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Archive for January, 2016

the Habsburgs make the Khardasians look like amateurs ;)

If you have travelled in Europe, you have no doubt encountered remnants of the House of Habsburg.  It was one of the most important royal houses in Europe and the throne of the Holy Roman Empire was occupied by the House of Habsburg from 1438 until 1740.  Like all the royals, they made marriage for alliance and power, not love, so they controlled most of Europe until the late 18th century.  They are especially in evidence in middle Europe.

That is why it should not have been such a surprise to find a lot of German influence in Peles Castle.  The building of the castle began in 1873 under Viennese architect Wilhem Doferer and continued in 1876 under his assistant.  Work was abandoned during the war and the castle wasn’t completed until 1883.  It was built for King Carol I, who became the first king of an independent Romania.  The general style is German Renaissance but, like most buildings in Romania, it is a magpie construction that includes Italian Renaissance, Gothic, German Baroque and French Rococo.

http://pelescastle.blogspot.ca/

It is situated in the gorgeous Carpathian Mountains near Sinaia.  It is not as over-the-top as Versailles but it is a very impressive building in a spectacular setting and well worth the visit.

I would also highly recommend the hotel I stayed at in Bucharest.  It’s the K+K Hotel Elisabeta.  It’s in a great location close to the Old Town, the city centre and the metro.  The staff and service is outstanding.  It has an exceptional breakfast.  One of the other great perks was that they organized tours for me so I just had to show up.  Of course, that also meant I was already scheduled to go on a gigantic tour of the Romanian countryside even though I had only had a couple of hours of sleep.  There are a lot of mountains and trees – I did sleep through some of the scenery 🙂

http://www.kkhotels.com/en/hotel-elisabeta

I had a very friendly driver named Marco who was a James Blunt fan.  American media has taken over the entire world but the Brits still hold their own when it comes to music.  It was a big day but very worthwhile.  First, we had to get out of Bucharest.  Our first official stop was the Sinaia Monastery.  There was an Orthodox Church with a separate bell tower.  Like Poland, church is important in Romania, but the vast majority are not Roman Catholic but, rather, Eastern Orthodox.

http://www.welcometoromania.ro/Sinaia/Sinaia_Manastirea_e.htm

byzantine magic

byzantine magic

The monastery and church were first built in 1695 to commemorate a religious pilgrimage to Mount Sinai made by Mikhail Cantacuzino. The church is old Orthodox so there is no organ and no seats.

We then headed to the main attraction for the day, Peles Castle.  We actually also saw Bran Castle that day, so, that statement might seem surprising but Peles Castle is absolutely the star.

Romania is still fairly new at the tourism game – and capitalism’s penchant that the customer is always right – so the organization part was a total gong show.  Marco got my ticket organized and put me in the right place but then I was on my own.  There was a long wait as the room filled with a large crowd of Romanian speakers.  I had understood I was joining an English tour but they forced me in with the Romanians.  I think they likely enjoyed the tour.  Our guide was a mumbling robot with a Romanian accent, so technically things were repeated in English but I only managed to understand random

worth the hassle ;)

worth the hassle 😉

sentences.

Nevertheless, the place was fascinating.  Full of wood, crystal and weapons!  The wood carving was especially over the top, gorgeous and ornate.  No surface was left without ornamentation.  There was beautiful stained glass and many chandeliers.  It was tough to photograph with all the dark, heavy wood and shining, glittering objects.

There are also lovely gardens and it was a perfect blue sky day so it was a spectacular sight.

would fit right in at disneyland :)

would fit right in at disneyland 🙂

From the castle, we headed on to Brasov.  It started medieval but added on some gothic, baroque and renaissance architecture, making it another super cute town that looks as though Disney came to town with some pixie dust.  I only had a fleeting visit but you can take the train from Bucharest and spend more time.  I did get to check out the Black Church, the largest gothic church in Romania, so named due to the damage sustained from the Great Fire of 1689.

http://romaniatourism.com/brasov.html

The city was at the intersection of the trade routes linking the Ottoman Empire to western Europe and allowed pre-Communist Saxon merchants to make fortunes and meddle in politics.  Once you have some money, you need a gated community to keep out the riff-raff so some serious city walls were erected along with several towers maintained by the different craft guilds, as was the real estate development custom in medieval times.

