Where Bukarest is dissed and Brasov gets approved

Okay, to be quite frank, then I probably should’ve done a short review of Bukarest before I went on to Brasov (as I did with Thessaloniki), seeing how we were actually there (in Bukarest) for three quarters of a day, but I won’t. Two reasons: 1) I don’t have any nice image from Bukarest (if any at all, actually), and 2) the only things we managed to see when we were there was what was strewn along the path between the central station (or one of them, can’t remember if there were several) and the hostel (which was very nice by the way), as well as the hostel and a (very) newly built mall, which we went to in order to replenish our supplies. And unfortunately enough, except for the mall (which looked as flawlessly clean and tidy and fancy pancy as one can expect from any mall), all we saw looked like straight out of your stereotypical grey imagination of a Soviet satellite state. Don’t get me wrong here, I’m positive there’s a ton of really nice stuff to see in Bukarest, but alas, we didn’t have time for it, and hence no review.

Now that we’ve been in Brasov for a while, I figured it’d be time for a review of that place though. However, upon looking through the posts of this last week, I noticed I’ve almost already written a review of the city, only spread over several different posts. Thus, this will be fairly short.

So yeah, a lot of the city looks a lot like what I described above in regards to Bukarest, but the old town centre makes it all worth it. And while you’re there, make sure to go for a trip to the nearby castles in Rasnov (very cool peasant-built 13th century fortress – featured below), Bran (marketed (and exploited in absurdum – they even tried building a theme park out there but luckily enough didn’t get the permits needed) as Dracula’s castle, which in a way is true ’cause it’s where Bram Stoker’s Dracula took place, but it’s not where the real-life character that Dracula is based on (Vlad the Impaler) lived), and Sinaia (stunningly beautiful castle from the end of the 19th century), ’cause they make for a great day-trip (preferably go with an organised tour of some sort), and you’ll get to see the magnifiscent Carpathian mountains in close-up as well (well worth it). Koeus highly approves.
- – -
Song of the day: Deine Lakaien – Life is a Sexually Transmitted Disease

~ by koeus on February 22, 2008.