From Pennsylvania to Transylvania

Hungarian Parliament

 So many people have asked about our recent trip to Eastern Europe that I decided to write a blog post.  We went on a Viking River cruise selected by our friend Bob; he and his wife Deb traveled with us.  It was a great trip, and we spent two weeks in Europe but only one week was on the Viking ship Atla, a long ship carrying 163 passengers.  We also stayed in hotels in the beautiful, cosmopolitan cities of Budapest and Bucharest and one night in Transylvania.

We flew from the US to Vienna and then to Budapest or the cities of Buda and Pest (Peche) which are separated by the Danube River.  We stayed at the Hilton Budapest in the Castle District on a hill overlooking the iconic, red-roofed Parliament building shown in a Viking ad on PBS.

We discovered that Hungarian Goulash is a delicious soup.  We ate several variations of Chicken Paprika and made a special trip to the Grand Hall Market to buy real Hungarian paprika—the sweet, not the spicy.  Red wines were very good on the whole during our trip.  We enjoyed Bulgarian Shopska Salata or country salad.  This is served with a thick, round bread.  We saw lamb cooked on a spit at Easter and we enjoyed Romanian sausages, cabbage rolls, and had pancakes for dessert, which are crepes with jam and cream.  And that is just the food we ate off the ship.  Viking also has delicious cuisine.

We had walking tours and bus tours, time on our own and optional excursions.  My favorite place was Dracula’s Castle in Bran, Romania which is in the region of Transylvania.  It was a royal castle built to be defended.  It is called Dracula’s Castle because Vlad the Impaler was prisoned there.  But that is a story too gruesome to be told here.



Dracula's Castle

Of course we learned a lot about the history of this very volatile part of the world.  From the Romans and the Ottomans to the Communists, these countries have been conquered many times.  Today they have been out from under the Iron Curtain for 15 years and are well on their way to building up capitalism.  Visible signs of the most recent war between Serbia and Croatia and Bosnia have been left as a reminder.  In Croatia we saw bullet holes in buildings and in Belgrade, Serbia, the bombed out Ministry of Defense has been left to sit among the downtown buildings.  This trip led me to look at maps of this region which was not at all familiar.  We visited Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Romania—all along the Danube River, taking numerous bus trips to excursions within these countries.  We traveled as far east as Constanta, Romania which is on the Black Sea.  We were close to Ukraine and Turkey.

Much of the scenery along the Danube is flat, fertile, farm land that frequently floods. (How’s that for alliteration?)  On our side trips we saw the snow-covered Balkans from Belgradochik, Bulgaria and the heavily forested Carpathian mountains of Transylvania. We saw Hungarian cowboys, plus musicians and folk dancers from all 5 countries; we visited a B&B in Croatia where we were served coffee and cake by the hostess.  We encountered wonderful, young, university-educated tour guides who were not only very knowledgeable about the history but also very optimistic about the future of their countries.

It was a wonderful trip.


Hungarian Cowboy