arnika round the world

So like I mentioned before Dracula is based on some guy called Vlad who would impale people, still he’s the closest thing to the dracula we know so of course towns connected to him capitalise on the dracula thing, a lot.

So being the tourists that we are, we headd of to Sighisoara to Vlads birth place to check it out. Again it was me and Pete joined by Martin (Dutch guy #3) but not #1 and 2 as they were still in bed. After spending an hour or so arguing with them about if they actually wanted to come or not, we finally got to the train station and caught the 2 hour train and I managed to book my next train ticket for the following day to Chisinau.

So Sighisoara…a nice town, actually a really beautiful little spot with an old town on a hill with lots of nice churches and old buildings.

From random blog photos

The centre was a little bit touristy but not so bad. It was all original building from back in the day and we checked out the tiny tourture museum and read about how they would torture and hang people, then we past the main square where they would burn witches….pleasant. Its seems all so crazy that that sort of stuff actually happened. the clock tower was really beautiful and the whole place seemed authenticaly old (becuase it is I guess!).

From random blog photos

For lunch we headed away from the old town to track down a little shop selling food, we got some bread,cheese and yoghurt. My yoghurt was apricot, the boys got plain. However when they opened it, it looked remarkably unlike yoghurt and much more like sour cream….because it was….oh the joys of not speaking the language. My yoghurt was good, Pete was sad. The best thing is how the lady just let us buy 2 tubs of sour cream when clearly we were trying to get yoghurt. Oh well.

We also climbed up to a church and saw an old cemetry and some views across the valley then we tracked down Vlads statue and brought vampire teeth to get our photo with it. We thought we were hilarious with our plastic vampire teeth made for chldren, not sure other people walking past thought it was quite so funny.

From random blog photos

We caught a late train home as it was much cheaper and hung out in the park for a bit playing on Disney ‘princess’ cards we picked up in the market. The train back to Brasov was empty and half way started cranking up music reall loud…it was a bit strange in this old train with no one around with really loud music, some sort of communist style and other stuff like ‘Cotton Eye Joe”…it was bizarre.

Back home we cooked up..PASTA! yep so creative and headed to bed.

The next day was my last before heading to Chisninau at 4pm, me and Pete were going to go check out Bran castle, the real dracula castle but left it a bit late so ended up chopping it in favour of walking through the bear infested woods up to the Brasov sign in the hills.

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(Brasov)
We had a late lunch then it was time to leave. I had to take a train back to Bucharest then change onto my overnight soviet era train to Chisinau, needless to say I didnt see any other tourists. the train was great, it was 4 berth cabis with sheets with roses that said ‘I love you’ and carpited floors and frilley curtins, excellent.

From random blog photos

So began my long, and hot journey into Moldova, probably the most random country I have visited yet

Brasov is the perfect palce for day trips around transylvania so a few os headed out for the day to Sinaia to visit the Peles castle that weas there. I was with Pete who is an english guy spending 2 weeks in Brasov to wirte some research thing for uni on tourism in Brasov and dracula stuff, so he trying to take notes on any amazing insights we had into the world of tourism….I’m not sure if we were ever helpful! Also with Dutch # 1 and #2.

We finally headed to the train station after everyone eventually got up and made it onto the train at around 12.30. It was a 2 hour trip out there and a rally nice train ride throug the mountains and saw lots of little villages and things long the way.

Sinaia was really beautiful, set  amoungst mountains and lots of cute houses around including some very gothic ones that could totally have been haunted and ery dracula-esq


. We were pretty hungry byt this stage so grabbed some lunch at a seemingly cheap restaurant which turned out to be expensive as men prices werent quite what they seems! Never mind though as in this part of the world, the difference is only ever a couple of dollars.

Finally we headed on up to try find the palace, we stoped at cute monastary on the way then walked all the way up this hill before evenually finding the entrance to the castle which we joked that by this time it might be closed.

It was.

Actually it was monday and it wasnt even open on monday, the guards wouldnt even let us walk around the outside! we thought briefly about climbing through the hills and sneaking around the front but there are bears and guards with guns. So we found a good vantage point to get photos, we still saw the while front of it, and really to be honest, the insides are never that great. So while our day tip was a little unsuccessful we still saw the catle, and the monastry and the town was really nice.

We headed back down to the train station which we discovered wasn’t that far at all we had just somehow mssed the main entrance (not that you would actually think to put a sigh there or anything) and walked the very long way.

We had an hour or so ait for the train then a 2 hour ride back where we discussed uni, politics and life without coming up to answers for anything (and we didn’t even solve the education problem!). The ride back was nice and by the time we made it back to the hostel it was getting dark. We stoped at a supermarket and brought heap of veges and cooked up thi masive healthy meal whch was awesome and had it while watching the worst movie ever, but also one of the funniest, Eurotrip- always god to watch while backpakcing around urope and ofending every european in the room with horrible stereotypes of their country. We headed to bed early with noter day trip planned for the next day. Well me and Pete did while the dutch guys ended p staying up till 5 am with some Canadians and never quite made it on our day trip.

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