Brasov

Hey, so it has been an awful long time since I updated this here blog, so I figured I would go ahead and let people know what I have been up to. I will start off in this post talking about our trip to Brasov last weekend. Brasov is a medieval Transylvanian city about three hours from here by train. We decided that it was necessary to see this famous landmark while we were relatively close to it. So, we got on a train at 7:30 in the morning and headed up there. The day was beautiful and probably the best day I spent in Romania up until that point (maybe some better ones since). We hiked up the side of a mountain to an old fortress and hung out for a while. Then, we went down into the central square of the old German part of the city. For a long time, Romanians were not allowed to live inside the city walls, and it was only Germans there. You can definitely tell that it is an old Saxon town by the architecture. We had some lunch and hiked all over the city in the afternoon. The biggest site to visit in Brasov is the "Black Church" that dominates the city. It is the biggest gothic cathedral between Vienna and Istanbul, and it is amazing. It has an organ with 6000 pipes and was built in the 1300s. It was built as a Catholic church, but later became Lutheran after the reformation. That evening, we tried to take a bus out to Bran Castle, but it was to late, so we will have to do that some other time. Instead, we went back down to the square where there was a concert and a big festival (Brasov days). We saw "Accent" (Think Romanian NSync) and we drank beer out on the square. After a very fun evening, we went and got some shwarma at a fantastic all night restaurant called Ando's. We didn't make it back to the train station until after two AM. We finally arrived at the station in Ploiesti at 6:30 Sunday morning, exactly 23 hours after we had left. Anyway, it was a great day and an amazing town!