Links to Romania
- Take a look at my links grouped in the following
categories:
For more cool links, see the
Romanian links page at In Your Pocket.
General information
- Many cities have some kind of city guide, but the best in Romania
are the two In Your Pocket city reference guides currently on the
market. Beware: I'm heavily biased because I'm the author of both guides!
The full content of Bucharest In Your
Pocket and Southern Transylvania
In Your Pocket can be found at
www.inyourpocket.com. Find out all about accommodation, where to
eat and go out, more about arriving, which taxi companies are reliable,
the latest on the visa situation, the cultural calendar of events, and much
more. Read and order online, or buy a copy locally for a mere US$1.
-
Romania.org is one of the best 'general information' websites around,
including a free fax service (see below)
- Check out the
Virtual Romania pages; a good starting point for finding out more
about Romania. No structure.
-
Romania on the Internet is another comprehensive site good for commencing
a virtual trip.
-
Tournet has a messy page about Romania,
here too.
- Romania's version of online
yellow pages.
- Another
Radu has a Romanian site with his own essays about various subjects
(monuments in Romania, gypsies, ethymology of town and village names). If
you get bored, take a peek at his holiday photo album, covering everything
between Greece and the USA.
-
The Romanian Ring links all kinds of sites about Romania.
- Search Romanian sites with
index.ro.
- The
Society for Romanian Studies has good academic information about
Romania. Their
gateway link page is impressive, but has many stale links.
Media, news and communications
- Mediafax newsagency
With Romanian
news of the day, databases, chat, business info and more links.
- More news in the Romanian language
Ziua (daily) newspaper
- Romania
Libera has a weekly english newspaper.
- Good online local papers are
Monitorul Cluj and Buna
Ziua Brasov.
- Eastern
Europe Orientation has a fairly useless Romania section with a few links
to weather and the exchange rate. Don't use the search function, waste
of time.
- Much better is
Central Europe Online's Romania page. All the latest news about Romania
and countries throughout the region. It features a few nice travel stories
too.
-
Romania.org has a great free fax service: surf to the
Bucharest free fax page
if you want to type and send a fax immediately for free in Bucharest.
If you want to fax to another place in Romania, go the Romanian language
Free fax outside
Bucharest page, or simply send an e-mail to number_of_fax@fax.kappa.ro
(example: 1234567@fax.kappa.ro) containing your message. Don't forget
the local prefix.
- The Hermannstadter
Zeitung, Sibiu's German-language newspaper, gets updated weekly.
General tourist information:
-
Discover Romania. A great site with lots of useful information about
topics like cities in Transylvania (and the other regions) and hiking info
about all mountain ranges. Nice photo's all over the site, too.
- A similar site (but not as nice or useful as
the above) is the Romania
Home Page by the ICI Research Institute for Informatics. Check out the
woolly English proze they use, straight from the 1850's.
- Adrian Mihai's
Romania site is impressive.
-
Planet Profiles has a few nice pages with impressions and destinations.
Outdated, but still good enough.
- Here's the
National Tourism Office with a slick page.
- The Travel
Shop An excellent German travel site.
- Romania's
Travel Guide.
- Romtour
travel info.
- Provider
Kappa's travel section.
- Rotravel
has a neat site that gives you lots of tips on (booking) hotels, visa,
places to go, etc. Don't forget to turn off the corny music.
Cities and sights:
Transylvania in particular:
- The
University of Brasov also has some tourist information. Here's
Welcome to Brasov.
- Kappa's (romanian)
Sinaia pages have nice pictures of Peles Palace and the Economat
Hotel next door.
- Aiud
is a small town, but has a very good Romanian language website.
- There's a lot to be found on the subject of
the German minority in Transylvania, or Siebenburgen.
Their massive exodus out of Romania this century has left them spread out
over the world. But Germans wouldn't be Germans if they hadn't a good
(inter)network running (some links in German). The best is Joachim
Fabini's
Sighisoara homepage (in German), with really useful information
on sights, where to stay, and nice pictures for those of you that
don't speak German. Sibiweb
(Siebenburgen Web, they have an
english version too) is another well-kept site. Find your relatives
back via the Siebenburgen
Historical and Genealogical Research Page. They also have a very
nice 1566 map
of Sibiu (Hermannstadt) and surroundings. When you visit, stay at one
of these
village guesthouses.
Guidebooks, maps,
guides and travel stories:
- The
Rough Guide to Romania is a rival of the LP. I think the RG's
books are slightly better (see why). Their
site also has a good introduction and extracts from the book about
the fall of the Ceausescu clan, Dracula, etc.
