Home of Dracula's Castle even though Dracula was never here
From Adrian McGurk's World Tour 2009/2010 in Bran, Romania on Sep 06 '09
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Day 20
On the bus to Bran, it passed the small town of Rasov, which like Brasov, also had a hollywood style lettering on the hill. Like Bran, Rasov also looked like that it had nothing else in common with Hollywood.
Even though Bran Castle is called 'Dracula's Castle' - apparently it has nothing to do with the Dracula story whatsoever.
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Bran was a tourist nightmare - full of tourists and plentiful of tacky souvenir shops. However, not even that could take anything away from Bran castle which looked ace from the town below. It was a strange looking and forbading castle on top of a hill face overlooking the town below. A little buzz of excitement came over me.
If you were gonna have a castle in a film that was supposed to haunted, spooky or feared by the locals then this definitely ticked all the right boxes.
Even going inside, every room raised the expectation levels even though the rooms were rather bare. Eventually, the excitement died down as the amount of tourists in the place seemed to keep increasing and they were blocking the walkways to watch a traditional Romanian folk band play music in the courtyard of the castle. I started to feel some embarrassment about being there among the tourists who were lapping up all the 'traditional' Romanian stuff that was being fed to them.
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It was now getting dark and the vampires would be coming out soon so I got the bus back to Brasov.
Despite all the tacky tourism about the place, Bran Castle was definitely the highlight of Romania so far.
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