C-c-c-cold

We made it to Romania, after a fun travel experience (taking a bus to the one border town with an international ticket office still open, buying said tickets literally 7 minutes before the office closed, and then getting to wait around 7 hours in a not-heated-after-midnight train station for our 3am train). When we got in, we headed straight up to Brasov, in Transylvania/the Carpathian Mountains, where we collapsed at a hostel and later worked up the strength to tour the town a little bit. Brasov is a really charming town, it had a skating rink in the center, right next to the town Christmas tree, and a little Christmas-y market selling gingerbread, handmade mittens and hats, and the like. Kel bought handknitted wool socks, and I bought a handmade hat there, and we both agreed those are some of our best purchases on this trip yet. At dinner that night, the restaurant had boiled wine--we clearly are no longer in the Muslim world.
Our next day in Brasov, we headed out to Bram, to see Dracula's Castle (they call it Bram Castle, and Vlad the Impaler visited it like once, but it's the traditional castle of Dracula). It was magnificently imposing, and Bran itself was an adorable village, clearly swarming with tourists in the summer, but laid back in the winter. We bought handknitted mittens there, which are also some of the best purchases we'd made thus far; my leather driving gloves may suit just fine in Ankara, but in the mountains of Romania they were not cutting it. After Bran, we headed over to Rasnov, which has a more impressive on the interior castle, with a catch: you have to climb several hundred stairs to get there from the village. In that weather, it was a little painful, but we did it and it was worth it. Still, we were soooo glad to get on the heated bus back to Brasov afterwards, where we met up with some other folks from our hostel for dinner. That night, we watched a vampire movie with a guy at the hostel, Vampire Hunter, which we figured was only fitting given where we were.
The next day, we got up and out of town early to get to Curtea de Arges, to see their Princely Court and 16th century Monastery. Our bus ended up taking 5 hours after in broke down on a mountain road and we had to wait for a replacement bus; that was fun. Curtea was snowy and beautiful; we walked a few kilometers between sights, and their monastery was gorgeous and full of art that was a little different than what we saw in Bulgaria. We headed from there to Bucharest, via the smallest train I've ever seen, and are currently there, where we've yet to see the town butwill do so today before heading out tonight inshallah, for Belgrade.
kib,
-R