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hungary and romania At midnight this morning Globe Trekker had all of my attention as Ian Wright made his way across Hungary and Romania, which was an interesting change of pace from other episodes that I've seen. In many ways what was formerly known as part of Eastern Europe is just as exotic as places in Asia. People have a general idea of what to expect there, but more often than not most of what they know is based on cliches and hearsay. I also include myself in that category. Before I saw the program about all that I could say about Hungary was that it was east of Austria and Budapest was one of their major cities. Anything else about the country was a mystery to me and I hadn't given much though to seeing the country. Then again up until fairly recently this was a communist country cut off from the West and casual travel. Ian seemed to enjoy Hungary, but I'm not quite sure if I would add that country of my list of places to see just yet. Maybe this has to do with it being so closed off from the rest of the world for so long that its interests aren't as well known to me. Even after seeing the episode not many things stayed with me. In fact I had to go to the web site to see exactly where he had been and what he had seen when he was there. Once I did that I decided that Hortobagy National Park and a museum of collected communist statues were what appealed to me the most. Now if Hungary seemed remote to me, Romania was even more unlike what I see in my day to day life. As Ian pointed out this was the country where the man who would become known as Dracula was born and a large population of Gypsies still live and roam, which in some ways is enough reason to go there just once. |