Day 11:
We spent the night in what is essentially a hostel, sleeping all four of us to a room. You might be thinking "Wow, what a terrible honeymoon," but consider that our first honeymoon was spent in 115 degree heat and I was attacked by scorpions. In context, this was actually pretty great. Once we were all up and ready to go, we headed back out to Sigisoara to tour the place in the daytime.
We spent a lot of time just ambling around the city. It was a great place for souvenirs, and for sightseeing. I managed to order myself a snack in Romanian all by myself again, although when it got to asking for a pastry I just had to say "si este" ("and this") while pointing.
In the middle of the city, in the Clockmakers' Tower (I think), there's a big history museum. It's I think six or seven floors (although each floor not that big -- it's the tower), and wow was it awesome. They had tons of artifacts from medieval Romania, just room after room of really cool stuff: tools, machines, furniture, signs, you name it. Then going back further, they had stuff from all the way back to the Second and Third Centuries, when the Romans ruled the hill and built a fortress there. There were old Roman coins, bits of tools and weapons, lots of neat things. And it went back even farther than that, because they had artifacts from the Dacians -- the pre-Roman civilization that lived in the area all the way back to the beginning of the Bronze Age. There were axe-heads and coins and lots of pottery that survived. Some of the pottery was really amazing, especially considering the primitive conditions under which it was made. It looked like stuff you would pay a lot of money for at Restoration Hardware or Williams-Sonoma.
We toured around the city some more, and in the afternoon piled back into the Dacia to head out.
Our next destination: Sibiu. Sibiu is another old, old Romanian city, much larger than Sigisoara but not as well preserved -- it's more like Bucharest, a modern cosmopolitan place but with some medieval buildings still around.
The trip to Sibiu was pretty uneventful, and only a couple of hours. After we got there, though, we spent over an hour looking for a place to stay. Gagi said that there were lots of "pensiunea" (bed & breakfasts) in the area, and we would just drive around until we found a good one. But the best values were outside of town, because Sibiu is a big tourism destination and many people get there by train or airplane -- so the B&Bs in the city are really expensive, but the ones that are driving distance away are a lot cheaper.
Gagi and Io went to check each place that we stopped. Em and I had to stay in the car because if the owners realized we were Americans suddenly the rates would double. The first place we checked, they said was pretty good, and 200 lei per night (about $60) for the four of us in one room. That was the top end of our budget. It was basically a small house on a dirt road shoulder-to-shoulder with other houses. But the owners kept chickens, and the whole place smelled like chicken-shit, so Gagi and Io decided to move on. The next place was a bit cheaper and a bit bigger, but the owners apparently kept rotting corpses in the basement, because Io said she was nearly throwing up the entire time they were there.
The third place we checked was this one in the photo to the left. Gagi and Io went up to talk to them, and I was sitting in the car with Em going "What are they thinking? This place is a palace. It's huge. It has a gazebo, for Christ's sake. Is that a tennis court? What on earth makes them think this is going to be less than the chickenshit house? It's like the hovel was too expensive, so we're all 'Well, maybe we could stay at Versailles.'"
But it turned out that Versailles offered us two rooms (a triple and a single) for the same 200 lei that the chickenshit place wanted. So Versailles it is!
Versailles is pretty sweet, as it turns out, with a game room, an outdoor barbecue, a combination tennis and basketball court, and a giant kitchen where we can cook food for ourselves so we don't have to go out. It's a little sad, actually -- the place has twelve rooms and a dining room that could sit 25 people with ease, and the first day it was just us and one other family; the second day it's just us alone. The proprietor is jumping through all sorts of hoops to make sure we're kept happy. The lousy economy has apparently taken a major toll on the tourism industry in general and this area in particular.
We had a lovely dinner of barbecued mici and sausage, and mamaliga (polenta with cheese and sour cream), and then all piled into our rooms to go to sleep. It's freezing cold (we're up in the mountains a bit) and there's essentially no hot water, but we're having a blast anyway. Tomorrow it's sightseeing and then we'll see what we want to do.
My favorite of the many dogs at Versailles. For some reason, her name is Mrs. Waffles.
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