Day 14 - Saturday 16th October - Bucharest
Official Itinerary says: "Breakfast is at the hotel, after which we will be visiting Snagov monastery, where Vlad Tepes is reputedly buried. The monastery is situated on a small island in the middle of the lake, and is only accessible by boat. After our visit, we will stop at a lakeside restaurant for lunch or a snack before travelling back into Bucharest. There will be opportunities for sightseeing and shopping before returning to our hotel. One possibility is a visit to the Orthodox Belu cemetery, where many of Romania's artists and writers are buried.
In the evening, we will be going to the Club Dracula Restaurant for a meal and vampire themed entertainment! Then it's back to our hotel for a last night of partying and drinking strange Romanian liqueurs into the small hours."
Holy crap, today is our last full day in Romania. Tomorrow morning we're going to be getting on a plane and heading home, and I'm probably never going to see any of these buggers again (except for KT, who I obviously see all the time). That's a freaky thought. It simultaneously feels like no time at all since I first met these guys, and years and years and years. I told Stella yesterday that it feels like I've known her all my life, and it's true. It's going to feel so weird having to pack up our bags and go back home. I know I said I was ready to go home, and that's still how I feel, but I can't quite believe that it's over so quickly. It's a weird feeling.
Last night... God, what happened last night? The nights are blending into each other so much at the moment. We had a meal at the hotel and then most of us went off out to meet a bunch of Romanian goths. Bucharest's a fun big city, incidentally (definitely big enough to confuse KT, who refuses to believe that it could possibly be smaller than London), but apparently quite difficult to navigate around, because Stephan and Nicolae don't know where anything is. We end up having to pay a taxi to lead us through town to our eventual destination. When we get there, we discover that there's not enough room in the club we were headed for, so we hang around on the street for a while and talk to a couple of our Romanian friends, and then we go back to the hotel.
It was definitely an amusing sight to see though – twenty-odd English goths standing on a street corner in Bucharest and looking lost. Blond Klif especially looked worried, since he was wearing a kilt at the time. Hee hee hee. Anyway, we eventually give up and go home, and have to find another taxi to lead us back to the hotel (my Christmas list for Stephan and Nicolae now reads, 'Fanbelts and maps'). We also make a stop at a very small convenience store on the way back to buy alcohol... prompting the equally amusing sight of the same twenty-odd alcohol-deprived English goths descending onto a very small and confused shop at half-eleven at night.
We go back to the hotel and invade Disorganised Mick's room, and commiserate about the fact that this year has managed to break the long-running tradition of going up to the organiser's bedroom while he's not there and moving all of the furniture out of it. We've left it a bit late now though, so Debs leads a small expedition to go kidnap all of the potted plants from the corridor and put them in Mick's bathroom. Wow, instant Vietnam effect, how cool is that? Disorganised Mick doesn't seem to find it quite so amusing, so we all look embarrassed and move the plants back outside.
I don't quite remember returning to my own room that night, but I guess I must have done, because I wake up in my own bed. In fact, I get woken up by KT, who's complaining that the room we're in is taller than it is wide – apparently, someone must have had their plans sideways when they were building this hotel. At nine in the morning though, I can honestly say that I don't care.
After breakfast (have you noticed that the Official Itinerary always takes great care to remind us we have breakfast every day? Maybe there have been complaints in the past...) me and KT wander around the exterior of the hotel, and I discover to my surprise that we're actually sat out on an island in the middle of the lake. Blimey, what a thing to realise all of a sudden. Once everyone's awake and on the coach (apparent from Sir Duncan, who has managed to sleep in), we head off to a different lake, where we're going to catch a little boat out to the island monastery of Snagov.
I like boats, boats are fun. Some of the others aren't too sure about the stability of the small, slightly battered craft, but I think it's great. I'm very easily amused. We putter across the lake and all hop onto the relatively dry land of the island, where we're greeted by the head monk. The monk is a little bit intimidating and looks suspiciously like Brian Blessed, and has a habit of crossing himself every time one of us looks at him. Honestly, why do we keep getting that reaction off people? He looks us all over and notes that black is the colour of Orthodox Christianity, and also points out that many of us are wearing crosses (although quite a few of them are technically ankhs). None of us decide to argue.
Oh, except for Nicolae. Our beloved guide finally seals his reputation by first disagreeing and then openly arguing with the monk in Romanian. In the middle of the church. Now, everyone's entitled to their opinions (unless it’s me and it concerns Star Wars, apparently), but the place to be airing them is quite definitely NOT in the middle of a church, in front of the head monk. Most of us make our excuses and escape back outside to explore the small island.
