18 Jun 2014 Brasov, Sinaia
As we wake up, it is still raining. To the south, about 40 km away, is Sinaia, the home of the famous Kastel Peles. The folks on the train had said: don´t miss Sinaia. The boys on the train from the day before had said: don´t miss Babele, at the top of a long cable car, from Bustele, about 5 km north of Sinaia. Since we have paid for the two days of our hotel room, we ask: will it rain in Brasov? YES. Will it rain in Sinaia? NO. So day trip it is. But whether we will get to the cable car is still a very open question.
Note: Before the end of WWI, Sinaia was in Romania and Brasov (Kronstadt) was in Austro-Hungary.
Before we leave, we have a few errands. It is laundry day, and there is a laundry at STAR a few blocks away. There is also a market next to STAR, both indoor and outdoor. Indoors you get meat, cheese, bread, and wine (the kind they dispense into your own bottle and real bottled wine). There is also a vending machine that dispenses 10-egg cartons (Eggomatic?), and a vending machine that delivers a liter of (raw?) milk into reusable special liter bottles. Outdoors are vegetables, fruit and flowers. So we shop away (cheese, bread, salami, wine, carrots, radishes, apricots, cherries).
STAR is a 4-story department store. One of the spaces is a laundry. But the building doesn´t open until 9:30 am. Finally, 9:30 comes. We go back to our room, and drop off some of our food goodies, collect our laundry bag, with four days of dirty clothing, and go back. The laundry is in a corner on the 1st floor. How much? we ask. It weighs 3.5 kg (7.7 lbs) and the price is 16 lei per kg ($2.30 per lb) so 56 lei it is. It is much higher than we have paid so far, but what choice do we have? Sometimes the only way out is paid laundry, which will be ready at 6 pm.
It is now about 10:30 am. Back to the hotel, then to the bus stop, take a 51 bus 3 km (6 stops) to the Bus Station, immediately next to the train station.
There loading up is a Bucuresti bus which goes through Sinaia. So we hop on. We pay 11 lei apiece, and wait for the bus to leave, and wait, and wait. Finally, at noon, we finally leave.
The bus gently climbs the pass at Predeal (which we had also been told to visit) (was this the pre-WWI boundary?) and then wends its way onward. Finally, we get off at Sinaia. There is a young gentleman from Brazil/Holland, Anibal, who also gets off. We are going in the same direction, so we go off together.
Lonely Planet shows that the palace as apx 1.5 km away, reachable by a series of winding roads, and obviously uphill. So we find some stairs, and stopping every so often to check our bearings, we walk.
After a while, we reach the Sinaia Monastery. We pay the 7 lei to get in (Mike, 5; Carol, the just-retired "student," 2). The main church was built in the 1840s and is a classical church with a big chandelier and formal painted icons.
Next door is a museum with a 1685 Bible and numerous paintings and icons, from previous iterations of this church. Our bonus is a small church next door from the 16th century that was replaced by the current church.
Time to continue uphill. At a turn, we are no longer on a road, but on a wide walkway. The first sign to Peles points the way. Soon we see the tchocke vendors, and thereafter the castle itself. The vendors doing really well are selling small baskets of fresh fruit to the childen. The guy selling a kind of boomerang also profits. This crowd is not looking to buy embroidery, etc.
It starts raining as we approach the castle - so much for the weather predictions of hotel staff.
This castle was built as a summer palace for King Carol I (no relation!) and his wife Elisabeta. It was started in 1875 and finished 39 years later, just as the king was dying. LP says: "The first European castle to have central heating, electricity and vacuuming (!)" It has 160 rooms - really humble.
It is the most opulent building we have ever seen. Even Disney cannot compete (after all, everything is original). King Carol I had way too much money for his own good.
You can see the main floor on the basic ticket. For extra, they throw in the top floors. Photography and video also extra.
We opt for just the main floor (Mike 20, Carol the student 10). But we also buy tickets for Pelesior, the small castle next door, also 20 & 10. For evidence that she is a student, Carol has been presenting her Emory card. Sometimes they take it - sometimes they don´t. Anyway, the total is 60 lei ($18.60). If you want to see the upstairs of Peles, it is hugely more expensive, unless you are a student. Our friend, Anibal, wants to see the upstairs of Peles, but not Pelesior, so we bid him farewell.
