Packed up my stuff this morning and headed out for my last Bucharest day, lot of information and a lot of museums/galleries lately so taking today as a quieter day, sun is out, really warm here, about 25.
Back to Hanul Manoc for lunch in the courtyard, they have these soups here called ciorba, kind of a sour soup made sour by using slightly fermented grains or cabbage, mine was lamb and was insane. Then I had mici, kind of Romania's national sausage, also unbelievably good especially the Romanian mustard, as all of you reading know Dijon is barely in my top ten mustard list at all, this Romanian dijon style mustard was really soft, mild. Also drinking a ton of Ursus Black beer.
After lunch I found a park and spent the afternoon in the grass, dozing and reading.
The pic is Dracula's church, where he and his cousin St. Stephen the Great, Prince of Carpathia (and basis for Vigo the Carpathian from Ghostbusters II) would pray before and after each battle to halt the advances of the Ottoman empire, and Islam, into Europe.
The two of them and their forces fought at least 44 successful battles against the Turks and are a significant reason this part of the world is Christian today (they were some of the first military leaders to equip their foot soldiers with handguns).
It is understandable that they are Romania & Moldova's two main national heros when you consider that during their lifetimes Romania was surrounded by the Ottomans, the Tartars, the Huns and the Saxons and managed to maintain most of their independance.
Some of the rougher buildings in Bucharest, after all the beauty in Prague and Budapest I really enjoyed seeing buildings with this level of lived-in-ness to them, kept taking more and more pics like these.
Waiting for my train to Chisinau (Kishnev in Russian). The first pic is what $1 gets you at the train station pay toilets, which featured my first squatties of the trip, stall doors that didn't close and full blown gloryholes.... neat!
The departure board is one of those ones that goes chukachukachukachukachuka and all the letters revolve to update.
There was a guy in the station with a couple trained birds, for a couple bucks he would have them sit with you and you could feed them and such.
My ride's here!
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