[mappress]

Cluj Napoca is the capital of the region Transylvania in Romania. Transylvania is synonymous with the birth place of Dracula but it’s just a myth.

Spent the day walking around the city. The city is pretty small, around 300,000 people and doesn’t require a lot of time to walk around it. I read that the city is ranked as one of the top five growing city by the magazine Monocle and there are some offshoring activities by European companies here because there is a big talent pool of students. According to the American magazine InformationWeek, Cluj-Napoca is quickly becoming Romania’s technopolis. There are many ethnic Hungarians here that sometimes indentify more with Hungary than Romania.

Ate at Agape, sort of like a food court in the city center.

Chatted with a lady and she talked about there is an upcoming election and how she is dissapointed with the Politicians in Romania. After traveling across the Balkans and Eastern Europe, all I heard is that every ex-communist countries citizens complain about their corrupted and incompetant leaders. After the Soviet Union collapsed, many state firms were sold at a low price to people who were well connected with the governments and those well connected people are still running the government behind the scene today. So even though, there are good leaders out there but it’s hard for them to be elected because of the behind the scene power. I remembered that this is sort of mentioned in Joseph Stiglitz book, Globalization and its discontent.
Cluj is a nice university town

There are 2 big malls in Cluj and visited Iulius mall

and Polus mall

with bus 24.
Took an overnight train to Bucharest at 11.30pm (9 hours train ride, 500km, 54LEI~`13Euros)

Some guys at the Hostel. There is a Portuguese, Finnish and Romanian.

From the hostel, walked 30 minutes to the train station and took an overnight train to Bucharest at 10.30pm (54 LEI ~ 12 Euros).

Romanian is a football crazy country, met some football fans on the train who are traveling to see the match between Red Star vs Fenerbahce.

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