Poenari Fortress

Friday evening, I and six others hopped on a bus to Pitesti. We arrived there at 4:30 in the morning. We wandered into the first hotel we saw, the three-star Hotel Yaky, and chatted with the receptionist for a bit. The plan was to leave our bags at the hotel and reserve a room for the night so as to escape the extra-day check-in fee, but the receptionist just shrugged and said since it was already Saturday, we could get our rooms early and pay for the one night. It was a wonderful start to the day, and much-required because after that eight-hour bus trip, we were feeling like zombies. I was in a room with Ashley and Lauren, and after a two-hour nap, all of us were feeling more human.

We ate a quick bite and then hopped a maxi-taxi (sort of a large van) to Curtea de Arges, the town near Poenari Castle. Once in Curtea de Arges, we got taxis to the castle and we were finally at the destination I'd been hoping to see each trip in Romania. However, it's no easy trip - there are 1480 steps up to the fortress ruins. We slogged our way up, taking occasional water breaks. But once we reached the top, all the tiredness melted away. The views were wonderful and the ruins were neat to see up close. It also afforded great picture opportunities and I got lots of myself with other people, and good solo shots as well. It was definitely a good bonding experience.

When we left, we had lunch at the one restaurant at the base of the mountain. After that, we hitched rides back to Curtea de Arges.. sort of. Lauren, Charles and Sean managed to get their own car. I successfully flagged down a ride for myself and Chris, but Nick and Ashley stole our car, because it pulled over near them. But we let them have the car and walked four kilometres more in attempt to get another car. In the end, we just flagged down a maxi-taxi coming from somewhere up the road, so that was sort of a failed attempt to hitchhike, but it was an interesting experience.

Back in Curtea, we stumbled upon this really neat monastery that happened to be featured on the 1 leu bill in Romania, and houses the tombs of very historically-prominent people.

We managed to catch the very last maxi-taxi back to Pitesti. At the hotel, we all had lovely showers in actual bathrooms (and ours had a whirlpool, though I didn't make use of it). Then we set off to find dinner and selected Matteo's, where we had the worst possible experience: the waitress forgot to enter our orders until an hour after we'd arrived. We sat at 9:30, waitress put in the order at 11:00 or so, then we finally got to eat at 11:45. It was terrible, but we made the best of it.

After a good sleep, Sunday morning we got the bus back to Cluj. But we arrived in the city after all the other buses and trains to Zalau had stopped, so we weighed the options - stay a night in Cluj, return Monday morning and miss some work, or get taxis. We opted to just get taxis that would take us directly to Porolissum. We finally got home just after midnight.

Tuesday night was Rob's birthday, and always a big cause for celebration here. There was chicken, hamburgers and mici, and lots of beer and wine to drink as well (and tuica, of course!) That ended up being a late night, but it was worth it, because Rob got totally plastered and he was incredibly entertaining, truly in rare form. He remembered none of it the next morning, but we had great fun filling in the blanks.

That's all for now. I read Go Down Moses by William Faulkner, which was all right. And now I'm reading The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle.