LAST DAY

everything is on a really grand scale. The “People’s Palace” aka Coucescu’s palace is the second largest building in the world. Only the Pentagon is bigger. But all the buildings around it are huge as well.
Ceaucescu took advantage of an earthquake in 1977, or at least in the 70’s, to demolish a lot of area around his palace on the premise that it was dangerously damaged, and replace it with luxury apartments for high level flunkies. Most of those people managed to grab a lot of money at the end of the regime and now have places in the countryside.
These apartments now rent for $1000 a month, mostly to foreigners who can afford such outrageous rent. The average salary in Romania is about $700 a month. Of this, about $200 is what the employer claims he pays and the other $500 is under the table. This is because employers have to pay a huge percentage of tax for medical insurance, social services, etc., on an employee’s salary, so they claim to pay them next to nothing to avoid the taxes. But even in Romania, nobody would work for that, hence the under the table payments. On the other hand there are no such taxes on the government, so a person who works for the government is more likely to get the actual salary they say they are paying. Talk about a system dootmed to failure. You can never build any infrastructure, because the whole system is based on a lie. If the picture with the wires comes out anywhere near this, you can sort of see what I mean. Westerners are apparently allowed to ride roughshod over any kind of rules and regulations -- in fact, everybody bribes everybody here. The wires are because anybody can put up any wires anywhere they can find a place, so the whole area is ugly with all these wires.



They also took us to a nice beer hall restaurant today. Our food was chicken soup, fried cheese !!! with mashed potatoes and custard. Basically a gold-colored meal. Thee fried cheese was really good, but perhaps just a bit too heavy. Even I didn’t eat all my food. However, the restaurant itself was really fabulous in a kind of a Jungenstile way.

***We had a city tour on the bus which was just awful. Usually a bus tour is not great, but all right, but on this one we went past the same things multiple times and by and large they weren’t that interesting the first time. When they finally dropped us off at our hotel, they told us that the outdoor museum was a ten-minute walk.
If I had gone by myself, it might have been a 20 minute walk, but four of us went together and it was more of a 40 minute walk. This is because everybody else thought it was hot. I thought it was nice. The museum was really interesting with traditional houses that had been brought from all over Romania and gave you an idea of the different types of houses people had built over the years – thatched roofs, cellar construction, various things.
Plus it was quite and peaceful and just a nice place to be. It seems like it might be the kind of museum they take kids to during the school year. Because everybody but me was dying of the heat, and because we had to be back to the hotel by 6 p.m., we took a taxi back. Five of us went in the taxi and the ride was 10 leu, which is about $3. The guy who paid it apparently gave him as much again for a tip, mostly because once you leave there, you can’t use the leu anywhere. I’m not sure why they don’t use the euro there anyway, because it is a member of the EU. Anyway, you can see from the pictures what a nice place the museum was, and even Zoe thought it was worth the walk, after she got cooled off.

ANOTHER DAY IN TRANSYLVANIA

On the hill above Sinaia – you don’t actually go out of the town, are two real treasures. The biggest is Peles Castle (pronounced Pelesh) and it was the home of the last king of Romania, who at 91 is still alive and apparently looked on favorably by Romanians, even though he is no longer king. He donated this palace to the state, probably because he couldn’t afford the upkeep. It’s made in the German style, with lots of ornately carved wood and lots of really over the top décor. There was an Italian room, a Moorish room, a music room with a piano, an Erard harp, and a 1771 French harpsichord, though no maker was named. Most of the harpsichord was covered with a cloth and it was closed up, so we couldn’t see the case decoration or soundboard. This was the best picture-taking indoor place on the whole trip, but they wouldn’t let us take pictures. The grounds were gorgeous, and we got a lot of pictures of the grounds. Although the grounds were lovely, I have chosen to show you silly pictures of us on the grounds.

