Oct 1-3, 2014: Somehow, I just never warmed to Sibiu, European City of Culture or not. Maybe it was the weather. Maybe it was my hotel. Or maybe it just couldn’t match Brasov for charm.
The weather was mostly cool and grey, with actual rain some of the time. My room at the Levoslav was really a suite, with two big rooms, two TVs, two desks, two armchairs…. Trouble was, the furniture didn’t fill the space, and the decor had an industrial feel. The overall effect was stark, plus the shower was very awkward to use and breakfast was poor. And, when Lonely Planet told me it was walking distance from the train station if might have mentioned that half of the walk was uphill. In Brasov the Saxons had lived behind the walls, here they lived on top of a significant hill.
The upper town was built around three “squares”, but I didn’t find them welcoming. The two biggest were so big they effectively swallowed the cafes, and there were no fountains and few benches. Some parts of the old walls remained, but they were just walls. The History Museum was seriously disappointing, aside from some guild artifacts. The Art Museum in the Bruckenthal Palace owned a lot of rather bad paintings and a few interesting Turkish rugs, plus a couple of Rubens, but its star exhibit consisted of paintings retrieved after their forced transfer to Bucharest under the Communist regime. These included a brilliant, and brilliantly lit Brueghel: “The Slaughter of the Innocents”, but I could hardly see the rest, the lighting was so dim. (I should also put in a good word for the Greek Orthodox cathedral, and its massive iconostasis, and there were one or two quirky buildings I liked.)
The best part of my stay in Sibiu was a visit to the ASTRA open air museum just outside town, a good substitute for the museum I had missed in Bucharest, and apparently the second largest in the world. In season, it looks like a lot of demonstrations and activities fill the buildings, but I was there off season, and little was happening. Still, I enjoyed wandering around under the trees and beside the big lake, checking out the churches, houses, barns and mills, and even a small flock of sheep. I did notice that the gates from Maramures were all inferior to the elaborately carved ones I had seen in situ.
I didn’t eat particularly well in Sibiu, but I drank rather better than I ate. The desk clerk at the Levoslav said he didn’t drink coffee, and couldn’t recommend a cafe, but the very helpful T.I. sent me to the Cafe Wien, with a view down to the lower town, and good coffee. So, after Brasov I found Sibiu a bit disappointing, and it is firmly on the “glad I went, no need to return” list.
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