Cluj-Napoca, Romania — October 2006
Manning Leonard Krull  |  Trip index  |  Photo album

I took a series of buses from Curtea de Arges and wound my way up to Cluj-Napoca, a really nice, big, friendly city in the northwest of Romania, full of students and cafes and nice distractions everywhere. In my three trips to Eastern Europe, there's always been a point near the end of the trip where I arrive in the next place and suddenly, unexpectedly realize that I feel like I'm in Western Europe again. On this trip that happened when I hit Cluj-Napoca. The differences are almost intangible; suddenly I feel a little less out of place, people are a little more used to Westerners/foreigners and this makes communication smoother all around, everything's a little newer and more comfortable and more convenient.

We'd just arrived at the hostel in Cluj-Napoca when I received the shocking news: Black Sabbath, Interzisi???

My first afternoon in Cluj-Napoca, I was trying to find the Transylvanian History Museum, and I ended up in the Pharmacy Museum by accident! It only cost 2 lei and looked really neat so I checked it out anyway. It was great! It consisted of just four small rooms full of dusty old medical cabinets and jars, but the place had an amazing spooky atmosphere, and the guide there was a weird, old, incredibly charismatic guy who gave me a private tour of the place, switching back and forth between his okay English and okay French. The building is the site of an actual pharmacy that opened in the 1500s and operated continuously for something like 400 years.

Painting on the door of a medical cabinet. Just a friendly reminder about what happens if you don't take your medicine.

The basement of the museum shows what a pharmacist's laboratory would've looked like when this place opened 500 years ago.

It was weird to think about how most of my travels in Europe have been funded by my freelance work building websites for American pharmaceutical companies, and here I am visiting a medieval Romanian pharmacy. I wonder if these guys need a website.

After the Pharmacy Museum, I finally found my way to the Transylvanian History Museum...

File this under Things I Did Not Expect to See in the Transylvanian History Museum. I'm pretty sure this is a werewolf skeleton. They've got a lot of those in Transylvania.

Whoa, actual dead people! Bonus!

Not a lot of people know that ancient Transylvanians had prehensile tails.

Okay: Things I Did Not Expect to See in the Transylvanian History Museum, Part 2. I seriously don't get how this is Transylvanian, unless they were going for some sort of awesome Dracula Versus the Mummy thing, in which case, my hat is off to you, Transylvanian History Museum!

Probably the official seal of Cluj-Napoca? I dunno.

This awesome organ is in the big cathedral in the center of town. The church was so dark, I couldn't really get a good picture of the thing, but I wanted to at least get a halfway decent picture of...

...The little singing faces on the pipes! How neat!

From Cluj-Napoca, I took a minibus into Hungary, all the way to Budapest, and since I'd already visited Budapest a couple times, I continued onward by train to my last destination of the trip: Bratislava, Slovakia.

- Manning Leonard Krull