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.