More from the weekend

Hi all just some follow-up from the weekend. This is a picture of the mountains. We stopped in the town of Bustemi. Which is a ski resort town at the base of the mountains. It rained a little each day I was out but never enough to make it impossible to get around. The nice thing was when it rained hard, and it did, it only lasted a few minutes and I was always somewhere to take refuge. So in this picture either the clouds are really low or the mountains are really high. Actually it is a little of both. Romania is about the size of New York State and they have packed in there flat lands, mountains, and coast. The people of Bucharest love the mountains and the road to the mountains on Friday and Sunday during the summer is packed with people trying to escape the city.
This is a view from the courtyard of Castle Bran. Remember it was the residence of the royal family so it had to look good inside. Outside I think they wanted it to look formidable so no one would bother them. So you can see there are 4 levels to the castle, with lots of rooms. Also, lots of places to look down on the courtyard.
This is a view of the courtyard form one of the levels above. Here you see one of the things every castle needed to withstand a siege. A well inside the walls. Since castles were so formidable often the enemy would just set up camp outside and try to wait the people out. They figured that sooner or later they would run out of water or food and have to come out. So, if you were living in a castle you needed to make sure that you always had plenty of food on hand because you never knew when the enemy would show up. The people sitting around the well was part of a group of tourists from Israel. I also saw a group from Japan. Romania is slowly becoming a tourist attraction. I also met a young man who was making his first trip back to Romania since he had been adopted as a young child. He had been to the village where he was born (it is near Vaslui, where I have gone the last two years) and actually met his birth mother.



Here is a view from the fortress at Rastov. Take a look at the video and then tell me why it was a good idea to build this fortress where it is. The fortress was built to protect the people of the village below it. They would retreat to the fortress when enemies attacked. The fortress was only breached once, and then only because the people did not have the well built yet and they had to go out for water. One time the Turks tried to defeat the fortress but had to eventually leave. They went to the next town north of here Brasov and burned it to the ground. I guess maybe they were a little mad that they could not defeat the fortress at Rastov. This morning Wednesday at 9am pacific standard time I will be going to one of the web cams here in Bucharest. Here is the web address http://www.jurnalul.ro/webcam/piata-revolutiei-77.html
If you can click on it it will take you to the camera. If not copy and paste it into the address of your browser. I will be by the big tree that is at the middle bottom of the picture. The camera is on a hotel looking on Revoultion plaza. You can see the "Big Potato" in the background. Talk with you all later.

Mark