Transylvania - Sinaia

The “Land Beyond the Forest” lends an air of mystery and adventure. Such is the English translation of the Latin word Transylvania, a magnificent mountainous region in Romania that in modern times has been closely associated with the fictional character Dracula and the legendary warlord Vlad Dracula otherwise known as Vlad the Impaler.

Occupying nearly 42% of Romania’s total surface, the region is hugged by the Carpathian Mountains (“the Carpathians”) to the east and south and the Apuseni Mountains to the west. At the centre is the Transylvanian Plateau made up of a network of valleys, canyons, and small mountain ranges.

Occupied by Dacians, Romans, Huns, Slavs and Bulgars, until just after the end of the first millennium AD Transylvania became part of the Kingdom of Hungary and then the subsequent Austro-Hungarian Empire for the next 900 years. Following the end of WW1 and the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, Transylvania was transferred to Romania.

The region is populated by a mix of Romanians, Hungarians, and German Saxons. This cultural diversity beautifully shows up in the well-preserved Gothic architecture, the Saxon fortified towns, traditional folk costumes, and its finger-licking good food.

I am currently in Sinaia, a mountain resort town that is located in the historic region of Wallachia, south of Transylvania. Wallachia, referred to as Muntenia by Romanians, was a region that was often at war either with the Ottomans to the south or Hungarians to the north. It continued this way until the late-19th century when Wallachia together with Moldavia, a vassal principality in the northeast, joined to become the Kingdom of Romania with King Carol I, a member of a German royal dynasty, as the first monarch to rule.

King Carol commissioned the construction of Peleş Castle, a summer residence in the north of Sinaia on an extant medieval route linking Wallachia with Transylvania. Built at the end of the 19th century the castle has a Neo-Renaissance and Gothic Revival architecture. Completed with more than 170 rooms, it is a beautiful structure of spires, wood panelling, a clock tower and highly detailed frescoes. The grounds are filled with terraced gardens, niches filled with statues, fountains, grand lion statues standing guard and more.

Whilst outside is just stunning, the inside is an absolute visual feast. Spectacular carvings, walnut panelling, themed rooms, gilding on walls and doors, sumptuous velvet seating and curios abound all around. The central atrium was covered with a large stained-glass ceiling allowing natural light to filter through. Medieval weapons adorned the walls where I recognised the curved scimitar swords of the Ottomans, 16th century muskets, battle-axes and various daggers and swords. Everywhere I turned there was something to study or admire.

Filled with all the wonderful art and architecture, I stepped outside and took in the crisp, clean air of the Bucegi Mountains. As the castle proudly sat on a hill surrounded by dense forestry, I imagined this was a quiet getaway for the family from their royal duties.

Taking a stroll, I visited the nearby Pelişor castle the King built at the turn of the 20th century for his nephew, Ferdinand I, heir to the throne, and his wife, Maria. Much smaller in size, the Art Nouveau castle is famous for the Golden Room that is decorated floor to ceiling in golden leaves.

Passing by King Carol’s towering statue at the main entrance, I head out of the estate and towards the city of Braşov.


PS. Experience our virtual challenges in real life - The Conqueror Adventures



The team at The Conqueror Challenges
https://www.theconqueror.events

 

 

The Captain Eats Alone

17th June 2024

Hey McBeth,

In regards to a video you posted where you mentioned the tradition of a Captain not eating with their crew, I happen to have read about this in a book called “Bully for Brontosaurus” by Stephen Jay Gould. There was an essay about the famous voyage of Charles Darwin aboard the HMS Beagle.

It would happen that back in the day of sailing ships the Captain was considered to be of higher class than his men. Do remember that the Captain was likely the only person on ship who could read and write in Darwin’s time and so was the only person who could keep logs. He had to be educated and education took money back then. Thus, the Captain was wealthy or a nobleman.

The United States government did not make reading and writing a requirement of education until after the First World War. It was deemed necessary for soldiers to be able to read complicated instructions for the weapons they would use. I’m not sure if England followed suit, but it was likely that until the Second World War most crew members were unable to keep logs. This could be why there was a tradition of the “Captain’s Log” as opposed to the ship’s log which I believe is more universal.

The essay in “Bully for Brontosaurus” stated that Darwin was aboard the Beagle as companion to the Captain. Isolation from the crew often caused mental problems for the men who commanded ships. He was there to keep the Captain from committing suicide as was common at the time.

In the layout of a three mast ship, like Hook’s ship from Peter Pan, you can note the Captain’s cabin aft of the third mast. This room was the highest built on the ship and had large windows affording the Captain light to read and write as he needed this for log keeping. It also cemented his status of being above the crew.

It should also be noted that the Captain would have had better food than the crew, and eating it in front of them would have bothered them and been bad for morale. The Captain would have been more vulnerable when eating, and so eating alone would have made it harder for the crew to attack him or poison his meal.

In other words, it was a good idea to keep the Captain from his crew for security reasons, but it was a measure of status back in the day. It would be less practical for an army unit to do this on the march which could be why this is not tradition in the army.

However, I will note that in the film “Letters from Iwo Jima” there was a line stating that Japans regulations required that an officer be served three dishes at every meal. This would indicate that the practice of an officer not eating with his men was common in some militaries. Then again, that was just a movie.


Best,



Richard Leland Neal

Two Horror Properties

18th August 2024

Dear Director,

In reading your ad for a horror film I can say I have two properties that may be of interest to you. To be fair, it’s hard for me to keep psychological elements out of my writing. My degree is in psychology.

