More overnight trains!! Woohoooo!! Everybody loves a good overnight train... Or something...
We had an overnight train from Budapest to Brasov, which meant we didn't have to meet until 1045pm the day we left Budapest. There were a few people on the tour who had quite set routine 9pm bedtimes, so I'll leave you to imagine the whinging that one generated. Go on. It was good fun. We were all there waiting by about 915pm, so we had plenty of time to enjoy it.
That train turned out to be much better than previous overnighters. Kim and I had a room to ourselves! We even had room for our bags! It was quite amazing. And it was cleaner and nicer than the others, and we didn't get thrown around all night. We did have to wake up at some ungodly hour to get our passports stamped at the border, but the border guards were really nice and spoke surprisingly good English. As usual, they were pretty fascinated with my passport. Most people are - I have a brand new one, it's much prettier than the old ones. And around somewhere like Romania, they don't tend to see too many NZ passports.
We got into Brasov around lunchtime, and the main reason you go to Brasov is as a jumping off point for Bran Castle. So everybody except Marsha and Cameron talked themselves into needing to see it, which meant dumping our shit in our rooms and running back out and getting straight into taxis. It was about 2pm by this stage, and it was a 45min drive to Bran, and from what we knew the castle shut at 4pm. The taxis were a total fiasco. We had 14 people wanting to go, and poor Tony had ordered 3 taxis and was trying to organise things so that there were four people in each. One couple decided that they'd martyr themselves and not go, because otherwise two other people were going to have to miss out. They made such a song and dance about it, originally because there weren't enough taxis for everybody, and then when we convinced them that we could just order another one, because it was unfair that two people should have to pay twice what everyone else had paid. It was incredibly frustrating. I'd never seen Tony be anything other than relaxed and happy, but even he was starting to look a bit tense in the facial area. In the end I said I've got a bright idea, why don't we put three people into each of the last two taxis? so Kim and I grabbed one of the single men and got into the next taxi that rolled up before we got too murdery.
So the castle itself, when we managed to get ourselves there, is pretty cool. You can see why people would think that it might have been used as the setting for Bram Stoker's Dracula. I love that it's turned into such a tourist attraction though - it might or might not have been the setting for the novel; Dracula the character might or might not have been based on Vlad the Impaler, or another member of his family; and Vlad the Impaler, although he lived in the area, never lived in that castle. But it is perched up on a cliff and from the outside it definitely looks like it could be pretty creepy.
I also got a couple of decent photos inside..
Generally the inside wasn't as interesting or as Dracula-centric as you might expect. That's not how they market it, it's just what's become the common perception. Inside was quite plainly decorated and furnished. There were some nice pieces of furniture but we walked through almost without pausing.
We wandered through the market at the bottom of the hill, which sold strange looking dolls and a lot of tacky Dracula souvenirs, then jumped in the taxis back to Brasov.
I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening wandering around Brasov with Kim. Her modus operandi is to make a list of what she wants to see in a place, then tick them all off, so she was a pretty good person to trail around behind. We went for a coffee on the edge of town, then walked along the town wall past the black tower and the white tower (the black tower was cleaned a bit overambitiously so now it's white too). I forget which tower this photo is of. Potentially the black one.
Then we went to the churches and the "narrowest street", which we decided should be classed as an alleyway, not a street.
Wow. Blogspot just made me download google chrome before I could keep working on my blog, and now it's changed the set up so I can't lay my photos out the way I want. Very annoying.
Anyway. Notice the Hollywood-style Brasov sign on the hill in the last photo? There was another town we we went through called something like Radov that had one too.
This is the lovely town square. Below is the massive church that was literally just off the town square.
And this is Kim in the street where we had dinner. We sat outside. It got colder. And colder. And colder. Neither of us had any kind of warm clothing but the decision had been made to sit outside so we figured we could bear the consequences.
Then we went to the awesome self-serve soft-serve shop. They had lots of different flavours. Shame they were all a bit crap. I meant to take a photo of it, but apparently I forgot. Sorry!!
