Freakishly Happy

So where did we leave off?? That’s right, in Vienna, Austria. After Vienna we hopped on a train to Budapest Hungary. We arrived a little after 10 at night not really having any idea where our hotel was, save an address we’d gotten off the internet. At this point we figured out how to beat the system. We talked to one of the 20 or so cabbies who were standing around soliciting passengers disembarking from their trains. €We showed him the address and he quoted us a price of 12-15 €. Then we waited around for awhile, scraped together a 5 Euro bill and a handful of change amounting to just under 12 or so Euros, and approached a different cabbie. We explained that we were just about out of cash and told him we’d give him the 12 or so Euro that we had to take us to the hotel. The hotel was about a 15 minute drive from the railway, so I’m glad that we didn’t have to walk or figure out the trains in the dark.
We got to the hotel which was pretty nice and settled in for the night. I called my sister Juli as it was her 40th birthday and then we snuggled down and went to sleep.

The next day we spent walking around the city, which was absolutely amazing! Although parts of it are becoming more modernized, for the most part Budapest is an old romantic city with a whole lot of charm. We visited a couple of beautiful Orthodox churches, as well as the Fisherman’s Bastion up on the hill. By afternoon, we were both famished and stopped in to a café near the Bastion. The food was amazing, but we were a bit surprised at the bill. One thing I learned on this trip was, that just because a country seems poor, and the money comes in VERY large denominations, don’t expect things to be cheap… more on this later.

After lunch we headed to what we thought was a series of crypts under the old castle and church. We paid the entrance fees, and set off through a long maze of pitch black caverns. I was completely freaked. I mean completely. We couldn’t see anything really, as lanterns were only sparsely placed throughout the tunnels and I really don’t like dead things. We were there for probably 20 minutes before I figured out we weren’t amongst the creepy dead remains of Hungary’s finest, but rather in an old set of cellars that were turned in to a hoaky tourist trap, depicting the growth of the human race, with stupid stone looking statues built into the caverns making them look real. Initially, I thought that the stone things were sarcophaguses. Things became pretty clear as soon as we saw the Indian looking thing on a horse and felt the statue and realized that it was hollow plaster. Things weren’t nearly so scary after that.

When we finally emerged back into daylight, we wandered around the city some more, walked along the river back to our hotel and picked up our bags before heading back to the train station. Before we left we decided to grab some dinner. The area around the train station had a pretty meager selection of restaurants, sex shops it had, restaurants not so much, we went to a greasy Chinese restaurant. The food wasn’t so hot, but hey, it was food, right?

That night we boarded a night train to Sigishoara Romania. The next morning we hopped off the train into the crisp cool air of Romania in March. We were approached on the platform by a local Pension owner. We told him that we already had made arrangements with another hostel, which was only half true. Ok pretty much not true at all We’d met a friendly Australian chap in Vienna, who’d told us about a great hostel he’d stayed in in Poland. This hostel had a sister hostel in Sigishoara, so we decided to check it out but had not made any reservations. We walked out of the train station and quickly found the other hostel. After ringing the doorbell 4 or 5 times and knocking, we were approached by the Pension owner from the train, who informed us that the other place would be closed until May. He was very hurt that we did not take him up on his earlier offer asked us in a very sad voice, “why you no want to stay in my rooms? I have nice clean rooms. Why you no stay with me? Come, I show you. Very clean.” So we piled into his car and he drove us into the main part of town.

Sure enough, his rooms were clean, so we decided to stay that night with him and his wife Christina. Upon arriving, the room was frigid, so what better thing to do when it’s cold than to hibernate? We curled up and took a nice 4 hour nap.
As usual, we both woke up hungry, especially since we hadn’t yet eaten anything that day. We roused ourselves from our room, and asked Christina a good place to eat. She recommended a great little traditional restaurant near the center of town. So we walked down the cobblestone street towards the clock tower, where we met a very interesting and enterprising young man named Paul. He asked us for money, and when we said no, he told us that he’d be our tour guide and that he’d be the best tour guide in all of Sigishoara, and then asked us for money again. We told him that we’d see if we needed a tour guide once we’d gotten a better idea of the town and continued through the clock tower to the central part of town.

