ME :)

Sunday 03-May-2009

After recovering from a big night, we headed downstairs for a light breakfast before checking out and heading to Rasnov. In Rasnov we visited the Rasnov Fortress which is located on a hilltop in the Carpathian Mountains 200m above the town. Rasnov Fortress isn’t in great shape since it has been around since the 13th century.

There are some parts of the fortress that is quite dangerous as you may slip or fall down a set of stairs. There’s no such thing as health and safety here so be careful. There are some great views of the town below and also surrounding mountains to be seen from up here so it’s definitely worth a visit.

We headed back into Bran to see if we could visit Dracula’s castle but the city itself was jam packed with people. There was a festival taking place there and the large crowd put us off so we decided just to head back to Bucharest and making a pit stop at Sinaia for lunch.

The traffic back to Sinaia was ridiculous. There is only one highway that goes from Bucharest to this part of Romania so when there’s a long weekend the traffic basically comes to a crawl. This is still about 160km from Bucharest mind you and there were already signs that it was going to be a long drive in.

It didn’t really matter to me because once we crawled our way into Sinaia, we headed to a Taverna Sarbului for lunch and this was by far the best meal I’ve had all trip. It was superb! The menu had so many options and I just wanted to eat everything. Taverna Sarbului is relatively high up in the mountains in a rustic environment, so the location is also great. The only one drawback as with many other restaurants in Romania, you can smoke in it! Apart from that, I highly recommend this place and so do many other local celebrities who frequent this place would agree.

From Sinaia back to Bucharest the traffic did die out so we took advantage of that and sped all the way back. That evening Alin & I went for a walk around Bucharest so that I could see what it was like. Like most Eastern European countries, there were plenty of cars about, car horns going off and there wasn’t the hustle and bustle I’d expect it to be. This is most likely due to the May long weekend in Romania and the tradition is to head down to the Black Sea to drink up and party.

Not to worry, we met some interesting characters during the walk especially the owner of a corner store and his mate, an old guy who hated Americans for backstabbing them during the war. He was quite friendly to us and to me especially. He even want to have a drink with me but due to the language barrier, I had no idea what he was saying and Alin couldn’t translate properly because he was talking to the owner.

I wanted to take a photo with him, but in Romanian he asked Alin what he should do in the photo, he didn’t know how to pose, whether or not to smile or from what I understand from Alin, “should I kiss him” didn’t eventuate. I was only told of this comment after the photo was taken since Alin wanted to see what this old man would really do. Nevertheless this old man really enjoyed our company but we had to leave and make our way back to the apartment.

smiles