We had an overnight train from Budapest to Brasov, which meant we didn't have to meet until 1045pm the day we left Budapest. There were a few people on the tour who had quite set routine 9pm bedtimes, so I'll leave you to imagine the whinging that one generated. Go on. It was good fun. We were all there waiting by about 915pm, so we had plenty of time to enjoy it.
That train turned out to be much better than previous overnighters. Kim and I had a room to ourselves! We even had room for our bags! It was quite amazing. And it was cleaner and nicer than the others, and we didn't get thrown around all night. We did have to wake up at some ungodly hour to get our passports stamped at the border, but the border guards were really nice and spoke surprisingly good English. As usual, they were pretty fascinated with my passport. Most people are - I have a brand new one, it's much prettier than the old ones. And around somewhere like Romania, they don't tend to see too many NZ passports.
We got into Brasov around lunchtime, and the main reason you go to Brasov is as a jumping off point for Bran Castle. So everybody except Marsha and Cameron talked themselves into needing to see it, which meant dumping our shit in our rooms and running back out and getting straight into taxis. It was about 2pm by this stage, and it was a 45min drive to Bran, and from what we knew the castle shut at 4pm. The taxis were a total fiasco. We had 14 people wanting to go, and poor Tony had ordered 3 taxis and was trying to organise things so that there were four people in each. One couple decided that they'd martyr themselves and not go, because otherwise two other people were going to have to miss out. They made such a song and dance about it, originally because there weren't enough taxis for everybody, and then when we convinced them that we could just order another one, because it was unfair that two people should have to pay twice what everyone else had paid. It was incredibly frustrating. I'd never seen Tony be anything other than relaxed and happy, but even he was starting to look a bit tense in the facial area. In the end I said I've got a bright idea, why don't we put three people into each of the last two taxis? so Kim and I grabbed one of the single men and got into the next taxi that rolled up before we got too murdery.
So the castle itself, when we managed to get ourselves there, is pretty cool. You can see why people would think that it might have been used as the setting for Bram Stoker's Dracula. I love that it's turned into such a tourist attraction though - it might or might not have been the setting for the novel; Dracula the character might or might not have been based on Vlad the Impaler, or another member of his family; and Vlad the Impaler, although he lived in the area, never lived in that castle. But it is perched up on a cliff and from the outside it definitely looks like it could be pretty creepy.
I also got a couple of decent photos inside..
Generally the inside wasn't as interesting or as Dracula-centric as you might expect. That's not how they market it, it's just what's become the common perception. Inside was quite plainly decorated and furnished. There were some nice pieces of furniture but we walked through almost without pausing.
We wandered through the market at the bottom of the hill, which sold strange looking dolls and a lot of tacky Dracula souvenirs, then jumped in the taxis back to Brasov.
I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening wandering around Brasov with Kim. Her modus operandi is to make a list of what she wants to see in a place, then tick them all off, so she was a pretty good person to trail around behind. We went for a coffee on the edge of town, then walked along the town wall past the black tower and the white tower (the black tower was cleaned a bit overambitiously so now it's white too). I forget which tower this photo is of. Potentially the black one.
Then we went to the churches and the "narrowest street", which we decided should be classed as an alleyway, not a street.
Wow. Blogspot just made me download google chrome before I could keep working on my blog, and now it's changed the set up so I can't lay my photos out the way I want. Very annoying.
Anyway. Notice the Hollywood-style Brasov sign on the hill in the last photo? There was another town we we went through called something like Radov that had one too.
This is the lovely town square. Below is the massive church that was literally just off the town square.
And this is Kim in the street where we had dinner. We sat outside. It got colder. And colder. And colder. Neither of us had any kind of warm clothing but the decision had been made to sit outside so we figured we could bear the consequences.
Then we went to the awesome self-serve soft-serve shop. They had lots of different flavours. Shame they were all a bit crap. I meant to take a photo of it, but apparently I forgot. Sorry!!
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