Brasov, now

Sitting in Brasov station, since the timetable in the hostel was inaccurate and I've an hour and a half before the train to Sibiu. The farmers market by the hostel sells the most wonderful peaches and tomatoes, and potatoes which actually taste of something; it's a little early for the cherries so some of them are still a bit sour.

This is Transylvania, so originally Hungarian (and therefore in the C19 mostly German) rather than Wallachia and ethnic-Romanian. Brasov looks like a run-down version of a small German town; there's a hill rising steeply directly behind it, from which you can see that it's at the edge between the fertile plain and the darkly forested, uninhabited mountain.

Came through Sinaia yesterday, which has two palaces. Peles, built by King Carol I (an imported German) looks like an English stately home taken to the ultimate excess; walls are tooled leather when they're not dark oak carved inches deep, huge Venetian-crystal mirrors on many of the walls, Persian carpets on the floors, a couple of utterly OTT Moorish and Turkish rooms, and a secret passage in the library.

Queen Marie, of Dorothy Parker fame, was an imported English lady, a grand-daughter of Queen Victoria (OK, so German two generations back ...); she couldn't abide Peles, and had Pelisor built.

Now, that is a fantastic palace. Rather than a copy of stately-home styles from the C17 and earlier, this is a blank-slate Art Deco design of an enormous luxurious house. Light wood subtly shaped; two-tone wallpapers in greys or golds; Tiffany and Lalique ornaments. White-painted wooden furniture, staircases at a human scale with plain carpets. Art Nouveau paintings. papersky may be my only reader to understand that this is the other end of the scale with Castel Coch in the middle.

At both Peles and Pelisor, interior photography is forbidden, so this is all you get. Sorry.