Day 155 - Traipsing Through Transylvania

Picnic lunch by the side of a stream on our road trip
John, George and Josie

In April, I finally had the opportunity to see more of Romania than Bucharest and Iasi. I had been invited by the Fulbright lecturer in Timișoara, a university town near Yugoslavia, to speak to her students. Instead of flying or taking the train, I rented a car and drove with three Canadian students of Romanian origin to see the Transylvanian Alps, tour some of the Medieval towns in the valleys, especially those associated with Vlad Ţepeș (pronounced tse-pesh), believed to be the model for Dracula, and visit friends in Cluj-Napoca along the way. The Canadians were two brothers from near Toronto, John and George, and a female friend from Montreal, Josie. The three of them had grown up speaking Romanian at home so they were excellent guides for me.

Imposing Castle Bran

One of our first stops was the town of Sinaia where the embassy had a cottage for its staff to use on weekends. John and I had spent a weekend there earlier with my friend Gayle, a teacher at the American School, and her boyfriend Roger, and a few others connected to the embassy through the American School. Sinaia looks like a movie set. It is perched at the edge of the mountains with all the buildings looking like they came from Heidi or The Sound of Music. We didn't spend time in Sinaia; our destination for that day was Castle Bran, an imposing building that looks like it was carved right out of the mountain it sits on. It has often been featured - from a distance - in films as Dracula's castle. But as imposing and dreadful its appearance is from a distance, Castle Bran is one of the friendliest looking castles on the inside. There were lots of narrow staircases, but none held the foreboding atmosphere promised by the exterior. The bedrooms looked cozy, bright and light. The bed in one of the rooms looked as though someone had just gotten up. The was a body-shaped indentation on one side.

The courtyard reminded me of what I had seen in films of Italian villas. There were curves and arches everywhere, with plants in cubbyholes that looked like they had been designed for just that purpose. When breezes blew overhead, an eerie whistling could be heard as if pipes for an organ were being played by the breath of the wind.

Staircase in Castle Bran with George
and Josie

But as charming as Castle Bran was, we couldn't spend the night there, so we headed toward the larger city in the neighborhood, Brașov, in search of hotel rooms. When we got there, we learned there was a conference in town that day so there were no rooms available, it was still light, so we considered our options for routes to our destination of the next day, Cluj-Napoca. There were two possible routes, one that hugged the northern edge of the Transylvanian Alps and one that hugged the southern edge. Once we set out on one of them, there was no opportunity to change our minds because there were no roads over the Alps to connect them. We choose the southern route, through Hungarian territory. All the signs on this road were in Hungarian, not Romanian. Suddenly it didn't seem that any of us had a linguistic advantage.

It was getting late with the sun nearly ready to set when we pulled into the first town that was big enough to have a hotel. In addition, we were getting low on gas, so the option of continuing to drive had expired. Our first stop was at a Tourist Center, the source for information about hotels and restaurants in the area. We were certain that the staff there would speak Romanian in spite of our being in Hungarian-speaking territory. Because Josie and I knew that women in Romania would likely be ignored, George and John went into the center. They returned with the addresses of the three hotels in town. We headed for the first one. This time, we all four went in to see if they had rooms. The clerk behind the desk barely looked at us and sent us away, telling us they had no rooms.

Balcony off upper floor of Castle Bran

On to the second hotel. This time George and Josie went in, figuring maybe four of us appearing all at once was overwhelming. They returned with the same news. There were no rooms. At the the third hotel, John and I went in together. Again, there were no rooms.

So there we were, in a small town in Hungarian-speaking Transylvania, in a car so small it would have been difficult for even one person to sleep in, without enough gas to be certain we would reach another town. We decided we needed to head back to the Tourist Center, this time to find out if there might be a house in town where we could rent a room for the night. This was a common way for students to travel throughout the country, but in recent years the government had banned Romanians from allowing foreigners from staying in their homes. But we didn't see any other choice.

Since George and John had gone into the center the first time, the only ones of us the staff hadn't seen were Josie and me. Since Josie's Romanian was fluent, she did the talking. Even though I couldn't understand everything, I could tell that there were some people in town who had rooms to rent and the woman Josie spoke with walked to a desk with a phone to make arrangements for us. While she was on the phone, Josie filled me in on the whole conversation. The house had only one room with two double beds. Josie had told her that we would be happy with that arrangement since there wasn't really any option. As Josie was filling me in, the woman realized that I wasn't Romanian. She put her hand over the receiver, looked up at Josie, and asked her if I was a foreigner. Josie told her that all four of us were foreigners. At that point, she hung up the phone and told us we had to stay in a hotel; we couldn't stay in the home of Romanians. Josie told her that we had already checked with all the hotels and none of them had rooms. In response, the woman picked up the phone again and began dialing as she told us that if the first class hotel in town didn't have any rooms, they woud have to make a room available, even if it meant telling guests in the room they would have to move out. She completed her call and told us we shoud go back to the first class hotel - the one we had gone to first - where they would have two rooms for us.

We went back to the hotel. And this time, they were happy to provide us with two rooms. Foreigners were more welcome as guests than Romanians, I guess.