Trip Start Aug 27, 2011
14Trip End Sep 09, 2011
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Where I stayed
Hotel Paltinis Borsa
Read my review - 1/5 stars
Read my review - 1/5 stars
The next goal of our journey was Putna monastery with its museum of Byzantine items. By far the most crowded of them all - well partially because it was Sunday and the villagers came for a mass there. Generally Sunday was the best day to travel through this rural area, because you could see hundreds of people going to churches, mostly dressed in traditional clothes (which you can also see on the photos) - a tradition that died in most of the countries we had visited so far and sadly, in Poland mostly as well
From Putna we followed the same track back to Radauti, a small town famous for its Bogdana Monastery. We spent an hour or so looking for the monastery, as all the signs and people were telling something different. We even took a gravel road out of town and drove for about 15 minutes before we decided it was not the right route. Spare the trouble, the church is the least impressive and not worth your time if you're aiming for many more along the way. What was interesting though was Marginea, the village of pottery. It is where we made some shopping (beware though, as not everything is as handmade as the shoppers would claim) and had a chance to take a look at the pottery workshop next to one of the stores. There we experienced the whole process behind creating the vases, cups and other pottery stuff, from forming the clay till heating it and creating desired shapes.
100km later, in Sucevita we again found ourselves gazing at the beautiful painted structure. Sadly not photos were allowed inside and what's most important - it was strictly forbidden to make photos of... nuns - with a self-explanatory sign that you can see posted here. Moldovita on the other hand was a completely different story
What's still worth to mention is the road from Bucovina towards Maramures area, as yet again we encountered a village with all the houses painted - this time not with flowery motives, but different patters - like the ones we used to draw in our notebooks between each lesson in primary schools.
For the next night, we selected a place deep in the mountains, near Stationea Bursa
And the worst of them all - our hotel... For a few moments we were sure we would keep driving and lose the money we paid for the reservation, but, after all, decided to stop and rest before Maramures. The hotel name was Paltinis (http://www.booking.com/hotel/ro/paltinis.pl.html?sid=400e394a1f5a4c129e01742940b243c4;dcid=1) and I put this link here for the sole reason to warn you! The room itself was not that bad, though it was lacking any view that we were so much hoping for