Saturday, January 05, 2008

Transylvaniara

When one arrives at Luton airport to take the plane to Cluj, there is no mention of the city to which the plane flies - the departure boards and the check in lines all read "Transylvania" - I am struggling to think of any other place one could fly to in which the city is not mentioned. Malta is one, but then Malta is a small island which is (to all intents and purposes) one city with lots of bits. Transylvania is very large, and, well, you could be landing anywhere from Oradea to Brasov, two cities that must be getting on for 500 kms apart.

Anyway, it turned out to be a very good thing that we were flying back to Transylvania on Thursday, since, if we'd tried to fly to Bucharest we'd have been up shit creek without a paddle, as it appears the entire south of Romania was blanketed in a blizzard of epic proportions that day, and both of Bucharest's airports were shut for hours (and hours) . So, hurrah for Transylvania, in which the roads were clear, the sky was blue (though it was - and still is- colder than a witch's tit) and the parking was miraculously free at the airport (and the car started first time despite sitting outside in sub -10 degree temperatures for a week).

The upshot of this is that I am now back home and will resume blogging in a 2008 stylee very shortly.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi Andy, great that you got back safely; we did too, on the same flight, a week earlier. I think I was grinning for all of the 2.5 hours as I considered the 200 RON the return ticket cost and remembered the 11+ hours it used to take with buses and planes via Budapest!! I also noticed that we were flying to "Transylvania". It used to fly to "Tirgu Mures/Transylvania" before the persistent fog there made WizzAir switch to Cluj. Maybe Wizz is hedging their bets in case they need to land at whichever airport doesn't have fog; or it's to attract geographically-ill-informed Dracula enthusiasts (we forget, there's a lot of them about).