Pastries. Basically, what study abroad means to me. Nothing else hits home that you’re studying abroad as much as walking by a castle, palace, or famous landmark eating a schokolade kipferl. It doesn’t hurt either when you walk by the place where the Pope gave speeches while eating gelato. And let me tell you, Romania has the BEST pastries I’ve had so far. I’ve even been debating buying a ticket back just to eat one more. The gogoși is basically a pocket of dough filled completely with melted chocolate goodness. When you bite it the chocolate will even overflow.
The first day we spent in Romania, we started the long trek to Brasov and then onto Bran’s Castle, also known as Dracula’s Castle. It took eight hours round trip. It started off a little rough since no one speaks any other language besides Romanian in Romania. My group spoke English, German, Spanish and French. Nope. We spent the majority of our trip lost and getting yelled at in Romanian. And people think German sounds scary! We asked around three or four people how to get Bran’s Castle. There answers were all you take a train to Brasov and then get on the bus. When we asked which bus they said that we would see signs for it. Well, when we got off the train, there were no signs. Also, almost no one who spoke English. We finally found someone who told us to take the 23 bus four stops. Well, there was no 23 bus stop in front of the train station. We then found another person who repeated the information about the 23 bus, but then also told us the bus stop was across the street and down a ways. Then he said we would have to take another bus from that stop which would have no markings on it, but we would know. Well, we didn’t know. We ended up asking people and asking people and they kept directing us behind their establishments until we came to an abandoned, run-down empty lot. We were the only tourists. We waited an hour until a bus finally pulled up with a little paper sign in the front that said “Bran”.
So we finally got there and it was all worth it! The little town of Bran was the only part of Romania I saw that embraced tourism. The city center was full of outdoor stalls and markets that were full of Dracula memorabilia as well as other touristy trinkets. The castle itself was very pretty and located atop a small hill with a forest behind it. Inside the castle itself, it was not as vampire fixated as I thought it would be. It mostly focused on the history of the castle itself with one room that focused on Bram Stoker and his creation of Dracula.
Getting back to Bucharest was once again an adventure. We got to our bus stop twenty minutes early since we had to get on this bus to make the last train back to Bucharest. It was a good thing we got there early because the bus arrived ten minutes early and half the size of the one that took us there. My fighting instincts kicked in because there was no way I was spending the night in Brasov and I fought my way to the front of the crowd and got on as he was telling the crowd no more. I tried to explain our situation, who knows if he even understood me, but he ended up letting our little group on. Then he slammed the doors to people banging on the bus and drove away. There were of course no seats so we spent the hour ride back standing in the aisle. All in all, it was an adventure, but completely worth it!
Navigating yourself around a foreign city is hard enough but it gets tougher when you don’t speak the language. My advice to you is to try and research it as much as you can, take screen shots of directions, and try to upload GPS before you go anywhere. Also, don’t be afraid to ask directions and be aggressive if you need to go somewhere. If not, who knows what weird places you’ll find yourself in, and let me tell you being lost in Romania is not the same as being lost in the streets of Paris, so plan ahead!