Do you remember right at the start of the holiday I commented on how all the trees are painted white up to a height of about two feet? Well, they are here as well, out on the island. I’m beginning to doubt that the paint is to make them more visible in the dark so that cars don’t run into them.
As well as trees and monks who look like Brian Blessed, the island is populated by a surprising number of animals. There are several dogs, a flock of geese, two goats, a couple of cows, a chicken and a cat, all of whom come wandering over to us in the (correct) assumption that we’ll have food on us. I make friends with one of the cows (it’s an amazingly friendly cow), and it licks my coat and tries to eat my pants. Bless. I take some photos and a load of video footage for the scary goths playing happily with puppies and kittens… for blackmail purposes, obviously.
Once we’re back on the mainland we head into town for what was supposed to be a quick lunch. Once again though the Romanian lunchtime curse comes into effect, and it all goes horribly wrong. We are advised to all order the same thing, since it will take less time to arrive. This makes sense, but it turns out to be a complete lie, as the food takes well over an hour to turn up. By the time it gets to us, at least half a dozen people have given up and gone elsewhere (Blond Klif leads an alternative expedition to McDonalds, and I think it was probably a damn good idea), but the rest of us chow down regardless. The food is all right, but nothing special – potatoes, vegetables, fried cheese, stuff like that. And then the bill comes, and it turns out that they’ve charged each item as a separate dish – meaning that each plateful cost roughly four times what it really should have done. Balls to this. After several minutes arguing, most of us throw down what we reckon we should have been charged and storm out, which unfortunately means Disorganised Mick and Organising Helen have to sort everything out (sorry Mick and Helen… I know it’s a bit late, but sorry anyway).
It’s a bastard of a way to spend the last day of our holiday, and it means that we’ve now got no time for either shopping or visiting the local graveyard. Everyone’s in a foul temper by this point. It’s a sour note, but eventually (once we’re all back on the bus and passing around the vodka bottles) tempers come back down to a reasonable level and we shrug it off. Hell, what’s done is done.
After a quick stop back at the hotel to get all dressed up again, we head out en mass to Club Dracula for a meal and some fun entertainment. There’s one more bad moment when we get there – we almost have an official Nicolae-lynching when he tells us that there’s not enough space for us all to sit in one room. Ohhhh, that man is pushing it so much. But this is our last night and we’re going to enjoy ourselves, goddammit. Besides, we can just shout through the door at the people sat in the other room.
The food turns out to be pretty entertaining all by itself. The starter is a fantastic cold meat platter that is soooo tasty, and the main course is a chicken-n-ham-with-breadcrumbs-on-n-melted-cheese-in-the-middle thing that has been practically ubiquitous on our menus for the past two weeks. The two ace things about this particular chicken-n-ham thing though are that a) there’s no polenta in sight, and b) the whole thing has been very carefully moulded into the shape of a rat, complete with tiny ears and a tail. Dear God. Darren, in a fit of psychopathacy, attempts to viciously stab his rat to death, only to discover that the cheesy filling has been dyed bright red. Apparently, being squirted in the face with red goop from a rat-shaped burger does not actually aid your appetite, because Darren promptly decides that he’s not hungry.
Club Dracula is designed to look like a peasant house, with scary wall hangings that bring back unpleasant memories of the Doll Museum in Bistritsa, and a huge bear skin rug on the wall in one of the rooms. Downstairs there is a dungeon bar, but we don’t go down there because it’s full of… um… very friendly ladies. And their clients. Yargh. Anyway, after we’ve finished eating, the lights dim and a soundtrack of wolves howling and thunder roaring starts up, and the rooms fill with dry ice. Oooh. And then The Count himself appears from downstairs (I’m assuming he was down in his crypt… and not, for instance, hanging around with the friendly ladies down there), who’s a relatively-convincing guy in white face paint.
He wanders through the rooms, wailing and shouting and waving a candelabra about in a very nice, dramatic way. And then he decides to bite a few people on the neck. Going by the ever-popular principle of ‘hey, let’s pick on the most freaked-out girl in the place, that’ll be funny!’, he promptly descends on KT, who attempts to hide inside her own jacket. After he’s finished poncing about and nibbling people, we chase after him and pose for some photos, and he bites my neck and all. I’ve decided that being bitten by a vampire tickles… and I really don’t like having my neck tickled. Especially not in public.
At the end of the night, the waitress tells us that the drinks bill has been totalled up and given to Nicolae, and we should just give our money to him. She seems a bit surprised when most of us laugh in her face. I guess she’s kinda used to tourists trusting their tour guide… odd that.
TO BE CONTINUED!