Wednesday, August 24

The drive from Iași to Sighișoara was straight out of 1950’s America.  With no freeways north of Ploești, every 18-wheeler and touring family was jammed onto every two lane road with tractors and horsecarts (yes, you would see those occasionally on the road in 1950’s America) and the driving speed was a min function.  After Piatra Neamt, the road gradually climbs into a gorge which must have been gorgeous at one time but is now packed on the bottom with cement plants and on the top with wall to wall souvenir shops, all identical.

Somewhere on this trip, we drove past a shop called “Cheap Chinese Stuff” or words to that effect; I thought that was way honest.

There were a few honey stands, which does us no good since the next act is going on an airplane and no checked luggage, and more than a few selling wicker baskets and brooms.  But the great majority sold Dracula coffee mugs and Star Wars pillows.

That night, we stayed in a faux-kan in Sighișoara, called “Casa Lily”.  Lily apparently fell in love with Japanese tourist hotels and in 2008 came back to Transylvania and built one, with her husband.  The hotel has a humorous sense in its rendition — for example — when I looked down the hall to the rooms, I thought, oh wow, it really has sliding paper doors, but it turns out, and you can try this at home, if you take the coarsest pressboard, the kind with big chunks of wood splinters flattened out under thousands of pounds of pressure, and you paint that flat white, many layers, and tack onto it wooden frames of the style that hold paper, then, from a distance and properly lit, the result really resembles the hallway of a ryokan.  Similarly with some other features, others are played straight, like the koi pond and the turtle pond and the torii delineating the place where the garden becomes the forest.  The TV set is behind a screen.  More people should do that.

We rented the Red Room, which hopefully has no significance in Hungarian or Romanian or on booking.com.  It would be worse, if there were nobody else in the hotel, but in fact, it’s full up.   We got the last room.

We went to Mimoza, a restaurant that Butza recommended because his wife Gabby made the designer cups that the restaurant uses for coffee in the morning.  We got sausage, and bean soup and tomato-cucumber-cabbage crudités.  I have just learned that you aren’t supposed to say “crudités” in public any more, lest people reach for their revolvers.  And a glass of wine.  They were in Romanian on the menu but misused; the soup wasn’t ciorba and the sausage wasn’t mici and the crudités weren’t salata but it all tasted good.

Thursday, August 25

We returned to Mimosa to have coffee in Gabby’s cups, and fresh-squeezed orange juice. On our way to the Clock Tower, there was a photographer waiting for the figurines to do something at noon. They didn’t do anything. Each of these figurines represents a day of the week, and they have a Changing of the Figurine at midnight, not noon. (We didn’t go back to watch that.)

We bought our tickets and walked up the stairs in the tower, stopping at each level to see a few exhibits in the History Museum located throughout the tower. The top level of the tower had arrows pointing to places, but instead of pointing to visible local landmarks, they pointed to distant cities. We continued our perambulation, and after stopping at a place with expensive antique postcards, walked up the Covered Stairway (which reminded Dave of the escalators in Hong Kong) to the Church On A Hill.

We’d heard of the Friday night organ concert which we wouldn’t be able to go to, but then on Thursday afternoon the organist was rehearsing. The main square in town was being set up for a cultural festival, featuring cultures from all over. We had an early dinner there, eating an enormous plate featuring three different form factors of bacon: one cooked like a ham, one deep-fried like chicharrones, and one as simple cubes of fat with skin attached. There were also pickles and cheese and tomatoes.

Friday, August 26

Travel days are given over to travel.  This one was particularly trying.  Romanian roads are pretty much where American roads were before President Eisenhower pushed through the construction of the Interstate Defense Highway System.  Almost all the roads are two lane, and almost all the trucks are driving on them.  Maybe NATO will assist in the construction of roads that can carry tanks against the Russians, though fiberoptics are more useful.

We spent one hour getting from the start of a traffic jam south of Predeal to Busteni, a total of ten kilometers.  That was the slowest part.  The worst parts were when the traffic was moving, because then you have to pass and jockey and dodge the cars and trucks and horsecarts.  We got the car back to Hertz.  Their shuttle was off somewhere, so a skinny tattooed teenage skinhead doing the Seven Holy Sleepers thing since a Suicidal Tendencies concert in 1979 announced to us that he was the driver and our car was the shuttle and dropped us off at the terminal himself.  Then it was the usual hassle to get through security — the X-ray observer hadn’t seen the little skinny M.2 NVME 2280 form factor SSD backup drive before.