The Peles castle has the finest rugs, paintings, marble, etc. It has a room of armaments from the 15th century to the end of the 19th century. Many of the suits of mail would be too small to fit Carol. Fine lot of good this collection of weaponry did Romania in WWI, which was after all fought with tanks, heavy artillery, and eventually airplanes and poison gas. (Actually, Romania came out quite well after WWI. The Treaty of Versailles gave it Transylvania, Bucovina and Moldova, and doubled (apx) its size.)
Visitors have to wait to enter until a tour of your language (in this case, English) could be assembled. So we waited, and waited while 2 or 3 large Romanian school groups were admitted (a visit to this castle is probably a must for all students). Finally, it was our turn. Visitors have to put on a cloth mini-shoe over their street shoes to protect the carpets. You can´t take pictures or video without the special expensive ticket. About halfway through the tour, however, so many people were taking pictures that Mike started also. Every kind of fantasy room you can imagine: Turkish style, Austrian style, etc. Lots of marble columns. Our guide rattled off many stories that she had surely repeated 1000 times.
We walked up to the castle at 2:00 pm, were admitted at 2:30 pm, and back out at 3:15 pm.
It is still raining, but not very hard. We find a dryish place, and quickly down some of the food we have in our backpack. We then head uphill to see the Pelesior castle. This castle was built by the nephew of King Carol, who became the kingś adopted son after their only child, a daughter, died of scarlet fever at age 4. He ruled Romania between WWI and WWII. (Russia grabbed Moldova in 1940, and parts of Bucovina were incorporated into the new Ukraine after WWII. Soon Romania became Communist, and soon it was ruled by Caucescu, who was deposed and killed in December 1989.) We were told that some time after the death of Caucescu, the kingś descendants moved back, and now live in Brasov.
Anyway, Pelesior, while quite magnificent, is a small castle compared to Peles, and is tame Art Deco instead of gonzo lavish. We walk through its three floors fairly quickly, and we are out at 4:15 pm.
We walk out the same way, but at the Monastery we take a different turn, and lo and behold, we are right at the train station/bus stop. Within 3 minutes a bus comes along. We buy our 11 lei tickets, and are off back to Brasov. It is now 5 pm.
A trip to Babele is now completely out of the question. It is too late, and it is probably raining at the top. Too bad.
Back in Brasov, we see two female tourists going to a hostel in the old town. We are all taking the 51 bus, so we promise to show them their stop. We will get off where we had gotten off the day before, and they would continue on to the Black Church stop. Unfortunately, the 51 bus stopped at a different stop near our hotel, so we also wound up riding past the Black Church. This gave us the opportunity of finally viewing the Black Church.
The gentleman at the admission counter scoffed at Carolś student documents, so we paid 8 lei each.
This church, originally from between 1385 and 1480 (apparently, the records are somewhat hazy about this point), had been burnt and rebuilt several times, hence "black" for the char on the stones. Like many of the major Transylvanian churches, it too was converted in the Reformation. It is one of the classic west European cathedral style. Though photos were forbidden, Mike managed to get off a few blurry shots. We walk past the hotel to retrieve our expensive laundry, and back to the hotel.
We are going back to Casa Romaneasca for dinner, but will go slightly out of our way to try to see the two old synagogues of Brasov. First is the Orthodox synagogue on Str. Castelului 64. We walk by. It is locked. We ring a few bells, and can get no one to open the door.
The second is the Schei Synagogue, very near the Schei Gate. Did we say that Brasov was a walled city, and a good bit of the walls remain?
Anyway, the synagogue is open. There is a Jewish film festival, and an artsy film is about the life of the French singer Serge Gainsbourg is showing. Too much heavy symbolism. We watch for 10 minutes or so, decide food is more important, and leave.
On to the restaurant, where we have Ciorba Ardeleneasca (the soup of the region), Cotlet Surpriza (a piece of meat baked in a pastry and topped with Haiduk sauce), Carnati Oi Picante (6 spicy lamb sausages), Clatite Brasovena (a kind of sweet Brasov style pancake), and an espresso. 61 lei.
We take the bus 2 stops, back to the hotel, in part to figure out where the bus stops actually are. Like most of the cities on this trip, bus stops are apx 1/2 km, or 1500 feet, apart, and you had best know where they are, or you are in for a whole lot of walking.
We get in some much needed internet time, and then to bed.
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