Beautiful Romania

These days I have been away but now I am back to my computer, so, I will try to catch up a bit with everything that happened while I was away.

I took a short 3 days holiday with my wife and a couple of good friends and we headed for a well known resort in Romania, called Lacul Rosu (Red Lake). We managed to see in only 3 days, a lot of places and came back with a lot of photos.

I have decided to only put here a few of them, because this is not the subject of this blog, but because a few days ago I have decided to add a new category called Romania, I think it will fit just fine. So, here it is:

Red Lake was formed around 1837 where it used to be a forest and now you can see tree parts coming out of the water, kind of spooky. We rented a boat and sailed to a couple of them, to see for ourselves how they look like!

This is an area where the concentration of people of Hungarian origin is high so every sign there was AT LEAST in 2 languages: Romanian and Hungarian. Plus German, English, French sometimes… Just as an observation, there are tensions born by historical events and by the fact that Hungarian people there, even if living in Romania, don’t speak Romanian well and sometimes, with just a bit of bad will, it is told they don’t want to.

I can say that we were a bit tensioned in that area at first because you could hear Hungarian speakers all around you, in the very heart of Romania, making us feel like we were in an other country, but beside that, I can say that we haven’t had any problem and people were OK even if in some cases we found it a bit difficult to communicate in Romanian, but with a bit of effort on both sides, we went along fine!

In the above picture, my wife is on the left of the picture, the other 2 people are my friends that joined us for this trip. Of course, I was taking pictures.

We traveled to the other side of the country, crossing an invisible historical border, totally changing the accent. My mother in law is from that side of the country so I am a bit used to the accent. We have found a telecabin where we least expected, especially because we couldn’t understand why is it there. We presumed it will serve a hotel that is currently under construction, but for the moment I can’t see the point… But well, it seems to have clients, at least we took a ride…

We have visited a few historic locations.

On our way back we visited a newly launched salt mine. Newly launched(2 days ago) for tourists, cause it was old and not used, anymore, of course. However, very impressive. I felt like in Jules Verne’s Trip to the center of the Earth. People were playing a lot of games there, buying stuff, etc. We played cards waiting for our return bus.

We took a trip to an old and beautiful medieval city, one of the most famous of Romania, from this point of view, Sighisoara. And just for the fans of this kind of stories, believe it or not, historically speaking we have seen the house where Vlad Tepes’s father lived and where Vlad Tepes was born (Vlad Tepes, the historical personality that is the root of Dracula’s story, ruler of Romania’s lower grounds, which almost all the time is identified with Bram Stoker’s Dracula).

Loved the girl speaking on the phone dressed like “old time” people.

Finally, we took a trip to Sibiu, which was the Cultural Capital of Europe in 2007. Sibiu is a beautiful city that worths every minute spent there. It reminds of German cities because there are a lot of German people living there, a community that blends perfectly with Romanian spirit.

It was a demanding trip and I was very tired when I got home, but I must admit, it was a beautiful trip. I didn’t take my guitar this time cause I knew there is no time, in the evening we were all tired so the only thing we wanted to do is hit the sack!

But now I’m back and ready to blog and play the guitar! Yeah!

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