Thirteen places in the world to creep you out

by Jamie Rhein on

Kelly’s post on haunted hotels reminded me of when I was a kid. There was an abandoned house on my grandparents’ street that was too hard to ignore. One Halloween my cousins and I dared each other to run across the front porch and knock on the front door after dark. Imagine my surprise when, instead of my fist meeting the glass of the door’s window as I expected, my fist kept going. There wasn’t any glass. Yep, I screamed and ran like hell. For years, each time I visited my grandparents and passed the house, even after a family moved in and fixed it up, I remembered the delicious feeling of being spooked.

That house was small potatoes compared to the list of 13 of the world’s most creepy places that Ralph Martin at Concierge.com has cooked up. I could almost feel that tickle of a breath on the back of my neck when I read about them. Just look at the photo of Bhangharh, India, a town where people haven’t lived since 1640 because, possibly, a bunch of people who lived there were massacred, and the rest fled never to return. Notice those monkeys? See how they are just sitting there watching the tourists who come by day and leave by night? Images of Hitchcock’s horror flick, “The Birds,” come to mind.

Here are more of the 13.

Then there’s Philadelphia’s Mütter museum, similar to Bangkok’s Museum of Forensic Medicine. There is a vast collection of gross out oddities such as removed tumors and models that show various maladies like just what gangrene does to a person. I’ve smelled it and it’s not pleasant–I can imagine the looks of it. *shudder* Willy wrote a detailed post on the museum with links to photos back in March. And for more forensic medicine gross outs, here’s another post from Willy on Thailand’s Siriraj Museum–there are 10 museums that make up this one to make sure you really lose your appetite.

In Mexico City’s Sonora Witch Craft Market, a happy Buddha sits in the midst of dressed up skeletons. Here you can get your fortune told and advice on how to turn your luck around. Before you leave you can pick up the ingredients for all your potion needs.

Easter Island off Chile’s coast is where huge heads carved from volcanic rock reside. You can wander among them and wonder how exactly they got where they are located and what happened to the people who made them centuries ago. No one really knows. Creatures from outer space, perhaps, came to help out with their UFOs? That’s one theory.

If you’re interested in traveling the path of a voodoo queen who put a curse on a place, head to the Manachc Swamp in Louisiana. Every once in awhile a dead body turns up here. There are torchlight night tours if the boat tour by day doesn’t give you enough chills.

Leif has also written about the Bran Castle in Romania. Bram Stoker modeled the castle in Dracula after this one. Look for the engraving of Vlad Dracula having dinner while surrounded by people he has impaled on stakes. Yum.

Gaad! was my impression when I saw the photo of the Catacombs in Paris. Walls of skulls and bones are hard to forget. Going here will make you feel like you’ve stepped into an Ann Rice novel. She’s used it as a setting for some of her stories.

To see the rest of the list, head to the article at Concierge.com. Here you’ll find the specifics about how to contact each place and lovely tidbits about what makes these spots unique. And, if you want 13 MORE places for Halloween, check out these. These aren’t the naturally creepy places, however, but ones created by humans to be perfect for Halloween frights and chills.

GADLING TAKE FIVE: Week of September 29–October 5

by Jamie Rhein on

How exactly does one pick just five posts to highlight out of a week’s worth of post bounty? Impossible, I say. Particularly since we have one more blogger on our team who has been a writing fiend ever since he started posting on Monday. Blogger Grant Martin has an eye and ear out for cheap travel and the bizarre story like Delta Requires Two Seats for Conjoined Twins.

Then there is Leif Pettersen’s last post on his hilarious series My Bloody Romania. He’s back in Minnesota thinking that everywhere he goes smells like french fries. I’ll miss Leif’s missives here, but more can be found at his blog Killing Batteries.

We’ve had a week of dabbling into science and technology with posts on a man-made island (Neil), space travel (me), and forays into the mysterious like the Loch Ness Monster (Catherine). Kelly’s travel read picks have also started again now that she’s back from Australia. There are five new One for the Road gems.

Here are my five posts if I must pick five–and I must. It’s “gadling TAKE FIVE,” that’s why.

This coming week, watch for another Where on Earth post. Brett’s wild about Gozo, Malta, the place he featured for this go round.

