Hi guys,

I will report a bit about my second Easter Holidays which I took at end of April...First we went to fancy Cluj, the famous university city!!! There we visited great sights like Piata Unirii with the Michaels Church, Bulevardul Eroilor, Casa lui Matei Corvin, the Orthodox Cathedral, Bastion Croitorilor and of course the best university Universitatea Babes Bolyai!!!:D We took nice cocos coffee @Coffice and had great dinner in an Italian (!) restaurant!Passing by Aiud with a great bastion, next stop was Alba Iulia, a historically really important place (Unification took place here) with an impressing Citadel with a Romanic cathedral (yeah, something for me:)) The Citadel seemed like a city in the city, with the Orthodox complex, the Romanic one, Princely courts and the Costozza monument (and also the archaeological faculty of the university). There are aso Baroque style reamins, so it is all a mix of different architecture styles!On we went towards Dacian territory, where we stopped in Deva, a small town (with Easter & Bunny statues still reminding us of Easter). The highlight is without a doubt the Citadel with the Hollywood-like sign DEVA on the mountain, but we didn't go up.The Museum of Dacian Civilization is closed for restauration until October, so we couldn't see it.But maybe the real attraction was the lets say most interesting hotel I have ever seen, Hotel Decebal, purest communist feeling!!!A really ugly block hidden between some shady trees, inside everything made of wood, in the rooms the simplest beds ever, in the bathroom the washing sink nearly breaking down and the shower handles falling off during every shower... We felt like the only guests there, the restaurant was abandoned, though fortuntaely the next morning we managed to get a breakfast (that is, bread, butter and bad coffee) served by a nice woman. For the real breakfast then, we went to ARTA cofetarie, and the name already indicates: They made pastry an ART!I ate a Passion choc cake,yummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmy!!! Resuming, Deva is nice to stroll around. There still was more to come...

Hi people,

I feel that I want to write a bit about Romanian culture...The food portions here have not become smaller, shop assistants in food shops use to give you candies or chewing gums instead of small cash, people still wonder why it could be useful to learn Romanian and toilets usually dont have keys, very annoying especially for women. On 23 of April there was not only the International Book and Authors Rights Day, but also an important event for Oradea took place, they introduced the first new tram here in our city!!! And guess which one it is...pure Austrian Fabrication, reminds me of Vienna...Somehow this new tram doesnt fit into the city and it destroys in a way the atmosphere of the nostalgic old German construction trams...But anyway its good for Oradea, I think. Another Austrian point they have MILKA here, I saw a MILKA car and publicity on TV and in the street tja MILKA cea mai fina placere, oriunde ai merge...Although I have to admit that I prefer POIANA csoki. It seems to me that all Oradea is waking up and being polished, what can that be??? Right ELECTIONS on first of June!!! They built gleamy new tram stops with panouri e.g panels, they dug up the green spaces to renovate them, on historically and culturally important buildings they put a signs, and so I learn about places and palaces of which before I hadnt even been aware of...Its quite interesting though to see how a city changes because they are electing a new major. Anyhow I  better keep my nose out of politics!!! More useful to concentrate on... languages!!!

Monday, the last day up in the North... We had breakfast together with Jens, the Norwegian guy. Then we went to Sighet and visited the Memorial Museum, a shocking experience!!! In the prison, there were various exhibition rooms dedicated to various topics like e.g. communist regimes, Securitate, Ceausescu, minorities persecuted, but also women in prison, poetry in prison, censured writers or arts & culture. What especially touched me was the creativity people develop in really bad situations like during prison: the elaborated double-based etuis for messages, wrote whole dictionaries Englih/French-Romanian, or poems on paper tissues or stitched onto handkerchiefs. After a short stroll through Sighet we had to say goodbye yo Jens who continued his journey and we also started our trip home. We only stopped to eat lunch & play volleyball (by the way, on this occasion we beat our personal record - we did more than 200!). We arrived in Oradea in the evening.