I have discovered where German buses come to die and be reborn into another life.  Transylvania, fittingly enough.  Nearly cost me at least another hour of standing by the road in scorching sunshine by "Not-Dracula's Castle" peering at oncoming traffic... I'd been lurking there hoping for a bus back to the beautiful city of Braşov, but given that there were no actual timetables, or even a bus stop, things were a little uncertain.  I'd leaped off the bus there and asked where to get the bus back, and was rewarded with a grin and a gesture towards the other side of the road.  It didn't occur to me that the vehicle in question would turn up disguised as a German school bus, meaning I automatically turned away and thought about something else, until at the very last moment I registered the possiblity of a cunning disguise and peered at it more closely.  Naturally, it makes sense to simply stuff a little cardboard notice in the front window of a recycled bus, rather than going to all the unnecessary expense of respraying the bus, but just sometimes one can see the point of all those corporate rebrandings etc...

Sorry about the photo.  It's really not possible to do Dracula-like atmosphere when the sun is beating down like no-one's business.  Especially funny when the main reason I headed out there was because it was so horribly grey and rainy in Bucharest.  There, I couldn't see more than a metre when I was looking for a restaurant, and the rain was so hard that there was at least an inch of water over every single bit of pavement in the city.  I was fascinated by the story of Queen Marie of Romania however - definitely novel fodder!