My Bloody Romania: A return to the American Dream – minus gainful employment and money

by Leif Pettersen on

Does anyone else have perma-smell associations for whole countries? One scent that transports your brain to a specific country, drops you on a random street and makes you dreamily reminisce about the life you could have had with the achingly cute girl that worked at the local travel agency that not so subtly offered to give you a ‘private tour’ (nudge-nudge) and you distractedly turned her down because you had to go review three hotels and two restaurants that afternoon and you then decide that you’re a thick-skulled jackass for not noticing the palpable flirty signs until you thought about it two days later while sitting on the train to the next city and then you wonder how the hell anyone that is so painfully unobservant could possibly be trusted to be a travel writer? Show of hands?

Some countrywide perma-smell association examples: France smells like butter. Italy smells like garlic. Romania smells like a mix of pălincă and grass (with a hint of manure).

So what’s the overriding smell I associate with the US? French fry grease. It’s everywhere. If you’re saying to yourself “Well it doesn’t smell like French fry grease at my house!”, you’re wrong grandma. It most certainly does, you’ve just gotten used to it.

You don’t notice how the US smells like French fry grease until you leave for a while and your nose has had time to forget. You need at least two weeks, but the sensation magnifies the longer you’re away. Get out of the country for like 10 months and you’ll see what I mean. When you return, the instant you hit the top of the jetway the French fry aroma in the airport hits you like a bullet in the kneecap, even if the food court is 100 yards away. If you think an air quality assessment at an airport is unfair, fine, let’s change it up. Arrive in Duluth by boat. Parachute into a third tier suburb of Pittsburg. Teleport into Oklahoma. It changes nothing. Hello French fry grease. Goodbye clear completion.

And have you ever noticed how as soon as you walk through a cloud of French fry grease vapor you’re suddenly starving to death? Even if you just ate? Even if your nose is sealed shut from a bad Eastern European head cold? Don’t try to tell me that stuff isn’t laced with heroin. You don’t even have to ingest it to become addicted. Meanwhile there’s no cure for herpes. Oooeeeoooeee.

On that note, I arrived back in America a few days ago. The trip was fairly disaster-free, but a freak cold I contracted while in Suceava meant that I rarely went more than two minutes without putting a new coating of snot on my upper lip and finger tips. I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize to everyone in Bucharest, Heathrow and O’Hare airports for the Nose DNA that I unintentionally left behind during layovers. There was nothing I could do about it. More material exited out of my nose last week than all my other orifices combined.

I was seated in the dreaded center row on the longest leg of my journey, with a half-deaf bitty on one side and a Danish Moonie on the other. The Moonie was so large and had so many airplane seat accessories that it took her five minutes of packing, rearranging and grunting to let me out so I could get to the bathroom and refresh my Booger Wad.

Here in Minneapolis, in addition to a stupefying visit to a supermarket for the first time in years (57 kinds of tomato sauce, versus five in Romania and 23 kinds of peanut butter, versus zero), I’ve been hyper-aware of the differences between big city America and my hideouts in Romania and Italy these past few years. The utter convenience and reliability of everything. Free WiFi clouds so profuse that only suckers pay for their own home services anymore. Going to work with more than 30% of your available cleavage on display is considered a bad thing.

This is just the beginning. I’ve got giddying months of reverse culture shock in store for me as I re-establish myself as a resident of this land of wretched plenty. Never mind 57 different ways to enliven pasta. I’ve got 21 new energy drinks to appraise. I have to get up to speed on over four years of TV, movies, music, politics, pop culture and reprobate starlets that ‘accidentally’ expose their private parts in public every other week. I can go to a restaurant and eat breakfast at 2pm, lunch at 10:30am or dinner at 5pm. I can pay my electric bill without it being a two hour, three visit affair. I can turn on the hot water and have it actually work most of the time (we eventually did without hot water for over two weeks last month in Iaşi).

Equally, in America I can’t buy a decent coffee for less than US$4 or wine for less than US$9. Shallots are a pricey extravagance rather than a common ingredient. World news is glossed over for 30 seconds before eight minutes of local sports results. There are dizzying, infuriating rules about when and where one can park a car, drink booze or get nekkid. Worse, you’re often limited to only doing one at a time (unless it’s football game day, when anything goes – God bless America!)

