Vlad Tepes - Dracula!

Well, I rushed through the last post on here, and this one might be a little hurried too, but we'll see. Shannon and I are at a hostel in Krakow, Poland right now, and while the internet is free, it seems today (or tomorrow maybe) is a Polish holiday, and it's starting to get a little packed and panicky as people wait for the computer. Meh, let 'em wait.

So after Turkey, we hauled off to Bulgaria for a 4 night stay to pretty much sit still for a few days in a quiet Bulgarian town and spend some time doing laundry and short hikes around the town. Quite a neat place, Bulgaria, with heaps of antique shops selling old WWII artifacts, and super cheap food and beer. We found a moderately old church too, which wasn't really much to look at, but the basement was open, and going inside we found what I'm pretty sure is some kind of human remains storage area. It was pretty old and damaged, but there were shelves of human skulls all with dates and what we thought were names on them, along with a few dozen boxes filled with human bones. Yes, I did indeed open as many as I could to check them all out, though I stopped short of actually handling the bones, since I didn't really want to be responsible for breaking anyone's skull open, whether they were still using it or not.

We caught the train from Bulgaria to Romania, which right away had a different feel to it. For starters, the 3 hours to the border cost us about $4 a person, but the 3 hours past the border into Romania cost us $20. Kinda strange. Romania also seems to have a much stronger presence of uni-brows - people (men and women) whose eyebrows fail to make any form of discernible gap between them across their forehead. Lots of facial warts too.

We went straight to Brasov, into the heart of Transylvania. We hadn't initially planned on it, but our Romanian trip quickly turned into a sort of Dracula-hunting expedition, as vehicle rentals were quite cheap, and we picked up a car for a few days. The story about Dracula, as far as I can understand it, begins with a Romanian ruler called Vlad Tepes, or Vlad the Impaler. This guy was pretty bad-ass, and had a nasty habit of a) impaling those he thought were conspiring against him onto stakes and b) assuming everyone around him was conspiring against him. He was quite a ruler too, conquering lots of land and doing well for Romania. Anyway, sometime later, Bram Stoker writes a book about vampires, calling the vampire Count Dracula, already another nick-name taken by the now deceased (I think) Vlad Tepes. (Dracula I think comes from Dracul, which means either dragon or devil, not sure which. I really should research this as I write it).

Well, all that history basically meant we spent 4 days cruising around to old castles and citadels either used by Vlad Tepes or used as a setting in the original Dracula book. Pretty cool.

After all that, we made our way to Poland, which we're staying at now. We're hanging around in Krakow, a wonderfully gorgeous city that I know very little about. Oh, except for the nutty legend about the dragon that used to live here, and the shoe-maker who killed it by stuffing a fake sheep full of sulphur, causing the dragon to explode. Lots of cobble-stone roads, old churches, fancy town squares, real nice place to be. Auschuwitz is also right nearby, which we went to see. That was quite an experience, though it was rather lessened in its intensity by the 5000 or so high school students that were also on a trip there that day. Still, despite the crowds and the youngin's acting like fools all around us, it was definitely worth the trip.

Probably time to bugger off the computer now. Next stop on the agenda is Prague, followed by Berlin, hopefully I'll have some fun things to type about then.