- Check out
Lonely Planet's Destination Romania, an excellent site with
lots of recent information about Romania. You can also order their
new Lonely Planet Romania and Moldova guide here.
The (Central & Eastern Europe) Thorn Tree is LP's useful travellers'
billboard, ask and answer practical travel questions here.
LP's reader’s letters about Romania offer some recent
stories and tips.
- Leafpile is the best site around
about life in Maramures - an American couple stayed in a Maramures
village for a year and documented all seasons and events.
- Go to the
travel library site for traveller's stories: read this informative
account of
Tan Wee Cheng's mad trip through Eastern Europe. And for something
REALLY sad, read this story of
two poor Brits who traveled throught Poland and Romania in 1992.
Their diary is full of paranoia: everyone they meet is a potential
killer, and they voluntarily jump from a train (!) to escape from
carriages full of percieved criminals. Of course, they're so stupid
that they get robbed. Worse of all is that they blame Poles and Romanians
for their depressing attitudes.
- Here are some nice on-line maps dating from
1882. Area's covered are
Transylvania and
Banat.
- For Dutchies:
de Volkskrant heeft een uitgebreide vraagbaak-site over allerlei
landen, ook Roemenië. Helaas niet zo druk bezocht als LP's
Thorn Tree.
Into the Carpathian Mountains
- Now have a look at this. This is the Romanian
tourism of the future: Green Mountain
Holidays (located in Izvorul Crisului near Cluj) has an exiting site
offering holiday houses, kajak and mountain-bike trips or rent, ski trips,
caving excursions and much, much more. This is what the country needs,
so get booking!
- Mihai Munteanu has written the
Ski, Hike, See, Bike the Carpathian Mountains
; a great website about every kind of sweaty activity in the Brasov region.
It's worth visiting this site for the beautiful photographs alone.
- The
Romanian Village site wants to spread information about village life
and culture in southeastern Transylvania. As Brasov's photo club is involved,
lots of great pictures here too.
- The
Trento Bike pages have useful information on cycling in every
European country, including Romania.
- Take a hike... or a canoe or a mountainbike
and trot off into the grand Carpathian nature with
Cicloturism in Cluj. This is a good place for getting more info on
cycling in Romania. Contact
Radu Mititean , strada Septimiu Albini 133, appartement 18, 3400 Cluj-Napoca.
Tel: 064-142953.
- Brasov's outdoor club
CPNT (cpnt@vega.unitbv.ro
) organises all kinds of activities in the surrounding mountains.
- Check out the beautiful pictures on
Tom's Romanian hiking page. He also scanned a few hiking maps,
which are handy for planning trips: one of the (Western)
Fagaras range, and one more detailed map of the
trails near Bilea hut near the highest Romanian peaks in the Western
Fagaras.
- Catalin Popescu also has a very nice page on
hiking in the Carpathians. He's put lots of hiking maps online,
as well as photo's and more links.
- Romania is not a bad place at all for skiing.
The Alps only mentions Poiana Brasov, but includes a trail map.
The Virtually Complete Skier is not complete at all when you
look at their Poiana Brasov and Sinaia information.
- EWP offers organised or individual
hikes through the Bucegi and Fagaras mountains.
- Also take a look at
Piet's (Dutch) hiking information on Romania.
- For information on which cabana's (mountain huts) burnt down or
were rebuilt in recent years, check out
Balint's Carpathian page.
- Here's the Hull University Speleological Society report of a
caving expedition to Romania (Apuseni mountains).
- The Dutch YMCA has a site with
photo's and impressions of their trips into the Apuseni Mountains
(caving, hiking, climbing, etc).
Accomodation
- Camping Eldorado
in Gilau, between Oradea and Cluj, is online. One of the very few western
style campings in Romania.
- ECEAT (see the travel page
for more info) has a neat guide with addresses of (ecological)
farms in Romania (and nearly every other country in Europe) where
you can pitch your tent or sleep in a converted barn. Updated annually,
good value and much more fun than normal campings. A copy costs only
GBP 5 or USD 8,-. Get a Green Holiday Guide Romania and Bulgaria
via their Dutch or English site.
- ANTREC (the
National Association of Rural, Ecological and Cultural Tourism, website
not updated since 1997) is the official place to book cheap nights in village
homes throughout the country. Bad stories surround this organisation though
- maybe better use local alternatives (like ECEAT, OVR) if available.