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But coping on the fly with constant culture adjustments is all part of the fun of frequent international travel. You can never be accused of being flaky if you’ve just gotten off a plane from somewhere that has unusual toilets. It’s an all-purpose excuse to get out of bad manners, falling asleep at family meals and low tipping. And my buddies, bless them, are all in on the plot:

“Please excuse my friend. He’s a professional travel writer and just got back from two weeks in Buenos Aires, where they only tip 3%, it’s socially acceptable to be drunk at 10am and ass-grabbing is the highest form of flattery. If we’re lucky, and he remains conscious, he may tell us the location of the only free public toilet in Venice.”

Friends, sadly, this brings to a close my critic acclaimed (yes, just the one) travel series My Bloody Romania. I hope my sarcastic and spotty knowledge of Romania has been amusing, enthralling and mostly factual. Thanks to Justin and Willy at Gadling for the opportunity to prattle, curse and digress at will and special thanks to my regular readers over at Killing Batteries for descending on Gadling and padding my comments sections. Killing Batteries Minneapolis Edition resumes in a few days. Set your feeds and botox treatments accordingly.

Oh, one last kernel of Romania knowledge: the first person to establish import rights for Skippy Peanut Butter into the country is going to be a squillionaire – andale!!

Leif Pettersen, originally from Minneapolis, Minnesota, co-authored the current edition of Lonely Planet’s Romania and Moldova. Visit his personal blog, Killing Batteries, for more unrelated tangents and diatribes when pre-season high school football coverage eclipses reporting on the events in Burma.

My Bloody (Drunk) Romania: Beyond the moonshine

by Leif Pettersen on

People are often taken off guard when I tell them that I’ve spent about 17 cumulative months in Romania. Inevitably, wooden stake at the ready, they start digging about what the hell kept me here so long.

Is it the low cost of living? Initially yes, but with the US dollar tanking and the Romanian lei gaining, I could almost live cheaper in Miami these days.

Is it the scantly clad girls? Well, duh.

Is it the orgy of high-speed file sharing going on that’s better than any software store, CD shop and on-demand satellite service combined? I don’t know what you mean detective.

But, there’s a bunch of non-financial, non-depraved and non-somewhat illegal reasons as well. Though hardly pious, a primary incentive to get good and comfortable here for a while is the availability and shocking low price of decent alcohol, namely wine.

With the exception of parts of Transylvania that inexplicably lean toward German wines, there’s enough Romanian wine on offer here to keep you woozy for months. Big names include Bucium, Cotnari, both based in Moldavia, and Murfatlar based in Dobrogea. Bottles from US$2.50 to US$6 range from one step above table wine (Bucium) to bottles that routinely win awards abroad (Murfatlar and Cotnari).

Prahova will probably sound familiar to UK readers, as it makes up 70% of their Romanian wine distribution. Despite being highly respected (and relatively highly priced) within Romania, I haven’t been able to find the page on their web site that lists their awards. I’m sure it’s just an oversight.

Alternatively, avoid Vampire Wine, a hokey bottle of wine-flavoured poison marketed to vampire fanatics that appears to be acquired from the dregs and ‘oopsie barrels’ from reputable wineries. I’ll admit though, it makes a fun souvenir. But you don’t need to come all the way to Romania to buy a bottle. The winery appears to be owned and operated out of California. You can get a bottle on their web site for US$9.99.

A popular variety of desert wine that I’ve only recently discovered is busuioaca de bohotin made by Vincon Vrancea, among others. Unlike many desert wines, it doesn’t have that syrupy taste that coats your tongue and turns your eyeballs orange after only a single glass. Granted, it’s not the type of thing you want with your fillet mignon, but it was great for multiple glasses later in the evening while we watched a shaky copy of “Superbad” that may or may not have been acquired in an unscrupulous fashion.

Also, not to betray my hosts, but the availability of super yummy and cheap Moldovan wine here in Romania cannot be ignored. Big names like Milestii Mici, Acorex and the self-proclaimed mother of all Moldovan wine Cricova are easy to find in most supermarkets, but keep an eye out for feisty bottles of perfectly drinkable Cojusna that seem to only find their way into tiny, corner shops here in Romania, probably secreted across the border in someone’s hollowed out prosthetic leg.

