Bear beer and good times

We have seen two wild bears so far! And D reckons he has seen a third. Luckily we saw them from the safety of our cable car in which we were acending to the top of a mountain in Sinaia. we saw two brown bears cross a clearing in the forest. I though they were pretty big from that distance. But apparently they are scared of people.

Romanians are obessed with bears. It is like their national symbol, similar to the Nz kiwi. We rented a room from a family in Sighiasoara for a night and we slept in their lounge which was full of bear memorabilia. The national beer is called Ursus, which means bear.

Coincidently mum sent me a bbc article about how Romania bears are being forced to find food in towns. the government has caused a controversy of late because it is allowing rich foriegners to hunt 400 of them this year. Article is being posted below. I feel kinda sorry for the poor creatures...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3854507.stm

I believe Romania is truely underrated by most other Europeans. The countryside and towns alike are really beautiful. It is much more "developed" that Bulgaria, which is pretty rough. I think the EU is throwing a lot of money at it in lieu of its accession to the community in 2007. Everywhere you go whole towns are being rennovated.

In the countryside people are still dirt poor and eek a living from the land.

We are now in the town of Oradea, near the Hungarian border. We arrived here from Sighiasoara which is in the heart of transylvania. The town is the best preserved medieval citadel and it was hosting a medieval festival. It was packed with people. Most of whom seemed to be hard metal fans. There were a lot of black t shirts and long greasy hair. Iron Maiden seemed to be the most popular band on display.

We are renting a car for the next three days and are going to drive around the Maramures region, near the Ukranian border. It is mostly peasant villages where apparenty they live untouched by the modern world. Everything is still done by hand, with no electricity or running water. They even managed to escape the hard hand of collectivisation that communism dealt to the rest of the country.