After lunch, we strolled through the town square (full of completely adorable buildings just dying to be photographed) and then took a walk around the remains of the city walls.  Marco convinced me I should climb to the top of one of the towers to get a view over the town.  It was a serious workout and the view was a bit hazy but it was good exercise 🙂  Of course, I have climbed to the top of a lot of towers in Europe and seen a lot of terracotta roofs but – if you haven’t – you may be more impressed…

The terracotta roofs of Brasov may have been underwhelming but the other sights were anything but and – not only should you check out Romania while it is still under the radar – you should get out of Bucharest and see the bucolic countryside.  You can always pretend to be a Habsburg checking out your territory 😉  They apparently died out due to in-breeding… there is a mini-series here…

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my date with dracula ;)

Be gentle with the Romanians when you start talking about Dracula.  Evidence suggests Vlad was really just a man of his times.  Gruesome torture was kind of the standard in the 15th century. He spent his adolescence as a hostage in the Ottoman Empire court of Sultan Murad II to keep his father, Vlad II Dracul, in line and allow him to rule Walachia in favour of the Ottomans and neglect the Hungarian court.  Not exactly the ideal way to spend your teenage years.  Although he was like a prince, so he was educated rather than beaten.  The 1% has always been with us.  They used to be princes rather than billionaires.

And we’ve always been tribal.  Luckily, some parts of the world are making tribes get along better and not feel so compelled to fight each other over turf but that lesson took at least five hundred more years in the part of the world into which Vlad III was born.  Vlad III’s father was vested into the Order of the Dragon, a fellowship of knights sworn to defend Christianity against the competing choices, especially the conquering Ottoman Empire.  As part of this ritual, he was given the epithet Dracul or dragon by the Holy Roman Emperor.

Dracula’s dad was the Voivode of Transylvania, which meant he wasn’t the king.  The king was in Hungary – but he was the most powerful person in Transylvania.  Transylvania is sexy 🙂 but, at the time, there were two other regions in Romania – Walachia and Moldova.  Despite Transylvania being associated with Romania, at the time it belonged to the kingdom of Hungary.  Walachia was the rebel state.  Dracula’s grandfather (Mircea I) was the ruler of Walachia but Dracula’s dad was the illegitimate son he sent to the Hungarian court, which was how he got put in charge of Transylvania.

While Dracula (son of Dracul) gets all the attention thanks to Bram Stoker, his family tree would make an excellent telenovela 😉  His grandfather Mircea the Elder was a good guy apparently.  Mircea’s dad was the Voivode of Walachia but he defected and won against the Hungarian crown, creating the first real Romanian state.  You should look him up on Wikipedia.  The Republican presidential candidates might want to do the same 🙂  Mircea was a true leader who brought peace, prosperity and progress to his people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mircea_I_of_Wallachia

not too scary in bright sunshine :)

not too scary in bright sunshine 🙂

That’s why you need to put down your copy of Dracula for a minute and learn a bit about Romanian history.  To the Romanians, Mircea the Elder is like Thomas Jefferson or Winston Churchill… and, if you check, Mircea might have the better morals… The dude you think of as Dracula thanks to an Irishman who never set foot in Romania is the grandson of a founding father.  This was the 15th century.  The printing press was just being developed.  Factual information was hard to come by so a lot of the Dracula stuff may be legend rather than reality.

That’s the point of fiction.  Why let the truth get in the way of a great narrative 😉  What’s not clear is whether Vlad III was more blood-thirsty than his compatriots in a century that included the Spanish Inquisition.  What is clear is that he had a tough upbringing and he worked tirelessly trying to keep Walachia free from the Ottoman Empire, so, be sensitive.  He is a kind of folk hero too.  It’s possible he used some of the drastic tactics because he had a small army and his grandfather had used guerilla warfare against the Ottoman Empire to keep the region stable and prosperous in a time when that was hardly the norm.  Remember, Thomas Jefferson owned slaves.  Power and heroism are tough to reconcile.

While you should be sensitive in your chat about Dracula or Vlad while you are in Romania, by all means, go and see Bran Castle!  The Romanians will forgive you.  Bram’s fantasy was good for their economy 😉

the gorgeous romanian countryside

the gorgeous romanian countryside

Bran Castle itself is a little underwhelming but the countryside of the Carpathian Mountains is gorgeous and well worth the journey.  Be prepared to

you will not be facing dracula alone!

you will not be facing dracula alone!

queue and it will be tough to get a photo without heads in it.  As is no doubt obvious, I enjoyed the history more than the castle itself.  There is more history to learn too.  Bran Castle was used by the royal family of Romania, expropriated by the Communists and then returned to one of the Habsburg clan (even more ubiquitous than the Khardasians).

