Romania, Day 2 – Dracula’s Castle

A little cottage lying in the shadow of Bran Castle, but this batch is a good one if I do say so myself.

Me, my peers and our first world problems. Every angsty, twatty teenager/tweenager moaning about not being able to get a boyfriend/girlfriend/good job/degree/working visas/studentships/Coldplay concert tickets etc., should go on a trip to Romania. It really puts things in perspective. When you have hordes of gypsies and prostitutes hounding you everywhere you go, begging for money, destituteness written in every sun-burned wrinkle of their faces, and when people keep attempting to scam you – you stop sulking about why people didn’t like your insightful, wittily worded Facebook status.

When I think of Romania, I think of Benjamin Sisko saying “It’s easy to be a saint in paradise.” (Star Trek: The Maquis, part I.) The poverty in this country is shocking. Either that, or I’ve had it far too easy. In any case, I am immensely fortunate, and grateful, that I was able to live as my life as I have so far. These poor people. In a way, you can’t really fault them for scamming/begging/extortion, due to the ridiculously low living standards here. Their locals told me that the average Romanian earns 98 pounds per month. Their prices, although cheap compared to the rest of the EU, are pretty much the same as Taiwan. I’m never going to gripe about 22K again – but I still want to earn more than that.

That being said, I’m still very angry about what happened on bus 780 in Bucharest and despite all the stuff I just said, I still think that nothing can justify what they did and the mental scarring they left me with. What terrible people.

I also think of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII: ‘Men’s evil manners live in brass; their virtues we write in water.’ Despite the fact that the majority of the local Romanians were amazing people, generous, hearty and welcoming, the bus incident will always loom ostentatiously in the backdrop of my memory room. It’s always going to be the first thing I think of when I remember this trip and Romania. As a matter of fact, whenever people ask me now about Romania, my initial response is, ‘Incredibly unsafe.’ I feel that this isn’t entirely fair, but as Shakespeare said, unpleasant memories tend to linger a lot longer. Tolkien similarly noted that ‘it is a strange thing, but things that are good to have and days that are good to spend are soon told about, and not much to listen to; while things that are uncomfortable, palpitating, and even gruesome, may make a good tale, and take a deal of telling anyway’ (The Hobbit). Anyway, I’m going to have to stop all these quotations before this blog post turns into my dissertation.

Well, we spent the night at the Kretan Hostel, which cost us 7.32 for a night. It was fairly nice, though it wasn’t really anything to write home about. We left for Brasov by train at 0830, and the first thing I said as we watched Bucharest roll away in the distance was ‘Good riddance.’

Bucharest. Why does my camera always make things look so much nicer than they really are? Rose coloured lens?

Again, the actual city looks a lot worse

The journey took about 3 hours and cost about 7 pounds, was moderately comfortable (I slept through most of it), and when I woke up, we were in the land beyond the forests, Transylvania, Wallachia of old and the legendary home of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The countryside was very nice, although the mountains reminded me a lot of the ones back home in la belle Taiwan. And the Taiwanese don’t scam poor, innocent travellers.

We arrived in Brasov, our destination, without any problems, where we were based. It’s a very pretty town, and seemed a lot friendlier too. The weather was also scorchingly hot.

The Romanians have a way of signposting their town names, Hollywood-style:

This is probably irrelevant, but the one thing I don’t like about travelling in Europe is pronouncing things wrong and embarrassing myself. I think I’ve given up pronouncing things in France, but in Romania it’s fairly easy to get the hang of their names. Basically “ș” is pronounced “sh,” so Brașov is Brah-shov. And no, I didn’t forget the little toggle at the bottom when I typed Brasov – I just can’t be bothered to press ctrl+insert every time. The “oa” is pronounced “wa,” so Sighișoara is “Siggy-sh-warah.” I will never forget the look on the Luxembourg boy’s face when I asked him how to get to the Maison de Victor Hugo. Try saying that with an English accent, seriously.

Another probably obvious but oft-overlooked fact is that if you learn some really basic local phrases, you’ll get a much more positive reaction. One of my friends is Romanian and keeps trying to get me to learn his language, and I managed to pick up some elementary phrases from him. “Ce faci” (cheh fah-chee) is how are you, while “Multumesc” (mool-tsoo-mesk) or “mersi” is thank you. Frumosi (just the way you read it) means beautiful/handsome. I got lots of frumosis during this trip, much to my gratification. “Tren” is train, while “autobuz” is bus. And the Romanians keep telling me that Romanian is the hardest language under the sun. I think they forgot the fact that my native tongue is Mandarin Chinese.

We left our luggage in the hostel (6 pounds per night), and went to Autogara 2, the bus station connecting Brasov with all the other outer towns. The bus from Brasov to Bran costs 7 lei and takes about 50 minutes. The plan for today was Bran Castle, which was supposedly the fortress that Bram Stoker based Dracula’s castle on: ‘Suddenly, I became conscious of the fact that the driver was in the act of pulling up the horses in the courtyard of a vast ruined castle, from whose tall black windows came no ray of light, and whose broken battlements showed a jagged line against the moonlit sky [...] the castle is on the very edge of a terrible precipice. A stone falling from the window would fall a thousand feet without touching anything! As far as the eye can reach is a sea of green tree tops, with occasionally a deep rift where there is a chasm. Here and there are silver threads where the rivers wind in deep gorges through the forests.’ It was actually a rather accurate depiction, although I didn’t think that the cliff was that sheer. Or maybe it looks sheer by moonlight.

(A/N: None of these pictures are photoshopped or filtered in any way, because I’m lazy. Shoot me.)

The valley was very pretty.

The castle’s interior was quite interesting (5 lei admission fee I think), although if you see a certain amount of castles in a short period of time they start to all look the same.

  

We headed back to Brasov for a very satisfying dinner. The food here is amazingly cheap: full course meals don’t usually cost more than 7 pounds. Some of the things they specialise in are polenta (mămăligă – Jonathan Harker ate this when he was in Transylvania too, Bram Stoker really knew his stuff), Moldovian stew and Bulgarian salad. They also make a mean mojito. I don’t usually drink, but the booze here is super cheap. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I LOVE ROMANIAN FOOD. Or is it because I’ve lived in the UK for too long?

YUM!

To be continued – I need to wrap this up quickly, since my dissertation is laughing menacingly in my face.