Today — Doug and I set ourselves the mission of reaching Sighisoira — a small Transylvanian town North East of Sibiu. The journey took us a staggering 3 hours by what can only be described as the slowest train in the history of existence. It was also complete with a man playing the accordion and singing terribly and a woman trying to sell biros.

We got to Sighisoira at 15:00 and were told our bus would be leaving at 19:56 — so we had a fair amount of time to kill. That did not worry us though, as we had been told that Sighisoira (it’s a real hassle to type so I’m just going to say “Sig” from now on) had many little gems tucked away, with many a tower to climb.

Sadly, our experience in Sig can only be described as pretty darn depressing. Having climbed to the top of the hill where the historic centre stands, we soon realised that perhaps sight-seeing on Christmas Eve was a terrible, terrible idea.

Everywhere was shut. Everywhere.

We climbed to the very top, determined to find the highest church and seek refuge within. I’m not even sure it was a real church in the end. It looked like it was made of marzipan. But you couldn’t go inside it because it was made or marzipan. And you couldn’t eat it because it was a “monument istoric” like every other bloody building. Here is an example of another “monument istoric”:

By the time we’d walked about a trillion miles, it was 17:00 — so we still had another 3 hours to kill until our bus was meant to leave.

This may have been spent at the souvenir shop, had it been open.

Instead, we began to head down the hill. On the way down, we passed a sign that seemed to indicate “no trumpets”. Odd you may think, but after 2 hours of sitting outside a bar at the bottom of the hill, we realised that rogue trumpet players were a genuine issue in Sig, and began to understand why people might just pass laws against them

The trumpet playing we heard can only be described as upliftingly poor, in the same way that this video is.

After eventually waiting until 19:30 — we returned to the bus stop only to find that the last bus had in fact left at 14:00, a whole hour before we’d even arrived there.

Not to worry, there’s always the train.

Well actually, there isn’t. The last one left at 17:00.

Pricks.

We thought about hitchhiking for a solid 7 minutes before reluctantly surrendering to the prospect of being murdered and raped in the back of a Romanian taxi. And paying 250 Lei for the privelidge.

But we were neither murdered nor raped, and we’re sitting in the flat now having received one piece of Christmas cheer from our landlady:

Having received no calls from girls confessing their undying love or unconditional affection, we’ve come to the conclusion that either the signal here is terrible, or Love Actually is hopelessly unrealistic. We’re leaning towards the former.

As always, here’s a bonus round from Sig — it wasn’t all bad.

← Bonus tower for getting this far.