- In the foothills of the Apuseni mountains near Cluj, you can lodge
rural-style at Puiu’s
ranch.
- If you're travelling around the Saxon villages, check out this great
(German)
Saxon Guesthouses site. It has clickable maps listing villages
with pensions, addresses and more.
- Cheap hotels in Bucharest are the ones near the main station (Gara
de Nord). Villa Helga
(Str. Salcimilor 2, tel 01/610 2214, e-mail
helga@rotravel.com (US$10/night) is good, new is
Villa Elvis (US$12), who also have hostels in Sighisoara and in Brasov.
Practical travel information and travel agencies:
- Is It Safe To Go? I think
yes. Here's the British governments'
travel advice for Romania. (And if you think it's not safe, compare
the Romania advice to that on Hungary, Czech Republic, etc.)
- The Romanian
Customs have their own (Romanian) site with recent visa information,
addresses of local offices and more.
- TAROM - Romania's airline.
- Get there by a cheap but long
Eurolines busride.
- Wasteels travel has
offices in the main stations Bucharest and Brasov. Buy your cheap international
European rail and plane tickets there.
- Forget bringing Travellers Cheques: you'll be kept waiting in banks
for a long time, and will have to pay high commisions. Avoid this by surfing
over to the Mastercard site, that offers an incredibly incomplete
list of Mastercard
or Cirrus-compatible ATM's in Romania (and every other country in the
world). They only mention ATM's in Bucharest, Constanta and Pitesti, but
I know there are more in every large town (Cluj, Sibiu, Brasov, etc) where
there's a Banca Comerciala Romana office.
VISA also has a site that should know where you can get money out
of Romanian ATM's with their cards, but you have to fill in the city to
see if there's one in the first place. A list of all their ATM's in Romania
would be very useful, but they didn't think of that yet.
- The Romanian National
Railways (CFR) have a site (in English) with prices and a searchable
timetable, but you have to know exact spelling to fill this in. So
why not use the German railway's excellent
Deutsche Bahn
site (go to International for the English version).
- For more information about the Turkey (Istanbul) to/from Romania
(Constanta) ferry, contact the
Stinpoli shipping company. This year the service (and the website)
seems to be out of order (the ferry was in a Greek dock until the end
of August but nobody expects it to sail soon). You'll have to take a train
or bus via Bulgaria.
Language
- First of all, see my
language page, with a link to online lessons and dictionaries.
- The
Alternative Romanian Dictionary has all the information and linguistic
backgrounds you need about cursing and insulting in Romanian (including
the degree of how insulting your curse is).
- Learn the 20+ ways to say '
bread' in different Saxon dialects!
- Confused by hearing three different names for one Transylvanian
village or own? This site gives a
list of place names in Romanian, Hungarian and German. I've made
my own list on my thesis pages.
History and books
- History books in the
Corvin virtual library; downloadable in Word format or browsable
as web pages.
-
The Little Vlach Corner focusses on an unknown minority in the Balkans:
The Aromanians, Romanian-speaking descendants of shepherds in the mountains
of Greece and Albania.
- If you're interested in sociology or human geography
of Romania, read a book by Katherine Verdery, Professor of Anthropology
at Johns Hopkins University. Try Transylvanian Villagers, or 'What
was socialism and what comes next' (
excerpt here; Princeton University Press, 1996).. Really good stuff.
-
Rough Guide's Romania site has a 'further reading' section with lots
of old and new books on Romania. Try Patrick Leigh Fermor's travel books
on Central and Eastern Europe.
- Find and order your antique and rare books on
Romania online at Eastern
Books of London. Just fill in 'Romania' and click 'search'.
Civil society and human rights
Environment
Miscellaneous
- Wine lovers can check out what Romania has to offer on
Vinexport's page.
- The legacy of the Ceausescu's has been sold in a series of
auctions. On this auction preview
site you can still view pictures of Nicolae's and Elena's cars (a Buick
Electra, a Hillman and a Renault 25, presents from respectively President
Nixon, the Shah of Persia and President Mitterand), but also yachts and things
like statues, wood carvings of hunting scenes featuring Ceausescu, carpets,
shoes, and clothing.
- The
Romanian car site gives you a great overview of anything on four wheels
ever built in Romania. Including a guestlist where you can join the search
for spare parts.
- Interested in what sites are popular in Romania? Check out the
Top 100 Romanian sites.
- Link Romania: humanitarian
aid projects from England.
Questions? Comments? Mistakes?
Improvements? Mail me! jeroen.vanmarle@berlin.de
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Last modifications: 20-10-2001