The three B's

Brasov, Bran and Bucharest, all firmly on Romania's tourist route. Brasov is a beautiful small old town with Saxon heritage. It has a large old town square and two rather mundane towers that the locals are supremely proud of, one called the White Tower and one the Black Tower, confusing since they are both built from beige stone. They call them towers but they really resemble giant lego blocks. The town is nestled in a vally with a large hill on one side covered in trees. At the top of this hill is a fortress/castle that has a cable car to go up, or as one local put it "you can walk if you have half a day spare". Three quarters of the way up the hill, jutting out of the trees is a 'BRASOV' sign remeniscent of the Hollywood sign in L.A. As one older resident eloquently put it "do they think Im so old I dont remember where I live?". Brasov looked just as god at night as it did during the day, with most of the town under lights, including the 'BRASOV' sign. We only spent one night in Brasov which some would consider not enough but we have places to be so it is on to Bucharest.
On the way there is a touristic place called Bran which is famous for one reason, Dracula. It was the castle here that Bram Stoker based his novel so we thought it was worth a visit on the way to Bucharest. We were greeted by streets lined with stalls selling all sorts of trinkets and other things you dont need. They certainly saw the tourist coming. So did the castle, it was another case of 'gee, we are charging a lot to let people in, I guess we should put some stuff in the castle'. Overrated is an apt description and definitely not worth the rather high cost of admission, but they need to pay the three guards who checked our tickets, two of which were metres apart. My favourite was the plaque alerting us to the fact that we are in a "Hallway". There were some good parts to the castle, the old shields with insignia on them were quite nice, although it would have been better if they werent made from aluminium. I was looking forward to getting a photo of the whole castle but there really isnt a convenient place to take one that doesnt have a shop with Dracula dolls in it. Incidentally, Dracula the fictional character is from Transilvania, but the real life person people associate with Dracula, Vlad Tepes is from Wallachia which is another province and until recently (200 years or so) wasnt technically a part of Romania. Still, it is an interesting story and as the saying goes 'dont let the truth get in the way of a good story'.
We left Brasov for Bucharest which was only a few hours away and also a whole world away. Since we arrived in Romania we have dealt with a mosly rural country, even the towns arent what you would call busy. Bucharest is the commercial centre of the country and a completely different story. Just driving into the city we could see the difference. The monuments were so much bigger (a bigger version of the Arc de Triomphe), the buildings bigger and the thing you most notice, the traffic was bigger. How to describe Bucharest traffic? Insane, chaotic, fluent, effervescent? Maybe that is a good way to decribe it, imagine a glass of lemonade with the bubbles being the cars and you are somewhere close. On our travels, people have described Bucharest for us and not really painted it in a great light, saying it is a little dull and communistic. Well, they were right. It actually reminded me of New York, with the traffic and wide streets, tall office buildings but without the attitude. We saw some of the sights of the city, most of which seem transplanted, engineered for a specific purpose, which of course they were. Ceausescu, to my mind, wasa little jealous of the USSR and was like a little brother trying to show off what he had done. He didnt do it the right way though, starving the country by selling off all its food to pay for his construction, one of which, the Presidential Palace, is the second largest building in the world behind the Pentagon. It didnt work though, he and his wife were executed during a riot, or revolution I guess it would be (it depends on who wins, history is written by the winners) on Christmas day no less.
The next stop for us is Bulgaria, another country that has the impression of being shrowded in mystery, mostly because no one really knows anything about it.