two at Lynda, grabbing her pockets and getting into her bag. Pushing them away was doing nothing as they just came back, making
Inside Peoples Palace
Room after room of grand lush furnishings and details a grab for anything that they could get near. Realising that Lynda was in trouble, I stopped walking, spun around, and let lynda get behind me, still they came, in desperation and realising they would not stop until they robbed us, I put my hand up to tell them to stop, and raised my other hand threatningly. Then they stopped and ran away.
I felt awful that I had threatened a girl at all, let alone a young one, but I knew they would not have stopped unless I did that. We checked our belongings and amazingly they hadn't got anything. Still this gave us a big fright. Almost got robbed in a dark alley by three 13 year old girls. After this we noticed just how many Gypsies there are in Romania, and started hearing firsthand accounts of robbing and Gypsy raids. One girl who had just taken the night train from Budapest to Bucharest had a Gypsy raid on her train. They managed to cut the lights, before running on board and stealing anything not bolted down. These stories did not help our confidence when we realised just how many overnight trains we are planning to take.
Brasov
From the hill next to the black tower (which ironically looks pretty white). The next day, with our cameras well out of sight we went on to look around the city, and especially to see the Peoples Palace. The construction of this immense building (the largest in the world after the pentagon), almost bankrupted the country, room after room of incedibly lush and beautiful furnishings, marble everywhere. In the end due to this scheme and others the communist dictator of Romania and his wife were arrested and shot on Christmas day 1989.
On to Transylvania, and yes I did have some garlic in my pack (mainly for cooking but it is a good idea to prepared anyway). We headed to Brasov, where we would stay for a few days.
Brasov proved to be a surprisingly big town, nestled at the base of the hills. The next few days we spent exploring the town and making day trips to castles near by. It also turned out to be a good place to go out, although that may be because of some of the great people we met at the hostel.
After a few days we were ready to move on to Hungary, so on the watch for Gypsies we boarded
Brasov Square
The main square the night train to Budapest.
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