Beginning of summer, we visited some friends who moved to Germany and spent a couple of days in their small Northern town. We didn’t expect much of the trip when we planned it, except for spending some time together with them and catching up. But we got a bit more, very much worth to be mentioned here – a lovely small town, good weather and lots of green areas to be explored, to relax and enjoy the quiet and easy pace around.
For a visitor, Sibiu is mostly known for its old medieval town, with pedestrian areas, colorful houses with small windows in their attics called ‘the eyes of Sibiu’, for its German heritage, for its large and beautiful squares, for the villages surrounding it. Except the old town area, a few parks, the village museum, the city is mostly gray, with tall buildings, lots of cars and nothing too attractive to show. But SISAF (Sibiu International Street Art Festival) managed for the last couple of years to change this gray image a bit.
The Suru Chalet is definitely our favorite chalet in the Făgăraș Mountains and with good reason: very nice hosts, always friendly and smiling, excellent accommodation, clean and comfy, delicious food, kids friendly place, a perfect view, and small enough to feel like you’re actually visiting your family. We’re visiting this place at least once a year because of all the reasons above, but also because it’s quite close to Sibiu and easy to reach for us. This year we went up there again to spend a sunny and warm September weekend with friends, while helping in preparing a dinner with ingredients found mainly in the mountains area.
Astra Film Festival (AFF), is a major event in the European film community and Romania’s leading documentary festival. It is located in the Transylvanian city of Sibiu and it is unique in this part of Europe. The Festival champions that particular type of engaged cinema, which produces a detailed and intimate account of the human condition in the form of powerful cinematic stories. AFF, which came into being 26 years ago, prides itself with having established a consequential framework for the development of documentary cinema in Central&Eastern Europe and having reinforced a platform for emerging filmmakers in Romania and in the entire region by providing networking opportunities as well as national and international visibility for their work.
We first heard about this place a couple of years ago and when checking it out more in detail, we were completely mesmerized by the idea of being in a remote area, in the beautiful Romanian mountains and exploring the surroundings on the back of a horse.
After visiting Rîu Sadului for the Burduf Challenege event, beginning of July, we paid this lovely village another visit one weekend later with a main purpose – to spend two days at a shepherd’s cottage up on the mountains surrounding the village and to get in contact with their daily routine and to enjoy the beautiful view around.
Piatra Craiului Mountain Range is one of the smallest ones in the Central Romanian Carpathians, but most probably one of the most fascinating, when talking about the landscape, the flora and the fauna. In July we had our first trip to Piatra Craiului, a 2 days short weekend trip with our daughter (and a couple of other friends), on an excellent weather, enough to convince us that we have to come back to explore this mountain’s paths some more.
