DraculaLand
- Taken at a cemetary in Romania; isn't it just awesome?
- View of Brashov from the top of the cablecar
- B for Brad? or B for Brashov?
- Bee-you-ti-ful Romanian castle
- Shots of the crazy game of soccer we saw in Sofia
Hello again dear friends,
I am happy in the knowledge that this post ought to make you all pretty damn jealous, as this post is being written in Sighishoara...Now, why, you may ask would a post written in Sighishoara make me jealous? Is TK on crack?
Nope; no crack.
Sighishoara is in Transylvania, Romania and is, in actual fact, the birthplace of Vlad Tepes, the nasty little man who was the inspiration for Count Dracula, Prince of Darkness. So there!
The downside to my gloating is that Sighishoara is actually a pretty dull place. We planned a day trip here enroute between Brashov and Budapest, but it only took 2 hours to see literally all the sights. The sights were predominantly plaques on walls stating that 'Vlad was born here' or 'Vlad ate a meal here once' or that 'Vlad bought a stamp here' or 'Vlad sucked someone's blood here' and things like that. But our train does not leave for another 6 hours....and that's after having already (a) seen all the sights (b) had 3 cups of coffee (c) gotten lost (d) had lunch (e) sent a bunch of long winded emails to just about everyone I know. Oh well, we had an 11 hour gap between trains, so 4 hours down and 7 to go! No excuses for typos in this post; I should have all kinds of time for spell-checking!
Overall Romania has been very cool and I would recommend it as a good place to visit. To get here, we took an overnight train from Sofia to Bucharest, on which we slept not a wink due to the 4 hour border stop between 1am and 5am. I swear 7 different men dressed in uniforms of varying severity insisted on looking at our spiffy Canadski passports, and they all strategically timed thier knock on the train compartment door for the moment we were finally drifting off to sleep...Nevertheless, our train arrived promptly on time at 6:02am. I would like to note that this is the ONLY train thus far in our travels that has arrived on time, and it is also the only train that we were hoping would be late...anyone else sense a new Murphy's Law coming out of this one?
Anyway, not a thing is open in Bucharest at 6:02 am. Except MacDonalds. The coffee was surpisingly good, but trying to get a non-meat food stuff out of a Romanian MacDonalds is akin to doing advanced linear algebra with a hangover! Neither easy nor fun, and very much headache inducing! Our guidebook did not have very many positive things to say about Bucharest, so we decided to just spend the day there and take a late afternoon train to a popular city in Transylvania called Brashov. So, after our sleepless night on the train we drank about 6 cups of the aforementioned MacDonalds coffee (have I mentioned lately how much I miss my Tim's? Has anyone out there gone to a Tim's and had a cup on my behalf - email me; let me know!!) and then went for a 7 hour walk around Bucharest. We saw pretty much all of it. We saw the Parliamentary Palace, which has the honour of being the second biggest building in the world (after the Pentagon). It's big. Photo forthcoming. We saw the musuem of Romanian State History, which had some pretty gold necklaces and not much else. We drank more coffee. We went to the Village Musuem, which is an outdoor musuem of buildings and exhibtits designed to look like a traditional Romanian Village. Probably the most interesting thing we saw was a mini L'Arc de Triumph randomly planted in the middle of an intersection....Decidedly odd.
Our afternoon train ride to Brashov was very, very nice and Brashov itself has been a highlight of the trip so far. We found a fantastic hostel called KismetDao (link on main page); it was so nice that we ended up spending 4 nights there which is the longest we've stayed in one place in over a month I think! As I say, the hostel was great; nice common room with a TV and a bunch of good DVDs (except Highlander, which is a truly awful movie), great clean rooms and a free laundry service, which came in very, very handy. Of course the thing that makes or breaks any hostel is the other people there, and KismetDao was full of very cool, very fun fellow travellers, which was great. Over the past few days we have toured Romanian castles, gone hiking, drank much tasty Romanian beer, and rescued the cutest kitten ever from under a car... We have met cool peeps from California, Toronto and Jordan. The wife of the California couple was from Moscow, so we got to speak Russian with her for a while; the Toronto couple had been teaching in Japan for 8 months and then travelling for 4 months on the way back home and were supercool, and the couple from Jordan were actually American Peace Corps Volunteers who had been living and working in Jordan for two years! All in all, a very eclectic and interesting bunch of people were hanging out in Brashov last week.
