Brasov, Romania

Beer, Elevator that I was assured, unsolicited, is safe, it really is, it’s safe, and then the early morning view from this apartment.

Castles

 

More mixed and matches images from a couple of Romanian castles.

Current location: Brasov, Romania

Price of a beer in a bar: US$1.60 got me 500ml of domestic strong dark ale, bottled

Song currently stuck in my head: Your Gold Teeth II (Steely Dan)

The matron of the house here in Brasov in which I’ve rented a room for a few days poured exactly the right amount of homemade ‘Romanian whiskey’ (rajika) to level me up into an ideal neurological range, euphoric enough to Bliss out in headphones and ignore how aggressively asinine Gavin Rossdale’s lyrics are; to fall back into the nostalgia of being too inexperienced to know whether I got burned on that ball of hash my friends and I bought at X-fest in ’93. Even live he was immediately unlikable. Distilled apple/pear/fig, perhaps some barrel aging, stored in and poured from a plastic water bottle along with a story of higher education, mechanical engineering and revolution induced joblessness, then an offer of some soup.

The psuedoephedrine doesn’t hurt. I’ve never had the psuedo stuff before; more nostalgia of the 90s when ephedrine wasn’t just available over the counter, it was tacitly recommended by its impulse placement, next to the roadies and needlessly ornate bics. I’m not one to wax poetic about glory days, but I feel like I’m on thick ice when I suggest that OTC trucker speed was better in the 90s.

My bag has slimmed down considerably, but I am carrying some low lying Bulgarian infection or Bulgaria derived condition and the psuedo is 1/4 of a stack of sprays, drips and pills the private hospital internist recommended. He said I might be straightened out in a few days, might hit Asian ground firing on all cylinders. Given what’s waiting for me, it might be healthier to arrive unhealthy; allow the malady induced humility, the heightened salience of mortality, to establish a pattern of restraint early on.

Oh well. ‘Buy the ticket’ and all.

I visited Peles Castle earlier today, a ‘must-see’ that’s been on my radar since well before we booked flights to this continent. It surpassed all expectation; so much so that I won’t bother to try to convey it.

I met a European Train Guy on the ride to Bucharest; these travelers are their own breed. This guy had a job as a railway traffic controller in Western Europe and a lot of opinions about each countries current investment (or lack thereof) in their rail lines, particularly the ongoing disappearance of night trains. It’s an interesting way to travel, though; he targeted train stations the way other tourists target towns; the routes were his attractions, his equivalent of ‘the local sites’, and he would just arrive at a station, consult his printed train guides and choose a route he wanted to see from among the practical options left at that station that day. It’s a spectator endeavor, to be sure, but those rides show you a huge amount of countryside and they’re far more interesting than the routes the highways take. I get it. He had particular routes he wanted to see and a lot of leeway in how to cover the miles and fill the time in between.

3 days until my flight to Asia.

Edit: Subsequent posts wrapped back in time and started being posted on Tuesdays beginning here.

Castles

These shots are mixed and matched from a couple of different castles.

Rail

Train from Sofia, Bulgaria to Russe, Bulgarian border town before crossing the Danube into Romania. Also, all of my possessions and a Romanian train station.

Futureworld

Current location: Brasov, Romania

Song currently stuck in my head: Futureworld (Trans AM), obviously

Price of a beer in a bar: US$1.60 for 500ml of domestic strong dark ale, bottled, that I would order again.

Not to get all Christopher Nolan on you, but I’m going to warp the time line(s) on this project. I have about two months of posts already written and scheduled, like the one that posted yesterday, which was written months ago. I’m going to try adding in posts on Tuesdays that are closer to real time, creating two parallel time lines. Previously I staggered my posts so I could have more flexibility, retrospection and privacy, but the latter is less of a concern as I intend to be moving at a much more brisk pace (catch me if you can, I’ll buy you a beer) and I’m willing to trade the first two in order to experiment with more immediacy ( and perhaps more salience in the aging brain). We’ll see how it goes. In about two months these two time lines will unify, when then meets now, and I’ll be posting close to real time on Mondays again.

I’m in the Transylvania region of Romania and it’s an unexpected treat. I knew I’d love Peles Castle, but I wasn’t expecting the heavy German influence throughout. It’s all bears and forests and dark wooden chalets. The language is a Latin derivative, unlike all of its Slavic neighbors, and I’d actually be able to get by with some fumbly Spanish, like in Italy, if everyone didn’t already speak English.

I toured Peles and Bran Castles, took a free walking tour here in Brasov, hiked one of the local hills (pictured below with ‘BRASOV’ in white letters you can barely see in the first photo, click to enlarge, the second photo is from behind said sign), road the cable car down and have been having a generally great time. The locals here in Brasov (pop ~250,000) are cheerful compared to the more somber but dependably nice locals I’ve been encountering elsewhere and the costs are low, low, low.