Bike ride to Rasinari

This morning we woke up quite late after having slept amazingly well. After I took my first shower in two days, we got our breakfast, which was muesli with honey, yoghurt and fresh cherries, and an Illy espresso. We ate it outside in the private alley of our hostel. Our plan for the day was going out for a bike ride to a small village to the south called Rasinari.

As I wrote, our PLAN was to go for a bike ride to Rasinari. As soon as we got to the bike rental office, we saw taxis waiting a bit further and decided to go by taxi, because that would be about the same price (it was even cheaper in the end, since we took the bus back). Rasinari is a beautiful village with a lot of colourful houses, each with their own gate and inner square. A small river runs through the village and there used to be a tramline connecting the village with Sibiu.

The tramline today is abandoned. The overhead line is still in place, but hangs almost down to the ground in some areas, the rails are quite rusted and partially demolished and the trams are just degrading at the side of the road.

We made our way to the upper part of the village, where we saw the church, which had some old wall paintings on the outside. Since it started raining, we ran to the bus and came back to Sibiu. Once in Sibiu the rain stopped and we walked through the park where a biking route starts toward Rasinari. The park was surrounded by very nice houses in a typical Transylvanian style, one could easily imagine Dracula roaming the streets there.  There also was a very nice church, which had gorgeous icons on the inside.

We walked and walked and walked until we arrived back at the station. There we did something we could lose our job for in Belgium: we walked over the tracks, not wearing a high visibility vest in an operational area without any crossings. This way we arrived at what we thought would be the train maintenance depot, but which really was some kind of a locomotive museum. They had a lot of old steam locomotives and also a railway turntable which was still in use. As a matter of fact, they were even preparing a fashion show which would take place that night and where the turntable would be the catwalk.

When we finished fooling around on the train yard, we crossed the tracks again and went for supper at a restaurant called 'Weinkeller'. Obviously with such a name they had a huge selection of quality wines. We had a nice limited edition bottle of Romanian red merlot. I ate a turkey paupiette filled with pickled gherkins and paprika, with a delicious cheese sauce on top of it. As dessert we had cheese dumplings with cherries and whipped cream.