Brasov

Since Dad asked and because I was curious myself, I looked up where exactly the Carpathians are in Romania. It turns out that both Brasov and Cluj are considered to be in this mountain range. And we most certainly took a train through them on the way to Buchrest.

The Romanian countryside as seen through the train window and captured by my cheap cellphone camera. 

When we arrived in Brasov, it was already dark. After we arrived at our hostel, our first move was to go to the supermarket to buy shower supplies and after we got cleaned up we went out to get kebabs at one of the  the places we had seen on the way to the store. We ended up going to Andos, a sort of fast food chain. The kebab ended up being kind of nasty -- with way too much sauce! We vowed never to go back to Andos. Then we returned to the hostel and watched a movie in the common room. After it was over, we wanted to go out for a snack. We had seen a few pastry places that were selling this pretzel-like circular thing stuffed with chocolate or other things called covrigi. But when we arrived, they were all out of chocolate ones. Then we remembered that there was a picture of a really delicious looking desert pictured at Andos. So we made the worst decision of our vacation and went back to Andos. We went up to the counter, pointed to the picture and asked for it. They told us we had to go upstairs to get it. So we went up, and were handed a menu in Romanian. After some discussion, we decided to risk it and order something just because it had chocolate in it. Because how bad could something with chocolate in it be? 

Pretty bad, it turns out. Spoiled lumpy milk wrapped in a crepe sprinkled with chocolate sprinkles...yum.

The moral of this story is that you should ever order something just because the only word you understood was chocolate. Awkward. 

Meanwhile, our waitress has completely disappeared. We don't want to wait for her to come back and stare at our depressing dessert. And we know how much it cost, so we decide to just leave the money and bail. The only trouble was that as soon as we got out, Tristan thought he didn't grab his glasses. So we go back up stairs. And as we do, our waitress sees us, and goes up the stairs after us. As we leave once again, she says thank you to us, leading us to believe that she thought we had dined and ditched and then had an attack of conscious and returned to pay.

The next day we saw all of Brasov: 

Infamous Ando's and pretty fog. Also, it was as cold (if not colder) than it looks

Yes, that IS a sign modeled after the Hollywood sign up there in the fog. 

After seeing the main sights of the city, we hiked up to the Brasov Citadel, which was honestly pretty lame, but it was worth it for the views. 

The citadel 

 We finished up the day by walking by the city walls, and seeing "the narrowest street in eastern europe" which was the most contrived sight I've ever seen. If you ask me, it didn't even count as a street and certainly didn't warrant any pictures, it was more of gap between two buildings.
We relaxed for the rest of the night, which was quite lovely.