10-22-06 - here is a map of romania...many folks have been asking to see it in full...so i am showing it to you so you can see where i have been and where i still need to visit...this also shows what the surrounding countries are...i just returned from a five day trip to budapest, hungary and it took about 1 hour to fly there...to give you some sense of direction and time....as you can see from the star, bucharest is the capital of the country...to get to the black sea...constanta to be specific, takes about three hours - the road is pretty good from what i hear...but i haven't been there yet...soon i hope...the town north of bucharest, called brasov is about three hours away and right on the edge of transylvania....i was there for the liquid chocolate stop discussed earlier in this blog...yummy....as for where i went with the 8th graders...we went west (go west young man!) and were about two hours north of the town listed as craiova on the above map...the town were closest to was tismana, where a very famous monastery is loctaed...and tirgu jiu - where the most famous romanian sculpturer is from....brancusi....
this is the very beautiful tismana monastery...it was founded by a monk named nicodim, who lived in a cave above the site where the monastery is built, until it was finished...although it was not this grand back then...he was an interesting guy and was buried in the entryway of the monastery...he actually dug his own grave in anticipation of when he died....bizarre...
this is the original version of the monastery...much smaller than the one that stands on the site now...this is also where all of the nuns who live here are buried when they die...they still live at the monastery and we actually got to see them celebrating a birth in the nearby town...it seemed awfully somber to me...but beautiful to hear their singing anyway :)
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