So that's what we've been up to. Transylvania is a beatiful area and you all should come visit! No sign of Vlad yet though.... and only 5 1/2 hours to go before we hop on the train to Budapest, Hungary.
Bye for now,
TK
I am happy in the knowledge that this post ought to make you all pretty damn jealous, as this post is being written in Sighishoara...Now, why, you may ask would a post written in Sighishoara make me jealous? Is TK on crack?
Nope; no crack.
Sighishoara is in Transylvania, Romania and is, in actual fact, the birthplace of Vlad Tepes, the nasty little man who was the inspiration for Count Dracula, Prince of Darkness. So there!
The downside to my gloating is that Sighishoara is actually a pretty dull place. We planned a day trip here enroute between Brashov and Budapest, but it only took 2 hours to see literally all the sights. The sights were predominantly plaques on walls stating that 'Vlad was born here' or 'Vlad ate a meal here once' or that 'Vlad bought a stamp here' or 'Vlad sucked someone's blood here' and things like that. But our train does not leave for another 6 hours....and that's after having already (a) seen all the sights (b) had 3 cups of coffee (c) gotten lost (d) had lunch (e) sent a bunch of long winded emails to just about everyone I know. Oh well, we had an 11 hour gap between trains, so 4 hours down and 7 to go! No excuses for typos in this post; I should have all kinds of time for spell-checking!
Overall Romania has been very cool and I would recommend it as a good place to visit. To get here, we took an overnight train from Sofia to Bucharest, on which we slept not a wink due to the 4 hour border stop between 1am and 5am. I swear 7 different men dressed in uniforms of varying severity insisted on looking at our spiffy Canadski passports, and they all strategically timed thier knock on the train compartment door for the moment we were finally drifting off to sleep...Nevertheless, our train arrived promptly on time at 6:02am. I would like to note that this is the ONLY train thus far in our travels that has arrived on time, and it is also the only train that we were hoping would be late...anyone else sense a new Murphy's Law coming out of this one?
Anyway, not a thing is open in Bucharest at 6:02 am. Except MacDonalds. The coffee was surpisingly good, but trying to get a non-meat food stuff out of a Romanian MacDonalds is akin to doing advanced linear algebra with a hangover! Neither easy nor fun, and very much headache inducing! Our guidebook did not have very many positive things to say about Bucharest, so we decided to just spend the day there and take a late afternoon train to a popular city in Transylvania called Brashov. So, after our sleepless night on the train we drank about 6 cups of the aforementioned MacDonalds coffee (have I mentioned lately how much I miss my Tim's? Has anyone out there gone to a Tim's and had a cup on my behalf - email me; let me know!!) and then went for a 7 hour walk around Bucharest. We saw pretty much all of it. We saw the Parliamentary Palace, which has the honour of being the second biggest building in the world (after the Pentagon). It's big. Photo forthcoming. We saw the musuem of Romanian State History, which had some pretty gold necklaces and not much else. We drank more coffee. We went to the Village Musuem, which is an outdoor musuem of buildings and exhibtits designed to look like a traditional Romanian Village. Probably the most interesting thing we saw was a mini L'Arc de Triumph randomly planted in the middle of an intersection....Decidedly odd.
Our afternoon train ride to Brashov was very, very nice and Brashov itself has been a highlight of the trip so far. We found a fantastic hostel called KismetDao (link on main page); it was so nice that we ended up spending 4 nights there which is the longest we've stayed in one place in over a month I think! As I say, the hostel was great; nice common room with a TV and a bunch of good DVDs (except Highlander, which is a truly awful movie), great clean rooms and a free laundry service, which came in very, very handy. Of course the thing that makes or breaks any hostel is the other people there, and KismetDao was full of very cool, very fun fellow travellers, which was great. Over the past few days we have toured Romanian castles, gone hiking, drank much tasty Romanian beer, and rescued the cutest kitten ever from under a car... We have met cool peeps from California, Toronto and Jordan. The wife of the California couple was from Moscow, so we got to speak Russian with her for a while; the Toronto couple had been teaching in Japan for 8 months and then travelling for 4 months on the way back home and were supercool, and the couple from Jordan were actually American Peace Corps Volunteers who had been living and working in Jordan for two years! All in all, a very eclectic and interesting bunch of people were hanging out in Brashov last week.
So that's what we've been up to. Transylvania is a beatiful area and you all should come visit! No sign of Vlad yet though.... and only 5 1/2 hours to go before we hop on the train to Budapest, Hungary.
Bye for now,
TK
posted by TK at 6:43 AM
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