The first script is “Walker in the Trees” which breaks down to a siege film, one location, but it does have a number of college age characters. In the first act we establish that the characters are going out to a cabin to party but there is a “grass man” in the woods. One character, who is just giving them a ride, is looking for the people who killed his sister. By the end of the first act he is left bleeding by the side of the road.

In the second act we see the killers have the party people captive and are about to start killing when the thing in the trees starts to pick them off. They can’t call for help because they would go to jail and they can leave because it’s out there.

Third act, we learn that the man looking for his sister’s killer is telepathic. We have hallucinations, ghosts, and a bigfoot like creature that can communicate with him. I’ve had people tell me that the script was very cool but hard to understand.

The second script is one that would need work as I wrote it for live production when suffering from sleep deprivation. I wrote “Levi” back in a college writing class and it’s hard to describe but it starts as a murder mystery and then evolves into a Sci Fi horror with science made monsters.

Most of the action takes place off camera but we would bring on camera everything that the budget will permit. It’s a grounded dark superhuman story that people will talk about.

I do have another script called “House Broken” but that is a dark comedy with singing, dancing and superheroes. This would all be one location and could be done under your budget, but I don’t think it’s a film you’d be looking for.

Finally, I have been kicking around a concept called “Empty, Hollow, Thud” which is inspired by a Psychological experiment I read about. This would simply involve placing a character in locations that change every time the three words are heard. Empty would place them in an empty lonely space. Hollow would place them in a confined space. Thud would give them some injury.

Each situation would get more perilous as the film went on, but this is just a concept and the idea would be to film this in locations we can find. It’s more of an art project kind of thing.

Best of luck in finding what you’re looking for,


Richard Leland Neal

Enough Housing

20th August 2024

Hey Hank,

I guess I’ve been watching a lot of your videos in the last few days and something you said needed clarification. You mentioned that homelessness was the result of there being not enough housing and advocated for building more. This is true enough, but there are other solutions.

The problem lies in that we try to bring the housing to the jobs and not the jobs to the housing. I live not far from Los Angeles, and in Los Angeles most people need two jobs to afford their housing. Building more would drive down the price, but there are already more empty homes than un-housed people.

Further down the line, people will buy houses as investments and use them as rentals which are a big thing where I live because of tourism. There are any number of small towns and lesser cities where the rent is low, but there are no jobs to keep people in the houses.

I wrote a letter to the Governor once recommending that we install the infrastructure for recycling, most of our blue bin waste goes to landfills, in nearby California City which has all the space to build more and no people to live in the houses they have.

To install this industry in Los Angeles would be pointless. There are more than enough jobs to go around here but everyone needs more and more of them. Trying to force more and more into any space will eventually result in higher pressure. There are only so many places where you can build homes in the big cities, and housing projects have their problems.

Meanwhile, there are homes in smaller cities with no one to fill them. We can build homes where there are jobs, and place jobs where there are homes but only one solution brings life to fading communities. Truth be told we should do both.

As a final point, why would I bring this up with you? I mean, homeless advocacy is not your major focus, but you have so much larger of a voice than me. I wrote a few letters to the Governor of the State of California about this and I have no idea if he read or even saw them. You could make a video and the whole world would hear you.

Best,


Richard Leland Neal

Yellowstone - Yellowstone Lake

Having left Old Faithful, I trekked along Grand Loop Road until I took another small detour to see the Kepler Cascades. The viewing platform gave me a wonderful aerial view of Firehole River as it tumbled across several drops and plunged 50ft (15m) below to continue on its course.

Back on the road, I skirted the shore of Scaup Lake, crossed several creeks and arrived at my final destination, West Thumb Geyser Basin, on the shore of Yellowstone Lake. The basin is a boardwalk loop, passing several geysers but the most attractive was the Abyss Pool with its greenish-blue colour. The pool is 53ft (16m) deep and its eruption history is quite recent, having exploded for the first time in 1987. Its eruptions were between 30-100ft (9-30m) high but it stopped by 1992 and has since returned to being a quiet hot spring pool. In 1883, a visitor best described the pool as “a great, pure, sparkling sapphire rippling with heat”. The nearby Black Pool has the same beautiful colours.

Another unique and fascinating feature is the Fishing Cone, a geyser on the edge of Yellowstone Lake with its cone protruding out of the water. In the early 20th century, it used to erupt to heights of 40ft (12m) but with the lake’s water level increasing it inundated the cone and cooled it, thereby no longer erupting. It is now considered a hot spring. There was a story of a fisherman in the late 1800s, who caught a trout and tried to fling it ashore but the fish came off the hook and landed into the spring, getting boiled by the searing water. This description was also found in an 1883 tourist manual, “it has often been said that it is possible to catch trout in the Yellowstone Lake and cook them in a boiling spring close behind the angler, without taking them off the hook”. Thankfully thirty years later this practice was banned.

My journey ends on the shore of Yellowstone Lake, the largest body of water in the park and the biggest freshwater lake in North America at 7,000ft (2,100m) above sea level. During winter, the lake’s surface completely freezes and it takes up to six months to fully defrost. With ice as thick as 2ft (60cm), the lake remains cold year-round with temperatures as low as 41°F (5°C). It’s fair to say that swimming is discouraged.

Yellowstone is an incredible national park filled with tall conifer trees, sputtering geysers, colourful pools, meandering rivers and chilly lakes. Its fragile ecosystem deserves to be protected not just for future generations but also for the diverse wildlife that call Yellowstone home.



PS. Experience our virtual challenges in real life - The Conqueror Adventures



The team at The Conqueror Challenges
https://www.theconqueror.events