Adventures in Transylvannia

"In Romania, anything is possible." This is a phrase that kept coming up during my recent vacation in Romania. It wasn't meant the way it's meant when an American says "In America anything is possible". In Romania what they mean is that you can do/have whatever you want, no matter how odd, ludicrous or illegal, if you've got the money. It's such a cool country.

Flipperson insists that since my flight isn't until evening we should go for a 17 mile run in the morning. In a moment of weakness I agree and wind up heading onto a 12 and a half hour flight hungry, tired and sore. I spend a good portion of the night cursing Flip and wondering what Romanian hotels are going to be like. Hint: they aren't like a Sheraton.

I arrive in Bucharest. It's an inferno with daytime highs in the lower 50's. My underarm deodorant is immediately defeated. For most of the trip I wear it for purely psychological reasons.

I'm driven to the Hotel Triumf where I meet up with the rest of my friends. It's my first ever experience with Dacias, the national car of Romania. Dacias come in about 15 different shapes but only one size - small. If you run into something with them they get much smaller very quickly.

We've rented a van with a driver for the week - tension runs high as the eight of us (mostly full sized North American guys) speculate on the size of the van we will be spending a good portion of the next week in. Thank God - it's a full sized Ford van! It fits all of us and, thank God, thank God, thank God, it has air conditioning!

• The highways are full of horse drawn farmer's wagons and maniacal little Dacias. Gypsy caravans happen by on a regular basis. Dismayingly, the windiness of the roads does not discourage outrageous passing maneuvers in the least. Highway workers seem to all be focusing on tasks that can be done in the shade of highway overpasses.
• Dear Lord I've never seen so many nuclear reactors.
• We tour a couple of monasteries & churches from the 13th and 14th centuries. They seem to really like to keep pieces of dead religious figures handy in Romania - it's probably got some practical application that I'd rather not know about.

In the early evening we enter Transylvannia and arrive in the smaller city of Sibui (pronounced Sib You, or at least that's how I was pronouncing it). Everyone is psyched to be in Transylvannia. All present, except for our Romanian traveling companions, begin dusting off their best count Dracula impersonations. The Romanians can't understand what in the hell it is we're doing.

• We open with deep fried cow brains, and then move on to sheep's intestine soup.

  After dinner we hit a nightclub. Our shorts, sandals and MEC travel shirt wardrobe elicits pointing and laughing from the well dressed Romanian bar crowd. Love is not in the air. I run a few experimental forays into the land of the opposite sex and the hypothesis of inappropriate clothing is hastily confirmed. We retreat into an oblivion of beer.
• We stay put in Sibui for the next day. The morning (probably more like afternoon by the time we are in gear) is spent touring a museum of Romanian art. Reece and I come to the conclusion that Romanian art is very dark, brooding stuff. I guess when your country keeps getting conquered and pillaged you develop a slightly dark view of the world. Or maybe you just want to creep people out so they'll stay the hell away from you…
• Dinner in Sibui, it is decided, is to be a gastrointestinal test. We order a gamut of traditional Romanian foods and alcohol, and they prove to be as brooding and unfriendly as the art. The shooters of Svika (plum Brandy that makes tequila seem like a sipping liqueur) are powerful and alarming but they are nothing compared to the food. We open with deep fried cow brains, and then move on to sheep's intestine soup. My plain, meat and potatoes taste buds are walloped into submission.