By train through Europe - 14th August - Deva

Getting in the habit of waking up early was one of my smarter ideas I’d say, as this carried over to my vacation, which gave me a lot more time to see new things.

Around 8 am, we headed out for breakfast, but had to notice that several places were still closed. But, the early restaurant gets the tourist, and we ate some very nice omelets, accompanied by more lemonade (they didn’t have hot chocolate. I was very disappointed.).

The trip continued to an ancient, Romanian village up in the mountains. So far up in the mountains, that our internet died. Truly scary.

The place was an archeological site of a village, that had once stood its ground against the Romans, by throwing rocks and trees down the hills to crush the incoming legions. At one point, they apparently had enough of the fighting and made peace with the Romans but were allowed to keep their culture.

_{Have you already performed your blood sacrifice to the old gods this year?}

There were two things that stood out to me:

1. The ground seemed to glitter, because the stones were very rich in minerals. Super pretty, I’m sad my camera didn’t catch it.
2. People were still digging out stuff. In Germany, most archeological sites that are open for visitors are basically completely “finished”. Not here. @alexdory told me, that it’s usually a funding problem. I got the urge to set up a fund but have no idea how to. It’s always a shame when pieces of history are potentially lost.

As the sun was gaining in strength, we fled the heat to a truly vampiric looking castle, as it’s appropriate for Transylvania. The castle Hunedoara was beautiful and, almost more important, provided a lot of cool and shady places to protect us from the midday heat.

_{I tried to avoid capturing all the tourists ... it's harder than one might think}

I had an issue with the low door frames, as I bumped my head more than once. At the same time, the steps on the stairs were freakishly large. I asked @alexdory if ancient Romanians had weirdly long legs and very short upper bodies, to which he simply replied: ”Ancient Romanians were spiders, obviously.”

Another mystery solved.

After eating lunch, we headed for a hotel in Deva, to take a break. And then, we headed to another castle, which was a bit smaller and had the same issue as the old village: There wasn’t enough funding to properly fix it. For about an hour, we watched the sunset, before finally going down again, eating some lunch and falling into bed.