Brasov. It was hot but bearable. We walked past the ’Black Church’ so named because of severe acid rain damage it has suffered, and still showed clear signs of. We walked past the tennis courts, athletes preparing for the Brasov Open. We entered a cool, forested road at the foot of the E-W steep Brasov Mt. towering 400m above us. On Mondays the teleferica/funivia /cable car only begins at 12:30, so we continued our walk to the other end of town and wandered through a department store, to no acquisitional avail. Then we found a monument to the martyrs of the revolution of 1989, before turning up a pedestrian road to meet a Marianne and her husband, who fled Bucharest to the mountains during Covid and thought that was the best thing about the pandemic. She showed us photos of her home with views of two mountains. We had a snack of nothing special crepey things, mine with (yuck!) Nutella. Back to the hotel to collect our bags, book a bus from Bucharest to Ruse for tomorrow 16:15-18:00, and take a taxi to the train station. The driver knew more French than English because his wife had worked in France.

The train was 55 minutes late. Maybe anything less than an hour is considered ’punctual’ here. We chatted with Carston from Hong Kong, who was doing a student exchange year in business studies here in Timisoara. He had travelled around a fair bit. Here his rent was paid for him, but a study offer he had for Bern wouldn’t have been paid and would have been too expensive. I asked what is going on now in HK with the Chinese takeover. He is a citizen of ’Hong Kong’ of China.

The train with barely functioning AC was roasting. Luckily, there were effective curtains to shield us from the laser hot sun streaming in. We passed through alpine scenery which, with thick pine forests and craggy clift faces. Even ski lifts and chalets. Then the landscape flattened out to a farmland plain just like passing from Switzerland into Lombardy.

We entered the big city of Bucharest. The main train station, an old style ground floor main hall was jam-packed with travellers of every ilk. We worked out the Metro ticket system and took the right line but in the wrong direction. Backtracking we changed lines at the right place, Piata Victoriei = Victory Place, and headed south to Universitade to find the hotel. The code we had received didn’t work but a charming waitress in the Italian restaurant next door helped us by calling the manager. The room was decorated in flamboyant, modern designs and colors. We have never had such a grand bathroom either. Huge!! We decided to keep it simple and eat in the Italian restaurant with the nice waitress and then explore our neighborhood. Impressive contrast of dilapidated buildings and new blocks. Nets have been erected at first floor height on most art-deco decorated exteriors, probably to catch falling masonary and statuettes eroded through decades of neglect.

Historical Notes

Modern Romania consists of three main regions: Wallachia (the strip between the Carpathian Mountains to the north and the Danube River forming the border to Bulgaria in the south), Moldavia (in the north-east), and Transylvania (all the land northwest of the Carpathian Mountains as far as the border with Hungary).

Image courtesy Wikipedia

History of Wallachia

Following the end of Roman rule, the First Bulgarian Empire (est. 681) controlled the territory of Wallachia.

Image courtesy Wikipedia
The area north of the Danube was contested by the Hungarians, although Hungarian control was weakened by successive Mongol attacks around 1241. A Hungarian Vassal state from 1290-1330, Wallachia became a principality 1330-1417, then, after Bulgaria fell to the Ottomans, governed as a vassal state by the Ottoman Empire, on and off, from 1417 till 1859 (it was a Polish fiefdom 1600-1610, and a Russian protectorate 1829-1856), when it united with Moldavia to form the United Principalities. These were renamed the Kingdom of Romania in 1881. The other parts of modern-day Romania, including Transylvania, were not added till the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918. For this, Bram Stoker’s Dracula was encastled in Transylvania, and not Romania, in his 1899 novel.