Days 14-15: The Honeymoon is Over

Day 14:

Last day of our honeymoon trip. The schedule is wake up, go climb 1,500 steps to Poienari Fortress, and then head back to Bucharest with a couple quick sightseeing stops on the way.

It's hard to see the fort in that picture, but if you look at the building at ground level with the conical roof, the fortress is pretty much directly above that. It's probably only visible in the big version of the photo on Picasa (linked here)

Getting up there requires climbing 1,500 stone steps up the wooded mountainside. It's a very pretty walk, but it's 1,500 stairs.

That's a lot of stairs. If I were doing the Navy SEAL Workout every day like my friend Saeed, maybe I could do it no problem. But when we came to this sign along the way I was about ready to kill someone. By the time I hit the 2/3 mark I was seriously considering just taking over the fortress when I got to the top and ruling Wallachia as a bandit lord.

Eventually, though, we reached the top of the hill and had the fortress in sight. The original tower was built in I think the 13th century. In Vlad Tepes' time, the surrounding wall and outbuildings were constructed to help hold off the Turks. Legend has it that one Easter morning, Vlad had his troops surround the Easter feast of a noble family that he found out had tried to poison him. The guards seized the nobles and brought them out here, and forced them to work on the construction of the fortress in their finery until all their clothes were destroyed. I assume after that he had them all impaled, although the legend doesn't actually say.

The fortress itself was smallish but really cool from a historical perspective.

After that it was off to Biserica Domneasca, a 14th-century chruch in Curtea de Arges. There's a whole legend about this church that Ioana told me, but I wasn't listening very well. Something about the builder being forced to kill his pregnant wife and then jumping off the roof and creating a saltwater well where he landed, or something like that.

But the inside of the church was amazing, every square inch was covered in paintings (many of them restored originals from the 14th century). I didn't take any photos (expensive), but Emma did, so maybe I'll get some pictures up soon.

After that, it was back into the Dacia for one last leg back to Bucharest. We got home around 6pm. Goodbye, honeymoon. It was great! Write to me, Mrs. Waffles!

Day 15;

I gave the camera a rest today, so no photos. We went down to the village house in the morning for two different church ceremonies. First off, the priest has to do a one-week checkup on your marriage, make sure nobody has killed anyone or anything like that. Then we did the baptism conversion, which ended up being a much longer and more complicated process than I realized. The priest himself had never done one (not a lot of Roman Catholics in Romania) and had to go digging through the archives to find the correct procedure. But we eventually got it handled, and he asked me if I renounced my loyalty to the Pope, which is like asking me whether I renounce my loyalty to the Tooth Fairy, so I told him "Sure." He anointed me with oil, which I think is olive oil, so I smelled like bruschetta all day and was craving Italian.

Instead we went back to the village house for yet another party, although much smaller this time. We had mici and mutton skewers and basically just hung out all day in the yard. One of the attendees had brought her six-year-old son. He had never met anyone who didn't speak Romanian before, and he couldn't get it through his head that I couldn't understand him. He would ask me something, and I would tell him (in Romanian) that I don't speak Romanian, I'm American, I only speak English, and he would just cock his head to the side like "What the hell is this guy talking about?" and ask me the same thing again. I would try a different tack with "I don't understand" and then the kid would just yell his question at the top of his lungs, apparently having decided I must be hard of hearing. I eventually tracked down Ioana and tried to have her explain it for me, but he still couldn't get his head around the idea that I was a grownup and could talk but couldn't speak Romanian. He understood the concept of speaking English (his English teacher spoke English), but not the idea that I didn't also speak Romanian. He kept asking Ioana why I was using all small words, and I think after a while he just decided I was retarded.

Eventually we just played soccer together, which worked out fine because I know how to count in Romanian and he knows how to count in English, so once I learned the Romanian for "What's the score?" we were all good.