Peles Castle

We backtracked about thirty miles to the South from Brasov this morning to visit the Peles Castle at Sinaia.  Unlike, yesterday's defensive military castle, this one is more a palace, fit for a king.  King Carol, more specifically, who had it constructed as a summer retreat in the mountains in the late 1800s.


It is a bit difficult to get a good photo of the whole castle.  Both this one and the castle at Bram should probably be visited by balloon to get a good picture.  I didn't see any balloons around so I just did the best I could.  And speaking of photography, it costs 20 Romanian Lei to get in but 32 Lei to use your camera.  I didn't pay the extra fee and just tried to take a few photos surreptitiously.  When you pay the extra photo fee, they give you a 3x5 card on a rope to hang around your neck.  There are "minders" stationed around the castle to catch violators.  My first attempt to use the camera produced a stern looking woman (perhaps a leftover from the Communist era) shaking her finger at me shouting, "no photos!"   Scared the heck out of a paying guest nearby.  I don't think he used his camera again for several minutes.


The interiors, I thought, are a little reminiscent of the Hearst Castle at San Simeon.  I wonder if he had seen this on his European tours. I'm going to have to pick up one of these books about Julia Morgan when I get home and check on that.

Here is the dining room at Peles Castle.


One of the artistic treasures on display is a full suit of armor, both horse and knight.


After the castle tour, we stopped at the nearby monastery.  (remember you can click on any photo to enlarge!  A couple more clicks gets you into my Flickr Photostream.)


The monastery dates from the late 1600s and has some remarkable paintings on the ceilings and walls that depict biblical scenes.  Here is a section of the ceiling.


Near the center you might notice Jesus bringing Lazarus out of the coffin.

Odds and Ends From Romania

I had a few photos I wanted to include but they don't really fit with posts I have in mind so here they are, with associated descriptions.

I always love to take pictures of "interesting infrastructure."  We noticed this utililty pole across from the hotel in Bucharest.  This might top anything I have seen in Egypt.  At least they seem to be labeled.


Parking seems to be short in most of the country.  I watched this person park his car while I kept saying, "no way!"  But it did fit.


 

This is just a nice picture of fall color as seen through a defensive position in a fort on a hill.


Here is a walk-up window at a bakery.  This one is on a street in Brasov but we have seen them in several places.  I notice that this one has been a tradition since 1939, so I guess the concept works.


We found these onions on display at an open-air market in Brasov this afternoon.  Notice that they are sold in braids besides having an interesting shape.

Transylvania and Dracula

We headed northwest from Bucharest this morning.  It is a bit over a hundred miles to our destination, The city of Brasov.


Along the way, we passed through farmland for about thirty miles to Ploiesti, home of one of the world's largest oil fields.  There were two allied bombing attacks on these fields and refineries during World War II.  One was launched from Egypt, the other from Italy.  Put those on your WWII reading list if you don't know about them.

A few miles after Ploiesti, we reached the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains.  We passed several ski towns as reached higher altitudes.  The Carpathians mark the beginning of the Transylvania region of Romania.


A few miles short of Brasov, we took a detour west to Bram, where a famous castle is located.


If you don't recognize it from my picture, you might remember it from this older version.  Think pitchforks, torches and wooden stakes.


Signs inside provide a bit of family genealogy for the Dracula family and remind us just what a vampire is.


The castle tour is interesting from a historical view as well as from the Dracula legend.  Romanian royalty lived here.  I'm not sure what they did with this secret staircase where you can see Linda enter and me emerge.



Just outside the castle, a local vendor provides a sample of cheese to Linda and our tour guide, Eduardo.


And, the nearby mountains form a pleasant background for the castle tour.

What's the Price of Gasoline in Romania?

I always like to check the price of fuel in any country that we visit.  The prices at this station are pretty typical.  The price is in LEU which is abbreviated as Ron.  No, I can't explain that.  LEU is the name on the currency but RON is what you frequently see on a price tag.  They are worth about 31 US cents at the moment.


Diesel and 95 octane both are selling for 5.53 Leu per Litre.  That equates to $6.60 per gallon.  That should make you feel better when you fill up next time.

On the Road Again - Romania

We are off to Romania for a two week tour of this ancient kingdom.

We left Minneapolis at about 4:00 pm on Sunday and headed out on a seven-hour flight to Amsterdam.  One nice thing about this route is that it takes us almost directly over our lake cabin in Northwest Wisconsin.  Here I am, monitoring the trip on the in-flight navigation system.  I  added the red arrow to the photo to point out the cabin.  I always enjoy watching this late afternoon plane pass nearby Gordon.  On Sunday, we went over at about 4:20.  It was about 45 minutes behind schedule at this point since we had a "mechanical problem" that had to be fixed.



What is new at Schiphol airport in Amsterdam?  Free Interenet access!  You can now get two thirty-minute shots to surf the net or check your e-mail before you have to pay.  Break out the laptop on your next visit.  Especially if you have been frustrated at the usual ten to twenty dollar daily charge at most airports.

This tour of Romania is being provided by Eduardo of Medieval Tours.  We wanted to get a day of rest before beginning with the actual tour, so Eduardo just met us at the airport, drove us to downtown Bucharest, checked us in at a hotel and then gave us a quick orientation to the downtown area today.  The real tour starts tomorrow.

We are staying at a small four-star hotel around the corner from the Radison.  It is just a couple of blocks to Victory Square, the cultural center of the city.

Eduarado suggested a nice restaurant near the Piata George Enescu.



This small area holds the main concert hall.  We'll return to Bucharest and see more of this area at the end of the tour.  The concert hall, like the museum across the street are both closed on Monday.  But, here is a quick peek at the concert hall.



 

Later, when we returned to the restaurant for dinner, we found the menu easy to read with English descriptions below the local entries.  But the local entries (Were they in Italian because this is an Italian restaurant?) such as Fettuccini al Salmone were easy to understand.  The only confusion was that many items were served in "pink sauce."   I found a great sounding recipe for a pink sauce at thus site, but I suspect that there was more than a touch of paprika in the one I had here.  Perhaps since Romania and Hungary share a common border, the pink sauce here includes a bit of Hungarian paprika.

Can You Believe What You Read?

I have a link on this site to the English Language edition of Al-Ahram, Egypt's most widely read and largely government owned newspaper.

I saw a link yesterday to a Ynet News story originating from Al Ahram that I hadn't seen in the English Language version. The essence of the story is this accusation:

'Mossad agent Ofir Harrari' instructed Jordanian Ibrahim abu-Zaid to set up a company in Egypt which would exclusively import an Israeli hair product, for both men and women, which causes infertility. This in order to completely destroy Egyptian reproduction abilities

I suppose the science fiction story section of Al Ahram doesn't get translated in the English Language Edition.

But this gives you some idea why Egyptians have some strange ideas.

Touched By Tornados

This has been a bad summer in the upper Midwest for storms. While things were calm here in Bloomington on May 22nd, North Minneapolis was struck by a full F2 tornado. Across the Mississippi river and a bit further north, another tornado struck in Fridley.

Both of these storms had connections to us. The house on the right in this photo was the site of one of Terry's first apartments:


While the worst storm damage was in North Minneapolis, our concern was with mom-in-law who lives in Fridley. Since there was no phone service available, we drove up to see how things were. Things were pretty ugly:


That's mom-in-law's house behind the trees on the left edge of the picture. Mom-in-law has lived here for over 55 years and watched that tree grow from a new planting to ... She only needed a new roof, gutters, some siding and interior Sheetrock work to get back to normal.

Here is another long-time resident across the street from her describing the damage to one of the local TV stations.


Unfortunately, that neighbor, Tony Mack, suffered a fatal stroke a couple of weeks later. I count him as a storm casualty even though it will never show up in official statistics.

On the way back home from Fridley that evening, we stopped to take this picture of railroad cars that had been blown over as they sat on a siding between Fridley and Minneapolis:


Then on July 1, a storm struck near our cabin in Northwest Wisconsin. Soon we learned that the winds included another F2 tornado that touched down a few miles Southwest of Solon Springs. Hey! That's our neighborhood! Soon we had an e-mail from our neighbor at the lake with pictures of large trees down on our lot.

