Day 13 - Friday 15th October - Peles Palace and Hasdeu Castle
Official Itinerary says: "After breakfast we say farewell to Transylvania and travel south to Sinaia. Here we will be stopping to visit the Peles Palaces. Situated in wooded parkland at the foot of the snowy mountains, the spectacular Palaces were built by the Romanian royal family in the nineteenth century. We will take a guided tour of the castle, in which every inch of every room is richly decorated in an eclectic range of widely differing styles. We are also hoping to arrange an alternative visit to the smaller Art Nouveau Pelisor Palace for those who have already visited Peles before, or possibly an opportunity to take in mountain scenery with a cable car ride from the nearby town of Busteni to Babele, known as the 'top of Romania'.
Leaving Sinaia we travel south back to Bucharest. If time allows and there is sufficient interest we will stop at Campina to visit Hasdeu Castle, which was recently featured in the Fortean Times. The castle was built by Romanian spiritualist/medium B.P. Hadesu in 1896, based on instructions that he believed were dictated to him by his deceased daughter. The castle's interior is decorated in a heavily symbolic style and houses spiritualistic manuscripts and 'ectoplastmic photographs'.
We then drive through Bucharest to the Lebada Hotel where we stay for our last two nights. In the evening dinner will be in the hotel, and for those who are interested we will be organising a trip to Cabaret Macabre, Bucharest's alternative club."
Last night eventually went surprisingly smoothly, despite all the emotional turbulence that preceded it. We went to the Carpathian Stag, a very nice restaurant not far from the Black Church (and conveniently not too far from our hotel either), and there was wine tasting and folk dancing, two of my favourite things in the world. We went down into the wine cellars and were given six small glasses of wine (three red and three white, all different types of Morefatlard - yay!), plus a few nibbles. We didn't actually realise that this wasn't where we were having our sit-down meal, and several of us asked for water or beer instead of wine. They all got dirty looks off the waiters... as did KT, who mixed all of her wine with liberal amounts of cola. I yelled at her for wasting good wine, and she pointed out (quite rationally, I guess) that from her point of view it would have been a waste of alcohol to give it to me - free alcohol is, after all, free alcohol. I drink all of mine (and some of Scary Robert’s that he didn’t want) quickly, without much in the way of actual tasting. Oh hell, all wine tastes the same anyway. Except perhaps if it’s been mixed with cola.
We all move upstairs and have our proper meal, and I get even more drunk. There is more traditional singing and dancing, and at the end of the night I drag Tubby Mark up for a dance (and only stand on his feet once - go me!). When he manages to escape I grab Stella and dance with her instead, but she has to keep running out of the room to pull her skirt back up as it slips down while she’s dancing. Everyone is getting a wee bit drunk and silly by this point - all of the men and some of the women are flirting blatantly with the dancers, and anyone who goes to the toilet gets a round of applause both on the way there and on the way back. We all end up dancing out of the door in a conga line and then wandering around Brasov square in the rain singing ‘ALL AROUND MY ARSE, I WILL DUH-DUH-DUM-DUM-DE-DUM…’ (or maybe that was just me and Stella). Anyway, that’s Romanian-English relations put back ten years then.
We go back and invade the same wine bar we’d been at the night before, and scare one of the waitresses. I drink even more wine and then curl up on one of the seats and go to sleep. Amazingly, I don’t get kicked out, and I sleep there until everyone comes and pokes me to let me know we’re leaving.
Despite the fun we all have, there’s that same undercurrent of emotion running through everything, and we have a couple more bad moments during the evening. It’s obvious that Stella for one would rather not spend the night on her own. Before any of the men-folk can helpfully offer, I suggest that I sleep in her room tonight (half of the men look disappointed, and the other half’s eyes light up at the thought of two girls in one bed… sigh). So we end up getting back to the hotel at some ungodly hour of the night, staggering up first to my room to let KT know I won’t be back till morning, then on to Stella’s room where we crash out. And then we promptly keep each other awake for another hour by going, ‘you see that drunken tart there, going "wsh wsh wsh wsh wsh"? That’s you, that is.’
