I decided to take a train to Brasov Romania because I wanted to go to Transylvania where Count Dracula was from, and the guy who the stories were written from lived in a house near Brasov. When I got off the train I was greeted my a very enthusiastic older lady who took me to an apartment building that she rented and just let us travelers hang out there. She showed up every morning to collect the money. It was a very strange living situation, because we were just a half dozen travelers living in an apartment building with no supervision. I met an Australian girl there who I took a bus to Dracula's house with.

The house was about a 45 minute bus ride to the south. It was interesting being in the bus because they were old and full of people dressed in old clothes like peasants. Dracula's house was up on a small hill, and had a little courtyard in it. It wasn't very big. It belonged to a guy who lived a few hundred years ago who was a ruthless warlord. He presided over a battle where he won and stuck poles up the butts of hundreds of the losers to scare the rest of the enemy away. So that ruthlessness must have inspired the dude to made a story of a blood sucking rich dude.

Later that day we went on a walk around the city and we saw a girl with red hair and the girl I was with said she thought she was a foreigner. But the girl looked just like the other people except for the hair, but sure enough we saw that girl at the hostel later in the day.

The most interesting thing about Romania was all of the unfinished apartment buildings all over the place. The story behind them was that in the 80's the socialist dictator named Chouchesku decided the best way to modernize the country was to force all the rural people into the cities to make some kind of industrially strong first world new country. But he was also a criminal and stole millions to build his personal palace, so after he got the shells of his new buildings were made there were mass demonstrations where 600 College students were killed and there was a coup. As he fled from the Presidential palace in his helicopter his pilot betrayed him and landed it and the multitudes killed him and his wife. So now there are all these buildings that are twenty years old but are just unpainted, un-floored, un wired, signs of a bygone never to be dream of an impossible empire.

I went for a walk alone the next day. The city was poor and full of those unfinished apartment buildings, but it was pretty because it was nestled in between green hills, and didn't have a traffic problem and had a nice big pedestrian area surrounded by old stone buildings. One thing I liked about Europe was the stone buildings, the wooden pre-fab architectural style of America can get a little sterile in comparison to the ancient cozyness of the old stone structures of Europe.

After a couple days in Brasov I took a train to Bucharest and saw the same unfinished buildings. Bucharest was bigger and more crowded, and I didn't like it very much because there were a lot of beggars. I took the train there with a Japanese guy and when we got off the train a guy was following us and kept asking the Japanese guy for money and he totally ignored him but he kept following us for a couple minutes. Then when I got on the subway, I saw an older gypsy woman and a couple of her ten year old kids running all over the inside of the train asking for money. And when they got off the train they gave each other a high five as if they scored a goal or something. I heard a lot about the Gypsies when I was in Eastern Europe. They are an ethnic group that look like white people that came from India a few hundred years ago and have a reputation of wandering around doing menial jobs. They didn't have a very good reputation in Europe. A lot of people said they were thief's, and they were discriminated against. I took a walk around Bucharest, but quickly became bored and hoped a plane to Istanbul.