Interrailing – Day 11: Braşov and Bucharest

After our sleeper train The Previous Day, we got off at Braşov station in Romania at about 7:30am. We briefly got some cheap pastries and coffee for breakfast at the train station, then after trying and failing to book some bus tickets that sold out very fast, ordered a taxi to the ~30km-away town of Bran.

Bran is a small medieval town in the foothills of the mountains of Romania, most famous for Bran Castle, a medieval fortress built in the 1300s. For tourism purposes, this is often presented as Dracula's Castle, however apparently the author never visited or had any intention of using Bran as inspiration, so it's essentially a made up connection! While Vlad the Impaler served as loose inspiration of Dracula, he also most likely never visited or had any connection to the castle.

In reality, the castle serves as a museum of Queen Marie, the last Queen Consort of Romania, and, for lack of a better word, a bit of a girlboss. She was extremely popular among her people, very well-educated, and successfully persuaded her husband, King Ferdinand to join the Triple Entente to fight against Germany in WW1, during which she served as a military nurse.

The castle's museum has replicas of her and her husband's living quarters, kitchens, etc, and while it does firmly correct any historical inaccuracies, it plays into them a little, with short sections describing supernatural Romanian folklore, various torture methods, and Vlad the Impaler himself. It took about an hour and a half in total (plus me having to fully run out to the entrance to use the bathroom), and was pretty fun all in all!

We then went to the Castle restaurant, which used to be Queen Marie's Tea House. I don't remember exactly what, but there was definitely some sort of English influence here – perhaps just the concept of a tea house. This place was very reasonably priced, and had some really nice service and high quality food. We got drinks and fries to stall until 12pm when they started serving their full lunch menu, at which point we ordered our full meal. I ordered the sautéed creamy mushrooms with polenta, and a truffle poached egg. It was really nice! Polenta seems to be a Romanian speciality, so it was nice to revisit something that I used to not like as a child. We then also shared a Funeral Dessert, a traditional dessert of "boiled wheat" with walnuts, sugar, rum, and a fruit sauce. It was pretty tasty but I don't remember too much about it.

We walked around the grounds a little more, which had some "live history" with tailors, metalworkers, and jewellers selling some local works, and a small gift shop. Amusingly, despite watching us go in for a mere 90 seconds, this young lad clearly on some sort of work experience asked us if we could do a "survey about the gift shop", asking all sorts of questions about our overall satisfaction.

After this at about 2:30pm, we got another taxi back to Braşov, to get the ~2.5 hour train onwards to the capital of Bucharest. We would've stayed longer, but Braşov itself doesn't have too much to do, and we were a bit uncertain about how frequent and long the trains would be running for. So, after buying the worst matcha I've ever had at the train station, we caught the train, which despite being ~30 minutes late, was really nice, including an onboard bar that we shared a beer from. It went through a lovely scenic route through the mountain, and the air conditioning was merciful despite the exterior temperature sensor reporting 42 degrees outside!

While waiting for the train we saw some poor very confused guy get on a train that was terminating at Braşov – the conductors were telling people not to get on but both parties must not have noticed each other. We watched him aimlessly looking around on the solo train going off in the distance to nowhere. Thankfully, it stopped a short distance later and reversed back onto a different platform, and he just got off as if nothing had ever happened. I've included a diagram to demonstrate exactly what happened:

We eventually made it to Bucharest North station, the main station for the city, emerging into the sweltering heat. It's quite an interesting station, having a long concourse with a de-facto flea market that's emerged, with long rows of stalls selling things down the corridors. After a short bus, we made it to our apartment, and were amazed by just how nice it was. This thing was a 1-bedroom penthouse with a large lounge + sofa bed, a terrace, lovely looking bathroom, and a decently sized kitchen. The best part is that before a few extra fees we had paid a mere £25/night total for this place.

We messed around trying to find some food to order for a bit (it was late, hot, and we were all exhausted), before getting the most mid falafel imaginable, watching Dark (good show btw would recommend), and heading to sleep for the evening!t