We also went to Brasov which is a relativly large city near Sinaia and a very lovely old city center. We had a very short city tour -- basically driving us around enough that we could be trusted to walk around and show up at the bus again in time to go home. We went to the old city square and were given a whole two hours of free time to walk around. This is the most unsupervised time we've had on the whole trip, I think.
. We also went to the synagogue in Brasov, which was an orthodox synagogue in the moorish style with a very light interior. I think I now know that the difference between an orthodox and a reform or something synagogue is that the “altar” is in the middle of the room in the orthodox. This was also a town that had a gate to keep the Jews in the ghetto, I guess. Though of course they don’t say that now. This city had a thriving Jewish population before the war, now it’s only a hundred or so.
. The city square in Brasov is very charming in the way all European squares are. It is probably no longer the center of the city, which is quite large and modern, but simply the “Old town”. Near the square is the old Black Church, which is very large and only modestly interesting. They seemed to be having a display of turkish rugs there, but the signs only said “do not touch” and unless you’re an aficionado of Turkish rugs, they all looked more or less alike. The church is called the Black Church because it’s black outside and kind of dominates the area. It’s a Roman Catholic church. It has a single manual organ built in the early 1770s refurbished in 1777 and probably again later. I couldn’t see much of it, but I saw a list of stops and there were only about 15 and it said it was a single manual organ. I wonder if it was a poor church at the time, or if they just didn’t want to spend a lot of money on the organ?

More Romania, and Transylvania

Sinaia is a little town in the mountains about 100 K out of Bucharest. It's a charming resort town, and just has that feeling that resort towns have -- lots of people strolling along in the evenings, lots of tourist shops, all selling the same thing, and this bread that is to die for.So we’ll start with the food. First of all, we’ve been on the boat for almost 2 weeks and while the food is wonderful – no, exquisite – there was always a bunch of it, and it made me want to eat constantly. Once we got off the boat , though, everything changed. Now we actually have a few meals on our own, and a little time on our own. Our hotel in Sinaia, (the town is named after a visit someone in history, don’t you love the specificity here,) visited the holy land and came back and founded this town named after Sinai and founded a monastery here.


But I digress. I’m talking about food now. First of all, Romania is a wonderfully rich agricultural country and the food is fresh and organic.
I wouldn’t count too much on the water because people really throw their trash around. We had a wonderful local cabbage dish, minced meat wrapped in cabbage, another local specialty that’s a lot like dolmas, rice balls, Greek salad and tomato salad. But as far as I’m concerned, there’s this wonderful tourist specialty which is basically bread. It's called Kurtos Kalacs and they make it a loaf at a time so that whenever you buy it, it's fresh and hot. I think it’s about like pizza dough. The dough is rolled out flat and then wrapped around a thing like a rolling pin in strips, and then baked, or rather barbequed, over hot coals. When it comes out, it slides off the roller so it looks like a loaf of bread but it’s hollow inside. It’s rolled in sugar, and you pull off pieces and eat it.



The tomatoes are wonderful, and this is berry season, so you see people beside the road and walking around town selling baskets of berries packaged like someone who knows what they are doing. The berries are in a little basket lined with leaves, and the kids (gypsies) walk around selling them. Zoe bought a basket and I took a picture of her buying it with her camera and by the time I had the camera open the kid was telling me I had to pay him for the picture. (I can't find that picture right now, but now I realize it's because it's on Zoe's camera, not mine.)


We’re in the area of Romania called Transylvania, which is sort of in and around the Carpathian mountains. If you look closely at the mountain picture, you’ll see a cross at the top of one of the mountains. We had to go by this about 5 times before we got a day when the clouds weren’t hovering around the top of the mountain and you could see the cross.



Bran castle is the supposed Dracula castle, except of course that Dracula is a myth. Vlad the Impaler is a real person, but he had no connection to this castle. The castle is real, and apparently Bram Stoker visited it once and was entranced by the castle, so when he wrote his book, he made the Count Dracula castle this one. There are secret passages, which apparently figure in the book (which I've never read) and other features of the castle make people realize it's the one he used. In reality, this castle was once a residence of King Ferdinand(?) and Queen Mary. It was used as a summer palace because Queen Mary not only loved Romania, she loved this part of it.

Romania

Today is our first full day staying in the town of Sinaia, Romania. The Romanian language is quite close to Italian, etc., so we can at least read the signs and understand quite a bit of what's written. Not much of what's said, but since we're on a tour, we never actually have to talk to anybody anyway, except to buy souveniers.
Romania is a country that our guide describes as cursed with bad genes, in that he feels the people are lazy and suffer from the "latin" outlook on life. Manana. He is a Romanian, by the way. An example of this is the roadside. It's a beautiful country, but mostly agricultural. For whatever reason, there are lots of picnic tables beside the roads, and next to all of them are huge piles of garbage.

