HOTEL PRESIDENT TG MURES Tirgu Mures

... comfortable in the room, dropped my stuff and quickly went outside. Only to walk to.... somewhere. The weather was beautiful. About 20 degrees, clear sky and it was very quiet with only some birds whispering. I heard about the 'old citadel' up on the mountain, so i thought let's try find it. While walking i noticed life is going very slow here. So many people relaxing and just doing nothing. No hurries at all. The old citadel is part of the old center of Sighisoara which ...

... Sighisora is a town of only 30,000. Tiny compared to all the cities we've been to up to this point. Located in a valley in northern Transylvania, its main attraction is it's 15th century citadel with the birthplace and childhood home of Vlad Tepes. You know him as Count Dracula. He was born in Sighisora in 1431 and lived there as a child before the invasion of the Turks. His castle where he did all his nasty deeds is in southern Romania South of Brasov. His birth house however ...

... signs with arrows that pointed in the directions various international cities with the distance to each location. Some of the more interesting ones were New York, Sydney and Tokyo. After the clock tower we walked over to the house where Vlad Tepes was supposedly born. It is a very ordinary building that now houses a restaurant called Casa Vlad Dracul. From Vlad's Casa we went to a distillery that I ...

... It's really interesting how different Romanian is to the languages of the countries surrounding it. It seems to have much more in common with Spanish, French, and Italian than with Polish, Hungarian, or Serbian. I was pleasantly surprised that I could understand some signs and even a little bit of what people said because of its similarity to Spanish - a nice change from being lost in translation in all of the other European countries I've been traveling in.

... gente muy pobre, unos tipos poniendo lo que parecia un pequeno torpedo en el rio (?), etc. Por la noche y muy temprano de manana escuchas desde la habitacion del hostal los carromatos que vienen y van al campo a su tarea. Los campesinos y los carros se mezclan con los coches en la autovia y desde la ventanilla del autobus pensamos en este estilo de vida tan distinto al nuestro.

... t going to enjoy the jewelry, sticker books, and other girlie things I got his sister and cousin. I was really disappointed! The dracula dolls were way too expensive and the little made-in-China shot glasses with red blood were really just too tacky. Maybe I was too rushed and didn't get to the right store. I ended up with a generic sweatshirt - with "University of Transylvania" on it, or something like that. So ...

... compartment closest to the window refused to open it for the first two (hottest) hours. "It'll start working soon" he repeatedly insisted. Of course it never did. And, as nice as Transylvania is to travel through scenery-wise, 9+ hours on a train in the middle of the day (when I'm already leaving later than I should be) is time that could be much better spent. Frustrating. Tārgu Mures didn't exactly rub me right when I finally arrived at about 9:30 last night either. I had ...

... in Sighisoara, where our hotel is located within the walls of the citadel. To drive to our hotel we must pass a guard post, and the guard denies us permission to enter the citadel. It seems that busses above a certain size are not permitted to enter so as to protect the walls and the air quality. My guide is stubborn, and says we will sit there, holding up traffic, until he lets us in. The guard says we cannot pass, and waves other small vehicles around us. The guide calls to the ...

... go there. It really felt like the city was frozen in time. It was just there and surviving on the old city and tales of Vlad Tepes (Dracula). It was only worth a day though. It was great to be visiting with other tourists though. We took things so slowly there in between seeing sights, so having other people to talk with made things go faster. And we also played card games waiting for the train. It's also interesting because one of them, Katie, is an occupational therapist and primarily ...

... attitude is back and today I was almost back to form, leaving him panting in the dust while I sprinted nimbly up broken stone staircases, leapt from sidewalk to sidewalk and snapped pictures of the various old buildings in a single bound, etc. etc. Here's a hearty recommendation for Gia Hostel in Sighisoara, but a word about their "special double rooms": when we followed the guy from the train station, I was so exhausted that I collapsed on ...