Hotel Capitol 3 Brasov

We arrived in Brasov to be greeted at the station by Radu. A local man who had moved his family out to LA. He only came back in the Summer to work and, conveniently for us, he had built an apartment in his cousins garden! He drove us there and it was pretty awesome. Our very own little apartment with a TV and everything! First time we'd had that luxury since the Belvedere I believe. We walked back in to town and saw that they were setting up for some sort of ...

... telling her "10 o'clock".<br><br>Once we had the map we walked around the city centre to the sights that didn't need to be "open" to visit. We checked out some city gates and churches and at some point noticed the gondola up the mountain was running so we went up that, wedged into the car with a couple dozen children.<br><br>At the top there is a Brasov sign much like the famous Hollywood sign and from the sign there are great views of the city below. Apparently you can hike there ...

... and seen the stage play which came after, you have probably seen some of the many films based on his character. Some of the most important cinematic adaptations are F.W. Murnau's 1922 masterpiece "Nosferatu", which was loosely based on Dracula but subjected to a "makeover" for copyright reasons, Todd Browning's "Dracula", which starred Bela Lugosi, a Romanian actor who had previously incarnated the titular character on the stage, and would forever be remembered, and ...

... like many European borders these days, was unmanned, but with exchange offices and cafes replacing the old bureaucratic passport stamping. Then we hit the Vah valley at Trencin. This is a scenic valley, when it can be seen that is. A haze of pollution hangs over the whole area for the first 50 miles or so. What we could see of the scenery was good. What we could see of the towns and industry not so good. A bit like ...

... one. George and Roxana, Florin's parents, were extremely nice people and took us to the new location in their car. The apartment was very comfortable and even had a common kitchen. It was also completely decorated in IKEA furniture and kitchen items! That night we ended up dining at a Croatian restaurant after we had intended to visit a Romanian one. My guide recommended a restaurant that was right next to the Croatian one and they both had similar names, but ...

... but more about that later. We can't take photos in there unfortunately. The twins are a girl and a boy. The girl is about half the size of the boy and really looks sick. She's all grey and gaunt. But they both were full of smiles as we changed them and played with them. The oldest girl looked a little scared but once we paid her some attention she started smiling as well. She had been in there almost a week already but apparently the first few days she just cried the whole time. It ...

... past, whenever we were near a church people started breaking out into a cross. Romanian people do seem to be an attractive lot. There seems to be more than the average amount of good looking people. They do have one downfall though...there's also more than the average amount of big fat hairy facial moles. (moley moley moley) Loads of women have them, and many dont even bother to cut the hair growing out of them. eeewww. There's definately an opening for plastic surgery here.

OK - so even though the map pin for this entry says Brasov, the entry itself covers everywhere we've been in Romania (as per the title - Bucharest, Brasov and Sighisoara). We actually spent the majority of our time in Brasov, mainly due to the fact that the city is pretty cool, and the hostel we were in was fantastic (could have had something to do with the free beer...). Anyway, a few days ago, after another tiring overnight train journey involving multiple stops for ...

... he feigned interest. He said he spoke French, so I told him I was a traveler and writer without much money for a place to sleep. The church was big and empty. Either he didn't understand French well, or he just wasn't very concerned, because he kept pointing me to the nicest hotel in town. Now, when I'd been young and a Christian believer, I had this romantic idea that pastors became pastors because they wanted to serve people, but now I know Christianity isn't ...

... and is cute as a button, and I have a door outside my room that goes out on to the large terrace overlooking the mountains. I will doing a lot of studying, reading, and working-out here. My host family is wonderful, and they live modestly, they are so cute, laughing away downstairs at the moment, and are taking wonderful care of me and helping me with the Romanian language. The romanian language is a romance language and is the closest to classical latin...to me ...