A visit to rural Romania

I have safely returned from this weekends trip to Transylvania. Sadly no vampire sightings. It was a school trip,  so it was a 12 hour bus ride through Hungary and into Romania with lots of stops to look at little peasant churches and villages. The bus at 7 in the morning and arrived in our host village of Kalotaszentkiraly at around 9. As we got off the bus, we were surrounded by many small round shaped women with similar haircuts. These lovely ladies were our host mothers, and they were all related to one another somehow.
Mine was named Bubi, and she immediately whisked my friends and I home to feed us a "light" Transylavanian supper of a very heavy soup and an even heavier chicken paprikas. (It counts as light because there was no desert course) Her husband Janos also  supplied us with shots of his home-brewed palinka, a kind of fruit brandy with a similar alcohol content to rocket fuel served at every meal in Transylvania.  I quickly learned over the course of my meal that Transylvanian hospitality was going to be a problem for me. It is required for them to provide for guest in abundance, but I cannot eat in abundance. I grew terrified about how to handle meat dishes that I didn't want, because it seemed good manners dictated I have seconds. (I do eat meant, I'm just not a huge fan of it on a regular basis, and I'm highly suspicious of all members of the sausage family.) I discovered the way around this was to eat slowly enough to make it appear that I had taken seconds. Hungarian food has never been to my taste, and my poor digestive system really can't take it in large quantities, but I must say, this weekend provided me with some of the best hungarian food I've ever had. The host mothers are amazing at cooking large amounts of food for a large group.

My first full day in Transylvania had us wandering through the Turdo salt mine/subterranean health resort, walking through a quaint little village, hiking to a fortress hidden in the mountains, and visiting Cluj, the birth city of Matyas Hunyadi. All of which I did in vastly inappropriate ballet flats. The mines where fascinating, but being dark and occsionally forcing one to walk on wooden planks over very high drops, also slightly terrifying. The hike to the hidden fortress was a nice workout, and the view at the end was breath-taking. Cluj (Kolosvar, if you're asking a Hungarian) may have been nice, but as it was raining, most of the hour I had there was spent hiding in a cafe.

Sunday morning was spent in class, but afterwards we went to see a chess-maker and shop at a handicrafts market in a nearby village. Due to the rain, we couldn't visit the waterfall so instead we went to visit Kati Neni. Neni is the Hungarian equivalent of a Babushka. Kati Neni was a little tiny woman in a little tiny village who held onto all the traditional clothes and handicrafts that her children had left behind when they moved to Hungary, and she was incredibly happy to show it off and dress people in it.

Monday was spent almost entirely on the bus with the exception of a pitstop in Oradea. Like much of Romania, Oradea was once beautiful, but was kind of left to rot during the Ceaucescu period. Some of the buildings are architecturally stunning, even in their current disrepair, and I can't help but imagine that with the proper care, the city could be truly beautiful.

My next and final big adventure is a trip to Krakow this weekend. Expect a post lots of gushing about perogies in the near future!