Tags: Romania, language, weather, monasteries, Bucovina, random, PhD
Date: 07 July 2006 13:25:27
So, week 3 has been tourist week - here I am in Southern Bucovina, and my goodness Ian would be so jealous! I've now seen all 4 of the monasteries I wanted to see, which were all lovely, though I think Humor was my favourite - it was the quietest, and felt really tranquil, and I enjoyed the walk there too (it's about 8km away from where I'm staying) through really pretty countryside. It was boiling though, so I now have bright red patches on the back of my shoulders where I couldn't quite reach with the suncream (ouch). Yesterday I hired a guide with a car and we went to Moldovita and Sucevita, both lovely, bigger than Humor and busier but again really impressive. Adventures were had though, mainly in the form of the guide's car, a Dacia (of course) which broke down (literally) every 5 minutes - he said it was because of "dirty petrol". Then today I walked to Voronet, a slightly shorter walk in the other direction out of town from Humor, and (just like it said in the Rough Guide) it probably had the most impressive frescoes, but was also the busiest with tourists (there was quite a scrum at the gift shop!). The monasteries are all 15th-16th century and have interior and exterior frescoes with various Biblical scenes and accounts of the saints etc - needless to say I've taken about a million pictures, so will put some of the best on here when I get home.
My other adventure was when I arrived here. You might remember I was really proud of myself for making the booking over the phone by myself in Romanian the other month. So, I turned up after a very hot and sweaty train journey (some woman in the carriage obviously had a draught phobia as she objected every time I begged them to let me open the window for a while), desperate for a shower, and the woman at the pension told me that they'd given my room to another person who'd booked for 2 weeks, so they couldn't refuse. Like that was supposed to make it alright. So after much complaining and moaning (in Romanian - was v. impressed with myself) they sorted me out a room in another pension for the same price (they originally got me somewhere more expensive, but I didn't let them get away with that), and very nice it is too. The town I'm in is called Gura Humorului, it's OK - not unpleasant, but a bit "small town" after busy Cluj, not much going on. I've noticed that every other sign is for a carwash, which seems slightly bizarre. In Cluj, every other sign was for a dentist.
One of the villages I drove through with the guide yesterday (during a 5 minute window when the car was actually going) was Arbore, which was one of the worst affected by last week's flooding. You'd never know it now, it's so hot the ground was dusty and parched, and cracking in places. But we saw a house that had collapsed after the water had washed away two of its walls, and another where everything that could have been salvaged was now drying out in the yard. It was all desperately sad.
I leave Gura Humorului tomorrow and return to Cluj just for one night, then Sunday I'm off to Sibiu which is an old Germanic town in southern Transylvania. Apparently it's well worth seeing, and I have it in my head that next year it's the European City of Culture (though it's entirely possible I just made that up). I have a PhD-related appointment/meeting thingy there, and am hoping to arrange another. I leave there on Thursday for Bucharest, where thankfully one person has now answered my email so I know that I'll have a nice time on Friday evening meeting a good friend of my Romanian teacher in Glasgow, who happens to be a doctor so will be a useful person for me to meet. Then next Saturday afternoon I fly on to Chisinau (Moldova) for the next round of adventures.
Ooh I nearly forgot. Yesterday driving back into town I saw, in the middle of nowhere, a garden gnome shop. With lots of garden gnomes and a garden wild boar (which was very big). As you do. It looked a bit odd stuck there in the middle of fields and haystacks and forests and mountains and no other buildings. I wonder if it gets much business?