Monday, 16 January 2017
Bucharest - Romania
 |
| The Romanian Parliament. |
Bucharest is the capital and largest city of Romania. From what other Romania's had told us it didn't have a great deal to offer in terms of attractions but we were keen to check it out. We didn't research it at all other then finding some accommodation and the airport since we were flying from here out to Munich - Germany, so we didn't have many expectations.
Our AirBnB was a newly renovated apartment close to the city centre. Our host had a ripper email with detailed instructions to help us get from the main train station via the metro to the apartment. The beauty of this apartment was that we didn't need to meet the host, we were supplied a pin for access to the apartment via a keypad. This was by far the best and easiest method for access to an Airbnb we've had!
The apartment was fully self contained and basically brand new! They had supplied coffee for an espresso machine, tea, waffles for breakfast and a couple of bottles of wine! After a big couple of days driving around the country we were so happy to have some tucker supplied and such a comfortable space.
 |
| After settling into the apartment - straight onto Tripadvisor for the top cheap restaurants and thankfully it was a burger place called - Burger Van Bistro! Geez we love these little trendy burger places. They always have ripper food and local craft beer. Cost was 27AUD |
Our AirBnB hosts were keen to take us out for lunch on our first real day here so we took them up on their offer and met them at a traditional Romaina restaurant/beer hall. They were keen to meet up with us for feedback on their apartment since they had only just started the AirBnB thing. We had a good hour chatting to them about traveling and our experience with AirBnB. They were a young couple who had successfully started a large online flower delivery business over the past 10 years and were starting to look for other investment methods (via. property and AirBnB).
Caru cu bere was a pretty spectacular building. Our meal, coupled with a few local beers, was spot on and one of the highlights of Bucharest! Cost was a respectable 33AUD.
 |
| This impressive building is the CEC Palace, just an example of the architecture in the city. |
 |
| Overcast and a little chilly - Bucharest features pretty impressive architecture earning its nickname "Little Paris" in-between the period of WW1 and WW2. |
 |
| Stavropoleos Monastery dating back to 1724 really stands out in the centre of the old town. Its significantly smaller then its surrounding buildings because it survived a massive fire in 1847 which destroyed the majority of the old city and the communist period. |
Wandering around the old town with what seemed like the majority to be locals. Plenty of pubs, clubs and restaurants. It really didn't have much of a touristy feel which we liked. Bucharest was the original residence of our old mate, the Wallachian prince Vlad the Impaler back in the 1400's, burnt down a few times by the Ottoman's and destroyed by natural disasters. It wasn't until 1860 that it became the capital of Romania. It played a role in both WWI and WWII, before falling into a crazy communist leader Nicolae Ceausescu from 1965 to 1989 who demolished a lot of the historic buildings and replaced them with typical communist buildings.
Our third day took us to THE PARLIAMENT BUILDING.
Originally called "House of the Republic" now, "House of the People", this is the worlds largest and heaviest civilian building with administrative function. Built as a symbol of power and wealth in Romania, the project was never fully complete thus only a small part of the building can be visited by tourists.
1100 rooms, 12 stories tall, 2 undergrounds parking garages, 86m high and 92m underground!!! 340,000m2 of floor space. Some 200 architects and 20,000 workers worked around the clock to build this hooer!
 |
| View overlooking the building and back towards the city centre. Source touristinromaina.net. |
 |
| There were a tonne of tours on offer between English, underground, upper level and standard tours ranging from an hour and a half to three hours. From what people had said on Tripadvisor we only wanted to do the standard tour which showed a couple of main parts of the building, and gave us some communist history etc. Cost 23AUD. |
 |
| One of 480 chandlers, this is the biggest at 5000kg. |
 |
| There was hallway, after hallway that looked like this! |
 |
| These marble stair cases were re-modled three times during their construction until Nicolae was happy with their size and step-profile. There was an identical stair case on the opposite side of the hall for his wife. The plan was that during meetings or parties, Nicolae and his wife would present themselves to the party down each stair case in a powerful gesture. |
 |
| One of the main halls, featuring plenty of pure gold trimmings. All the finished rooms are for rent, and this hall was rented by famous Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci (first gymnast to score perfect 10's in the olympics), for her wedding. |
 |
| Views from outside the main balcony looking down communist built Unirii Boulevard - the streets were designed to be 1m wider then the Champs Elysees in Paris. This building was insane! It was so interesting to be able to experience such a significant place. In 1992, Michael Jackson stood on this balcony and addressed the crowd saying "Hello Budapest!" |
 |
| A size comparison for this marble column. |
To build the palace, a historic neighbourhood was demolished including 28 churches (8 of which were relocated), and 30,000 people were forced out of their homes to make room for the construction.