Home

There are other Dracula sites in Romania as well if you are a fan of Bram Stoker.  It would appear that he wrote it more based on the mythology and superstitions that arose from living in a densely forested and hostile environment back in the days before we started to conquer nature and see how fast we could make species extinct like it was some kind of demented video game.  So, be open-minded about Vlad the Impaler, but you need to admire Bram Stoker.  The book was published in 1897 and has never been out of print.  He was born in the wrong decade… he coulda been a billionaire…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bram_Stoker

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changes…

Not all are good!  Changes are kind of my thing and the number of figurative cliffs I have jumped off might number in the hundreds.  Some of it is attributable to David Bowie, even though I never met him.

The closest I ever got was possibly his best ever tour…1983… we got old Bowie plus brand new MTV “Let’s Dance” Bowie with a white-face Peter Gabriel as a Powerball bonus.

The best concert of my life.  We had to take a bus to Edmonton and I slept in a cheap hotel room with two other guys, neither of whom considered sleeping in the same bed as me to be a win…  I think in the end someone might have slept on the floor.  We didn’t have enough money for more than one room and back pain was decades off.

I was raised in that ultra-religious good girl kind of environment so the boys blew my world apart.  They insisted we needed to be as close to the stage as possible rather than sitting in the safe assigned seats.  It wasn’t really mosh pit days yet but it was not entirely safe. The benefit was that I really saw Bowie – and Peter – up close and almost personal.

What is more important at a concert though is that you are connecting with the other fans – and being close enough to touch the stage enhances your experience.

That memory involves the guy who eventually did become comfortable with me in his bed and became my first serious boyfriend.  There is no question Bowie played a role 😉

What he might not have appreciated is that Bowie was the first artist I ever liked that I didn’t need to feel guilty about – or just outright lie that I actually liked 🙂

For that, I have to thank Kevin.  He was my sorta-not-really junior high boyfriend.  It was a relationship that presented to me at such a young age that I never appreciated at the time how important it was and could have done so much better a couple of decades on.

In the old days when there was no social media our connections were very different so I should likely find him and express how important he was to my life and how much I learned from him even though we never even properly dated.

Right now what matters is that he was a drummer (the kind who did drum solos and everyone listened) and had musical taste… so he made me listen to Changes... and other stuff…  but Changes was always Kevin’s song.

Then I fell in love with Mike who was my musical guru – and a huge Bowie fan.  My musical choices improved.  Eventually I became someone with eclectic and great musical taste…

but it all started with Bowie… and my great choice in boyfriends 🙂

It is such a tragedy.  It is one of the few times I have felt bereft about someone I didn’t actually know.  He was an important guy.  The music was fantastic but what was more important is that he pushed the envelope and used his celebrity to promote social justice along with musical innovation.

I felt privileged to have seen The Serious Moonlight Tour.  I also got to see the Bowie spectacular at the Philharmonie in Paris last year.  I hope it’s still touring – would be a great tribute to a man who put a mark on our society that will be his legacy…

have checked since and it is… called, a bit weirdly, David Bowie Is… you might have to travel… but just pack your tunes 😉

http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/t/touring-exhibition-david-bowie-is/

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artsy stuff, shining examples

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let’s get this party started ;)

Right now I am reading a book I bought when I ran out of reading material in Prague.  It’s called Revolution 1989 The Fall of the Soviet Empire by Victor Sebestyen.  I highly recommend it.  I am fascinated by history in general but having been in Berlin in November 1989 makes the events described in this book especially poignant.  And it felt like something I should start reading in Prague…

I am always reading several books at the same time so I am only about half-way through this one.  Merely by accident, I just finished a chapter describing Romania under Ceauşescu.  I knew the dude was evil but it’s hard to imagine someone treating other people the way that he did.  Of course, psychopath dictators likely didn’t score points for sharing in kindergarten.  That period of Romanian history is shocking.  Hollywood loves to keep blaming the Nazis long after Germany has cleaned up its act.  There are plenty of other evil guys – and their Lady MacBeths.  They really need to branch out.