Closing out the wine category, though it will offend and alarm serious wine drinkers, I have to mention must, a low-alcohol, sweet, fizzy almost-wine concoction that is only available for a few weeks each year after the grape harvest. Some wine makers convert a bit of their stash into must and feed it to their employees to keep them congenial yet still productive. However, must production is big business for some, as tanker trucks of the stuff are enthusiastically gulped down at Romania’s innumerable autumn street festivals, being particularly popular with teenaged girls (and pansy-assed travel writers that don’t dig beer).

Now for the harder stuff. Ţuică and pălincă are two kinds of brandy usually made from plums. Though some people freely swap these terms to describe the same drink, they are, as your tongue will tenderly note, distinctly different. Pălincă is essentially ţuică, distilled twice. Ţuică is about 30-40% alcohol, while pălincă is 45-55%, sometimes dangerously higher. One time I got my hands on a bottle that could’ve dissolved lead.

You’re not going to find these two beverages in most stores as they are in fact that moonshine I teased in the title of this post. Ţuică and pălincă are almost exclusively produced in stills on private farms or in people’s tool sheds. Though this is technically bootlegging, the Romanian government tolerates this production, probably for the same reason that cats tolerate humans: unabashed personal gratification.

Traditionally, a shot of ţuică/pălincă is consumed right before a meal to ‘open up’ (or alight depending on the potency) the palette and help with digestion. Yet, if you ride down the main street of any village in the winter months, taking note of the large number of people who’ve only half successfully dressed themselves, weaving down the road singing folk songs to the neighborhood and you’ll get a sense of exactly how much moonshine gets consumed as a matter of course.

Though a few communities have negotiated dubious production licenses, making moonshine for restaurants and high-end tourist shops (complete with a whole pear at the bottle of the bottle), you’re more likely to find it for sale on folding tables by the side of the road in recycled soft drink bottles along with cheese and honey products. These roadside vendors will probably charge about 15 lei (~US$6) for a 0.5 liter bottle, but I hear tell that if you have the right connections in places like the Maramureş region, you can get a two liter bottle for as little as 10 lei (US$4). If the Romanian parliament is any indication, a two liter bottle of pălincă goes a long way.

On a closing note, while there’s innumerable ways to get happily loaded here in Romania, I have yet to be introduced to any national hangover remedy. Romanians don’t do brunch, so I’m not able to invoke my preferred antidote of an Everything Omelet doused in Tabasco, washed down with three Cokes and a chocolate shake, followed by a two hour nap. I’ve just had to suffer quietly with mediocre coffee, fruit and pastries. If someone would only open a 24 hour breakfast café, this country could be the next freelance writer’s ultimate retreat.

Leif Pettersen, originally from Minneapolis, Minnesota, co-authored the current edition of Lonely Planet’s Romania and Moldova. Visit his personal blog, Killing Batteries, for more ways to tie on a dignified drunk and why that’s OK as long as you emphasize the word ‘dignified’.

My Bloody Romania: Cabbage never tasted so good

by Leif Pettersen on

Before you read another word, click over to yellowpages.com and locate the Romanian restaurant nearest to your home (if you are actually in Romania, you are not eligible for this exercise).

So, how far away is the restaurant? Depending on your continent, it’s anywhere from 1,000 to 12,000 miles away, right? With the rare, screwball exception (Los Gatos, California comes to mind), you just don’t see Romanian restaurants abroad. Why is that? Some might be tempted to wryly reply “Because if I wanted to eat cabbage, potatoes and cornmeal mush, I’d go back to summer camp in Alabama.”

Certainly, Romanians love their cornmeal mush like few other sentient beings in the known universe, but Romanian cuisine is far more complex and surprisingly savory than most people know.

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Let’s start with that cornmeal mush, or mămăligă as they call it around here (or ‘polenta’ as it’s more popularly known). Admittedly, I don’t care for the stuff. I’ve had 20 different Romanians try to prepare mămăligă 20 different ways in an effort to roll me over and so far its been an unmitigated failure. It’s usually served mixed with cream and shredded cheese, which is certainly an improvement on the sawdust cake constancy and flavor of straight mămăligă, but it’ll never be something that I bolt upright in the middle of the night craving like I do with bacon cheeseburgers and Michelle Hunziker.