The whole tour and experience was mind-blowing. A country which was so poor had so much labour and natural resources thrown at this place. Nicolae Ceausescu spend 40% of the countries GDP constructing and it was inspired by North Korea's Kim Jong II.
Currently the Palace of Parliament hosts the Senate and The Chamber of Deputies. There are a couple of rooms which have been turned into cinemas, and a section of the underground area is used by the military.
Thursday, 5 January 2017
Romanian Road Trip
 |
| After nearly 48 hours I'd finally come to terms with my speeding fine.... |
What should we do for tea? Bugger it - lets order some takeaway! I quickly looked through tripadvisor for restaurants which deliver... Dominos... I quickly downloaded the iPhone app. and within about 5 minutes we had ordered a couple of pizzas. Within 45minutes it was delivered to our apartment!!! Kudos Dominos!
With a couple of days up our sleeve before we needed to get to Bucharest, we decided to hire a car and venture around. It was only a few hours to Moldova, but I couldn't find a car company who would let us take their car out of Romania... Or if they did - you wouldn't be covered for insurance.
We found a blog post on a road trip through Romania - Drink tea and travel - which looked pretty good, so using this as a guide we decided to take advantage of what turned out to be a crappy situation and have a bit more of a look around Romania.
I decided to give a local private hire car company a burl instead of the big Eurocar, Avis or Sixt. This local company called Ecoline was significantly cheaper, and seemed less hassle with insurance, unlimited kms etc. When we picked the car up the next day, the whole transition was fantastic - no significant paperwork to record previous scratches, just a couple of photos of the vehicle. Return it with a clean interior and a full tank of fuel - easy! The deposit was 300 euro (as opposed to 1000+ when using larger car companies), and the cost was 22euros per day. The plan was to get a little Toyota because via their website, this was the cheapest option, but we were up graded to a slightly bigger Peugeot.
 |
| The rocket! |
 |
| Another castle eh - building this sucker took 10 years but wasn't "complete" until 40 years after it had began. The castle is still owned by the royal family (currently King Michael 1 of Romania), and sits on a 1000 hectare estate. |
 |
| The castle itself was pretty nice, and had a lot of detail in its construction. |
Three Day Road Trip
Day 1 - Singasora & Baia Mare
Easy, about an hour and a halve up the freeway from Brasov were were at Singasora in no time. It was a frosty foggy morning but when we finally reached Singasora we had sun! Amy directed me to the city centre where we found a park featuring its own parking intendent, we bought an hour ticket and went for a quick look around!
 |
| Singasora was super impressive! The town was mostly untouched from medieval times! |
 |
| The houses were all colourful and streets were quite! It really felt like it was untouched by an modern and western influence. |
It was also hard to get my head around the speed limits here. On the way into a town there would be a 70 sign, then a 50 sign - ok, I'll obey. Then I'd get past by about 5 cars and a couple of trucks through the town who seemed to be doing at least 70kph... I'd have trucks up my ass until they could pass no matter what speed I through these villages. . I even had people tooting me when I was doing the limit. At the end of the village there would be a
Eventually we came into a town and I was sitting about 100m behind the traffic doing about 70kph. All of a sudden a police car appears on the other side of the road with his lights on and he sort of signals to the car in front of us. It kinda looks like he flashes me too so I pull over behind another vehicle who was flagged down too. I was defiantly speeding but I thought the rest of the traffic was too...
The copper came to my window and said something in Romanian, I replied with a sorry do you speak English? He sort of shock his head and waved something which I though was get out of the car so I did, and walked up to the front car. When I got there he said something else to me and then waved up the road which I took as - nah your right to go. So we left.
