Bucharest, Romania

Another day, another train.

Personally, I wasn't taken with Bucharest.  We've been to plenty of big, noisy, busy, dirty cities on this tour, but this was the first one I didn't really enjoy.  I loved all the others.  There were a few interesting sights, but generally I felt like there wasn't much personality to the place, and the people there were about as unfriendly as it got in the entire 8 weeks.

We were only there for an afternoon, again, so we went for a city walk with Tony and saw all the main attractions.

The first was the President's palace.  Sorry, it's been a few weeks now and a lots happened, including me sending my Eastern Europe book home, so my memory of what everything is and who everybody was is getting a bit hazy.  The palace was built by the last dictator, who basically surrounded himself with his family and friends in all the positions of power, then ran the country into the ground.  He spent an absolute fortune on building this place, and it is really, unbelievably, huge.

It looks big enough from here, but actually it's a square building.  I think there were over a thousand rooms in the place.

At some stage, someone decided they had to be the biggest and best at everything, so this is the Bucharest Champs Elysees.  It even has a street sign that looks identical to the one in Paris.  I believe the Bucharest one is 6m longer.  Sweeeet.

How is it that so many of my photos feature Colin front and centre?  He's the one with the hat.

We also went to the Student Square, where (as I remember things) there was a big uprising against the dictator while he was giving a speech one day.  He jumped in a helicopter and was taken away to safety, but some of the protesters died.  After that, the dictator and his wife were had up in court for the way they'd run the country into the ground, run up a massive national debt, and caused the people to have to live in poverty, and they both ended up in front of the firing squad.  The square now has lots of statues and monuments and so forth.

We're not sure what the birds nest up the pole is about.

Some of the architecture was pretty cool.  There were a couple of buildings where they'd kept the façade but built a new, much bigger, building behind it.

Oh yeah, this was awesome.  Check out how they were advertising the tv series True Blood (it's about vampires, for those who don't know):

It was a little sick, because the pigeons were drinking the water.

We were staying well out of the city centre, so that was about the extent of our veiwing of Bucharest.  The next day we left about 11am to get our next overnight train (woohooooo!!)...

Bran Castle and Brasov, Romania

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!!

Two Months To Go!

Tomorrow is bang on two months before I fly out...  I'm not entirely sure how I feel about that.  "Excited" is not the right word.  "Strange" might be a bit closer.  I keep having these moments of feeling completely taken aback about the places I'm going to go and the things I'm going to do.  Two days ago it was "I'm going to Romania".  Yesterday it was "Moscow...".  Today it's "OH MY GOD IT'S ONLY TWO MONTHS UNTIL I FLY OUT!".  Although I am much calmer about the whole thing now than I was a week or so ago.

Today I spent the whole day running round Achieving Things (after I woke up at 11am, that is).  I took my backpack in to have the places where the stitching has pulled resewed.  I went to the Sheepskin Warehouse in Evans Bay, where I used to work, and spent over $100 on merino-possum blend socks and gloves.  I went to the bank, organised the bank cheque for my Canadian working holiday visa, and sent that application away.  I washed my car and took it to Turners to see what they thought they could do with it (sell it for $500 at minimum $300 commission.  Conclusion:  Not Worth It).  I asked at TSB Bank about a Visa, because they have the best charges and rates, but it turns out you have to have a bank account with them for 6 months before they'll approve you for a credit card, so that went out the window too.  AND I tidied my room.  That only leaves me with a list that's most of the length of my arm to complete before I leave!