Turns out a tour guide would have been a fairly decent idea, as once we got to the main street we couldn’t find the café, even though we asked 5 or so people who obviously lived there. We walked 5 or so blocks before turning around and asking a flower vendor. The vendors spoke no English or German, and obviously we spoke no Romanian, so this conversation was a bit lengthier and more painful than it should have been had we all been on the same language page. Even though they had no answers for us, they recommended strongly (boarding on demanding) that we purchase something from them for their non-information. So I picked out a bouquet of Hyacinth, thinking that as it was in season, it couldn’t be too expensive. We pulled out the amount that we thought it was, but the woman (there was a woman, a man and a girl), shook her head violently. Thinking the bill too large we got out a smaller one which sent her in to a flurry of words that we couldn’t even begin to understand. She got out a bill from her drawer ( the same denomination that we were holding) and held up a second bill across the first bill making a T. We thought that she meant that she didn’t have enough change, and that we needed to half the first bill. After about 10 minutes of sheer frustration, and us trying to walk away several times without succeeding (and much embarrassment on the part of the girl and laughing on the part of the man), we figured out that she wanted twice the amount we’d originally offered. Being flustered, and annoyed we paid it, and again tried to ask where the restaurant was, using some broken French (manger meaning “to eat”) and saying the restaurants name several times in several different ways, and they finally understood and pointed us to the next block. All it cost us was about 20 minutes and a 7 Euro bunch of Hyacinth… again, don’t expect things to be cheap if you’re in a poorer country, you may be surprised.

So with Hyacinth in hand, we walked down the street in the direction of the restaurant. We still couldn’t find it. We asked a public servant who was busy doling out parking tickets, and he thought we were trying to prevent him from ticketing our car. His partner intervened, and pointed us to a restaurant that we’d passed earlier that we’d thought looked good. We went in, hungry and a bit overwhelmed. Thankfully the menus were in English. We both ordered a traditional meal of corn porridge with goat cheese, I ordered a side of rice and John a side of potatoes, and we ordered a dessert to split. Now normally, I wouldn’t go in to so much detail about food, but this was a significant meal. Now when I think porridge, I think Wallace and Gromit, sticky oatmeal-y substance, akin to soup, so I was surprised with two huge semi-spherical orbs, appeared, surrounded by several sausage links. These porridge balls, jiggled slightly on the plate and really reminded, in their shape, composition and placement on the plate of voluptuous female breasts. To this day we refer to this meal as “boobs on plate.” So we began attacking our massive mammary-esque meal with vigor. The goat cheese inside was… quite… goaty. I got through 1 porridge ball, and ½ a sasuage, and a few bites of my rice while John was able to get through 1 and a ½ porridge balls, his potatos and 2 sausages. A feat. Guiltily we sent back several half finished plates of food, as we knew dessert was coming. That’s a bad feeling of excess, knowing that some people in the country aren’t able to eat, and we were sending back plates full of food. In any case, we finished off the meal.. Rolled ourselves out the door, and decided to go for a walk.

We walked around the perimeter of the old part of town and decided to see how many of the old towers we could find. Then we walked up this long coved stair case, where we met a puppy. In Romania, they have a fairly serious dog problem left over from the days of Communism. When everyone was forced to move into the cities from the country side, everyone brought their dogs with them. Once they got into towns, they realized that there was no place in their homes for these outdoor dogs, so they set them free. Now there are roaming gangs of dogs many places in Eastern Europe. We happened on two of their smallest and cutest members.
So this little dog began following us up the hillside. Soon we met a friend of his, and we sat and watch them romp and chase and play for quite a while. Soon another group ventured up the hill and the first dog began to follow them. The second pup stayed with us. She was adorable. We named her “Lily,” and she followed us for quite a while. While we were walking through an ally, we came across a fence that was holding 9 or so scary dogs of all sizes. They barked and carried on at us. Lily slunk between John and I using our legs for protection. As we came towards the end of the ally there was a hole in the fence, and several dogs escaped. Lily tried to protect us and stand up to them and was rewarded with a harsh nip to her back. She yalped and scurried back to us. It was very difficult for me not to pick her up and take her with us. We seriously discussed it but decided against it in the end and are still kind of regretting it.

After our walk we came back to the town center and found a cute little internet café. I had a brownie and we sat and talked with the American owner of the café and the girls that were working there. We learned a lot of really interesting things about the local cultural history, and had a wonderful time admiring our surroundings, which used to be caves that were used to hide Christians in the early days of Christianity. After the café closed, we went back to our hotel room. Again it was freezing so we snuggled down for bed. As a side note, it was SO cold that when we arrived we noticed that the German guests who were also staying in our Pension, we in the kitchen. We bopped in to say hello and noticed that they had left the gas stove on after making their tea. We notified them, but they informed us that this had been intentional, as they were trying to get some heat into the room. The bedrooms weren’t bad as far as heat, but man oh man, once you stepped outside the door, you could see your breath. This made going to the bathroom an interesting ordeal.

The next morning I showered in the frigid shower with super hot water. John was smart and opted for no shower. We walked around town, and went to the history museum in the clock tower. They had a lot of really interesting artifacts dating WAY back and went and looked out over the picturesque Medieval town. After descending the 5 flights of rickety 12th Century stairs, we went and looked at the outside of the house where Dracula was born and went back to the café to grab some lunch for the train.

We took a taxi back to the station, and headed on our way towards Greece.