On our 3rd week in Romania, we moved to Brasov which is another town in Transylvania, with a very beautiful old town with some fantastic architecture. If we hadn’t spent a week in Sibiu we would have been blown away by the atmosphere of the pedestrian-only downtown. On the first day we took a “free” walking tour and decided that it was almost as good as the smaller town of Sibiu that we had just left. Lots of German/Romanian architecture from the 18th and 19th century that looked to be restored very well.
The most popular tourist attraction in Romania is Bran Castle which is also known as Dracula’s castle. The fictional story of Dracula was written by an Irishman Bram Stroker who never visited Romania but supposedly got inspiration for the story by looking at pictures of the castle. Dracula was also largely inspired by Vlad the Impaler who also probably never even heard of this castle, let alone lived there, as he was mostly down in the region of Wallachia, fighting the Ottomans. That doesn’t really matter for the tourist hordes that visit every day. The town is filled with Dracula souvenirs and other scary stuff, although the castle itself was much more focused on Queen Marie. We had heard about the masses of people squeezing through the castle and were a bit trepidatious, but we had to do it because it is the top attraction in Romania. We rented a car for a couple of days so we didn’t have to be a part of a bus tour. It wasn’t the best castle we have ever been to but we really were surprised by how much we liked our visit including the torture device museum part of the castle. While it was busy, it wasn’t as bad as it may be in high season. It reinforced the idea of going in with low/no expectations, end up being pleasantly surprised.
Near Bran Castle is the town of Rasnov. It has its own Hollywood letters sign on the hill near an old fortress, that you get to with a funicular. Unfortunately the fortress is closed for renovations so we ended up just walking around the town of Rasnov which we expected to be a cute example of a Romanian town. It turned out to be rather empty. Not many shops or restaurants around… but we found a place to have a real non-touristy Transylvania lunch.
The next day, we still had the rental car so we could reach Peles castle in the Carpathian mountains. This is the actual home of Romania’s royal family in the 1800’s. It was mostly built in the German style because the royal family were from Germany. It was really impressive. Lots of dark hardwoods everywhere with a lot of stained glass and big mirrors. The interiors were decorated with the fancy royal furniture from the 1800’s. Lots of people were also at this castle but we still enjoyed our visit and took too many pictures again.
On the way home we decided to check out a walled fortification church in the small town of Prejmer because it is one of 7 fortified churches to be listed as UNESCO world heritage sites. There was nobody there. We could have bought tickets from a vending machine and scanned them to get through the turnstile but we decided not to pay. We were able to see the church from the outside just fine and decided that if it was interesting inside that there would be some visitors. Kind of funny that we were frustrated by the 2 castles with way too many people, and then not interested in the place that had zero tourists. We just headed back to Brasnov and returned our car. After striking out in Rasnov as well as the fortified church, we thought that we didn’t need a car to go see anymore lukewarm tourist sites.
We stayed in our first Homeexchange here in Brasnov. We received GP’s (Guest Points) for signing up for the website and also for people that will be staying in our house in Seattle this summer. It was great on our budget to not have an accommodation cost for the week. I will write a blogpost about homeexchange later this summer when we have had some more experiences with it. We are now done with Romania and headed to Bulgaria. First stop – Veliko-Tarnovo!