So this morning everyone’s feeling a little bit tired and emotional. We’ve all spent a certain amount of time giving out sympathetic looks and words and asking everyone if they’re okay. Stella is still unusually quiet, but she’s shouted ‘Arse!’ a few time so far, so I hope she’ll be all right. And Blond Klif made a damn good effort of cheering everyone up by singing to us the full version of ‘Hauling Round My Tat’:
"Hauling round my tat
That I bought in Romania
I’m hauling round my tat
For the two weeks I’m away
And if anyone should ask me
The reason I keep buying it
It’s because I don’t know how much
I’m spending when it’s in Lei"
The man is a genius. There’re verses as well, but I can’t really remember them offhand - trust me though, they’re great. The second is all about how he’s had to buy an extra bag to put all his souvenirs in and is now well over his baggage allowance for the plane.
(Note from Future Rakie: Amusingly enough, incidentally, I’ve just found out that some of my friends from the trip have been reading this diary on the website. If any of them are reading this now - ha ha, I made you get that bloody song stuck in your head again!)
So, this morning we drove off to Peles Palace, which is very beautiful and ornately decorated, very much like the Palace of Versailles in France. The grounds were equally as beautiful and atmospheric, with mist hanging low over the trees all around. Unfortunately we weren’t allowed cameras in here either, so you’ll have to take my word for it - it was gorgeous.
After wandering round the palace itself, then stopping to buy coffee and cheap cake and a few more souvenirs (boy, they really do see us coming, don’t they?), we pile back onto the coach and head south again. We stop off at a place called Hasdeu Castle, but it’s only really a castle in the same way that the Bistritsa Doll Museum is a house with dolls in. There’s a whole ‘nother world of weirditude going on at this place.
It’s not a big place, about the size of an average one-storey house, although it is definitely castle-shaped. The large front door has a big image of the all-seeing eye engraved above it, but due to an earthquake this door hasn’t been opened for some time, so we go in through the side entrance. The castle was the work of a wealthy scientist who built it after his beloved daughter (a child prodigy who played the piano and wrote poetry) died of tuberculosis, aged eighteen. But the freakazoid thing about it is that the plans and design for the castle were apparently all dictated by the daughter… after she died. Eeeeee.
I feel like I’ve walked into a set from Zork Nemesis. Even if you have a healthy scepticism and disregard the ‘beyond the grave’ element of the story, the place is still very disturbing for a different reason. The castle is set out like an Orthodox church or chapel, with three rooms - the entrance, the main area, and the altar (all of which have technical religious names which I can’t remember). The entrance is underneath that engraving of the all-seeing eye and the sealed door, and the second room is in the main tower of the castle, with anterooms leading off on either side and a couple of recesses where, in a church, religious items would be stored. In this place, they’re filled with books. There’s a large effigy of Jesus high above the floor in the main tower, and the domed ceiling is painted gold and red, depicting the labyrinth and the cosmos (apparently quite common in Catholic churches, but usually decorating the floor, not the ceiling). And then in the third room, where the altar would be… there’s the dead daughter’s piano. Eeeeeeeee, let me out of this freaky place.
Basically, the whole castle is like a shrine to the scientist’s dead daughter. In one of the back rooms there’s a séance room (also apparently designed by the daughter), and a load of photos of the daughter, as well as one of her dolls. I take a load of videotape then run away, very quickly.
I’m still trying to decide whether the place is creepy or fascinating, or a mixture of both. Just like in the Doll Museum, I get the feeling that I should be laughing, but instead I just want to cry. It’s a place of obsession, and walking around inside there is like looking far too closely at the private feelings of a slightly disturbed mind. But maybe I just don’t like séance rooms. Either way, I run away and hide on the bus, like the big girl that I truly am.
TO BE CONTINUED!