Friday, June 28, 2013

Operation Vampire Hunt and predicting the future

Song of the day: Þjóðvegur 66 (Road 66) - KK

Today started out pretty good, and promises to get better. DOMA got overruled, I had a croissant for breakfast, and oh, yeah. I'm going to Romania tonight.

That's right, who's going vampire hunting? This guy.

So this might for the time being turn into a travel blog (exciting, isn't it.) and document my discoveries and trials at a course/convention on youth unemployment. After that, me and my friend who shall henceforth be known as The Queen of the Flying Tigers (at her request; I'll think of something shorter) will frolic about the country, and among other things visit Castle Bran; one of the several places linked for marketing purposes  to the disturbing individual known is pop culture as Count Dracula. Full name Vlad 'The Impaler' Dracul III.

We will be staying at a location in Transylvania, and this will cause me quite a bit of distress for the reason that after watching that awful Sandler flick Hotel Transylvania, I am utterly incapable of pronouncing it normally. Instead it will sound like I am being injected with a syringe full of clichéd stereotypical accents while being electroshocked at the same time and it goes something like 'TRANSilVANia!!!'

I will therefore resist all and any impulse to ever say the name. This may prove difficult.

From what I've seen, the temperature in Romania at the moment and for the foreseeable future will be hanging somewhere around 30 degrees Centigrade. This, of course, means that my brain is going to melt and I am going to DIE. Because, you see, here in this particular part of the northern hemisphere, we call it summer when the temperature rises over ten degrees, and 17 degrees for any amount of time is considered a heat wave. We do occasionally get something like 24 degree, at which point we stop wearing clothes at all and sleep outside. But I exaggerate (only a little bit:)

I'm not even going to get a tan, because I don't get tans; I get slightly weathered, or in extreme cases bleached, rather like a piece of driftwood on a foreign beach. And if I don't wear sunscreen at, like, strength 30-50, I'll burn so badly I won't be able to move. But I shall prevail; I have churches and museums and weird shops to see and people to meet! I even intend to wear my Pizza John shirt as much as I can in the vain hope that I will meet other Nerdfighters, and that they won't be discouraged from talking to the maniac with the giant map getting lost as soon as she steps outside her hostel in midtown Bucharest.

It's odd, though, how things turn out. I didn't ever expect going to Romania of all places; I don't even know anyone who's gone there, but I immediately got excited when the Queen (let's just call her Europa. For the moon/continent, not the mythological figure. Though I could of course make some nasty and uncalled for joke regarding her love of animals) told me about the project and since we could both afford it we thought why not? Although when looking at the photos she was a tad discouraged by the fact that the architecture looked very similar to Poland, from whence she originally hails. But we think it will still be different enough to be very interesting and worth visiting. It will be an adventure.

So I'll try to upload some pictures of interesting things and some interesting facts/happenstances as well once we've began our journey.

Now all I need is Rafiki to shower us with pieces of wisdom and make us get lost and we're set.

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