You Say It's Your Birthday

ONE YEAR!  I am mostly celebrating the fact that we managed to keep Gabe from killing himself for an entire year, despite his best efforts to the contrary.  I don't know how we survive, as a species.

The first day of Gabe's second year dawned sunny and beautiful.  Gabe woke up with the sort of look his mom has every morning.  You can already tell that somewhere, deep down inside his baby brain, he is thinking "How long is it before I'm allowed to have coffee?"

Today was the big Sighisoara sightseeing and souvenir-buying day for my parents, so they and I headed out bright and early.  Io and Gabe were running a bit behind and caught up with us around lunchtime.

My parents and I walked around parts of old-town Sighisoara, and then headed to the history museum that is contained in the Clockmakers' Tower.

I love that museum.  They've got artifacts dating back to the Dacian (pre-Roman) days, all the way back to the Bronze Age.  The metal objects (arrowheads, sickle blades, axeheads, etc) have survived decently, but the pottery has survived incredibly well.

Then they have artifacts up through Roman times, medieval times, and into the early Renaissance when the town was dominated by various trade guilds.  The guilds are the ones who built and maintained the different towers around the city walls.  They would also man and fight from them, when the Turks attacked.

Nothing makes you appreciate modern medicine and dentistry more than seeing the tools of the trade from back in the day.  For those unfamiliar with Renaissance-era medical practices, those round drills near the bottom were used to bore holes in your fucking head.

I didn't even want to photograph the amputation kit that was next to this.

The best part is at the top of the tower, though.  You have to climb up a bunch of floors to get there, but once you get to the top you can see the working mechanism that controls the clock.  The original-original mechanism, which was made all of wood, is on display but isn't used.  The metal mechanism that currently controls the clock was installed back in Renaissance times and still works today, chiming off the hour and quarter-hours.

The clock tower also tells you what day of the week it is, by rotating a series of figurines that represent the days.  Each one has the Roman figure for the day, surmounted by the alchemical symbol for whatever element the Renaissance alchemists associated with that day.  These are all the original painted wooden figures from the Renaissance.  Pretty cool.

From the top of the tower you can walk all around the outside catwalk, getting great views of Sighisoara, both the old city (the walled citadel) on top of the hill, and the newer city down in the river valley below.  Sighisoara is the oldest inhabited medieval citadel in all of Europe.

After the clock tower my mom and I hiked up some large number of steps to get to the church on the hill.  My mom went inside to see the frescoes and the crypts, but I hung around outside and checked out the views from atop the hill.

Io and King Gabriel joined us and we had some wonderful lunch, and then walked around Sighisoara some more, sightseeing and souvenir-buying.

I think we are vogue-ing here

After that it was back to the Bimbliombulgobilbomberboomerang for Gabe's birthday party.  We wanted to have a cupcake but ended up with creme brulee instead.  It's a long story.  Gabe didn't seem to mind.  I'm not sure that he knew what to make of all the noise and attention and having his face brought right up to things that are on fire, but I think he enjoyed it overall.

No, cake is for eating, presents are for -- OK, never mind

All in all this was a great but extremely long and exhausting day.  By the end of it, I totally crashed.  Thank God there was nothing around to interfere with my getting some sleep.

As if

Today was our last morning in Sighisoara.  We had a good breakfast and then headed up to do one last museum, the medieval arms collection.  Although I've been to Sighisoara twice before and I love old weapons, I had actually never been to this.  It was really pretty awesome, but I didn't take any pictures inside.  Great! 

We had a good lunch and regretfully checked out of the hotel.  Man was that place awesome.  Then it was back to the train station to catch our ride home.

Smart!

The ride home was, you know, 5 1/2 hours long.  That's pretty long.  We had our train compartment to ourselves again, but 5 1/2 hours is still a long time in a train, especially since Gabe basically didn't nap at all this time.

We still managed to have fun

And now we're back home.  Tania had an entire feast waiting for us, so we all had pork and stuffed cabbage  and bread and home-made freedom fries.  Io and I then took my folks over to the Jolly Fun hotel and got them all settled in, and now it's most definitely time for about 400 hours of sleep, the good King willing.  Tomorrow is his big hair-cutting ceremony and choose-your-own-adventure LARP.  To find out what all that shit means, tune in for our next entry.

Moment of Zen:

Scary.