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[ellarien]

I had a bookstore accident today. It does happen occasionally; the really surprising thing is that it doesn't happen more often, when I go into the campus bookstore nearly every weekday. Usually I just look, but today I went in hoping for Throne of Jade, didn't find it, and came out with four other books instead, three of them by authors new to me. (The other one being Jared Diamond's Collapse; I own a slightly scrambled copy of Guns, Germs and Steel back in Sheffield, but have never gotten around to reading it.)

My latest Amazon order arrived, too; maps of Romania and Beijing. The Romania looks surprisingly densely inhabited, except for the mountains; a webwork of roads and railways and little towns. (Most of what I know about Romania comes from Olivia Manning's Balkan Trilogy, which I read after it was televized in the late 1980s).

The September conference in Romania is billed as Wednesday-Saturday, but it turns out that the agenda for Saturday is a (daylight) tour of Dracula's castle. Decisions, decisions; go home on the Saturday and go to church with my mother on Sunday, which isn't something I get to do nearly as often as I'd like, or indulge in a bit of once-in-a-lifetime tourism?

Comments

[ellarien]

I think I've had too much exposure to the wide emptiness of the American Southwest!

The meeting is in Sinaia, which is a smallish resort town between Bucharest and Brasov, where the nineteenth-century royals had a summer palace; the tourist-board descriptions make it sound rather pleasant.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

Sinaia the town felt like an off-season ski resort to me, but the two palaces Peles and Pelisor on the hill above it (an easy walk up from the station) are really something - one's High Ruritanian with thick oak panelling and secret passages, the other is light and Art Deco. If you're flying into Bucharest and taking the train, the train ride up into the mountains has some lovely views.

http://fivemack.livejournal.com/2005/07/03/ recounts my trip there last year, and makes me feel wanderlustig again ... on the other hand, making me feel wanderlustig is no great feat.