I can think of so, so many reasons why my trip to Romania blew hard and why no one should follow in my footsteps and take a group tour there. So I have decided to type out as many reasons as I can think of. This list will grow as I think of things.
1. The hotel was an hour and a half bus ride away from the airport. When you have been traveling for almost 24 hrs, this bus ride is just horrid.
2. You have no control over your fellow tour members. They may just be awful (we had a few horrible ones in our group).
3. There must be some trick to the hotel showers cause ours kept flooding the bathroom floor...this occurred in a few different hotels.
4. Most mornings our wake up calls were between 7:30 am and 8:30 am. It is not a relaxing vacation when you have to be up at 7:30 am so you can hurry up and get on a bus.
5. Once you are awake, you must hurry so you can shower and eat breakfast at the hotel. It is pertinent that you eat breakfast at the hotel as you never know where your next meal will be coming from or when you will be able to eat again.
6. The tour bus will take you on journeys through the countryside. This sounds nice but these bus rides last for endless hours. One day we were on the bus for over 8 hrs total.
7. Our tour guide really, really enjoyed the sound of his own voice. Though knowledgeable, he was quite pompous about it and often quite patronizing.
8. Most of Romania is just like Borat's version of Kazakhstan. No, I'm not making a joke.
9. Did I mention the fellow tour members? There is a reason that Americans have a bad reputation as loud, obnoxious and xenophobic. Chances are, you'll be travelling with these sorts of people on your group tour.
10. When we finally got to eat lunch, often we were deposited unceremoniously at gas stations and told to grab something to eat on the bus.
11. Oh, the "Dracula Tour" left out a lot of that boring vampire stuff. We were promised vampires, Twilight, True Blood, etc. and not much of this was even mentioned. We got one cool themed hotel and one themed restaurant. No other attractions were vampire related.
12. The rest of the tour was occasionally related to Vlad the Impaler. We were expected to know a great deal of his history already. If you were not terribly familiar with Vlad Tepes, you were pretty much screwed. Basic questions were scoffed at.
13. In one town, they had a few museums. Not really museums, just a couple of rooms with some historical artifacts. In one room, there were some weapons. Instead of talking about the artifacts, the tour guide talked for a good 20 minutes about the Vikings invading Russia. I pretended to be claustrophobic and left because I was so utterly bored.
14. In Romania, they love raw bacon. They served it at a few different restaurants. This may not necessarily be a drawback to all, but probably to some.
15. If you are a vegetarian, be warned: it is assumed that pretty much all you eat is cheese. I was served appetizers of cheese followed by entrees consisting solely of cheese. It was not really an identifiable cheese. I think it was a cousin to feta cheese, perhaps, but I'm not sure.
16. Did I mention the fellow travelers? Well, they also take endless pictures of everything in sight. We had a pair that took pictures of the bus, getting off and on the bus, the gas stations, the gas station attendants, the bathrooms, etc. They also composed still life pictures of the things that they bought at gas stations and around town. They stopped tours in order for other tour members to take photos of them doing things like disembarking from the bus. They also really liked group photos, which I abhor. I don't want photographic evidence that I spent time with some of these folks. Many probably thought that I was a snotty bitch, and you can probably understand why. I didn't mind that people didn't care for me, this meant that the ones that I didn't care for stayed away from me and didn't try to talk to the bitchy girl.
17. Shopping was lame. It was mostly like a big dollar store. Everything was made in China, handmade goods were almost impossible to come by.
18. Oh, the fellow travelers! They will get impossibly drunk and bang on adjacent hotel room doors at 3 am. They will hold loud conversations in the hallway. They might even have loud drunken fights in the room next to you. They might also have loud drunken sex in the room next door. It's all wonderfully fun and relaxing at 3 am.
19. Back to the meal thing: you never know when you will eat dinner each night and you have no control over this. Remember to stock up on snacks at the gas station as you may be eating your dinner as late as 9, 10, or even 11pm at night.
20. At the themed restaurant, you get to meet an aging actor playing Dracula. He may not bite you, but he just might drool on you. Dirty old goat.
That's quite enough for now. I may add to this list if I have the time and wherewithal. Next I will post the follow-up e-mail that I received from Tours of Terror following the ordeal.
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
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4 comments:
#21 - the "coach" rides were on a bus, and not a horse-drawn coach like we were hoping for (like the novel I was expected to know inside and out)
#22 - the travelers' parting gift of larvae intended for us to eat on the 8 hour plane ride back to the states...
Wow. And ew. And wow again. Guess I won't be breaking open the piggy bank for a trip like this...
The Romanian Tourism Board may put a contract on you for this post, but I applaud your honesty! You'll save some poor bastard from a week of eating strange cheese and hanging out with Borat.
Man, too bad the trip ended up being suckfest (pun intended). But on the bright side, you guys learned a very, very important lesson, and that's that you should never, ever go on a guided package tour. Never. Ever.
Also, the Kazakhstan scenes in the Borat movie were filmed in Romania. From wikipedia:
The "Kazakhstan" depicted in the film has little or no relationship with the actual country and the producers explicitly deny attempting to "convey the actual beliefs, practices or behavior of anyone associated with Kazakhstan" in the "all persons fictitious" disclaimer. The scenes showing Borat's home village were filmed in the Gypsy village of Glod, Romania. The name of Borat's neighbor, Nursultan Tuyakbay, is a cross between the names of Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev and opposition politician Zharmakhan Tuyakbay.
No Kazakh language is heard in the film. Borat's neighbors in Kazakhstan were portrayed by Romanians who were unaware of the film's subject.
But hey, at least you guys got to see a little corner of the world that not many people get to see. That's pretty awesome.
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