An Uncontrollable Thirst
What would Count Dracula have for lunch? A bowl of mushroom soup and sliced bread, a small salad, vegetables with fried cheese all washed down with a goblet of Coke? Perhaps not, but that's what we sunk our teeth into at his house in the perfectly preserved medieval town of Sighisoara in Transylvania. Stone steps led up to the city wall. We stepped though a gate and the years reeled back to the 14th century. Slopping cobblestone streets led us past a massive clock tower, a monastery church and a square surrounded by houses. And then we were there, the doorstep of the home of the second son to Vlad Tepes - the home of Vlad Dracul.
We had prepared ourselves for a ghoulish place; cobwebs, eerie portraits of dead relatives, perhaps victims. There were none of these. But there were old wooden steps leading up a narrow hall, black cast iron hanging lights, low ornate wooden door frames, straight-backed chairs, dark thick-legged tables, enough to make us feel haunted.
Lunch gave us a haunted feeling as well; not in the food itself but in the service. It was confusing, should we sit or wait to be seated? No one acknowledged that we had entered. So we sat. The two waitresses placed salads on the other tables and walked past us. We waited. There was no menu and when I questioned what the meals were, I was ignored. Eventually a first course of soup arrived, then a second course, then a third. Not a word, not a smile. A dish of salt sat on each table, perhaps to ward off evil spirits? Fargo unwilling to let an entire meal go by smile less, poked his head out to talk to another tourist at the end of the meal and, ah ha, we're sure we saw the waitress's lips turn up. Was that a fang I saw?
Despite the odd atmosphere, lunch was filling and to walk it off we ascended the 172 steps of the covered stairway in town to the 1345 Gothic Bergkivche church. Then the most unusual thing occurred, we both were assaulted by an uncontrollable thirst. Had the bowl of salt not worked? We strolled through the vine-tangled cemetery behind the church; headstone were laid at the front of horizontal cement caskets as if a creepy movies. Our longing, however, remained unsatisfied. We toured the clock tower and viewed the relics of time in its museum, but that didn't help either. It wasn't until we felt a smooth liquid sweep over our tongues and a chill engulf our front teeth that we felt the surge of pleasure we had craved. Vlad would surely have approved - soft ice cream.
Another oddity is happening now. As the sun is setting we find our voices dropping an octave and our words ending in long drawn out twangs. Our R's are rolling; our W's sound more and more like V's. I'm sure there's no cause for alarm. Nevertheless, as we camp below the walls of the Bran castle (the very castle that in 1897 inspired Bram Stoker to write his tale of vampires) John is slicing a clove of garlic into our soup, just in case.