It's a bit hard to describe just where the tornado hit near Solon Springs, but if you start out at the corner of Cemetery and Ramel and drive over to the intersection of Ramel and Bill Ramel roads, you'll be close.


Much of the damage in this area was downed trees. This very old White Pine had survived such indignities as having a road built right up against it before the storm brought it down:


The storm damage in this area can be seen all the way along the highway from Hinckley, MN eastward to Danbury, WI and then northeast toward the Gordon/Solon Springs area.

Near Danbury, some trees broke;


While others mostly bent.


This newspaper article tells the story that goes with those trees and with Guy Pardun's trailer:

At Riverside Landing, a canoe landing in the St. Croix National Scenic Riverway a few miles north of Danbury on Wisconsin Highway 35, massive trees littered the launching area and had crushed a trailer belonging to Pardun’s Canoe Rental and Shuttle Service of Danbury.

Two buses from Pardun’s were trapped in the launch area, unable to leave because of downed trees blocking the exit; one bus had a smashed windshield.

Guy Pardun, owner of Pardun’s Canoe Rental and Shuttle Service in Danbury, said his company was just getting a group of 20 canoeists into the river Friday night when the straight-line winds came through. Toppled trees crushed the vans but, amazingly, no one was hurt, he said.

It took chainsaws and backup transportation to get the would-be canoeists and campers to his home, where they slept on the floor and on beach chairs, Pardun said.

The result was a lot of work for me with the chain saw and good old Black Beauty, the 1985 Ford F250. I've taken about fifteen loads of brush and limbs to the Gordon town dump and stacked several years supply of firewood.


And, no tornado story is complete without something like this. As we were cutting a path through the limbs up at mom-in-law's house in Fridley, I noticed this strange looking thing sitting next to her garage:


What is it? It's an ashtray. This warehouse across Main Street had a break area near those new "windows" and the wind moved the ashtray across the street to a new location.

Summer Update

Where are the Sawyers going next? How is your place in Egypt? When are you going back to Egypt? What are you doing right now?

So many questions!

We spend most summers right here in the Twin Cities area, dividing our time between our home in Bloomington and the cabin near Gordon in northwest Wisconsin. This, after all, is where many Americans come to vacation. Land of 10,000 Lakes. Mild weather. Fishing. Canoeing. Golfing.


We are looking into a fall trip to Romania. Think Transylvania. Maybe, maybe not. If we go it will probably be in October.

But the questions we are most often asked this summer are about the Cairo Condo. It is just fine. In fact, we had "city gas" installed recently. This is one of the benefits of having many good friends in Cairo who look out for things in our absence. If you were not aware of it before, we used bottled propane for cooking. Adding city gas will get us some cabinet space and eliminate the hassle involved when the gas bottle runs low.


But most people really want to know about the political situation in Egypt. So here are a few links to some websites with more information.

Here is a link to an article in the English language magazine, Egypt Today, with a feature on the no-longer anonymous Sandmonkey, Egypt's best-known English-language blogger. His experiences will take you back to the center of the revolution. A brief sample:

By 2007, Sandmonkey’s thought-provoking blog was also provoking authorities. His commitment to political and human rights and his staunch opposition to police abuse, alongside his street activism, put him on the state security radar. The fact that he was widely read internationally didn’t help things either.

How about the Egyptian economy? With about 14 million tourists arriving in 2010 and somewhere around 10-14 % of the economy consisting of tourist spending, things have been bad. This article says that Europe's largest tour operator is only experiencing a 14% reduction in bookings to Egypt this summer versus last. Our friends suggest the total is still down quite a bit more than that.

And the political situation? Well, elections are yet to come. Both parliamentary and presidential elections will be held this fall. Most eyes are on the role that the Muslim Brotherhood may play in a future government.

Michael Totten is by far the best journalist covering the middle east over the past ten years. He is an independent journalist from Portland, Oregon. This blog post consists of his interview, in Cairo, with a high-ranking member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Read it and you will learn quite a bit about the brotherhood.

And how is the United States now viewed in the middle east and in Egypt in particular? Here is a recent article from the Boston Globe that might get your attention. The lead paragraph:

The United States is viewed less favorably in much of the Arab world today than it was during the final year of the Bush administration, and President Obama is less popular in the region than Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, according to a poll released today by the Arab American Institute, a nonpartisan research and advocacy group.

