Braşov, Romania

Well, I made it to Transylvania, one of only 3 or 4 "musts" that I felt while planning this trip.  Yesterday was spent primarily on a train.  For quite a while I was the only person in the entire car (not just the compartment I was in, but the whole car).  I slept, but not very well, as for much of the night we were in the Tatras in Slovakia ... quite chilly, and then through the day in Hungary and Romania it was really hot.  When we stopped just across the Polish/Slovak boarder, I was asleep & was awoken by a loud scream as we were pulling in to the customs stop.  Then somebody walked past my compartment (as I said, that was odd, as I was alone in the car) ... my half conscious mind began to think about Agatha Christie plots, etc, and I had no way of remembering the person enough to give a decent description.

  Well, as I woke up more fully I realized that I was just being silly, and certainly when the Slovak boarder guards did their customary walk through of the train, they didn't find anything out of the ordinary, but it made for an interesting introduction to Slovakia - which I wouldn't get to really visit for another week & a half or so.

I'm glad that I stocked up on water when I was in the station in Krakow.  I never saw any vendors on the train, and as I didn't have any Hungarian or Romanian currency, I couldn't even run out at a stop, but I had two liters of "woda niegazowana" (non-sparkling water) from Poland and some food from Lithuania.  It was an interesting 22 hours, almost exclusively alone on the train.

Well, in any case, I made it to Brasov, got a cab to the hostel I had a reservation at, and discovered that I had misremembered my confirmed dates .

.. I had reserved it from check in on July 6th ... I got there on July 5th.  But they had empty beds, so it didn't pose any problems.  Although the room I was in on the first night was one with 10 beds.  One of the sleepers snored very loud & without any pattern or rhythm.  Eventually I slept and slept well, but it was annoying for me (and many others ... I'd guess about 8 others :P).

On the 6th, I took a ride up to the top of Mt. Tâmpa, part of the Carpathians aka the Transylvanian Alps.  I explored Brasov, ate at a Scottish-style pub (had the driest shepherd's pie ever) and made my way back to the hostel.  There one person was getting together a group to go out, rather than learning our names, he just learned where we were from, so the group that he (New York) got together called each other: New York, Chicago (me), California, Helsinki, Perth, Florida, Seoul, London, Oregon, Dublin .

.. etc ... there were a few others along the way.  It was a good mnemonic device as I remember these people's "names" better than any other people I met on the trip.  After the bar closed, we walked back as a group to the Black Church, an enormous and imposing edifice from the late 1300s looming over everything, by the time we got near the hostel, it was discovered that Perth wasn't actually from our hostel, and as such, she was not allowed in.  As it was the middle of the night, she certainly wasn't sober, and her hotel was a good 20 minute walk away, I agreed to walk back with her.  So, back the way we came, got her safely to her hotel's door, and once more back to my hostel.  This time going past the Black Church, I noticed that there were in fact bats flying around it and I marveled the situation: alone, in the middle of Transylvania, in the middle of the night, next to a 600+ year old church with bats flying all around!  Horror films have been successfully made based on lesser setups.