I reckon everyone was speeding and the bloke parked in front of me was the first in the line to get caught so unfortunately he got the ticket.
We got about 10min up the road and the copper was BACK with lights and sirens behind me! Bugger, I couldn't pull over right away because we were on a pretty long bridge, but he was right up me hassling! I sort of half pulled over as soon as we got off the bridge hoping maybe he wanted to go around but unfortunately he was pulling me over...
He rolls up to my window and says Problem, problem - and waves me back to his car. I got our and head to his car where he shows me a video of me doing 69kph back in the village. I agree its me and he writes out some paper work. Turns out to be a 120lei (40AUD) on the spot fine - which I luckily have the exact amount of cash in my wallet, and then we are free to continue... I was fuming!!!
 |
| Baia Mare clocktower which used to be a church - the only real landmark we came across on a little wander around at night. We were staying right in the centre of the old town in a old style AirBnB. Other then Hotels there were only a few places on AirBnB and this one was the cheapest. |
 |
| Oh hey - another beer. Loved this pint glass/jar! |
Back in Albania a couple of Polish girls at a Hostel recommended we visit the Merry Cemetery, and I saw it on another couple of blogs that said it was worth a visit. Unfortunately nobody said it was practically out in the middle of nowhere! It was a good couple of hours of slow windy, village to village road from Baia Mare on the border of Ukraine and Romania in a small village called Sapanta.
The cemetery stands to show the lighter side of death with plenty of bright colours, sometimes funny stories and hand carved scenes on gravestones. Unfortunately its all in Romanian which I didn't know, so the experience was a little disappointing after it had taken us such a long time to get here.
One of the crosses read: This is where I rest, Holdis Ion is my name, For as long as I lived, I praised the political party (communist party), Aid I tried so hard for people here to have a good live, I had no children, But I helped, The town management.
 |
| Typical Romanian farmland in between villages. |
Day 3 - Sibiu, Brasov then Bucharest.
We only had a couple of hours to wander around Sibiu first thing in the morning before we needed to be back to Brasov to drop off the hire car, and catch a train down the Bucharest. It was a pretty nice place with plenty to offer!
 |
| Massive brick Holy Trinity Cathedral. |
 | ||
The medieval fortified walls are still in place around the city, just like Singasora the old town is in ripper condition. The main pedestrian street was pretty big and had plenty of coffee shops (best coffee we'd had for a long time). Sibiu actually had the Christmas markets up and running and what looked like an impressive light set up in the large town square - it would have been well worth a look at night.
|
Saturday, 31 December 2016
Leaving our Workaway early... WA5
From what we've heard along the way from other Workawayers, is was only a matter of time until we found ourselves in an umcomfortable situation such that we had to leave. Unfortunately for us, our 5th Workaway experience happened to be it... We were situated in some of the most beautiful surroundings in the Carpathian Mountains Romania, our host family included an elderly mother, her son and daughter. We were throw into a very traditional home which will no doubt be one of the most memorable experiences of our trip.
This was the first WA we decided to go to from a host request. We were attractive to the family's son specifically due to my engineering skills. He was an ambitious bloke who likes to tinker on little projects. He had made a mobile ski lift, started building a biogas system to capture the methane from his cows and had other repair/steel fab requirements. Unfortunately we didn't get a chance to do anything engineering related, other then benchmarking a mobile excavator which he wanted to make to help with the road making and shovelling cow shit.
From the initial contact Amy wasn't 100% convinced about going to this WA, but we decided to accepted it since we wanted to go to Romania, and we needed to spend the extra time outside the Schengan zone before Christmas. A couple of weeks later we had a bit more of a detailed look at their profile and reviews (which were all positive), and came across a mention of 16 cats!! We both hate cats so in hindsight really should have pulled the pin, but trying to keep an open mind I really wanted to go and see what it was about.
We contacted the host again a month or so out from the stay just to touch base, and their reply was short "sure"... This wasn't very convincing... About a week out we asked for directions to their place and if we needed anything specific. The directions included a 5km walk from the bus station up a road to the accommodation (which would of ended up been an average gradient of 5% I reckon) which we through was strange... We asked if there was any chance we could be picked up because our bags are 20kg - unfortunately not. To make the situation worse it had snowed the days leading up to our arrival so roads were icy and very slippery.
