Romania

Our grand mission with Cris in Romania was to go tramping in the Fagaras Mountains. However, our tramping adventures are exciting enough (yes, they are - promise!) to be the subject of a separate post. Here's some other Romanian highlights:

Friendly Romanian #1: Thomas whom we met on the long bus ride from Budapest. Here he is taking us out to the local student pub in Cluj for a drink (photo: Cris).

Our first Eastern Orthodox church. Religion is prominent throughout Romania, particularly noticeable when (even on the bus) people cross themselves if passing a church.

Transylvannia has a significant Hungarian population, who are actively campaigning for their own state. This big statue in Cluj is a general who is famous for killing lots of Hungarians (photo: Cris). It was built by a pro-Romanian mayor who also embarrassed the locals by painting all the rubbish bins in the colours of the national flag.

For the real Transylvannian experience we visited the local Cluj graveyard. It is local custom to 'baggsie' a grave before you are dead. Sometimes they even fill in the first two digits of your year of death. We heard stories of some that are still on 19-- oops! Better get that re-carved.

From Cluj we progressed on an entertaining train journey with friendly Romanian #2 (Andre) to Brasov, which is quite possibly, but maybe not, the best city in the world. They also have a huge Hollywood-style 'Brasov' sign erected on the local mountainside. I went for a run up to it after dark, which I was later told was rather dangerous as that's when the bears come down to feed. It's not just vampires that eat you here...

In Brasov we stayed in a hostel with comically named rooms. The three of us shared this room, leading to hours of ... innuendo, as you can imagine (photo: Cris). This hostel also gifted me an extremely case of bed-bug attack, whereby my whole face was a swollen red blob and I couldn't open one of my eyes. [also attracting attention from a drunk local who was either appalled or amused that I seemed to have been beating her, I'm not sure which - Mark]

Our last four days we enjoyed the hospitality of friendly Romanian #3 (Raluca), who we couch-surfed with. Here she is having cooked us a local speciality of polenta with two types of cheese.