Sighet to Timisoara

We arrived in Sighet in the north of Maramures (back up near the border with Ukraine again) and strangely enough found a cigarette market!! So this is where they end up. There were border police everywhere in the town but obviously have a blindspot for this little market.
Sighet wasn't a particularly pleasant town but contained a prison in Ceausescu's time for anti party folk and was very cruel, starving and torturing prisoners. It now contains a museum covering the communist period in all of the satellite states and all of the various cruelties etc. The museum is rated up there with Auchwitz for it's representation of the past and certainly had a similar effect on us although not to the scale of Auchwitz.
We had a particularly friendly doorman at our hotel in Sighet who gave us a shot of palinka on our way to our room, and when he was our waiter that night continued to bring us shots and said (through the translation of the receptionist) that he'd keep bringing it as long as we wanted, all for free of course. The fact he looked like Robin Williams made him even more endearing, crazy.
From Sighet we caught a bus back through Baia Mare (no sign of the dolls) and on to Oradea. We weren't too stoked to be back on a minibus but our driver did very well given the state of the road. We had heard they were bad, and thought we had seen the worst of it but this was ridiculous. Almost beyond description really but it had the effect of jackhammering your spine into the base of your skull, yuk.
Oradea was a very sleepy town, leaving us with not much to do or see but spend a pleasant day wandering around watching a bunch of men fishing and waiting for somewhere to open to feed us (the hotel doesn't do brekkie on Sundays-must be a fast day for all travelers or something). The receptionist at the hotel was nice though asking what Australia was like and if we really have that many snakes and spiders.
From Oradea we grabbed a train to Timisoara, the town where the 1989 revolution began. The town was really pretty with three squares and lots of nice old buildings next to the newer cement ones. The protesting started here when Father Tokes spoke out against the government and was arrested. There were about 100 deaths in the following few days. It was strange walking around realizing that anyone over the age of 28 or so would remember the revolution or may have lost someone in it.
Photos: Some bloke we met in Timisoara, Think we should ask for Royalties?