The way through mountains and marriage proposal

or how I became a gipsy from Constanta...

Hey! How old are you? Do you want to get married? Or buy my skirt??

That's what I heard when my Romanian friends took me to a gipsy market in Brasov. Before we got there, I was told that the place would surely be stinky, chaotic and loud. And so it was. But I liked it anyway. Gipsies in their typical clothes (men with cowboy-like huts and women with colourful long dresses and scarves on their heads) were selling second hand clothes and shoes, shouting loud the prices of their products and staring and the potential customers. I tried to take some pictures of this unusual place but a gipsy man started to shout at me and forbade me to use my camera.
By the other stand some women were offering me their long colourful skirts and said I must be a gipsy from Constanta. I guess it was because of my long colourful skirt... And then a gipsy man asked if I want to get married. Well, I had to say 'no' to everything I was offered and soon left this distant and magic world.

Afterwards we visited Harman, a village with fortified church. It was peaceful and empty, with almost no tourist, which is of course a big advantage. And we visited also an old neglected school that is about 100 years now and completely deserted. Only local kids spend their time there, play, listen to music and use the old building as a kind of hideout.
We were also invited to an ethnographic museum with a great variety of local traditional clothes, furniture and Eastern eggs. I was really surprise to find out that Polish and Romanian folklore is quite similar, especially when it comes to the Eastern eggs.

At the end of the day, which was really full of new experiences, I went with Alex and her family to Campulung, a small town in the other county. It's not an attractive place but the way there is very fascinating. High mountains, empty villages, streets leading through fields with sheep, horses, cows walking down a street, wooden churches, old original houses... After two hours we reached boring Campulung and when we where walking down the street (Alex and me) we felt as if we were really exotic. Everyone was staring at us (maybe because of the different, colourful image), which wasn't pleasant at all. And when suddenly a man fell down on a street and needed an immediate health care many people gathered around him, just to stare and feel the touch of sensation. Someone took a photo to a local newspaper, someone called an ambulance, someone was happy to be accidentally captured on the photo and was looking forward to seeing himself in the newspaper the day after...
And what's quite strange is that almost all the kids we met were overweighted.