Day 4 - Wednesday 6th October - Curtea De Arges and Sibiu
Official Itinerary says: "Following breakfast at the hotel, we will be visiting to the outstanding princely church and monastery in Curetea De Arges and Manole's Well. We then continue driving north to Saxon town of Sibiu and check into the Hotel Imparatul Romanilor. The rest of the day is free for you to look around Sibiu. You may wish to visit the Liar's Bridge (legend has it that the bridge will collapse if anyone stands on it and tells fibs) or the Evangelical Cathedral where Vlad's son, Mihnea the Bad, is buried. Sibiu is also handy for changing currency and has a post office where you can buy stamps. Dinner will be at the hotel, which has a renowned restaurant. It also has a bar, enabling us to emulate two of the hotel's more famous clientele - Johannes Brahms and Franz Liszt."
Today is also Dad's birthday! He phoned us up this morning on KT's mobile and we all sang at him, and I spoke to Jacob. I'm missing Jacob so much at the moment... I swear, I am never going on holiday without him ever again. It’s just wrong. It feels like I’ve left one of my arms lying around somewhere and I’m not sure where.
But anyway. Last night after our mountain-climbing expedition, we had dinner at a teeny rural Romanian village somewhere near Poienari. Amongst other things, we were introduced to the many joys of the local plum brandy (also used as paint stripper and car fuel). It’s evil, evil stuff… although it starts getting fun after about two or three glasses. The food we have is brilliant as well (of course, anything would have been brilliant after climbing up to Poienari) (except maybe that polenta-cream-cheese thing from the day before), and we all eat far too much. They give us this amazing rustic potato salad thing that I could probably eat all day long if I was allowed, plus loads of salad, falafels, chicken, more polenta (d’oh!), mashed potatoes, strange cheese and a massive plate of chocolatey pancakes. I have to call a halt when the pancakes arrive, because otherwise I’d have had to be rolled back down the hill to the coach.
The surroundings and the hospitality are fantastic as well – we’re all sat out on this little patio, being served from the tiny kitchen of someone’s house. There’re three generations of the family in the kitchen, and all the food is homemade. I’m incredibly impressed that they’re able to cater for thirty random goths, and without raising an eyebrow either.
After the meal, we somehow manage to get back down the hill to the coach, despite the fact that we’ve all drunk too much plum brandy and it’s pitch black (no street lamps out here, nope nope nope). We even manage it without serious injury, although one of the guys (a nice boy called Ali who’s tall and skinny and has cute little white streaks in his long black hair) manages to fall into a ditch while trying to photograph a cow. The night sky is so clear that you can see practically all the stars and the Milky Way too… which KT tries to take a photo of. She even leaves the flash on, bless her.
(Incidentally, I’d just like to add a quick sidenote here: These people on the trip are all nerds. They are the biggest nerds I have ever, ever met. I’m writing this on the coach right now, and they’ve got a mix tape playing of theme tunes from 70s kids shows – Thunderbirds, Stingray, Joe 90, all that sort of stuff. They’re NERDS. Utter and total. If you yell a film quote then EVERYONE gets it (and most of them yell the next three lines back at you), no matter how damn obscure you think it is. They have discussions about the Star Wars books – not the movies or anything like that, the goddamn BOOKS. Nerds nerds nerds. It’s kinda lucky that most of my favourite people in the world are nerds, I guess. Nerds, generally speaking, are the most interesting people in the world. At the moment though I’m feeling just a little bit overwhelmed by the immense nerdiness of it all.)
Anyway, back to my point. We all roll down the hill, onto the coach and back to our hotel, taking a load of homemade plum brandy with us. At the hotel we head straight for the bar and buy five drinks for a grand total of about two quid (roughly three dollars, I think) and get even more legless. As another sidenote, I’d like to point out that the local red wine is SO NICE. I’m going to have to buy a ton of the stuff to bring back with me, because it’s fantastic. And damn cheap too… yay!
After the bar there’s a room party, with more plum brandy. Plus some JD… vodka… Romanian beer… more vodka… and some weird stuff that someone bought from a petrol station (the station was called Boromir, which we all though was brilliant… nerds, I tell you!) and tastes like chocolate liqueur of some kind. I don’t remember a great deal of the night, for some reason.
In the morning I’m hungover and not happy. I decline breakfast and head for the coffee, which is also damn nice and has a big old caffeine kick to it. Yum. After that we head out to the Cutea De Arges monastery, which is just down the road from the hotel. I change up a bunch of Euros at the hotel into local currency (Lei), which officially makes me a millionaire. Yay! 70 Euros gets you about 2,800,000 Lei… the Lei is really not a strong currency. In fact, it apparently doesn’t even count as ‘hard’ currency – meaning that you can’t change Lei back into dollars or Euros or Stirling or anything. So everyone just changes up small amounts at a time, especially since most things here are pretty cheap.
