Adventures in Romania

In a week  I shall be leaving for Japan so I decided to make my blog bilingual because I am pretty sure that both my Romanian and UK  friends will be interested in reading my future adventures. Still a week to go though so until then I shall share with you guys a slice of my adventures in Romania, the land of all possibilities, I swear!

As you might’ve read on my Facebook page ( I think I’m getting pretty obsessed with it tbh, last night I couldn’t sleep so instead I started facebook “stalking’’ until 4am…yeah, shame on me, I need a life ermm..) some friends of mine convinced me to go to Cluj with them. Last night Iron Maiden had a gig in Cluj and the guys wanted to go see them. I should be mentioning that a few years ago I would  have killed to see Iron Maiden or even to go to Cluj (effin shit, it’s so weird inserting Romanian names into English phrases), but the idea of spending 8 hours + pretty much 2 hours of delay in a slimy train really didn’t rock my boat anymore…Anywho, we bought the train tickets, made a two-night reservation for the 4 of us at a really nice villa right in the town centre (we paid each 20 pounds for 2 nites) and talked to a good friend of mine, because we needed a place to crash at as all the hotels/villas/hostels didn’t have vacancies to the concert on Saturday and Sunday. So we finally left on Thursday…Worth mentioning that it took us 10 hours to get there (500km/310miles)… My attempts of trying to watch some films on my laptop turned into a major fail. Back to the story. That night nothing of great importance happened, we went to some nice terrace, then went dancing to this nice club called Janis (named after Janis Joplin that is) where I used to go to with my lovely Hungarian friend Reka (I missed her not being there). A few words about Janis: the club is set in a sort of underground tunnel in the middle of the city centre, the music is good (but kinda the same every night and unfortunately no Don’t stop me now or Don’t stop believing ..dang..) and if you came there single chances are high that you won’t be leaving the place alone, if you want that of course. Usually a guy just has to sit at a table looking alone and sad with a pack of cigarettes next to him and maybe a girl will come chat him up or invite him to dance, that’s the strategy. In girls’ case you just have to lean next to the wall and look a bit bored and smile at someone and that’s it, pretty fun innit? Of course, chances are that you might want just to dance with someone and not get hooked up and then get very annoyed when the guy doesn’t get the right message and he starts snogging you without warning, srsly.  Um..yeah…so where were we? Oh yeah…so I went to the bar and heard some people speaking in a pure English accent. So when I got the chance to talk to them i asked where they were from. ‘hullo, enjoying yourself?’ ‘Oh, yeah, it’s lovely’ ‘Where you guys from?’ ‘oh well…ever heard of Yorkshire?’ ‘ you bet I did ^_^’ ‘Well we’re from Leeds’. I was so surprised!! I mean, what were the fucking chances to meet people from Leeds? Oh yeah, I’m sure there’s someone up there who knows how much I miss Leeds. Anyway, we got back home at 5 in the morning or so and the next night we went back.

On the second night same stuff, just that the usual routine was interrupted by an unannounced police raid. The music stopped, police started to ask people for IDs, whatever. When they asked me and Cristina about ours we told him they were at the cloak room, he asked where we were from, we said “Ploiesti” and then he replied “ah…yeah..whatever ok” he couldn’t give a toss anymore. You know that south/north battle in the UK? Same thing happens here. Generally people from the North (aka Transylvania) don’t like people from Bucharest (the capital in the south) to make things clear ^_^. Our accents are different and we can always tell who’s from where in most cases. I remember when I first went to Transylvania and people told me “Oh, you have an accent, Bucharest one” and I was “WTF?! You have an accent, I speak proper  Romanian” “No, that’s not true!” and so on.  The raid wasn’t over in almost an hour, the music stopped, everybody was waiting in vain so we decided to move to another club, same owner, different location. Apparently all the people in Janis moved too. It was really fun, especially when a power cut came into the picture for about 10 minutes and people started to sing different songs trying not to get their fun spoiled yet again. And of course, we got back home at 5 in the morning.   What else happened? Oh yeah, the guys went to see Iron Maiden and me, Cristina and Luffy went to a nice tea-house with shisha and all that jazz.  When we got back home, “streams” of people wearing black were flooding the street as the concert ended. From the 7^th floor we could see tiny people in black lookin like ants. So we decided to turn 10 again and started to throw bags of water at them, just for the lulz like we used to do it in our childhood (everybody has thrown at least one bag of water at old people on the streets, the advantages of living in blocks of flats huh?).

Here’s a link to an amazing oriental tea-house in Cluj! The psychedelic room is just ridiculously trippy!

http://www.explorra.com/attractions/samsara_20402

What else? Had a nice weekend with my folks at Bran (where you can visit the well-known Dracula Castle), went shopping in Brasov (a lovely town in Transylvania founded by the Saxons in the 13^th century, and there are still people speaking German as their first language!). Here are some lovely pictures of Brasov (also called Kronstadt or Brasso by the Hungarians).

That’s pretty much it! Photos soon on Facebook!