Today we did a lot of driving (sleeping), but we did get to visit another fortified church. And once again, we weren’t able to go into the bacon tower. They keep talking about bacon towers and special attic ventilation for bacon. Ancient life was built around bacon, as it should be. Do you know what I have not eaten since we got here? Bacon! Not a single meal they have served us has any bacon in it. It’s crazy!

Anyways, this was the fortified church of Biertan. It’s claim to fame is the divorce tower. Before you could get a divorce, the acrimonious couple had to spend three weeks alone in the small tower with one small bed and no silverware. The idea is that living close together in tight quarters will rekindle your love, but I think watching your husband eat with no silverware would have the opposite effect. The divorce tower does boast a high success rate. There was only one divorce in the history of the church, so the husband must have been a really obnoxious soup slurper.

Their other claim to fame is a super complicated and secure door lock. They invented it to take to the Paris World Expo, you know, the one they built the Eiffel Tower for. And the lock won first place! I don’t know if that means it beat out the Eiffel Tower, or if there were different categories, or if the Eiffel Tower wasn’t part of the competition. It is a pretty magnificent lock though and looks much older than 120 years old.

After all that excitement, it was time for a nice long nap on the bus until lunch. After lunch, we had a walking tour of Sighisoara. Now that I went to the effort to get that spelled correctly, I should write about it a bit. First of all, this is the birthplace of Vlad the Impaler. Secondly, it’s the oldest continuously inhabited citadel in Europe (or maybe the world). Thirdly, it is a UNESCO world heritage sight. I need to find a checklist of UNESCO sights so that I can check them off as I accidentally go to visit them. We have been to quite a few in Romania already. thetwinsontour do adore a good UNESCO world heritage sight.

In Sighisoara, there are these covered wooden stairs that go up the mountainside. They were built for the children to be able to get up to school. From the bottom, it doesn’t look like too many stairs. In actuality, it is 174 stairs. 174 stairs ancient, wooden stairs. 174 stairs? No problem. We got this! Except we had 15 minutes to make it up 174 stairs, take a quick selfie in front of 174 stairs, and then race back down them and get to the bus with a stop at the WC on the way. And, in typical twinsontour style, we made it with 1 minute to spare. Whew.

I covered the rest of Day 5 in the day 6 blog while this one was lost. Aren’t you glad I found it?

Love,

thetwinsontour