Today I was leaving Cluj, so I had to get up early with Mihai as he was going to work. We said our farewells - Mihai had been an absolutely brilliant host, he'd made me feel right at home from the moment I arrived. I'd thought about hitchhiking but frankly I was pretty tired and thought it would be easier to rest on the train, so I headed for the station. I
The next stop was going to be Sighișoara, a small but visually impressive historical town that was also the birthplace of Vlad Tepeș (aka Vlad the Impaler) - the 15th century Wallachian prince who was the inspiration for Bram Stoker's Dracula. Along the way to station though, I came across something fairly unexpected - a local kid wearing a yellow VB polo shirt. Yep, Victoria Bitter. And if that wasn't enough, the back was even more surprising - 'WARNIE 23'!! I almost wanted to run after the kid and ask how the hell he got that shirt, but I had a train to catch. I knew Warnie was a big deal, but not that big, wow. Maybe he was sending dirty texts in Romania too...

This train ride was much more straightforward than the previous one. It wasn't a fast train, but it was quite scenic, and I enjoyed getting a good view of the Transylvanian countryside. An older woman was sitting opposite me, eventually we started talking and she actually turned out to be quite an interesting person. She was an Israeli, and 69 years old, yet she had been travelling alone, hiking in the mountains up near Maramureș. Actually, she'd been at the same festival that Marius (Mihai's brother) had visited a couple of days before. She also told me how she visited Australia, where she had toured as a singer a few years before. Of course when she was in Melbourne she stayed in Balaclava.

About four hours later, I arrived in Sighișoara. The walk from the train station to the city centre was quite interesting, as I noticed that there was a significant Roma population here (to my surprise I actually hadn't seen that many in Cluj). I also saw a small cemetery covered in communist insignia (e.g hammer and sickle logo) - probably a relic from the Ceaucescu years, though it looked quite new. I arrived in the centre, climbed a bunch if stairs and found my way to the old town. My hostel was right in the heart of the town, although it was pretty cheap and rustic.

After having to wait a little while to put my bags away, I headed out to check out what this place was all about. I headed down from the old town, and decided to take a look at the more residential part of the town to see if I could find anything interesting (I was looking more for people than any particular special buildings). Admittedly I didn't find too much, other than a bunch of fishermen by the river next to a the orthodox cathedral. After some time I came back to the city centre to do the more touristy thing. The middle of the town is dominated by a giant clock tower which has been there in one form or another since the 14th century. Next to that is the house where Vlad Tepeș was born, but I didn't go in because I heard there's just some lame vampire thing inside. The streets were nice, and even if the centre seemed a little bit touristy it was still pretty colourful and alive. The old town was quite elevated as well, providing good views of the hills nearby, filled with lots of old houses.

I hadn't really eaten properly the whole day, so when it came time for dinner I decided to load up a bit at a traditional Romanian restaurant I had seen earlier in the day. Pork, ham, tomato, mushrooms, dumplings and sour cream were all on the menu. After dinner I decided to investigate that communist cemetery I had seen earlier. Upon further inspection it seemed more anti-fascist than pro-communist, but there were still symbols everywhere. Every grave was marked with the same inscription in Russian: Неизвестный герой (never forget? I'll have to check).

I decided that tonight was not going to be a big one, and I hadn't really met anyone in the town, so I decided to go back to the hostel and relax. Soon enough however, I started to meet people who were sharing my dorm, including a German couple and a Canadian. The Canadian guy (Mark) was planning to go to Brașov next, just like me, and we talked about the possibility of hiring a car to do the Transfagarasan highway (regarded as one of the most impressive drives in the world)... Hopefully that will work out.

Not long after I went to the restaurant area if the bar and joined Mark for a beer. After a while of talking about travels and the usual stuff, a German girl (Lisa) whom Mark had met already joined us. She was pretty interesting, and had lived and travelled Australia extensively. She also had with her a large watermelon, which would prove to be an important factor in how my night played out...

We had too much watermelon for the three of us, so we started to offer it around to people sitting nearby. One of them was an older guy with a fancy beard who was drinking a glass of wine, whose name was Mihai, just like my host in Cluj. He didn't seem to want the watermelon, but it wasn't that clear because he knew almost no English and was struggling to communicate his thoughts, so we gave him a piece anyway. We kept trying to talk to him despite the language barrier (English, Spanish and German on our side, Romanian and French on his), and he came an joined our table. The conversation used bits of all these languages to reach an understanding, which was difficult but quite amusing. After some time we worked out that he was an artist, and worked in the local school as an art teacher. However due to Romania's pitiful wages, in the summer he would work on various projects restoring artworks on Romanian churches, which we thought was pretty cool. Eventually he decided that he wanted to show us something - his private studio, located only a couple of hundred metres away. Lisa was now occupied with something else but Mark and I decided to go.

We arrived into an old building and went into a room at the end of the corridor. Like many art studios, it was a bit of a mess, but it was filled with religious artworks and portraits. It was clear quite quickly that we were not in the studio of some random novice - this guy had a lot of skill. Over the next hour or so he took us through some of his artworks, gave us plenty of Romanian wine (the more he drank, the more his English seemed to improve) and explained to us the details of a fairly significant project that was in its early stages of conception: the painting of the Bran Castle citadel, perhaps the most famous castle in all of Romania. It was going to take him three years, and apparently hardly anyone knew about it. We also talked a bit more about the communist days in romania, and a little politics as well. He probably would have had us stay there until all the wine was gone and we couldn't stand up, but we were getting tired and left the studio around 12:30am. On our way out he stopped us, and ran back into the studio. He brought back two excellent drawings of Sighișoara that he had done, signed them and gave them to us for free! What a legend! We thanked him and said our farewells before returning to the hostel.

Just when we thought the night was over we saw Lisa again at the table, this time joined by a Romanian guy. I didn't quite catch his name, but he was pretty funny (if not pretty full of himself) and was also an artist as well. He showed us some of his works on his phone, which also looked fairly professional, and told us how he's got an upcoming exhibition in New York. He could have been making it all up, though they were pretty good and I wouldn't have been that surprised if it was true. Nevertheless, about twenty minutes was probably long enough to listen to this guy talk about his art, so after that time I managed to escape the conversation and go to bed. All in all, it turned out to be one of the more interesting nights I'd had on the trip!