Seeing the “Goodbye Bansko” sign, was a big woohoo moment,
having had a great season, but completely ready to move on! Only 2.5
hours in the transfer car (I treated myself an extra 10lev to get in
with a few of my mates), I’d arrived in Sofia, which treated me like an
old friend. This is the third time I’d been to Sofia, and even the
hostel lady remembered me! I had a walk around to reacquaint myself
with the city before I met up with my favourite Sofia ladies – Sasha
and Asya, the crazy Russian and Bulgarian girls I met the first time I
was in the city.
I had dinner with the girls – lots of catching up and lots of wine…
and then our blind dates arrived. Haha, not really, but it’d felt like
that’s what Sasha had done to us! She’d met these guys a few nights
before at a Japanese restaurant, where she’d met a Japanese drum band
that were touring
the city, and these Dutch guys were working on the production. They
did come bearing gifts though, a few tour t-shirts, oh and they’d
gotten our drinks bill paid for too… so they weren’t half bad. ☺
By midnight, I was falling asleep at the table (we had started at
seven) and we said our goodbyes, but I had to promise that I wasn’t
saying goodbye to Sofia for the last time, and neglect my girls. It was
so nice to arrive somewhere – know the city, have somewhere to stay,
and have local friends to catch up with… so I will have to go back
there again someday.
Wednesday was a train day. A long, boring, tiring train day.
I left the hostel at 8am, and arrived at my new hostel in Brasov,
Romania at 12am the next morning. There was some excitement though,
around 10pm, when I’d fallen asleep, felt the train stopping, looked at
the time, thought “shit, this is my stop”, grabbed my stuff and bolted
off the train – only to look around and realise that I was on a tiny
town platform, not a large city platform. The train was leaving, and I
ran to the only person on the platform, “is this Brasov?” “No”,
she said. SHIT!!! I looked panicked, asked her what I could do, and
said “can you stop the train?” expected a look that said “don’t be
stupid”. Instead, she looked at how much train was left on the
platform, grabbed her walkie talkie and started yelling into it… and
the train stopped!!! She opened a door, I thanked her a thousand times,
and then an hour later, I arrived in Brasov. Now clearly it wasn’t my
fault cos the train was so late, and European stations are so poorly
marked! I was very lucky not to be stranded in the middle of nowhere,
close to midnight, and on my own though… it pays to be traveling as a
single girl sometimes!
The next few days I spent in Brasov,
a lovely little city in the Transylvanian region of Romania. I did a
lot of exploring of the city, mostly of the old town – home to the
“black church” which isn’t very black. It’s a really old church that
was nicknamed the black church after a huge fire that turned it black…
but they must have cleaned it because its not very black anymore. I
also visited the “smallest street in Europe” which is probably only
about one meter wide, walked through the “outcasts village” where all
the people that didn’t belong in the city walls had to live, and found
a lovely view of the city from a hill. That was about the extent of the
excitement of Brasov, because even my hostel was empty.
I did a day trip out to Bran on Friday, which is home to “Dracula’s
Castle”. Lovely castle, where I imagined a fairytale princess living…
not Dracula, but who am I to argue tourism? There was something a
little freaky about that place though, because I was eating my lunch in
a little park next to the castle and I spotted this bat, injured,
crawling along the footpath. Only little, basically a mouse with wings
– it kinda put me off my lunch, but I helped it along, off the
footpath, so no one stood on him.
On Sunday, I was off to Sighsigoaha
(pronounced Sig-i-shore-ra), which was a great little town. It was a
beautiful hot day (the first day I’d warn a t-shirt and had to sit in
the shade since October), and I explored the well-preserved Old Town,
which had a great museum in the old clock tower, and the house Vlad
Tepes (the real guy that was the muse for the character Dracula) was
born in… which is now a fully renovated restaurant, shame. I only spent
one night there, in again, an empty hostel, before I moved on to Cluj.