You, on the other hand, should just book a plane ticket to Bucharest!  I feel very guilty that it has taken me this long to write about Romania but I did make notes so will try to do it justice over the next weeks.  There is lots of talk of Cuba and of Myanmar.  I have already booked to see the first and am hoping to get to the second before 2016 is complete.  But there is little talk of Romania – or Bucharest.  I think it’s a place to go now before it becomes totally sanitized and you aren’t sure exactly what city you are in.  The internet is a wonderful thing but it – and the Americans’ incredible skills at marketing – are destroying the differences between cultures and making the world more homogeneous.

bucharest pre ceausescu

bucharest pre ceausescu

At least for now, Bucharest feels unique.  It’s an eastern European former communist city with a Latin soul.  It’s a bit like Las Vegas.  Nothing seems to shut and you lose track of time.  The first night was safe because I didn’t know my way around the city yet so didn’t want to be wandering the streets at 3am.  The second day I did a gigantic tour on a very jet-lagged sketchy night of sleep so partying hard was out of the question.  But then I caught up on my sleep, knew how to get back to the hotel in the dark and was ready to fully experience Bucharest 🙂

There is the quintessential charming European Old Town and it’s a tourist mecca.  There are the bars catering to the drunken lads and ladettes celebrating stags, hen parties or just the fact that beer is really cheap in Bucharest.  You will see them roaming in packs.  If that’s your thing, there are definitely lots of options catering to that type of tourist.  I am always hoping to meet locals and get a sense of the culture of the place.

http://www.inyourpocket.com/

Once again, I found the in your pocket guide very helpful.  I also just roamed around looking for something interesting, which is how I discovered XIX.  Alex was singing in the window and he was fantastic.  You could just watch from the street but I spotted a free seat and thought I should support the bar.  At the time, it was pretty new on the scene so the servers were very enthusiastic.  Had a lovely conversation with two of the staff, one Romanian and one Russian.  They were sure I had to try a Black Mojito.  It was too sweet for me but the Black Ursus beer is excellent and costs about $3

serendipity in bucharest

serendipity in bucharest

Canadian.

https://www.facebook.com/The-XIX-Bar-Concept-970246529694621/

Alex was a revelation.  It was covers but his range was amazing.  Music is definitely globalized.  It is always disconcerting to hear people singing English lyrics in foreign countries but he is an amazing singer.  From AC/DC Highway to Hell through the BeeGees, Leonard Cohen, Coldplay to Roy Orbison “In Dreams” and Radiohead “Creep”.

The “scene” is still under development – and especially as a foreign tourist – it was hard to figure out what to do once Alex had ended his set.  I tried a few places recommended by in your pocket but they were either empty or full of sweaty people singing karaoke without air-conditioning so I ended up at the Control Club.  It was also a bit quiet but there was music so I bought a beer and figured I would finish it and then head to the hotel.

http://www.control-club.ro/

But, unlike Paris and London, Bucharest is not yet overrun by tourists so the locals are very friendly.  I was invited to join a bachelor party and ended up having one of the most memorable nights of my life.  I am always hoping to meet locals and get a real sense for the place, not just tick off the tourist sites.

Life in modern day Bucharest is interesting.  It is no longer a violent police state and you can sense the optimism but it is also still an emerging market country and – as someone born in the first world, you appreciate how privileged your everyday life really is.  What I have found most interesting in emerging market countries is that generally people seem smarter and better informed.  They have to try harder than the privileged children of the west with their over-sized sense of entitlement.

It all started as just a friendly sharing of information.  The group was composed of civil engineers and architects so my kind of people 🙂  I forgot to check the time.  People started going home.  The bachelor left.  It was just George, Marius and me.  George was interested in Canada so we got another beer and somehow it was 4:30am when I got back to the hotel!  The young guy on the desk was super friendly so just added to the glow of a wonderful evening where I transcended being a tourist.

Everyone was so friendly and welcoming I went back to XIX the next night and met David Dango who was the musician in the window.  The friendly Russian server was on again and I met the owner before I left to head for the Control Club.  Once again, expected the night to end at normal time but a friendly Romanian guy had just broken up with his girlfriend and I don’t think the Control Club ever shuts… evening ended at 5:30am this time.  I needed to go back to Amsterdam to get some sleep!  On second thought, we’ll go with the whole sleep when you’re dead concept…

My time in Bucharest was far too short.  I only really scratched the surface.  I would love to see the country prosper.  At least, it is really heartwarming to see people having a chance to speak their mind and party like it’s Vegas.  And they can even joke about the evil Mr. C.  Check it out while it is still has the sense of opening a time capsule.  Even if history is not your thing, just go for the Romanians 🙂

 

 

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