From the initial contact Amy wasn't 100% convinced about going to this WA, but we decided to accepted it since we wanted to go to Romania, and we needed to spend the extra time outside the Schengan zone before Christmas. A couple of weeks later we had a bit more of a detailed look at their profile and reviews (which were all positive), and came across a mention of 16 cats!! We both hate cats so in hindsight really should have pulled the pin, but trying to keep an open mind I really wanted to go and see what it was about.
We contacted the host again a month or so out from the stay just to touch base, and their reply was short "sure"... This wasn't very convincing... About a week out we asked for directions to their place and if we needed anything specific. The directions included a 5km walk from the bus station up a road to the accommodation (which would of ended up been an average gradient of 5% I reckon) which we through was strange... We asked if there was any chance we could be picked up because our bags are 20kg - unfortunately not. To make the situation worse it had snowed the days leading up to our arrival so roads were icy and very slippery.
 |
| All smiles at the base of the road up to the property! |
 |
| The road was ice and surprisingly slippery under foot, there were a couple of cars parked on the side of the road on the way up which had just lost traction and momentum. |
 |
| A fresh wolf paw print! |
 |
| They still make hay the old fashion way - back breaking work. Using like an industrial walk behind/self propelled petrol mower they cut the grass in their steep paddocks, then a pitch fork is used to rotate and dry the grass. To cart the grass up the hill and into their barn they used an old Land Rover looking ute. The pitchfork, wheel borrow and shovel was used for 90% of the work on the property. It was bloody steep, and it really opened my eyes to how farming was completed without the aid of machinery. We really take having a tractor and front-end loader back home for granted! |
 |
| Looking west back toward Bran and Brasov. It was so peaceful here. |
 |
| Traditional style Romanian building on the property. The buildings were pretty big! |
 |
| Their 'winter' kitchen... It was a small room with a wood stove which was warm and more efficient to heat then the more modern kitchen in their house.. A couple of the cats had the flu and would sneeze and cough... |
 |
| Wood splitting was one of my activities. It was bloody efficient using a tyre to hold a heap of wood and you can just launch into splitting everything in the tyre! |
 |
| Amy's handy work weaving this fence. |
 |
| I spent a couple of days digging out this hole for a cement water tank. |
 |
| Fresh water spring at the bottom of the property. The grandfather of our host used to make his own whisky and spirits for the locals from this stream. |
 |
| This shepard was outstanding in his field. |
 |
| Didn't take long for the snow to melt after a good couple of sunny days. |
 |
| They had a couple of watch dogs to keep an eye out on the place, as well they try and keep away the wolves and wild boar. Our host had never seen a bear, but had came across the wolves a couple of times wandering through his property. |
 |
| On the Sunday they went to church, and we had our day off. We decided to take the 12km walk down to Bran for the markets and to get a good feed. Have a coffee and relax. It was freezing down in the valley - meanwhile up at the work away we seemed to be above the clouds (it was at 1100m altitude) and we had some ripper sun and fine weather. |
 |
| Traditional romanian hotplate. |
The work was the most labours of our trip, this was ok because we could see everything we helped with was making a difference. We managed to fill up a room of the house with dry split wood for the heating and stove. Amy begun a new fence and she helped finish some concreting on his Biogas system and on a tank cover. We were only there in total 7 days and we were happy we carried our weight and always did the best we could. One annoying thing was that we changed from job to job really quickly and didn't get a chance to sink our teeth into a couple of jobs to finish them...
At the end, the diet and cats were too much to handle so we decided we had to leave. Because we were cutting our stay shorter then expected we were left in limbo a little - but decided to head back to Brasov where we had a handful of days up our sleeve before we were flying out to Munich - Germany.
It was really hard to leave because the family were so grateful for our help, and really did everything to try and make our stay as comfortable as possible. It was a hard week of work, and an experience which really took us out of our comfort zone, I think it made us really appreciate what we have at home with regards to resources and the comfort of living.
Subscribe to:
Posts
(
Atom
)
