Day 5 - Thursday 7th October – Sibiu and Viscri
Official Itinerary says: "We start the day with breakfast at the hotel before travelling east to the impressive moated fortress at Fagaras. The fortress houses a good museum including traditional Romanian costumes and icons. We then travel north on minor roads to the medieval Saxon village of Viscri ("Deutschweisskirch"). Built in the 12th century as part of a scheme to repel Turkish invaders, Viscri has an outstanding fortified church set high up in the hills, which affords excellent panoramic views of the area. The church is also associated with the 'Little Vampire' series of children's books, by Angela Sommer-Bodenburg.
We aim to visit the church with a local guide before taking lunch. We then continue northwards to Sighasoara - the fortified town where Vlad Tepes was born around 1431. Dinner and overnight is in the nearby village of Danes, at the Motel Dracula."
I have a remarkably severe hangover today, so I'm going to have to write quietly. Yesterday afternoon we arrived in the medieval town of Sibiu, which is beautiful and atmospheric and full of strange medieval-esque houses. Unfortunately, medieval streets are not really designed to cater for huge coaches, so we have a few fun and games actually getting to our hotel. Amusingly, we end up getting a bunch of the menfolk to 'bounce' parked cars out of the way so that we can get through. I would've loved to have stuck around and see the faces of the car owners when they came back... 'y'know, I'm sure I didn't park my car all the way over there'...
A lot of us are absolutely starving by the time we get there, so our first stop is a supermarket to buy bread, cheese, wine and chorizo. How very continental. We also stand around laughing at the tubs of ‘Kracks’ and ‘Crap’, making ourselves look like the biggest, most stupid tourists ever. Oh, and the checkout doesn’t give out bags, so I leave with an armful of groceries. Then KT and me sit by the roadside and scoff our food (but not the wine, for obvious reasons... okay, no, just because I don't have a corkscrew on me), and then we have a wander around town and buy some funky souvenirs. KT gets a lot of quite sensible tourist stuff, while I buy an ashtray shaped like a pair of guns and a red Ikea bag, which gets bought simply for being an incredibly random Ikea bag in the middle of Transylvania. Also, I reckon that I should be able to fit about three bottles of Morefatlard into it to take home with me. Wheee, I have a dedicated alcohol bag!
And then last night we had a rather major room party. For some reason, there was a mix up with the rooms, and Mick the Younger (so called because he's about a year younger than Organising Mick... who incidentally is in serious danger of losing his 'Organising' title at the moment) was left without a room. The only one that was available for him was the luxury suite… complete with balcony, king-sized bed and an upstairs area. The jammy sod. But this does mean that the party is now officially in his room.
Anyway, I drink far too much red wine at the party and use up about forty minutes of video footage on Ginger Dave talking and Tubby Mark attempting to fit twenty-four Pringles into his mouth at once. I suspect that I'm going to have to wipe some of this footage if and when I run out of video tape (plus Stella has already asked me to wipe certain parts of it, since when she woke up she was extremely embarrassed by what she'd done). But the party is a great laugh, and I strike up some fantastic conversations with various people, none of which I really remember in the morning. I've also got no idea whether I embarrassed myself horribly or not, although I suspect that I did. Of course, so did everyone else, so that's all right.
Oh, and I also yelled at Ginger Dave for pronouncing Dragonball Z as 'Dragonball Zed', and for being a big nerd. Which, obviously, he is.
So anyway, this morning I'm feeling kinda fragile. We went off on an early morning walking tour around Sibiu, listening to Nicolae's mad stories as we go. We walk over the Liar's Bridge, which will apparently collapse if you stand on it and tell lies. So, yeah – guess what the first thing everyone does is. And no, it doesn’t fall down. We also see the place where Vlad Tepes' son, Mihnea the Bad (popular family, weren’t they?) was murdered. It's yet another cool story that would make a great movie – apparently, Mihnea took a bit too much advantage of the 'First Night' rule of monarchs, which states that the king can claim the first night with the bride of any of his subjects. The young woman he picked was unfortunately newly married to a captain in Mihnea's army, and he was a kinda unforgiving type. So one night, the captain waited for the king just near the church, and stabbed him to death. We see the spot where it happened, and it strikes me as a remarkably ignoble place for a king to die.
We also get to see the Museum of Alchemy, which is pretty cool – full of old bottles and fun medicines and stuff. In one room there's a big cabinet full of poisons, and Nicolae tells us a story about the pharmacist who used to work there. He was a compulsive gambler, and eventually got himself into a vast amount of debt. His creditors sent the boys round to get him, and the pharmacist locked himself in the cellar, where he poisoned himself. But he didn't kill himself – he deliberately took a certain poison that drove him completely, blissfully mad. What a way to go.
Back on the bus, it takes us at least an hour to escape Sibiu. As I mentioned earlier, medieval streets are not really tour-bus friendly. There are no cars in our way this time (which some of the guys are a little disappointed by), but as we're trying to drive away there's a very large digger parked in the middle of the street, digging an equally large hole in the road, and we have to wait for it to move. While we're waiting, Mick the Younger realises that he's lost his mobile phone and has to go back to search for it. So we sit on the coach for about half an hour while he goes looking.
And then, once Mick has declared his phone irretrievably lost, the big digger that was making the huge hole in the street hits a water main. We all pile off the bus to watch and giggle as the resulting massive spray of water soaks the entire street. Our favourite moment is when one of the workmen attempts to place a large wheelbarrow over the hole to stop the water, causing the wheelbarrow to be thrown about fifteen foot in the air. Wow, free entertainment, what could be better?
Finally we get back on the road. To entertain us further on the journey today, we've been set a challenge. Basically, we have to write a limerick that starts with the line: 'A weakness of Vlad the Impaler...'. I'm running low on both inspiration and hummus at the moment, but I'm working on trying to rhyme 'Impaler' with 'Polenta' (you have to slur it a little bit… okay, you have to slur it a LOT). For far it's... well... it's okay:
"A weakness of Vlad the Impaler -
He was overly fond of polenta
He ate it with cheese
And sometimes with peas
But never while on the toilette"
The main problem I'm having is not with rhymes – it’s to do with the stupid limericks that Dad, Yasmin and Jenny used to make up. I can't remember how it started, but basically they wrote a limerick with the third and fourth lines: 'So she tied everything/To a big rubber ring'. That then became the middle part of every damn limerick we've come up with since. So every time I try to think about Vlad the Impaler, all that comes into my mind is tying things to rubber rings, and I'm having a hard time working that into the limerick.
Oooh, I've just had an idea for another one:
"A weakness of Impaler the Vlad
Was writing at terribly bad
Spelling confused
Punctuation abused
And he couldn't rhyme either"
Y'know, I know you shouldn't laugh at your own jokes. But I just did. Hee hee hee!
Anyway, we stop for a very quick lunch at the fortress at Fagaras, but since we’re now officially running very late, we don’t have time to really look around the place. Most of us are feeling too darned hungover to really feel like doing the tourist thing at the moment anyway. Stella and a few others stay on the bus, curl up and go to sleep, while the rest of us go into the fortress and get coffee and a sandwich… mmmm, coffee and cheese sandwiches, is there anything better in the whole world?
Anyway, I suspect that I’m even more hungover than I thought, because we’re now back on the coach, and sitting here attempting to write is making me feel incredibly ill. So I think that leaving it here for the day is prudent, and I’ll fill you in on the rest of today, um, tomorrow. Or possibly later today if I feel any better.
(Note from Future Rakie: I didn’t feel any better. The rest of today will now be related tomorrow!)
TO BE CONTINUED!