Saturday 29 October 2011

83 Draculas Castle

Saturday 29th Oct.
Today a relatively short 120 km drive to Bran Castle. It is described by Wikipedia as follows:

Bran Castle (German: Törzburg; Hungarian: Törcsvár), situated near Bran and in the immediate vicinity of Braşov, is a national monument and landmark in Romania. The fortress is situated on the border between Transylvania and Wallachia, on DN73. Commonly known as "Dracula's Castle" (although it is one among several locations linked to the Dracula legend, including Poenari Castle and Hunyad Castle), it is marketed as the home of the titular character in Bram Stoker's Dracula. There is, however, no evidence that Stoker knew anything about this castle, which has only tangential associations with Vlad III, voivode of Wallachia, the putative inspiration for Dracula.

So...Draculas Castle it is then. 
It is now a museum cum tourist attraction and with our lack of knowing what day of the week it is we did not know it was Saturday. It was mobbed. 












On the bright side there were about 30 youngsters dressed in Halloween costumes. It was nice – to a degree, however as we left the obligatory souvenir shop at the end of the castle tour, all the kids were laid out on the courtyard floor of the castle. We were about to walk past when we heard what we figured out to be a Romanian count down from 10 to 1 which the kids joined in on. At “1” Michael Jacksons “Thriller” burst though the loud speakers and they all got slowly up as though coming out of the ground and started to dance to the song. It turns out that they were actually dressed as zombies (I’m not sure if there is a difference, except maybe for the 2 missing holes in the neck).



It was actually very entertaining and obviously something that happens only once a year. We enjoyed it and were lucky to have caught it at exactly the right time.

Then is was off to our campsite which when we saw it changed our minds and looded for a nearby hotel On top of that the temperature dropped to about minus 4 last night.
We saw these on the way to the hotel:

The hotel was hosting a wedding, but what was a nice touch is that the staff are all dressed up on Halloween costumes.

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