Yesterday I awoke to take a jog in the freezing cold weather, and took a trip from the hostel to three different places. There we're 5 of us going: Myself, a 27 year old girl from New Zealand who I have been at three different hostels with in addition to this one, a guy from Australia in his 30's, and two 22ish girls from Australia.
(1) First we went to a bear sanctuary-I learned that Romania has a long history of training bears to do different tricks, keeping bears outside restaurants, roadside shops, etc for amusement and other things-and the people who built this bear sanctuary felt these bears we're mistreated. So we walked around in the cold viewing the various bears. There was even a wolf from a zoo that closed down who became friends with one of the bears-which goes against there natural instincts-but I guess their instincts we're dulled when they we're taken into captivity.
(2) Secondly, we went to Bran Castle, where the Queen of Marie lived, but also known as Dracula's Castle-as this is where the story was supposedly based of. The castle itself was beautiful, which nice furnishings. There we're even banners from the Castle promoting the movie Transylvania 2. It was very cold and windy on the top of the hill where the castle was, and the base was very touristy, with lots of shops. No Dracula though. No bats, full moon, etc-of course it was during the day.
We had lunch in between. We we're supposed to meet our driver at 1:30, but the restaurant was very slow, and it was almost 2 by the time we got out.
(3) After this, We went to a fort-called Rasnov Citadel, which is located on top of a hill. The Citadel was quite nice, but very rushed, and we got back at 3:30 pm.
