My last day in Vienna (Thursday) was pretty cool. I went to the Hofburg which is the previous residence of the Hapsburg Emperors and Empresses. The Spanish Riding School is also in Hofburg and they have cheap (well, cheap for Europe) tickets to their morning exercise, so I watched horsies run around to classic music for 2 hours. I then went to the museum-y part of the Hofburg which started with the Silver Museum. Basically this consisted of a whole crapload of cutlery and crockery sets while the audioguide told w***y stories. I listened to about half of the audioguide but when it started talking about the particular way in which the napkins were folded and how only two people know how to fold the napkin in that way, I decided that the silver museum was just too w***y for me and skipped ahead to the Sissi museum. The Sissi museum is about Emperess Elizabeth (wife of Franz Joseph) who was terribly unhappy as an Emperess, was assisinated and has since become a cult figure in Vienna. It was followed by the Imperial appartments where Franz Joseph and Elizabeth lived. It also provided a lot of other information about Franz Joseph and his family. WW1 makes quite a bit more sense now that I know how Franz Ferdinand fits in.

After Hofburg, I went to St Stephen's church in the main square of Vienna. The church itself was actually much more spectacular than I expected it to be so I spent a bit of time wandering around and looking at the architecture and paintings. I also took the tour of the catacombs (as I am inclined to do) which was very different to the other catacombs tours I've done. They started with the more modern day stuff, which is still in use today. They had a room where all the coffins of the previous bishops are kept, including the latest one who died 4 years ago. It was a bit weird. Bones are usually the feature of a catacombs tour, not coffins. There was also the Hapsburgs' part of the catacombs containing a bunch of coffins and some urns. When they were deciding what to do with the urned Hapburgs, there were 3 major cathedrals in Vienna. So they decided that one got their hearts, one got their bodies and one got their innards in an urn. I was lucky enough to see the urns with innards in them. Apparently one of them leaked over the summer and they couldn't do tours for a week cause the smell was so bad. Thank you to the guide for that little tale. The rest of the catacombs were the standard bones-in-cellar type, no fancy designs. The tour guide collected the money at the end of the tour and told us that we could pay or stay in the catacombs. I liked him.

After that I went to visit the town hall again where they were setting up for the Christmas market, just to wander around and take some photos.

Thursday night was the 17 hour train ride to Bucharest which I wasn't really looking forward to. It actually turned out to be quite good as I had an entire 6-person compartment to myself and the couchettes that you sleep on are surprisingly comfortable. I got a pretty good sleep apart from being woken up at 3am by the Romanian passport police. I did get a stamp in my passport though which doesn't happen very much in Europe. The parts of the train ride after I woke up were pretty interesting as we went through tiny Romanian villages with people tending to their horses. I arrived in Bucharest at about 2pm and attempted to catch the bus to my hostel. The bus ride was less than pleasent with a woman yelling at me in Romanian for about 10 minutes. Then she hit me a few times. I got off at the wrong bus stop and ended up quite lost. A local rescued me and found the hostel with me. The hostel was pretty cool, a little Romanian house with 2 kittens running around. Unfortunently, most of the hostel was occupied by school kids so I sat around and had beer with the people who worked at the hostel. On Saturday, I went to the Romanian Village museum which was an outdoor collection of little romanian houses that they had relocated from various parts of the country. It was pretty cool. There was also a big park thing to walk around which was pretty. Unfortunently, the rest of Bucharest was pretty much a hole. Plus, the lack of people to hang with at the hostel made the whole time not particuarly fun.

I was very happy to be catching the train to Brasov yesterday (Sunday). The trains here also run on Europe time (ie. kinda vaguely like the timetable but not really) and they amble along the country side at a fairly slow pace. It was nice to see all the little villages and streams running through the Carpathian mountain ranges. Arrived at the hostel yesterday afternoon and just hung out for the evening. Many more people to talk to here, including the mandatory contingient of Melburnians.

Today (Monday) was a pretty miserable day, rainy and it's currently under 2 degrees outside. I went for a bit of a walk around the town, which is pretty and much more what I was expecting of Romania. I'm hoping to go visit the fake Dracula castle in Bran tomorrow as a bunch of people from the hostel are all going. Drac has the day off on Mondays.

Love, hugs, etc.