Additionally, as we are riding along, we see lots of people camping, again, right next to the road, or maybe 100 feet away, but still within sight of the road. My personal theory is that you frequently see people stopped beside the road relieving themselves in the bushes, so only the area that's visible from the road is marginally clean enough to camp in -- at least you aren't as likely to be pitching your tent in excrement.

Farming is likewise very labor intensive, seems to be done with horses and a lot of labor. We saw people walking and herding sheep, feeding cattle, and the cute little haystacks on our way to Bran Castle, which is supposed to be Dracula's castle but actually has nothing to do with Dracula except that Bram Stoker stayed there for three days once and incorporated the castle into his book.



Zoe and I enjoyed our visit.

Bulgaria (mostly)

*******
Here I am relaxing in our cabin on board the River Concerto. It's a nice ship, friendly crew (of course, they live and die on tips) great food.
I

I don't want to say we're eating a lot on this trip, but they have named a bus after me. This says Alexiev in Bulgarian -- which uses Cyrillic letters.

These are some pictures taken in Bulgaria as we were going to this famous rock formation. Things are bad in Bulgaria, there's lots of unemployment and a lot of people actually get from one place to another with these donkey carts. You see lots of abandoned giant commie factories and a lot of vegetable gardens. There are nice houses side by side with really run down places. They really need tourism here.

The church structure is actually a monument to the victims of communism and it's right near a statue of some heroes of communism. Apparently things were bad in Bulgaria under the commies, but they're worse now, and the older people are nostalgic for communism.


This picture is at this large natural outcropping of rock in Bulgaria that we visited. It's a modest tourist attraction, but our guide says most of the tour companies haven't discovered it, so we were the only large tour group there. It was quite a hike up to the top, Zoe cleverly decided not to go. Lots of "interesting" staircases where the railings went half way up and then stopped. Our second day in Bulgaria they took us to the town of Varna to go on a boat ride. The boats were sail boats, but there wasn't a lot of wind, so they motored out and back and raised the sails so they'd look pretty. Because Grand Circle doesn't want anyone to starve, they gave us a nice lunch on the boat. It was a beautiful day, the sea was calm, the breeze was nice and we had a really good time. This is our friend Marilyn who is a real kick.

Varna is a large city which we pretty much rushed through on the bus in order to make the boat ride. The most interesting thing we passed was the gypsy section of town. It was god-awful. They had these terrible tar paper shacks on the hillside and the whole area looked like a giant garbage dump -- not just because of the awful houses, but because they dumped all their garbage down the hills between the houses. What a mess. And it's a huge area. I'm guessing we were glad to be on an air-conditioned bus, because the smell must have been awful. On the one hand these gypsies are picturesque, like the ones with the donkey cart, but they'll have their hands in your pocket the minute you turn your back. They also take their kids out of school by the 5th grade, so are largely illiterate, they have an extremely high birth rate because they marry around 14 or younger.

pictures of Belgrade

We came into Belgrade this morning. It's pretty, isn't it? This is the view we had from our cabin for about a half hour, then another ship pulled up alongside and now we have a view of the underside of the ship. The way they do these ships on the river is to have them line up two or three or four across, then you walk across the other ships to go ashore, or they walk across yours. Sometimes, because of various heights and public areas, it can be a very confusing walk.

We took a city tour and saw St. Sava, which is quite a bit like St. Sophia, and currently under a LOT of reconstruction, visited the Tito Museum, and saw these bombed out buildings from the NATO bombings during the war here. We're told they aren't crazy about Americans here.

