Knowing that the May Day holiday would give us an extra long weekend, our student/friend Szilvi had invited us to go to Transylvania with her parents for the four-day weekend. We left from school at 2:00 P.M. and arrived in Székelykerestur at midnight. Transylvania is the region of Romania that used to be Hungary until the Trianon Treaty after WWI, and is still inhabited by people of Hungarian ethnicity. As along as we were able to see the beautiful countryside, the ten-hour trip by car was really quite enjoyable. We slept the first night in the home of Szilvi's uncle and aunt, with their two daughters and Szilvi's grandma. Jack, Cindy, Justin, and Szilvi all slept in the same room--it's a very small home.
On Saturday morning we were told that Grandma had made the fire in the water heater, so we would have to wait a while for hot water. Some of us took a shower, but a day of sight-seeing was ahead of us, as well as a delicious breakfast waiting on the table. Shown here are the chocolate snails and Jack's favorite: layered potatoes.
Uncle Marian, Boglarka, Grandma, Aunt Eva, Szilvi's mom Maria, Szilvi and Klaudia.
The side yard is a garden, with an unused chicken coop in the back.
The family lives on the end of a gravel road that dead-ends at the river. Even though the house was in the town, the area had a very rural feel to it, with roosters crowing at 5:00 A.M.
and chickens cackling almost continuously.
We walked along the river to the next road, where there is a building that serves as a memorial for the famous Hungarian poet, actor, and soldier Sándor Petőfi. The original trunk of a pear tree remains here. It was under this tree that Petőfi wrote a poem in 1849, while fighting in the war against Franz Joseph and the Hapsburg regime. He died soon after. A daughter tree now grows there.
Our first destination was Bran Castle, otherwise known as Dracula's castle. The ride was breathtakingly beautiful as it took us toward some of the beautiful Carpathian Mountains that once were Hungary's border.
We thought Dracula's castle was one of the best preserved castles that we have seen. The first stone fortress on this site was built in 1212, rebuilt in 1377, and over the centuries was expanded and refortified. We spent over an hour walking through all the rooms, narrow stairways, and connecting balconies, and reading the information which thankfully was also in English. As for the Dracula connection, one of the tenants in the 1400's was named Vlad, whose father was of the order on the Dragon (Dracul). But Vlad had a nasty reputation also, of impaling his enemies, thereby giving him the name Vlad the Impaler, a similar reputation to Bram Stoker's Dracula.
Before reaching our final destination, we stopped at a beautiful spot in the mountains, St. Anna's Lake. This gave us a chance to get out and stretch and breathe the fresh mountain air.
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