...In 2008, the final year of the Bush administration, only 9 percent of Egyptians had a favorable attitude towards the United States. A year later, after Obama took office, that number jumped to 30 percent. But now it has plummeted to just 5 percent of Egyptians who view the United States favorably.

As I always remind folks though, Egyptians feel much differently about Americans than about the American government.

We plan to return to Cairo in January, insha'Allah.

A Virtual Visit to Whitefish, Montana

Sitting at home today, I was browsing a blog that led me to a controversy about the members of the board of trustees at a community college in Northwest Montana. That soon led me to a Google Map of the area and I realized that it was not terribly far from Whitefish, Montana.

That, in turn, caused me to remember my last train ride in the United States.

The year was 1968. I was a graduate student at the University of Minnesota and had decided to travel home to Portland, Oregon, by train for the Christmas holidays. I left Minneapolis and headed west on the Great Northern Empire Builder. I had told my girlfriend (now my wife, by the way) that I'd be back on the 31st of December to celebrate New Year's Eve. After a pleasant visit with my family, I began my trip back to Minnesota around 6 p.m. on the afternoon of December 29th. The schedule called for about 37 hours to complete the trip with arrival in Minneapolis on the morning of December 31st.

Before leaving home, my wonderful aunt Frances handed me a large bag of cookies and a healthy supply of cake. I squeezed them carefully into my suitcase.

The train left Portland at 3:00 p.m. bound for Spokane.


In Spokane the cars we were on joined up with the real Empire Builder, coming from Seattle. I recall that we sat in the Depot in Spokane for quite a while waiting for the connection. I could see a bank thermometer from my seat while we waited. It was flashing -16.

We pulled out of the Spokane depot and began heading up into the mountains of Idaho and Montana where it began to get cold.

The National Weather Service records for the time list these temperatures:

City	Date	Minimum	Maximum
Spokane, WA	30-Dec	-22	-11
Whitefish, MT	31-Dec	-24	-7.1
Havre, MT	29-Dec	-43.1	-29

As we climbed into the mountains east of Spokane, I noticed that a few passengers from the car behind us had moved up into my car. "No heat back there," one grumbled. Soon it began to feel chilly in my car. The window frosted. Breath became visible. It was cold. More passengers came to enjoy the relative warmth, though.

It's about a five hour ride from Spokane to Whitefish. By the time we pulled in to the depot we were very cold. The conductor had us all leave the train and enter the depot. They would get the heat going again while we warmed up inside.

Now here is where memory gets warped. I've told this story many times over the years. Each time I tell it the Whitefish depot gets smaller, the number of passengers gets larger and the heat source in the depot becomes more like a glowing coal stove. Imagine my surprise this morning when I Googled up a few pictures of the depot and it looked like this:



That looks large and comfortable. I was just sure that there was a wood or coal stove in the middle of the tiny waiting room.

Streetside view from
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sjb4photos/2517939857/in/set-72157605029545189/
which is in Steve Brown's wonderful Flickr Photostream at
http://www.flickr.com/people/sjb4photos/




A photo recently for sale on eBay shows an older view of the depot.




Trackside view from
http://www.greatamericanstations.com/Stations/WFH/Station_view


While we spent two or three hours in the Whitefish Depot, railway crews were outside applying acetylene torches to some of the pipes on the side of the passenger cars. We were told that the heat was back on and loaded back up.

I don't know how far we made it before the next freeze-up. Maybe a hundred miles? And this scene repeated itself all the way across Montana and North Dakota. Instead of New Year's Eve in Minneapolis, I celebrated it on a railroad siding in Devil's Lake North Dakota. And the train was out of both food and beverages by that time as well as out of heat. But I had cookies. And cake!

Since this was long before cell phones, I sent a telegram to Linda telling her the sad story. When we finally arrived in Minneapolis about noon on January 1st, we were 30 hours late.

As I said, this was my last train ride in the United States.

But the train rolls on! Here is a clipping from December of 1990 noting an Empire Builder 24 hours behind schedule when it reached Fargo.