A Salt Mine on the Road to Celebrity

There is a rumor that Slănic salt mine will be featured in the next Batman movie as Batman's cave. By it's official name "Salina Unirea", the mine is quite impressive and spacious, having 54 meter high "rooms". It was started in 1938 and closed in 1970, the temperature is a constant 12 degrees Celsius, it's 208 meters below ground and the work was mostly done with inmates. After being shut down it has become a therapy center for respiratory diseases. If you move there you won't catch a cold ever again. The descent is done via a creepy and ancient elevator, there are also stairs but those look even creepier - I wonder how they got the Batmobil down there, if required, anyway. Probably disassembled. 

The only problem is that the location is not on a very circulated corridor, you have to make a small detour from the main roads to find Slănic, but it's worth the trouble.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slănic

Short stop in Timişoara

I've recently  made a business trip to Timişoara, the biggest city in the west part of Romania. Besides work, I enjoyed a nice evening on a terrace in the center square of the town, Piaţa Unirii. Probably one of the last warm days of this year, you could sit outside until midnight. I will get back with more impressions from Timişoara, for now I just want to mention the uniqueness of this square: each side represents a different culture - Romanian, Serbian, Hungarian and Germanic. 

http://timisoara-info.ro/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=252:piata-unirii&catid=44&Itemid=148&lang=en

A few ugly pictures made with the phone:

The inventiveness of the Romanian peasant

Take it with a grain of salt, of course:

A Britishwoman on a Romanian Tank

BBC had an entertaining episode of the "World's Toughest Driving Tests" programme that was filmed in Romania. A female presenter and an actor spent one week training with the Romanian army and learnt how to drive a tank. Enjoy:

The full episode here:
http://www.peteava.ro/id-488713/bbc-se-intoarce-in-romania-cu-tancurile-la-pitesti

No Reservations

Highly controversial upon its release in our media, maybe you can find something useful in this episode of "No Reservations" about Romania:

Churches of Transylvania

The most consistent part of our Saxon heritage are the fortified churches that you can find overall in Sibiu, Mureş and Braşov county. Some of them I've visited myself and these are:

Biertan - the most famous one, we already have a post about it here:

Moşna - unfortunately this one was closed so I had to admire it only from outside:

Stejăriş - small but neat, it currently undergoes a massive restoration process:

Richiş - not fortified, but full of history, you can learn here about the misterious Green Man:

There is an excellent website dedicated to these monuments:

http://fortified-churches.com/