Day 5

AUGUST 16, Monday
Vukovar
Up bright and early this morning to get a city tour of Vukovar and then a trip to Osijek for a home hosted lunch.
Vukovar is, of course, on the Danube, but there’s little to recommend it. This was a place of very heavy fighting during the war, and now has 30 percent unemployment. Most things look pretty seedy and there are lots of bullet holes in various buildings. It’s a very old city with an old fortress and a sort of charming downtown area, but you just can’t imagine anyone planning a vacation here. We went to a lovely little farmer’s market where you could tell that people were bringing the contents of their home gardens to sell. The watermelons here look fabulous, though the watermelon we get on the ship is tasteless. There was also a huge flower market in this farmers market, but on closer inspection, all the flowers were fake!!
From Vukovar we went to Osijek which is a considerably larger town. Along the way there are signs showing that many fields still haven't been cleared of land mines. We visited the Holy Trinity Church, known locally as St. Anthony’s. At the end of the visit we walked around the altar, which is supposed to allow you to get a wish granted. St. Anthony is also the finder of lost things, so the little prayer iis “Tony, Tony, walk around. Something’s lost and must be found.” Cute.

Our home visit was with a woman who looked something like Susan Ballew and was a real go-getter. Her name was Ramona. We had a wonderful lunch of tomato soup, some sort of meatballs, cabbage salad and potatoes. She was born of Croatian parents in Austria, and came here when she was five. I got the distinct idea that she was the one making just about everything this family had, possible. She was running a little farm out back, planning to develop a summer camp for city kids, was raising two of her own and two foster children.

In the afternoon, I went out hunting for an internet signal, and in fact, found one very close to the ship. I couldn’t go into the café, because I didn’t have any local currency, so I stood outside and used my I-pod. Later I decided to go back with the computer, but it was too sunny, so I ended up squatting behind a dumpster (for shade) trying to use the computer to upload the blog. I never could actually see it, and then it started raining. I’m pretty sure this qualifies as addictive behavior.

Tonight on the ship we had a local Croatian band who were very good and lots of fun to listen to.

Saturday August 14, leaving Budapest

August 14, Saturday

I’m obviously getting confused on dates here, but I know Friday was Friday the 13th. We’re having a great time. Today we finally left the hotel (farewell Marriott) and got on board the Concerto, our home for most of the rest of the trip. It’s a lovely river boat, but we’re now down to two small single beds instead of the two king size beds at the Marriott. I think our whole room is about the size of the two beds at the Marriott, but it’s compact and nice. Grand Circle is giving us another free excursion today, again to make up for the perceived problems some of the passengers are complaining about. Frankly, I haven’t been inconvenienced at all.



We took a lovely excursion to a small artisan town today, where the shopping was great. Plus they gave us 15 euros for lunch. I bought the most unusual egg that will be in my collection. It’s called a blacksmith’s egg, and it’s decorated with tiny pieces of metal held in by about a hundred nails. The premise of this egg is that the blacksmith was so delicate that he could do this work on an egg without breaking it. I also got an inexpensive beaded egg that’s quite interesting and doesn’t look like any of the ones I’ve made myself. At the same store of the cheap egg, I also got a Christmas-ornament sized hurdy gurdy.

After our excursion we came back and were finally transferred to the ship. When we got onboard, we had a wonderful view of Parliament across the river. But once the boat made a u-turn to dock where it’s supposed to be, we had a view of someone else’s cabin in the boat we were docked next to. We are once again in the middle of the ship, which means that after we docked last night, we woke up looking at the underside of the dock. The guy from Grand Circle told me this wasn’t the case. He lied. If we go again on some cruise, we’re going to ask for an end cabin.

Speaking of Grand Circle, they really are quite amazing. Some of the people on this trip put two trips together and sailed from Amsterdam to Budapest, then will go from Budapest to Bucharest. But, those people didn’t get much of a boat trip at all, because the river was too high from all the rains they’ve had upstream from here, and the ship couldn’t get under the bridge somewhere. So they were put up in hotels and bussed from place to place. By the time we got to Budapest, the boat will still unable to sail, so they put us all up at the Marriott. So now they’re giving us another of the excursions for free instead of the $80 we expected to pay, and we got a notice that when we get home we will get a notice of a pro-rated settlement for the inconvenience. I told my tablemates at dinner I didn’t know how much it would be, but I wouldn’t pay more than $100. They will probably give us some kind of a discount on the next trip we make. And of course, the food on board is great – and in great quantities.

I think I just uploaded the wrong pictures for today, but you'll just have to try to figure it out.