The Rest of Romania

Hello again avid blog readers!

You may think that just because we've already arrived home you no longer need to come and read this blog any longer! WRONG!!! We still have nearly 7 weeks of unaccounted travels that we'd like to share with you :)

The story continues...

So we left Brasov for Sigisoara, this was probably one of my favourite places in Romania and Transylvania. The Lonely Planet guidebook (a.k.a. The Book of Lies) tells travellers to only bother coming to Sigisoara for a day as everything in town can be seen in as little as 3 hours. This may be the case if you only bother with the town centre, but if you are anything like us then you're going to need the better part of a day getting lost looking for 800 year old oak trees! Thankfully we did manage to find them, after a small scare about how deep into the Transylvanian forest you had to go before you came across a bear or a wolf. They were pretty impressive for trees and the forest walk back gave us a good opportunity to take some pictures of cool looking mushrooms... I wonder how many of them were magic?

How far before we come across bears...?

HUGE 800 year old oak trees.

Mushrooms!! - All mushrooms are edible, some only once! (We decided not to try!)

The centre of the old town was quite picturesque but gives you an odd feeling as apparently it is one of the last residentially inhabited citadels left in Europe, but they did have a rather cool and spooky graveyard, which satisfied my morbid desire to see Transylvania far better than Dracula's Castle! Down in the modern city was a great little restaurant that we went to on both of the nights we were there. The only trick is to make sure you request the smoking section so that you get to sit in the restaurant with everyone else. If you choose non-smoking then you are directed to a single table that has been placed right at the entrance of the restaurant and has been enclosed in glass walls (smoke-proof glass walls to be sure). This basically means that everyone who enters the restaurant gets a free freak-show! "Please do not tap on the glass, non-smokers may become agitated"

Sigisoara

Graveyard in Sigisoara

Our next destination in Transylvania was Sibiu, European cultural capital 2007, hooray! Not really sure why they received this particular honour, probably just because they joined the EU this year, though they did have quite a few pieces of installation art around the brand-spanking new town square. Including an enormous jelly fish that announces in a voice far to loud in relation to your proximity that you should come back when it's dark... creepy. Oh and I ate deep fried brains at one of the restaurants :S

Sibiu

Now we were at the end of our time in Romania and Eastern Europe and had to get to Bucharest to catch our flight to Athens. We didn't really leave any time to see Bucharest as many travellers had advised us not to bother and we were rather over European capitals by this stage. But it was still an interesting place, by interesting I mean bizarre!

12 hours of weirdness in Bucharest:

• There are apparently between 100 000 and 200 000 stray dogs in Bucharest, we saw a woman on the 4th floor of a building throwing chicken carcasses onto the main road for them, she didn't seem too concerned about what she hit in the process. (We later met a friend in Egypt who was chased by a pack of dogs in Bucharest and had to climb up onto a van to escape them, if only he'd dropped his hot dog, no pun intended)

• Our Hostel was above a strip club (nothing wrong there I know).

• We had to escort 3 Swedes, one of which was drunk, to restaurant that was about 10 mins walk from the hostel and that they insisted they needed to catch a taxi to reach (I think they didn't want to scuff their new shoes, or maybe they were worried about the dogs).

• We met a crazy, possibly possessed, hobo at the airport bus stop, who kept trying to tell me about Australia in 3 languages (one of which I think was English backwards) then he showed me a series of homoerotic images of Jean-Claude Van Damme until the bus came. When it did arrive he gave us a very friendly farewell where he stuck half his body in the bus doors and waved with both hands... then the bus doors closed and he was cut in half!!! Just kidding he wasn't actually cut in half but it definitely would have hurt.

• We also met a 28 year old guy on the bus who was catching his first plane, so cool, he was really nervous! Such a nice guy, it's a shame he was catching Easyjet :P

Well that's was it for Europe! Now just a quick stop in the Mediterranean before we hit the Middle East!