ROMANIA -6,000 KM by Dacia car

It was a nice trip with my daughter's mother. We arrived by plane in Cluj Napoca and rented a Dacia car with which we traveled 6,000 km across the whole country, reaching the Black Sea coast and then went back to Bucharest where the plane was waiting for us to return to Italy. I don't remember all the details and names of the cities visited, except the main ones, for those interested you can go to the archive and find all this detailed news with the related photos. Romania has various regions, the first from Cluj Napoca is Maramures to the north, on the border with Hungary. It is inhabited mainly by farmers who have preserved their traditions and customs, on Sundays they wear traditional clothes, I remember the girls' embroidered socks and they all go to mass and the churches are so full that they cannot contain all the faithful who remain to assist out. There are the "biserice de lemn", i.e. the wooden churches, very characteristic, small but tall, especially in the bell towers and then decorated wooden fences and doors. The roads were horrible, full of deep potholes and you had to slalom and go slowly. I remember the visit to a particular cemetery, half touristy because every deceased is teased with humorous stories of his life or character. We stayed at family house very kitschy inside with plenty of colours and plastic but the owner was very kind and offered grappa produced by him containing berries he collected in the wood beside the river, I drank so much of it before going to bed and both of us were very happy! There is a not high pass and you arrive in Bucovina, the region of beautiful monasteries, painted inside and out and often surrounded by walls and monasteries with nuns who look after the complex. It feels like being in Switzerland, the roads are perfect and the view is very beautiful, lots of woods, hills and green mountains. We visited the most famous monasteries which we liked very much and then we moved on to Transylvania, the region famous for Dracula made famous by a book written by an Englishman, but in fact Dracula was the Romanian prince Vlad Tepes, considered a hero because he fought against the occupying Turks of the country and managed to defeat them and impale them, avenging the Romanians who had previously suffered the same treatment from the Turks. There is Bran's castle called Dracula's castle but in fact he only lived there for the first three months while the other one where he spent years is located on top of a mountain, but is in total ruins. We visited the middle age castle out and inside, not such beautiful in my opinion and furthermore full of visitors. Fortunately we then visited the elegant and artistic Peles castel, summer residence of the Romanian kings and queens with a garden rich of statues and plants, another elegant dependance and inside very luxuriosly furnished. The closest city is SIGHISOARA which has various ancient towers in the center including the clock tower, in short, a beautiful historic city. Other beautiful cities are BRAZOV which has a beautiful square with an ancient church, a pedestrian street with many cafes, a street so narrow that it constitutes a record and the writing on the city hill like the Hollywood writing in California. Another beautiful city is SIBIU with a huge square and beautiful pastel-colored buildings as well as the interesting and rich Bruckental museum. These two cities are located in the center of the country while Arad and Timisoaara are on the border with Serbia, therefore the western border and Craiova and Bucharest are in the south close to the border with Bulgaria. We passed the Transfagarasan, an impervious road similar to that of Mount Stelvio, Italy and which took us high up to a an iced smal lake and a refuge all surrounded by snow and it was May! Then we encountered LACU ROSU, a small lake with woods around it and wooden buildings and is famous for the color of its waters which are not exactly red but brown, due to the trees that fell into it following an earthquake that occurred about 200 years ago. Then at a certain point we passed through Galati where we had to take the ferry to cross the Danube river and then we arrived on the Black Sea coast in Mamaia which is the Romanian Rimini, Italy with a large sandy beach while to the south is the large port city of CONSTANZA which dedicated a beautiful statue to the Latin poet Ovid who lived here for several years of his life. We took a boat trip on the Danube Delta where birds from Europe and Africa once arrived, but have now changed their route following the pollution produced in the area by Ceasescu's communist regime. However, it was bucolic with reservations. The Black Sea coast is rather short, perhaps 150 km, while the Bulgarian coast, which I will visit the following year, is longer and more beautiful. I remember two locations Euforie East and West, one has a spa where you can bathe in the healing black mud that we tried. Further on on the border with Bulgaria there is the very pleasant town of VAMA VECHE with a beautiful beach and panoramic restaurants, where in the summer young people come to celebrate a music festival. On our way back to Bucharest we passed through Dobruja, a peasant region with large cereal and vegetable plantations. The capital is beautiful, it was once considered the Paris of the East. Unfortunately, the dictator Ceasescu in his megalomania demolished a large part of the historic center to build his pharaonic palace of the people, today the Parliament with over a thousand rooms, the second largest palace in the world after the Pentagon and with a volume that can contain the pyramid of Cheops. I visited it and I must say that inside it is very beautiful with white marble, lots of crystals, red velvet curtains, beautiful wooden parquet, it cost a fortune to the point of sending the state budget into a large deficit. The Saturday evening before departure I was lucky enough to attend Elton John's concert in his courtyard, which was exceptional and paid 50 dollars. From Bucharest I remember a beautiful white theater dedicated to the great Romanian playwright Eugene Ionesco and a beautiful green park with many colorful flowerbeds and several peacocks, some of which are albino or white. On another trip I also briefly visited Timisoara and Arad on the border with Serbia to visit that country and the Balkans. I remember beautiful Austro-Hungarian buildings and in Timisoara a huge square that they were restoring. Romanians are a mixed race between Thracians and Latins and their language is in fact neo-Latin with some Slavic reminiscences. Instead, the Roms are gypsies of Indian origin and have nothing to do with the Romanians, however there are many of them and they are treated with racism by the locals who despise them for the fact that they do not integrate and tend to....... .we know well what......., in the meantime many of them have emigrated to other countries and we Italians have received a good number of them who cheer up our cities. In Romania you eat quite well; mamaliga, a good polenta that goes well with good roast meat, you drink good wine and excellent rakia or grappa. Ah...the girls, especially the brunettes, are beautiful and sexy, the most beautiful brunettes in Europe and they love to dress elegantly and provocatively like women from other Eastern European countries, including Russia.