I just ran across this neat rocku-documentary about my best friend Vlad Ţepeş, aka Dracula. It's in three parts, each one about ten minutes long...

And here are parts two and three.

There are a few really cool shots of Castle Poenari in the snow. I was there in October when it was chilly and a bit cloudy, but I'd love to see the place in wintertime like that. The documentary also tells some of my favorite weird stories about Dracula, like how he used to keep a golden chalice in the town square of each of his cities, which no one ever stole because all of his subjects were all so terrified of him. I love that stuff.

I try not to collect things; I try not to own things. Of all of my adventures all over Europe (about twenty countries in the last few years), I've only ever kept one souvenir: this small rock that I pried out of the floor of Cetatea Poenari — the castle built by Vlad Ţepeş, aka Vlad the Impaler, aka Dracula — in the Transylvania region of Romania.



It's about an inch and a half tall. I carry it everywhere in the pocket of my backpack.

Vlad forced his imprisoned political enemies to build his castle for him, and I love to daydream about the guy who put this particular rock in place, and what he'd think if you told him some guy from the New World would steal it five hundred years later and carry it back to France (on an aero-plane no less, but let's not overwhelm the poor chap), and later to America and a bunch of other exotic lands.

I like to pretend the rock is cursed. And just because I'm pretending doesn't mean it's not.

It's October and I've got spooky stuff on the brain twenty-four hours a day. It's kind of driving me crazy. I bought a tie with skulls on it to try to partially assuage this terrible longing for Halloween stuff while I'm over here in non-Halloween-land.

I just realized it's been a little over a year since I was at Dracula's castle! It's also my first October in three years that I haven't been in Transylvania. That's kind of a weird thing to be able to say. Anyway, you know, I've been posting photo galleries of my travels around Europe for a couple years now, and I know a lot of my internet friends and real life friends and even my family look at them when I announce them in my LiveJournal, but other than that, I never really think about other people finding them or anything like that. But about once a month, I get a great e-mail from a total stranger regarding my travel photos, and it's always always always about Dracula's castle. And I think that's competely awesome. Sometimes these people are just Googling stuff about the historical Vlad the Impaler, some of them are actually interested in traveling to the castle like I did, and one guy even asked me to sketch a map of the castle so he could recreate it as a playable area in some video game (which I painstakingly did from memory, and then it turns out there was a map I could've photographed, ha). I love the fact that people are searching for info about Dracula and finding my site; it makes me feel I've made a tiny contribution to the whole Dracula mythos. I'm really proud that my site comes up pretty high in the results when you search for a few different phrases regarding Dracula and Castle Poenari.

Anyway, one of the main comments I get from people who're interested in Dracula's castle is that there's just not much good, detailed, accurate information about the place online. Boy do they not gotta tell me. I scoured the web for a couple years trying to track down any shred of info I could find before finally going there. (This is still by far my favorite article on the matter, by the way.) Of course, like with any somewhat obscure topic, there's a frustrating amount of websites that are just reposting the same vague/inaccurate info that they all copied from one another.

I still do searches for Dracula stuff every few months, since the internet is getting bigger and more thorough all the time. I recently came across this great site that appears to be pretty new: MyDracula.com. I found it by searching for stuff about Castle Poenari, as I periodically do, but my favorite thing I discovered on this site that's totally new to me after all the Dracula research I've done is this collection of German Stories About Dracula. They appear to be translated from German, and pretty loosely at that. Some of the stories are pretty grisly and fun, some are kind of confusing, and for some of them I can just see Vlad shrugging his shoulders and saying, "Guess you hahd to bee zere." They all start out sort of all over the place, and then almost all of them end in impaling. Man, that guy really was a card.

Good heavens, the view from my bedroom window is ridiculous. It's been cool and rainy and gray and cloudy since I arrived in Paris last week, and I've been waiting desperately for a little bit of sun so I could take a couple pictures to show you LiveJournalists. It doesn't help that living way up on the hill basically means I live in the clouds. But the sky finally just cleared up a little a few minutes ago, so here you go...





(You can click 'em for bigger versions if you want.) I've got beautiful Montmartre out my back window and sleazy Pigalle out the living room balcony on the other side of the apartment. I'll try to take some pictures of that some night soon.

My pictures from Cluj-Napoca, Romania are up!

My pictures from Curtea de Argeş, Romania are up!



This is the town just south of Castle Poenari, so this set finally fills in the last blank between Switzerland and Dracula. There's a little more Romania still coming up, and then Bratislava. Whew. Did I mention at Dracula's castle I poured a little bit of my Coke on the ground? Because Dracula is my dead homey.

My pictures from Sibiu, Romania are up!

I don't usually post trip photos out of order, but I've been dying to post my photos from Dracula's real-ass Castle near Arefu, in the Transylvania region of Romania. So they're up now! Go look!

The castle was just one part in the middle of a big trip through Switzerland, Austria, Romania, Hungary, and Slovakia. (Not to mention I still haven't posted my photos from the Bosnia/Croatia/Montenegro trip last summer). But I've been dying to get these castle photos online asap; I was hoping to have them up before Halloween, but there just hasn't been time, with moving and everything.

Perhaps coincidentally, my LiveJournal userpic that I'd been using as my default for over a year (a picture of me at Buda Castle in Budapest) suddenly just broke on LJ's server a couple days ago, and it hasn't come back; it just turned into a red X while my other userpics stayed fine. If that's not a sure sign of being cursed, I don't know what is. Is that like the information age version of not appearing in a mirror? Not appearing in a jpg? For now, I've replaced it with a picture of me in a tunnel underneath Sarajevo that was used during the war in the 90s to sneak food and supplies into the city while the Serbs had the valley surrounded. Boy do I have a lot of stories I haven't told yet. I really look forward to catching up on all that stuff. But first thing's first. Go look at Dracula's Castle!