Next is mici, or mititei, links of grilled minced-meat composed of a blend of beef, mutton and pork meat, enlivened with pepper, garlic and other random seasonings, served with a side of mustard for dipping. Although very popular, mici seems to be less present as an at-home regular menu item and more of a fixture at picnics and outdoor festivals where its easy-to-carry-around nature makes it wildly popular street food. Ironically, this is customarily where the worst mici is served. Better to try it in a decent restaurant first and judiciously regress from there. In its street form, mici is nearly always served with a giant glass of beer, as most dodgy street food is, to disguise irregularities like pig nostrils and hooves.

Chicken and pork play a big roll in Romanian restaurant menus. Inevitably there’s a lengthy list of subtle variations on simple fillets, usually with a sauce of some kind. These dishes are really hit or miss, ranging from tender and superb to something resembling microwaved brake pads. Price is rarely an indication of what you should expect, so be prepared to gamble. Below is a fine example: grilled chicken breast on the left, a pork fillet under a red mushroom sauce on the right. Although you can add any side dish you want, I usually opt for the ‘countryside potatoes’ (cartofi ţărăneşti), roasted potatoes seasoned with onions, garlic and bits of ham.

Turning the to poor, seemingly un-enticing cabbage. As hilarious as it would be to report that people sit on the front stoop on a Sunday afternoon and eat cabbage raw like a giant apple, it ain’t so. It isn’t even a main course. Like everywhere else, it’s principally used to add substance to dishes, like a stew. Though cabbage is usually seen as a poor man’s meal fortifier, it’s really a kind of light, healthy wonder food when you think about it, since it tends to absorb the qualities of the food it’s cooked with, while adding both weight and a nice texture.

Soups are big in Romania, especially in winter when it’s colder than a vampire’s gonads. Ciorbă, similar to borscht, is a general term for any soup with meat and vegetables. I can’t get enough of ciorbă rădăuţeană, an egg yolk chicken soup with shredded carrots, onions, red peppers and potatoes served with sides of cream and garlic and a jalapeno. This stuff will warm you up no matter how undead you are. Other ciorbă that I’ve liked are ciorbă văcuţă (red soup with beef, green beans, onions, carrots and other veggies), ciorbă cu perişoare (cream soup with meatballs) and an out-of-this-world ciorbă de pui a la Grec (chicken soup, ‘Greek style’, with carrots, pepper, potatoes, onion) that I noisily swooned over at Bella Musica in Braşov.

Unfortunately, it’s difficult to find a good piece of beef here, but if you look hard enough, you can find something that won’t make your face screw up. I had excellent beef in both Sibiu and Braşov, but have yet to find a place in all of Iaşi that can 1) serve a good cut and 2) prepare it correctly. Unless you know the restaurant you’re in will get it right, or you’re just dying for something other than chicken and pork, probably best not to roll the dice on the ‘fillet mignon’. Equally, at about US$9 for a your meal, you can afford to go around town sampling beef in every restaurant until you find a winner.

Finally, probably my favorite dish: sarmale. Kind of like a mini-burrito filled with ground beef (or pork or veal), rice, onions and spices wrapped up in cabbage or grape leaves and baked in a pot of water until the water has boiled away or been absorbed. Some people in Romania deride sarmale and accuse restaurants and guest houses that serve it of trying to pass off ‘cheap peasant food’. This isn’t remotely true. Firstly, sarmale is a delicious explosion of flavor by any standard. Secondly, it’s a very labor intensive meal to prepare. After one goes through the lengthy effort of preparing the beef, cutting up all those vegetables and boiling the cabbage (or what have you), all those little burritos have to be hand rolled, which I can tell you takes hours. I’ve flown from Minneapolis to Norway in less time. When it’s served to you, especially in a private home, know that they’ve pulled out all the stops for you and be suitably thankful.

I’ll close by admitting that you can go wrong, very wrong, with Romanian food sometimes, but it’s really no different than eating out in restaurants in any other country. Some places are phenomenal, others will give you mild food poisoning that requires pharmaceutical intervention to correct. Just don’t allow yourself to get too hooked on this food, because once you get home the drive to your nearest Romanian restaurant is a doosie.

Leif Pettersen, originally from Minneapolis, Minnesota, co-authored the current edition of Lonely Planet’s Romania and Moldova. Visit his personal blog, Killing Batteries, for more information on food he can’t cook.