Dracula and Deutsche Bahn

Now we have clearly reached the land of Dracula, who is omnipresent on posters, postcards and souvenir shops in Bucharest. However, during a guided city tour we learned that he was quite different from how Bram Stoker described him. The count didn't suck blood from innocent victims; he had the habit of impaling criminals and enemies though, which led to the nickname 'Vlad the Impaler'. The surname 'Dracula' comes from the Christian order of 'Draculea' to which his family belonged.

Apart from vampire myths we learned more about the Romanian communist times and their former leader Ceaușescu, who built an enormous building of parliament (apparently the biggest in this world), while the population was suffering from a famine. Nevertheless he was voted the most popular leader of state recently. People seem to remember only the good things of the dictatorship as it seems.

For us the connection to Germany was also very interesting. In the past many Saxons were settled here to build a bastion against the Ottoman Empire. Even nowadays many people still speak a little bit of German. Besides, Deutsche Bahn seems to have an outpost here, since the trains we travelled with are old DB Regio trains.

With them we travel to the communist-like border city of Russe (Pyce) in Bulgaria, where Mary can show her Cyrillic skills in translating street signs. From here we book a night bus to Istanbul, finally ready to leave Europe...