Sibiu, Bucharest, Romania 10/2 – 10/5

Before going to Bucharest we decided to go to Sibiu.  We liked the description we read:  Sibiu is one of Romania's cultural and tourism capitals, attracting tourists due to its wonderful medieval charm, excellent views of the surrounding landscapes, great food, and stunning parkland. Sounded good to us, and it was only a couple of hours away from Brasov by train.  Additionally we thought that the train from Sibiu to Bucharest would take us via a scenic route that could include the capital of Romanian online fraud (I forgot the name of the town again), and that presented a special interest to me since eBay was their primary target.  That hope unfortunately did not come true; the train we took was going via Brasov.  Oh, well.

The town however was just as the book, and the wiki page described it.  It was well restored, and had a lot of medieval buildings.  There was a hiccup with the hostel we booked that was getting rave reviews as far as our tastes in hostels went.  They could only accommodate us for 1 out of the 2 nights, so not to unpack we decided to go immediately to another hostel they suggested.  That hostel turned out to be much worse, not to our liking, and we did not get much sleep there.  Nevertheless we enjoyed what the little town had to offer tremendously – the architecture, the food and the sunny weather.  And Julie got a consolation prize – the hostel that we wanted to stay in originally allowed her to take one of the books from their library.  One more book in my backpack…

Naturally, we could not miss the synagogue.  What was different about this synagogue was that we were invited in for free by an old lady that (I guess) was minding the admin part of the Jewish life of the town.  She unfortunately did not speak English, so information we got was very limited, but we were overwhelmed by her hospitality.  When we got there the synagogue was closed, as well as the community center, but she saw us standing there, opened up everything, and gave us a tour. From what we understood, the Jewish community in Sibiu is very small (about 65 members). They meet regularly for Shabbat and to celebrate holidays, as well as for community projects. Under their care are 3 synagogues (only 1 is functioning and the other 2 they try to upkeep to preserve the history) and 10 old Jewish cemeteries. Also they do a lot of outreach projects to seniors in Sibiu and surrounding areas. Since the community is so small, they actually don’t use the old synagogue building for prayer. Instead they use a small room in the community center behind the synagogue. And the synagogue is used for concerts and other evens by the city of Sibiu. All this was a great change from all the other synagogues that we saw in Europe. They either required tickets to get in, or were closed to us completely.

2011.10.02 Sibiu

After spending 2 days in Sibiu we moved on to Bucharest, our 2nd to last stop in Europe.  Bucharest reminded me of St. Petersburg in the late 90s.  It’s in its development stage, not “cleaned up” yet, but you can see that they are trying.  We saw a few restoration and infrastructure projects under way.   We also noticed loops and loops of extra wires hanging from pretty much all the light poles in the city. (Most of those wires were not isolated)   I’m told that there is a huge project underway to get them underground, but that has not happened yet. 

As far as sightseeing went we were not able to find any tours that were suitable for us (the one for 65 Euro per person that we found would not work on our backpacker budget.)  Later in Sofia we met 2 travellers from Romania, who apparently organize free walking tours in Bucharest, but our hostel did not know about them, and neither did Google.  Julie gave them a quick lesson in marketing for the future :)

One tour we thought we could catch was the tour of their Parliament.  That building is rather big (second biggest parliament building in the world), not-so-bad-looking, and it has a terrace from which you can see the panorama of the city.  Unfortunately once we came there the guard told us that the Parliament was closed to tourists for the next 5 days due to an “administrative problem”.

Another annoyance in Bucharest was due to the fact that all the banks are afraid of transactions coming from Romania.  First my PayPal account was put on hold pending the password/secret question change because I tried to book a hostel while in Romania;  second, and more annoying was that HSBC decided to suspend our primary ATM card, and it took me 2 days to get it working again because their agent was screwing up. 

Note from Julie: While all this was happening, I got a lesson from Levka about online Fraud. Apparently, Eastern Europe has split up their online “business”. Russia has the Mail order bride business. We heard that they are “franchising” into other eastern bloc countries. And Romania has the online auctions fraud. As Levka mentioned above there is a village in the middle of Romania that has a Mercedes dealership in it.  Apparently it’s the central hub of the online fraud (that targets eBay) and has been investigated for many years by Interpol and others, but it’s still going strong. 

2011.10.04 Bucharest