Transylvania, Romania

Few places in Eastern and Central Europe have charmed me the way Transylvania did. Perhaps it was because it is so off the beaten track that it is still wild, and unpredictable. Perhaps it was because a majority of the people still travel around on horse and wagons, though in the cities they drive alongside fancy new cars. Perhaps it was because I was reading Dracula while wandering through the fog filled streets and valleys. It doesn't matter why I liked it. I just did.


At first glance you know you've crossed the border. To begin, in the rolling hills and farm lands you will see solitary men watching the cows or sheep graze. They still harvest their hay by hand, (as they do in many places in Slovakia), but waiting alongide the fields are the horses, waiting for the wagons to fill up. A while later you come across the potato fields, and the rows of people bent over, digging in the rich, dark soil. Sometimes there was a tractor waiting, but usually a horse.

And the people, too, seem to to be of that land, and far removed from their Mygar and Slavic neighbors. Their language rolls off their tounge like poetry. Their skin is the color of the soil, and though it sounds like a huge stereotype, their facial structure really does look like the vampires in the old movies. Their brow is pronounces, lips thin and receded and the two are connected by the highest cheekbones immaginable.

To add to the mystery of the land, far off any major road (and there are no highways except near Bucharest), on a forested one lane gravel and dirt path 20 kilometers from the nearest village, the dirt suddenly turned to cobblestone. Why was it there, and how old it must have been, I can barely immaging. It just was.