eric's blog

We're still in Romania, and I'm loving it. It's such a great country. After spending a lot longer than we thought in Sighet (and visiting a whole bunch of little villages around there too), we headed to an area called Southern Bucovina, which happens to be in the north east corner of the country. The train ride there was amazing, as the whole country side is just rolling green hills, with little villages along the way.

We decided to stay in a little village called Vama, and use that as our base to explore all the monasteries around the area. This town was great, as it wasn't touristy at all. Just a few guesthouses around. The next day it was off to see the monasteries. The thing is, that the busses here suck. The good thing is that it's very easy to hitch hike, so people just do that instead. We always manage to get rides quite quickly, and you're just expected to pay the bus fare (although sometimes they won't accept that). Anyways, we got to the monasteries, and they were awesome. The insides and outsides are completely covered in frescoes. Cartoon Jesuses and other important biblical people are great to see. It's really strange because the insides always seem to have one room that's completely covered in gruesome images. Saints heads are being chopped off (and the halo remains around the head) and blood is gushing everywhere.

After that, it was off to Transylvania, the home of Dracula. We wanted to break our long journey up by spending a night in a city called Cluj-Napoca. We thought that this would be a smart idea, but man, were we wrong. We had the intention of camping, and since that was a bit away from the city, we had dinner first. We then followed the direction from our Lonely Planet, and that's when things went wrong. It told us to take a bus to the end of the line, from where it would be an easy (and marked) 2km walk. nope. It turns out the end of the line is way past where we wanted to get off, and the 2km turned out to be a lot more. There were no signs either, so we relied on friendly locals. We arrived after almost 2 hours, at about 11:00.

The next day wasn't so great either. Our plan was to take an early bus to Sibiu, so that we would have the whole day to explore that city. However, the only bus that we could find (it turns out the bus station has been moved, so it was not in our book) was at 4pm. We then arrived to Sibiu in the late evening, and went to the hotel that our guide recommends. However, this was full, as were any other hotels that we managed to find around town. We started joking about sleeping in the park, but once 10 o'clock came around, it started to sound like a good idea. Our saviour was when we decided to check the internet, and found that a hostel had recently been opened, and it turned out they had room for us. Yippee!

We're are now in Sighisoara, birthplace of Vlad Tepes. You may know him better as Dracula. We saw the house where he was born, which has now been turned into a tourist trap restaurant, where the waiters dress up in capes and everything. But at least the town is really nice, even if it is a bit too touristy.