Romania is in a lot of ways like a jigsaw puzzle, with various Voivodes and princelings chopping up and stitching back together the country over centuries, and it still bears those marks today. There’s the four historic regions: Wallachia, Moldavia, Dobruja, and Transylvania.¹ There’s also the various waves of ethnic immigrants who settled or colonized over the centuries, not just Romani but Hungarians and Transylvanian Saxons. And of course there’s the rural/urban divide which is causing problems everywhere these days.

I suppose that’s why I’m so grateful I got to spend time here, seeing it all. If I had only had a week I might have spent some time in Bucharest and taken a day trip to see the nearby castles. A little longer and I might have managed a trip up to Moldavia to see the Painted Monasteries. But you need longer than that to be able to spend two or three days in all the areas, to visit the countryside and a few of the big cities, to start to feel the differences between then and learn the history underpinning it all. Three weeks is at least long enough to get a sense of it. You’d need months or years to understand it.

This trip has also been a big step back to the way I used to travel, before the pandemic screwed everything up. If my trip through Southeast Asia counts as the last pre-pandemic trip I took, you could count this as the first post-pandemic trip where things felt like they used to.² It’s the first new country I’ve visited since I left Korea.³ It’s the first place I went on a whim, with no real reason to visit other than I had time and I had never been before.⁴ It’s the first place I’ve had to carry cash around.

It’s also the first place I’ve been in 18 months where English wasn’t commonly spoken, and that’s been oddly kind of a relief. It’s easy to forget, whether living in Ireland or traveling throughout Northern Europe, that English is only spoken by about 20% of the people in the world. That’s a huge number by any standard,⁵ but its popularity as a second language and its prevalence on the Internet and in academia and engineering can still overstate how common it is.

Not that it’s been difficult to get by at all; most people in customer-facing roles understand the basics, and there’s enough fluency around that I’ve been never felt like I couldn’t be understood if I needed to be.⁶ But it’s been nice to gently reset my expectations, to remind myself I’m a visitor and to force myself to stumble through what few words I managed to memorize in Romanian before I landed.⁷ It’s humbling. That’s a good thing.

I started in Bucharest, and liked it a great deal more than I had worried I might. I took it slowly, only booking a couple tours and otherwise wandering around and getting a sense of the city. I didn’t get out much beyond the city center, but I was relieved to see a lot of it survived the Communist period without getting knocked down to put up ugly Brutalist monstrosities.⁸ You have the Palace of Parliament of course, disappointingly banal and looking mostly fit to host overpriced wedding receptions. But that’s about the worst of it.

In contrast, the Old Town almost entirely survived. It’s completely given over to nightlife and tourism now and there’s a lot of development going on that may yet manage to destroy some of the buildings that survived,⁹ but at the moment it’s a great place to wander around just after dark, stopping for a bite to eat here and a drink there, watching the crowds or the street musicians or just grabbing a pretzel from a bakery and wandering over to the fountains nearby.¹⁰

That’s similar to how I finished my trip, in Cluj-Napoca. I took a day trip down to see the Turda Salt Mine¹¹ and visit Sibiu, but other than that I just kind of relaxed, got some work done, and strolled around the city. Cluj is the both the university and tech capital of Romania, and has experienced rapid growth with the tech boom over the past decade or so; I found it a perfectly nice city to explore.

Between those two places I had reserved a car, intending to spend a little over the week-and-a-half in-between driving counter-clockwise in a grand circle around the country. I’d heard bad things about the trains¹² and was looking forward to setting my own schedule for once. But that’s not how things worked out.

Before leaving the United States for the first time, one of the common suggestions is to get an International Driver’s License.¹³ And I had always assumed that was one of those moldy chestnuts of advice like packing traveler’s checks or changing money before you leave.¹⁴ And that’s kind of still my feeling on them — there’s only about a dozen countries which require it to drive, and having rented a car without it in at least two of those, maybe I can be forgiven for assuming you didn’t need one.