The chapel and the monastery are both beautiful, all gold gilding and handpainted murals (a lot of which were unfortunately defaced during one of the many wars and invasions). We can hear the monks chanting from one of the buildings, the sound filling the gardens. It’s a beautiful place, and most of us buy a few souvenirs from the small gift shop – I get a wooden cross on a necklace for mum and a plastic cross with a suction cup attached for Jenny to put in her new car. Together they cost 40 Lei, which is about sixty pence. I also buy a couple of tapers to light, as does one of the other girls, Rosie (Tall Ali’s girlfriend). All of the orthodox churches here have two small areas outside where you can place lighted candles – one area for the living and one for the dead.
Despite the beauty of the church, there’s a gruesome history behind it as well. At the time it was built, there was a superstition that every new building should have a ‘guardian spirit’ to watch over it, which was unfortunately often achieved by sealing a person up within the walls as it was being built (I’m not sure why exactly this would encourage the spirit to guard the building, but again, I’m not arguing with people’s superstitions). In this case, the unfortunate person was actually the architect’s wife. The story goes that the men made a bargain that the first wife to arrive on a certain day to bring her husband lunch would be the one to be sealed in the walls. Which is a rather shoddy way to reward a wife’s devotion I feel, but never mind. Anyway, it was the wife of the architect (a man called Manole) who arrived first, despite having to battle her way through a rain storm in order to get there, and she was promptly bricked up within one of the outer walls.
And the story doesn’t even finish there. When the church was almost completed, the king (possibly Vlad Tepes himself, I’ve managed to forget) asked the architect if he would ever be able to build a more beautiful church. Manole, rather stupidly, said that yes, maybe one day he would build a more beautiful church. The king then waited till all the builders and Manole himself were up finishing off the roof, then ordered the ladders to be taken away. Most of the builders fell to their deaths while trying to climb down from the roof, but Manole built himself a pair of wings out of wood and glided down. He managed to get a fair distance, but then he crash-landed and died as well. At the spot where he landed, a spring apparently appeared, and there’s now a drinking fountain there. I guess you have to pick and choose the bits of that story to believe, but it’s still a pretty cool story.
I filled up my water bottle from the fountain (the water’s very nice, much nicer than the stuff from the taps, I think), although several people refuse to drink from it. KT’s rationale is that there are lots of dogs around, and they’ve been peeing on the ground, so the pee will have seeped down into the water supply. I’ll let you know if it does me any harm (Note from Future Rakie: It doesn’t. Maybe dog pee is actually good for you…).
After we left Targoviste we headed north again towards Sibiu, which is just across the border between Wallachia and Transylvania, two of the regions in Romania. Nicolae pronounces it 'Valakia', incidentally, and softens the second 'a' in 'Transylvania'. So anyway, today will be our first day actually inside Transylvania... yay!
I managed to lose my phrasebook at some point last night – probably while stumbling down that pitch black hill – which I’m a little cross about. But I guess that if that's the worst thing I mislay on this holiday then I'll consider myself damn lucky. (Note from Future Rakie: It turns out it wasn't lost – I’d left it on the coach. Because I'm smart like that). And right now, as I'm writing this, we're stopped in the middle of the road waiting for a random flock of sheep to pass us. There're random animals all over the place in this country – cows, goats, horses, stray dogs – all wandering around loose. In one town we went through, there was a cow peacefully grazing on a four-foot square patch of grass surrounded by tower blocks. Surreal.
Oh, and now that we're past the sheep, we've stopped again... I think we may have lost another fan belt. Dammit, I am going to go out and buy these buggers a batch-lot of fan belts. Ah well, time for a cigarette break...
The smokers are always the first ones off the bus and usually the last ones back on. I've got three photos now of the same group of people standing at the roadside and smoking. While they're having their fag break this time, I decide to go climb a nearby tree... and get yelled at by at least four different people. Okay, so they have a little justification (if I'd fallen out and hurt myself it would've screwed up the holiday for everyone), but even so I'm a little surprised by the force of their reactions. The best one is Organising Mick, who yells, 'Rakie, I'm a scientist and I say get out of that tree!'. I can say that that’s definitely the first time I’ve had THAT yelled at me.
Honestly, it's been at least a year since I last fell out of a tree (and that one wasn't my fault). Some people have no faith. When I climb down, KT threatens to call my dad and tell him what I've done. Even at a distance of a thousand miles or so, I suspect that I would be able to hear my dad rolling his eyes and shrugging it off...
TO BE CONTINUED!