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Last night we had a lovely dinner at the Dracula house which is just a charming old building where supposedly Vlad the Impaler was born. I had cabbage rolls as did others, served on a bed of mashed potatoes. Polenta (i.e. from corn) is also popular here as are tomatoes, both of which were transplanted from the New World.
This morning we rose to a day that I would call changeable, with clouds scuttling in and out but no real rain. Our local guide Petr met us and gave us some history of Sigisoara, a town that has survived mostly peacefully over the last many centuries of great turmoil in the region. You can see from the pictures that they are mostly old, very old buildings, cobblestone streets which are hell to walk on , and an old town which has its share of curio shops. It is a World Heritage site for UNESCO and is a walled city. We walked around it today with the very knowledgeable Petr whom you will see in the pictures.
We then boarded two vans and took off to see a couple of fortified churches. You can read about Sigisoara and the fortified churches on Wikipedia but the basic deal is that the churches were where the people of the area would gather to be safe when they were invaded by whatever marauding hordes were showing up near them.
The area of Transylvania was mostly settled by Germans at first but (I don’t understand this part) most of the Germans left. And somehow Romanians speak a language closer to Latin than anyone around them. You can read the signs written in Romanian and you can almost understand them, different from those in Hungary which were totally indecipherable!
The churches are Lutheran. One we went to had a tower being reconstructed, paid for by the Lutheran church! So we went to one church, rode a while to the next village and went to a farmer’s home which she has turned into a gathering place. She served the sixteen of us great quantities of bean soup, lamb stew, mashed potatoes, cheesy custard with jams on top.. wine, slivlovic or its equivalent, mint tea. The last fortified church was handsome. Petr explained in great detail the customs of each church, where the different types of worshippers sat, etc.
The third village, name still unknown to me, has a guest house owned by Prince Charles. He apparently owns three, and I don’t know which one this is. It is the blue house. The village is/has been in decline, as have many of the others we saw. Romania is, I suspect, right on the edge of a major renewal. With Ceausescu out, and communists not in sight, beautiful hillsides of green, mountains etc, it is just beautiful!
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We drove over the Carpathian Mountains and are now down into a modern and swank hotel in Braslov, quite a change from the houses of the rest of the day. Others in the group sallied out to bars etc, but I chose to pick up some wine and cheese at the nearby supermarket and settle down here for the night. Tomorrow Bran Castle, home of Vlad the Impaler, Count Dracula!
This morning we took the bus to Bran Castle and got there before most of the crowds arrived. By the time we left, it was very jammed with people. A woman in the restroom line said they were 43 people on her tour. We have 15. . The castle is still owned by a Hapsburg and has never been destroyed completely. The queen of Romania lived in it for a number of years in the early 20th century, presumably in season, and between the wars it was renovated but it had not been destroyed and was not reconstructed. It is a charming little castle and If there weren’t so many crowds of people it would be delightful to walk around it. It is in a beautiful valley. The roads leading up to it are covered with tourist stands so you can buy Dracula T-shirts etc. to your hearts content. We went to the hotel in Bucharest and because I had not slept well, and rain threatened, I stayed back from the orientation walk.
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