And honestly, I haven’t rented a car often enough to put getting one on my priority list. They’re archaic and a pain-in-the-ass to get, only available in your home country and only valid for a handful of years before you need to renew it, so who wants to go through all that anyway?

But Romania apparently just passed a law three years ago mandating them if you want to rent a car and none of the rental agencies will budge on that requirement. I can’t fathom the value of making it harder for tourists to drive in a country where the trains are so balky and slow and the buses are nigh inscrutable, but I guess some Romanian bureaucrats do.

So I ended up at the Henri Coandă Airport with my rental reservation denied and my travel plans completely screwed up. After trying to figure out how to bypass the system¹⁵ I gave up, headed back to Bucharest, and caught the train to Brașov.

In Brașov I managed to reconstruct my plans through the simple expedient of finding a tour guide. Up until now I haven’t relied on them too much; since I’m not really on vacation I’m generally trying to save money, and I’ve never been big on giving up that much autonomy. Not to mention I’ve always had a abhorrence of large tour groups. But you honestly can’t explore Bucovina or Maramureș without a car. And finding a tour guide turned out to me one of the best decisions I made.

I did a couple day trips out of Brașov to see the local castles¹⁶ and Sighișoara, and caught the train to stay in a castle turned hotel in Zăbala.¹⁷ But I was able to get in touch with a tour guide named Ciprian Slemcoe, who runs Hello Bucovina, and arrange a multiday private tour through the north of the country, getting picked up in Zabola, driven north and staying for two nights in Suceava, heading across to Maramureș for a night, then finally getting driven down to Cluj.¹⁸

Most of my experience with tour guides has been of the “load everybody on the bus and talk them through a couple tourist sites” variety. Which I guess is great if you want to be loaded on a bus and talked through a couple tourist sites. But the more serious kind, where you have a personal guide that will work out an itinerary with you and ferry you around and shepherd you through food and lodging and things you specifically want to see is a new experience.

And maybe I got lucky with Hello Bucovina. But the fact is I didn’t have much of an idea what I wanted to do beyond the basics. And without a doubt, a knowledgeable tour guide from the area is going to unlock so much that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to see. I’d have gotten to see the couple of things I knew I absolutely wanted to see on my own. The dozen other places I found fascinating, the churches and monasteries and restaurants and villages? I’d very likely have missed them entirely.

There are really two things you should do in the countryside in Romania. The first is visit the Painted Monasteries. In the 14^th to 15^th centuries a style of church was created that used elaborate painted sequential scenes¹⁹ to teach Biblical stories to the laity. They’re wondrously intricate works of art which double as religious explication, and the churches embody the worldview of the Romanian Orthodox Church at the time. There are eight of them — I saw four — and if you’re at all interested in art or history or religion they should be on your list to visit.²⁰

I’ve spent a lot of time staring at religious art, particularly of the Roman Catholic variety, and much of it by necessity presents a single theme: the Last Supper, or the Slaughter of the Innocents, or the Annunciation. These were more akin to a paintings by Hieronymus Bosch or the Sistine Chapel, only they have at least an order of magnitude more room to work with. They were telling dozens of stories at once, Heaven and Hell and the Creation and the Apocalypse and the lives of the saints, all at once. And much of the paint was made with local minerals²¹ so much of it not only survived but remains bold and lustrous to this day.

The other thing you need to do is spend a day or two exploring Maramureș. The region has been called a window back into what rural life was like in Romania over a century ago, and it’s got plenty of people still dressing traditionally or riding a horse-drawn wagon along the main road. One of my favorite memories was coming across someone driving a horse cart filled with empty milk pails down the road across from a construction crew fixing the pavement in a brand new shovel excavator.

I don’t know how long it will hold out; it’s certainly already changing in ways big and small.²² It’s hard to see how traditional²³ village life can hold out in the 21^st century. But for the moment it’s still hanging on.

I rounded out my time in Maramureș by visiting a few of the many wooden churches and monasteries around the area.²⁴ I also got to see the Merry Cemetery, where the local woodcarver started decorating gravestones with cheerful images and poems ridiculing the deceased.²⁵ And after all that, I was more than ready to collapse in Cluj for the week.

