My Dear and Unfortunate Successor: Digging Dracula's raison d'être

Alternate title: I'm going on an adventure!

When I went off to Kingston, I did a post giving a little bit of background on the town, the school, what I would be doing there, etc.

Doing that for this trip is going to be a bit trickier.

Let's discuss the whole trip, shall we

Wednesday night-Thursday, I fly from Albany-->Toronto-->Frankfurt-->Budapest, Hungary
I stay in Hungary for a couple days
I take a 13 hour train ride from Budapest to Sighisoara, Romania
I take another bus/train from Sighisoara to my final destination, Odorheiu Secuiesc
Where I will then spend 5 weeks digging furiously in the dirt, pretty much 9-5 Monday-Friday

So, Part One: Budapest

Budapest is Hungary's capital
I am really, really excited to be there for a few days on either end
A family friend of ours is of Hungarian descent and I love listening to her talk about Hungary, and Budapest specifically
The language is messed up
No seriously, Hungarian is a weird, weird language.
I will be in Budapest for 2.5 days in June and ~3 days in August, before heading home.

Part Two: Sighisoara

The most important thing about Sighisoara, for me, is that it is the real Dracula (Prince Vlad III, the Impaler)'s birthplace.
I will be going there for that piece of history alone.
It houses a couple really cool places
It's a UNESCO World Heritage Site

Part Three, Odorheiu Secuiesc

General Info re: Transylvania (plus random trivia):

Transylvania is a region in Romania that has been handed back and forth between the Ottomans, the Hapsburgs, Hungary/the Magyars, Romania, the Austro-Hungarian empire, and just generally passed around like a hot potato for much of its existence
Apparently, Transylvania was at one point ruled by the Bathory family from Hungary. The Barthorys were split into two branches and one of them includes the infamous Countess Elizabeth Bathory, the "Blood Countess," sometimes called "Countess Dracula". Elizabeth ruled Hungary in the late 1500s and is most famous for bathing in the blood of virgins to keep her youth and beauty

the narrative thread found in many stories and much of real life of a woman's only power being her beauty
the new movie I am desperate to see: Chastity Bites, starring one of my tip-top actress (Allison Scagliotti). A modern-day version of Countess Bathory, she heads up an abstinence club in a high school and kills the girls in it. The tagline is: Who says the virgin lives till the end?

Bram Stoker, daft old man, never went to Transylvania, only researching it swiftly after a traveling friend mentioned it as an ominous place he ought to look at for his horror WIP.
Bram Stoker, the man, the myth, the writer behind some of our most persistent vampire myths, is often held in high esteem for using Dracula. Much has been done connecting the creepy fictional vampire with the terrifying Vlad, the original vampire, the impaler and drinker of his enemy's blood. In fact, Bram never did much research on Vlad Tepes. He was flipping through a book one day (in Whitby, northeastern England, of all places!) and found the names: Dracul and Dracula. Dracul was Vlad's father's nickname; a horrible old man, he earned the nickname Dracul (which means 'dragon' and is related to his part in the Order of the Dragon; it is not 'devil' as was translated early on) and Vlad III grew up an angry, vengeful, mean man with the name Dracula, son of the dragon. Bram thought, ooh that sounds creepy enough, done! He crossed out the working title of his novel and penciled in Dracula instead. The name stuck.

I think my favorite part of this is all the academic work on connecting the two figures, and he did it purely on a creative writerly whim.

I am dying to go to Bran Castle, the supposed basis for Bram's Dracula and called "Dracula's Castle" in Brasov

My Dear and Unfortunate Successor