I managed to meet some of our tour companions last night over dinner in the little Trattoria and this morning met the rest of them. Five Aussies (us, two nurses who are both burned out from working Covid wards, one insurance broker), an Irish schoolteacher (who is just lovely), an American schoolteacher (also just a delightful young woman), a travelling machinist who works his way around the world (fabulously intelligent and interesting young guy), a Chinese student who studies in Qatar (she’s quiet but very pleasant to have around) and that One Annoying American that every group seems to have who (depending on when you talk to her) seems to be a) an electrical engineer who contracts to the US defence department, b) a curator/judge at the Sundance Film Festival or c) a professional podcaster??? She’s loud and gregarious, has a tendency to sing along to her music or laugh outrageously when watching videos with her headphones on.
I had a wee run in with her over dinner last night – she said to me, ‘Mom do you want some wine?’ to which I responded, ‘No thank you and please don’t call me, “Mom”.’ (She’s like five years younger than me). She kept pushing the wine on me and eventually I’ve said fine, pour me a wine and I’ll drink it. A few minutes later she’s passing me a breadbasket and says, ‘Here you go, Momma.’ I took the breadbasket and passed it up the table and said, ‘Thanks, but please don’t call me ‘Momma’.’ She looks at me like I am joking and says, ‘Well, can I call you Momma-Robyn?’, and my deadpan response is: ‘Not if you expect me to answer. Robyn is fine.’ She makes yet another attempt at calling me Mom/something and I snap a little (you read about transit and lost luggage yesterday, right? I was in no mood for this shit…), ‘AA, Nicknames are for people for whom you have affection or familiarity, and we have neither. Please call me Robyn or do not call me at all.’ Well, you could have sworn I run over her dog by the look on her face, but it worked. The Mom/Momma references disappeared.
But we set out this morning and she was decidedly chilly towards me and I could feel this was just going to ‘become a thing’. We shall see.
Our first stop today was Sinaia to visit the Sinaia Casino – which of course was closed; Monday).After that we made our way to Peleș Castle which is a Neo-Renaissance castle in the Carpathian Mountains, near Sinaia. It was built, on an existing medieval travel route that linked Transylvania and Wallachia, and was built between 1873 and 1914.
It’s a pretty cool looking place and a bit of a shame that we couldn’t go inside, but you have to be somewhere on a Monday, I guess?? This whole little area/town has a very German influence so we ended up stopping for lunch at a German Bier Haus. Angus ordered what he thought was a chicken breast with veggies, what he got was a chicken sized potato with a potato sized chicken for lunch!
After lunch we went to Bran Castle which is totally different from when I was here back in 1995… where there was a car park, there is now a little market village flogging all sorts of souvenirs and toys to tourists. Where the castle was a bit like touring someone’s English manor home it is now a full on tourist attraction complete with glass display cases and multi-language guide books.
Bran Castle, is a national monument owned by the former Romanian Royal family and is a fortress style manor connected to the iconic story of the famous Vampire, Count Dracula of Transylvania – aka Vlad the Impaler, aka Vlad Teppiche. The place is far more touristy than I remember – lots of visitor information plaques all over the place and a gift shop.
It was on to Brasov after Bran Castle, which also looks much different to what I recall… my memories was it was a dingy run down looking place with downtrodden folk and many getting around with donkeys and carts. Today, it looks like any thriving German touwn, complete with a wee picturesque tourist village in the town centre – cathedral, cobblestones, restaurants lining the main square.
We went for a wander around the Black Church – named such for having survived a 17thC fire which decimated the entire town. It is a fairly typical German Lutheran church with undecorated vaulted ceilings and a number of pipe organs that have been collected from little used and sold-off churches across the countryside that couldn’t afford the upkeep on them. The only distinctive thing about this church is the amazing collection of Ottoman rugs – seems that it’s a local tradition to drape a coffin with a rug at funerals of local dignitaries, businessmen and councilmen etc., and then donate them to the church afterwards. The church has been hanging them up around the church as decorative wallhangings for a couple of hundred years. The church smells like an Istanbul rug shop, and there have so many that it is apparently the largest collection of Ottoman rugs outside Turkey.
The rugs were lining the walls above stalls (almost in place of stall plates), hanging from galleries and draped from baulstrades. They looked really out of place, but I guess that is because this is the only church I’ve ever seen that is collecting Ottoman rugs?! 
These are some of the gravestones that used to be set into the church floor – burials under the church floor were a very popular tradition across numerous cultures, but these ones are carved in such deep relief, I imagine they would be quite the trip hazard. 
We then went on the check out the main square in the centre of Brasov – lovely fountain, cute church, square lined with bistros and umbrellas for al fresco dining – and subsequently went hunting for a restaurant serving traditional Romanian food.
I ordered the Bulz, which is a polenta dish with a small layer of cheese with some ham and a fried egg on top, served baked in a ramekin. It was very tasty, but a little too salty for my liking so I only managed to have about half of it. 
Angus had a lamb mici, which reminded me of a Turkish adana kebap but was pretty heavy on the rosemary and thyme. All very tasty and better than the pasta and wood fired pizza offerings that seem to be the flavour of the month in Romania dining. 