I’m now in the lounge of the airport in Cluj, a couple hours before my flight leaves. I’m flying into Vienna for the weekend before I head on to Norway for a convention. We’ll see if I get into Austria; hopscotching across Europe made a lot of good sense a couple years ago²⁶ but now there’s a whole other level of anxiety with all the fluctuating restrictions I discovered as of a week ago Austria requires FFP-2 masks which I hadn’t a clue how to obtain in Romania.²⁷

Most of the time I’m a little sad to leave places but ready to move on. And I can’t say I don’t feel that way about Romania; it will be a relief to be someplace with less culture shock and a lower language barrier.²⁸ But for the first time in a long time I’m feeling like I’ll need to come back — not because I feel like I missed things²⁹ but because there’s so much worth thinking about and revisiting later. I could honestly spend another week in Bucharest or Cluj. I could relax for another weekend in a castle B&B. I could travel through the Carpathians again, even visit some of the other Painted Monasteries.

I don’t know when I’ll get the chance. But I hope I do, maybe this time with a friend to share it with.

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Footnotes

¹ There’s actually eight administrative districts, which divide those up further, and some parts of the historic regions lay in other countries as a result of wars and treaties. And don’t even start on Transnistria.

² Or as close to the way they used to as things are going to feel for a long, long time. There’s plenty of COVID news still going on, and masks are ubiquitous here on public transit and in shops.

³ You could argue Iceland was new since I was only there previously when I missed my connection in Keflavík, but I spent the night so technically not.

⁴ I’ve been running an online role-playing game for the past year where the players are trying to kill Dracula, and thought it might be fun to wrap the campaign from Romania. That wasn’t a big motivation, though, more an amusing coincidence.

It has been nice, if a bit galling, to visit all the places I’ve been mentioning in the campaign and discovering how badly I mangled the details. I did the best I could while rushed with Google Maps and Wikipedia is all I can claim.

⁵ Mandarin Chinese is second at around 15%, but that’s overwhelmingly by native speakers.

⁶ I did have an amusing problem trying to explain to the cleaning staff I needed access to a locked office to pick up my luggage before my bus left, but Google Translate solved that.

⁷ Locals in Iceland, Denmark, and the Netherlands, to use three recent examples — not to single them out specifically — will invariably switch into English as soon as they get a whiff you don’t speak the local language. Which is great, but it would sometimes be nice if I managed to ask if they could speak English first.

⁸ I’ve been assured that happened plenty, but the worst of it tended to happen on the outskirts, where the government threw up cheap apartment complexes to house everyone they were throwing off the farms.

⁹ Many aren’t in terrific shape, so there’s a lot of owners looking to cash out and a lot of developers looking to cash in.

¹⁰ Worth noting, Romanians eat late. About as late as the Spanish. And in Spain dinner is usually simple and light: some pinchos or tapas, maybe. Dinner here is typically the biggest meal of the day, and it’s not unusual to start it after 9:30.

¹¹ Someone had the bright idea of converting a defunct salt mine into a family activity center, with a Ferris wheel and skee ball and ping pong and a playground, all in an otherworldly salt cavern thirteen stories below the ground.

What really sells it is the decor. They didn’t just throw a bunch of carnival rides in there. It’s all unvarnished wood and metal with glowing light bars and ends up being super eerie and oddly soothing, at least on a weekday morning with sparse attendance. There’s even a lake another thirteen stories down, with small boats you can rent if you wanted to spend a lazy afternoon drifting around in a Giger painting.

¹² They’re incredibly old and slow. In the actual experience they were fine, for what they were, but they take forever. That’s okay if you’ve got nowhere to be and you’re in no rush to get there, and they’re incredibly cheap if you’re looking for a deal. But I recommend renting a car.

¹³ Technically an “International Driving Permit”

¹⁴ By now I’m traveling with at least three bank cards that allow me to withdraw money without ATM charges at reasonable exchange rates worldwide, and I use my credit card for 95% of transactions anyway.