Cluj-Napoca is Romania’s largest student town, so I expected a party,
and I wasn’t wrong. In the first 10mins of arriving, I met Matty the
Hungarian, and after walking around town, seeing a few sights and
having dramas trying to exchange Bulgarian Lev (no one takes it, even
though they’re neighbouring countries???) we headed back to the hostel
with some beers and vodka. Which were polished off, just in time to
head out with some others heading to a “ladies only” night at one of
the locals. Bonus, was I didn’t spend any money that night, with free
drinks from the bar and some of the punters… negative, was the most
disgusting hangover I’ve had in a long while.
I didn’t see much more of Cluj, spending the whole of Tuesday
recovering, and then Wednesday I was on the road again, heading up to
Sighetu Marmatiei, a town in the Maramures region.
Sighetu Marmatiei didn’t have a very nice greeting for me
– it started pissing down with rain as soon as I stepped off the bus,
and then I took me twenty minutes of walking in the rain to find the
place, cos the dot on the map was marked wrong. Once I’d gotten to the
hostel, everything was fine, except the grandmother and granddaughter
of the English man that owned the hostel were the only ones there, and
I had to communicate through the ten-year-old… and I only saw her at
the start and at the end of my stay. Again, I was the only one staying
there (I was beginning to get a complex) and that’s when I realised how
hard it was to get around a town without that one overly helpful
English speaking hostel worker or any kind of information center, or a
reliable internet connection.
I did ok though, I was there for three nights, and on Thursday, I
found the Museum of Arrested Thought – which was about the time between
the 1940s-1980s when Romania was a communist state, and a learnt a lot
about the incredible amount of people that were killed, or jailed, or
put in hard labour camps. They even had a few buildings through the
country that were “personality adjustment” centers, just like in the
book 1984. Unfortunately all the displays were in Romanian, and because
my Romanian is a bit rusty, I only had an English booklet describing
the displays, which didn’t really do it justice.
Friday was more eventful, with the plan to get to Sapanta where the Merry Cemetery was.
I had got a little information from a local that said the town was only
about 20km away, and when I asked about a bus, he said, “no, just
hitch-hike”. Since I’m not really a fan of getting raped and plundered,
I figured that I could manage cycling 20km. After getting a frustrating
glimpse of google maps and confirming that the distance was correct,
the route was fairly flat, and there was only one road, so getting lost
would be hard – I borrowed one of the hire bikes downstairs and off I
went.
Cycling was a great way to take in the sights and smells of the
countryside, and with a slight burn in the thighs, I made it to
Sapanta. The Merry Cemetery is named as such because all the tombstones
are painted in bright colours and carved from oak, with a picture of
the deceased and an inscribed story telling of their life. Again,
because my Romanian isn’t up to scratch, I couldn’t read what was
written and I’ve heard the stories are quite funny and anecdotal – told
in the first person, they talk about the persons life, good and bad,
and sometimes about how they died too.
For example “I grew up in Sapanta where I lived all my life as a
farmer. It was a pretty shit job, but someone had to do it. Everyone
loved me and many people traveled miles to visit me. I had a loving
family, but I cheated on my wife. I died by one of my cows accidentally
sitting on me, until I suffocated.” Not even kidding, this is what some of them say!
The ride back in the afternoon felt quicker than the way there.
Probably because Sighetu Marmatiei is a bigger town and I had a
countdown of the km on markers home, and I wasn’t worried that the
cemetery might turn out to be 35km away, not 20km. So I made it home
with a sore ass, but none worse for wear, and had a beer to celebrate
making the journey, and cycling over the border into Ukraine four times
– without a visa! I’m such a rebel.
Anyway, so today (being Saturday) I’ve had a fabulously boring day
of buses and extremely long waits at bus stations to arrive in Sibiu
tonight at midnight. I do have one friend though, a Japanese guy I met
at the bus station, who was deciding where to go, and has come along.
I’ve got four days left in Romania before I cross the border into
Hungary and am greeted by some crazy Hungarian relatives in Budapest!
Ciao xoxo
