Sighisoara, Birthplace of Vlad Tepes (Dracula) in the heart of Transylvania

So after a long train ride, in the realm of 10-11 hours, from Constanta to Sighioara we arrived at our hostel around noon, yesterday. On the train, we were joined by a new acquaintance from Canada, who's also in Europe traveling all over the place for about a month. This is another somewhat touristy town but quite different from either of the places we've been so far as far as population goes. I've found that during this trip we haven't been eating much but we've walked a ton... so perhaps I've found a new diet to market... the travelers diet. Now if only I could kick beer our of the diet I'd come back 50 lbs smaller...haha.

There are still a ton of gypsies around here, and I don't think they live here but travel in to mess with tourists. I imagine early morning there's a couple tiny cars filled with dirty little bastards, all around 4-11, brought up to make the parents money. In the train station yesterday a kid, around 8 came up and just kept mumbling "dollar, dollar, dollar" and I've found out, and been told not to ever give them anything. It's the whole, give them a hand and they'll take your arm, kind of deal. We watched a kid get a couple pieces of pizza from some old guys yesterday, only to see him walk up < 30 minutes later to ask for more, only that time he brought a couple other little kids with him. I saw another kid yesterday with a big smile looking through a wallet, I'm sure someone was rather pissed off since I'd put a paycheck on it that the wallet most likely didn't belong to the kid. I didn't even bring a wallet this trip for that reason, I actually notice a lot of people walking behind me to look and I usually just kinda laugh it off. Other than the uneasy feeling from the gypsy folks, Romania's been an absolutely awesome place.



So, we're in the land of Dracula... and it's marketed pretty heavily as you could imagine. It's pretty awesome seeing the architecture here, as it's been restored a bit but certain buildings seem to be exactly like they were in the 1200's.





A statue of Vlad Tepes (Vlad the Impaler, or Dracula)











The hostel we're staying in is pretty nice, the chick that works here speaks great english and has been very nice. We did our first laundry yesterday... It's still outside hanging on the lines drying. We didn't eat much yesterday and by the time we actually got some food in us, both of us ended up getting a bit smashed and just sitting around with the folks at the hostel watching a couple world cup games. We also ran into a few other Americans who are staying here for about 3 months with Unicef or one of those kind of organizations.

It's raining today so now we're gonna try to figure out something to do...