¹⁵ There are a number of scammy “get an IDP in an hour” sites online which can produce documents for you but can’t produce legal ones — whether they’re good enough to work for you and worth the hassle of finding a print shop to makes copies for you, I can’t tell you.

¹⁶ Peleș, Bran, and Râșnov. Bran is the one everyone knows, since it’s “Castle Dracula” despite having nearly no connection to Vlad Tepes; at best he might have slept there once or twice. It’s small and historic, well worth seeing but needs to be understood in context. It’s far more interesting for its connection to Queen Marie of Romania, who wanted a summer residence. And she turns out to be fascinating. She served as a nurse during World War I, and her ceaseless advocacy for Romania during the Paris Peace Talks is largely responsible for unifying the country in its present form; she reportedly dismissed her advisors and conducted the negotiations herself, stating “You’ll all just have to get used to accepting me with the faults of my virtues.”

Râșnov is a large fortress on a hill where the local village would retreat whenever the Tartars were rampaging the countryside, which apparently happened a lot. It’s undergoing restoration, and wasn’t particularly accessible when I was there. It’s fascinating to medieval history buffs, but less so to anybody else, especially while it’s closed off.

Peleș Castle is the real jewel. It was inaugurated by King Carol I in the 1883, and served a similar function to Castle Neuschwanstein in Bavaria; a fairytale residence to celebrate and reinvent the conception of royalty. Unlike Neuschwanstein, it was basically finished and furnished, and the inside is a series of jaw-dropping rooms heaped with marble and paintings and carpets and mirrors. It manages to both seem over-the-top in a more-money-than-God kind of way while still being tasteful, if not exactly restrained. If you can only see one thing in Romania I’d probably still say to see the Painted Monasteries — they’re gorgeous and historic — but Peleș is pretty close.

¹⁷ The Zabola Estate. Romania is absolutely littered with castles, and one consequence of that is some of the mid-level ones have been turned into B&Bs. Zabola turns out to be a small estate with a horse farm that’s converted the ominously named “Machine House” on the grounds into a set of guest rooms. The rooms are ridiculously overstuffed with working antique fireplaces and gloriously soft beds and claw-footed standalone bathtubs if you wanted to soak away the afternoon. It’s probably only worth a couple nights — three if you want to go riding — but it was a great weekend.

¹⁸ I could have caught the bus up to Bucovina and, likewise, the bus back down to Transylvania, but the buses run at incredibly inconvenient times (the bus from Brașov to Suceava leaves at 6am), the trains run almost as slowly and require transfers, and in both cases you don’t get to stop and see anything on the way.

¹⁹ Comic strips, basically.

²⁰ Full disclosure: for my day trip to the Painted Monasteries I was guided by Bucovina Day Tours and I can recommend them as well.

²¹ Including lapis lazuli, for you Tutankhamun fans.

²² I spent the night at a rural homestay run by a delightful Romanian grandmother who didn’t speak a lick of English but who possessed what may have been the largest flatscreen television I’ve ever seen. Apparently she has plans to open a kind of pub out back on her property, and it was an early acquisition for that.

²³ And largely preindustrial

²⁴ Not painted this time, or at least not painted nearly as elaborately. As a poor, rural region most of the churches were put up by locals and the art reflects that. The monasteries are more elaborate, but tend to have burned down and been rebuilt many times over the centuries. So they’re all built in the traditional style and many are worth seeing, but they’re authentic, not original.

²⁵ He’s buried there as well, amazingly not as a result of any incensed relatives.

²⁶ Flying from one Schengen country to another is far easier than flying into the area, whether pre- or post-COVID, for obvious reasons.

²⁷ Ciprian once again saved my ass by directing me to a store which stocked them. Seriously, if you’re thinking of touring the area, give Hello Bucovina a call. I can’t recommend them highly enough, and I’d further like to apologize for not being all that talkative. I’m just not.

²⁸ Austrians are better at English and I’m better at German.

²⁹ Although I’d kind of like to see Corvin Castle