more than words

okay awful title, but the truth is that i feel overwhelmed. so much has happened in the past week or so, that there is no way i could possibly document all that i want to. i want to write about vienna, because i loved it and had several of those important "oh, so this is the answer" moments. i guess the thing i wanted most to blog about while i was there was going to freud's apartment and waiting for the answers to come to me (because so many had been in the previous few hours) about whether i wanted to go into psychology or literature. what i left with were not answers so much as some postcards and some dorky pictures of myself looking psychological on the stairwell and ponderous in the consultation room. i also really wanted to talk about the schonbrunn palace, which was the most ridiculously beautiful and also aristocratic-like place i've ever been. it's also home to the oldest zoo in (i think) europe, which is also one of the happiest places on the planet. we ate some delicious austrian fried garlic pita thing called a langosse and some ice cream and we looked at penguins (!) and some families of wart hogs and we took pictures of us jumping all over austria. i' ll show you later, hopefully. anyways, so that's... oh wait... no, one more thing... we went to an all you can eat sushi restaurant where the sushi came out on a conveyer belt and i ate so many fried bananas that i almost threw up. it was incredible. okay, so that's austria in the tiniest little nutshell i could manage.


now i'm in romania. what a sad life i lead, right? actually, i have been frequently having moments where i look around at where i am and who i'm with and what i'm doing and wondering how my life has taken me here. i keep saying "where are we? who are we? how did we get here?" i'm in friggin romania! what am i doing here?!

i should say that i've never liked a place more than i like this place. i mean, first there is the eerie beauty, which i briefly described in my last entry. i know why the vampire legends came from transylvania. we went hiking through the forest all day today, and at one point we came upon a wider part of the trail that was lined with thick, tall, dark green trees. the brush around was all grey and black and everything was so silent that the slightest movement of wildlife sounded like an avalanche. i told kristen that my spider sense was working overtime. i was almost positive that a vampire bear was going to leap out of the forest and turn us in to night creatures.

but vampires are the tiniest part of what makes transylvania the best place ever anywhere. the place is so untouched by mass tourism that people actually still like americans and view us as somewhat exotic (in a positive way). today, when we started on our hike, our method was actually just to walk towards the mountains until we found the trail heads that these british blokes from our hostel were talking about. we ended up on some private property where some kind of ruckus was being made from behind a fence. after we stood in a state of paralyzed confusion for about five minutes, i peaked through the fence and said 'poiana brasov?' which was the name of the place we wanted to hike to. one man walked up to us and said 'speak english!' and so we told him we were looking for a trail to poiana brasov. he was very pleased about getting to help us. he led us through his farm (it was a yard, i think, but there were so many animals that i will call it a farm), where a large group of people were trying to break in a horse. we avoided the bucking horse, only to be approached by several half-wild barking puppies who kept bumping into my legs. then a turkey started following us and loudly gobbling. the chickens all kept to themselves. our new friend took us along the road we'd just come from, except on his side of the fence, and showed us a path through to the outskirts of town, where you can pick up the (extraordinarily well-marked!) trails. before he left us, he said something almost unintelligible, but which included the word 'bears.' so that sort of freaked me out.

we walked over this little hill and ended up in someone elses backyard with more barking half-wild puppies, and traversed the most picturesque cobble-stone sidewalks through these colorful delapidating houses until we found a road that went by a stream. we followed it away from town, and i'm almost positive that we were the only non-residents who'd walked those streets in a while, because everyone seemed to know each other and were all bewildered (in a friendly way) by us. we found our path, jumped on it, and happily hiked all the way to some raod we didn't recognize, where we jumped on another path and happily hiked it to a brasov overlook point, where we ate sandwiches and met more superfriendly locals who wanted to walk us almost all the way to the path they thought was best for us to get back to town.


mmmmmm. what a day.



yesterday was also the best day ever. (i've been having several 'best days ever' this week.) we went on a mini-bus tour with greg, the hostel-owner's husband, which ended up costing us twice as much as promised, but was also very pleasant. he took us (and two british guys named joe and dan) to the castle at bran, which is billed as 'dracula's castle', but confidentially, it's just a vampire-ish looking place on a hill that vlad tepes may once have attacked. it was a nice castle. we took a lot of cool pictures. then we bought some plastic fangs and posed with them later that night under the full moon. i'll show you those later, hopefully. after bran, we went to rasnov, which was way better than any other castle i've been too. again, because tourism isn't such a huge thing here in romania, the castle is just now being renovated and spruced up, which means that it is still authentic-ish. also, because romania is known as the 'wild west' of europe, meaning basically that it still, in some ways, operates as if it were from another century, people use horses and carts interchangeably with cars. so, not only did we get to see a cool, authentic fortress/castle, but we got to meet some of the workers, who were equipped with horses and carts to carry all of their materielle. by meet, i, of course, mean say 'salut' to. according to greg, that means hi. romanians shares a lot of words with other romantic languages. it is the least slavic of eastern european languages. this is helpful.

last night we hung out with the german guys who just wanted to party like anyone else. they were funny. i'm not sure there's too much more to say about that. it was really fun though, and we all ended up staying up later than we expected for our big night on the front porch of the hostel.

the hostelling experience is interesting. it really does give you and instant community, and everyone is from different countries and different backgrounds and different decades, even, but everyone also speaks english and shares the same passion, which is travelling. one of the guys who works at the hostel, an english guy named nick, is most proud of the fact that he's travelled to albania. he talks about it all the time. he's been almost everywhere in world, but mostly he is proud of the four days he spent in albania, because it was so difficult to travel to. he said that when he was in albania, one man tried to be his tour guide for something like 50 euros a day, and nick's response was 'i'm not a tourist; i'm a traveler.'

i've been thinking about this label. there is definitely a difference between the two, and i've not heard anyone articulate it so well until nick did. i've met so many people over here who, for one reason or another, don't want one home. when you aren't at home, you make fast friends, and reasonably close friends. this morning, after our german friends left, the landlady made up their beds. i looked at their made up beds and felt a little sad. i made a joke like 'in and out of our lives just like this.' and it was sort of true, though. i like these people i've met, and i feel as close to them as some of my acquaintances from austin or birmingham after only knowing these guys/gals a few days. but all this traveling has also made me crave a rest. part of me never wants to stop traveling, but another part of me wants to go home. i'm guessing this is why people like to travel with significant others, because when you find someone you love, they can become a sort of mobile anchor. for instance, i've known kristen d. for only a few months, but i feel like we've been friends forever. she's my best friend here, easily, and i think part of it is because we've become sort of like traveling anchors for each other. but what about these travelers who go alone? my next project is going to be to toss this around in my head for a while and talk to a lot of homeless nomads.

okay. it's time to sleep. this entry only says 1% of what i want it to. good night, transylvania, i love you...


p.s. i'm not editing this tonight, or maybe ever. muah ha ha ha ha