Gypsy Trip

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Gypsy Trip

About Tour

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Let your prejudices aside and come to celebrate this exclusive feast, because to celebrate is what the gypsies do best. This trip presents the complex image of one of the most interesting and personalized ethnicity from Romania: the Gypsies.

We will discover the world of an ethnic group that strongly individualized through traditional features that had done in a small degree to integrate in Romanian society of those times and continues to experience difficulties in adjusting to new realities and requirements arising from EU membership.

1 st Day

Arrival

Included highlights:

  • Arrival in Bucharest, the capital of Romania.
  • If time allows a short city tour can be organized. Bucharest will be the first point where we will start to discover the Gypsy World. You may even stumble upon a Gypsy band in one of Bucharest’s beautiful city squares. If such is the case, you’d be hard pressed not to take part in the joyful dancing that always accompanies such impromptu concerts. You can get a taste for the vibrancy of Roma culture - and surely you’ll get a strong sense of how gypsy culture is rooted deep within Romania’s history.
  • In the evening a meeting with a local personality of gypsies’ will take place and you will have the chance to discuss over dinner about their history and culture.
  • Check-in.

2 nd Day

Discovering Gypsy communities in Transylvania

Included highlights:

  • Departure to Sighisoara, the only inhabited medieval citadel, the Rothenburg of Eastern Europe.
  • Stop in Viscri, where we will discuss about Prince Charles projects regarding the gypsy communities in Transylvania
  • Have lunch.
  • Arrival in Sighisoara.
  • Dinner and check-in.

Included meals:
  • Breakfast
  • Lunch
  • Dinner
3 rd Day

Discovering Sighisoara and the Gypsies

Included highlights:

  • Enjoy the city tour of Sighisoara - the place of Dracula’s birth and the best preserved medieval citadel of Romania - part of the UNESCO patrimony.
  • Visit the gypsies from Valeni.
  • Traditional gypsy lunch and Barbeque with the gypsies and enjoy the traditional gypsy life.
  • Continue to Reghin.
  • Check-in.
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4 th Day

Discovering the Gypsy life

Included highlights:

In the district of Apalina, situated in the suburbs of the Municipality of Reghin, live 466 gypsy families, but not at all a easy life. People from there succeed to survive from the social help delivered by the City Hall and also by colecting recyclable materials. Here we will visit a family that is involved in Horse breeding.

  • Visit the Gypsies from Apalina,
  • Lunch with the Gypsies
  • Continue to Bacau.
  • Check-in at the hotel in Bacau.

Included meals:
  • Breakfast
  • Lunch
5 th Day

Listening the Gypsy Music

Included highlights:

  • Lunch in the neighborhood of Bacau,
  • Listen the gypsy fanfare - a brass band of Gypsy heritage. Music is a very important part of their life. They attend all the important moments in the village life such as weddings, baptisms, funerals and all the other family or community celebrations. The musicians are men and their instruments have been passed on from father to son for generations. Roma being involved in performing at the weddings have always represented an important link in economic and social life of the local community.
  • Continue to Botosani city.
  • Dinner and check-in.

Included meals:
  • Breakfast
  • Lunch
  • Dinner
6 th Day

Full day dedicated to the Gypsies

Included highlights:

Full day dedicated to the Blacksmiths, Lingurari (producers of domestic products of wood tools) and musicians at Stefanesti. Formerly also an important jewish center, Stefanesti exhibits a very interesting mix of the 2 Roma groups plus Jewish remains and influences. Return to the hotel.

Historically gypsies were divided as follows:

  • “rudari” or goldsmiths, were dealing to pursuit the gold in rivers;
  • “ursari”, who wandered the country with their bears;
  • “lingurari” dealing with domestic products of wood tools;
  • “laiesii” who were blacksmiths, builders, manufacturers of combs, were small thefts. They did not have stable housing, living in tents and wandered the country in order to get the bare necessities of life.

7 th Day

Discovering the Gypsies from Moldova

Included highlights:

  • Visit Soroca, the Gypsy “capital” of the Republic of Moldova with a sizable Gypsy minority settled here.
  • Visit the fortress which is a unique monument of defensive architecture of Europe.
  • Visit the “Gypsies’ hill” where we will get acquainted with local sightseeing -“Palaces” where the gypsies live. Here you will have a tremendous possibility to visit a gypsy family owner of a bakery, to get familiarized with the gypsies’ way of life
  • Try the dishes of traditional Gypsy cuisine.
  • Visit Chateau Vartely. Here we will have an excursion around the complex, visit the wine factory, have the wine tasting
  • Have dinner in traditional Moldovan or European style at Chateau Vartely.
  • Check-in

Included meals:
  • Breakfast
  • Lunch
  • Dinner with wine tasting
8 th Day

Wine tasting in an underground wine city

Included highlights:

  • Check-out
  • Discover TIRASPOL (capital of Transnistria) - the old USSR is still alive and well in Transnistria. It is a breakaway territory within the internationally recognized borders of Moldova.
  • Enjoy a brandy tasting and lunch.
  • City tour of Tiraspol
  • Visit the Football Academy.
  • Departure to Chisinau,
  • Check-in
  • Wine tasting in the underground wine city Milestii Mici, registered in the Guinness Book of Records for being the biggest Wine Collection in the world. It contains over two million bottles of wine highly appreciated by the winemakers from all over the world. The wines lie right there, at a depth of 80 meters, in bottles covered with dust and mold, in small elegant houses which are completed every year.
  • Return to our hotel.

Included meals:
  • Breakfast
  • Lunch with brandy tasting
9 th Day

Departure home

Included highlights:

  • Departure from Chisinau.

Included meals:
  • Breakfast

What People Say

More reviews ›

Have you ever wanted to go on a culture-wine-food tour? In California? France? Italy? Please, have some imagination! Be a little adventurous and go on one in Romania and Moldova. 

It was my good luck to participate in a tour organized by Ways Travel, during which i checked out the many wonders of Romania and Moldova. 

Our group on the bus was an international gang of nine – a Belgian, a German, a Norwegian, an Australian, a few Americans of interesting ethnic alloys and me, dual Dutch and American citizen. What can I say, it was an experience just sitting on a bus with these people and hear their war stories and get initiated into the workings of the behind-the-scenes travel industry. 

Leader of our tribe was the fabulous tour guide Victoria, who speaks four languages, English, German, Russian, Romanian, one of those people who makes a simple bilingual person such as myself feel humble and uneducated. 

The trip was a symphony of history, food, drink, music and dance. Dancing with the Gypsies no less. I tell you, it was fabulous, it was intoxicating. We got history – a dizzying whirl of wars and battles and bloody strife. Of conquests and annexations, of armies rampaging through the countryside, raping, pillaging and impaling. We heard colorful tales about Dacian tribes, the Roman Empire, the Red Horde, the Saxons, the Ottoman Empire, the communist era under Ceausescu. And let’s not forget to mention good old Count Dracula, Vlad the Impaler, who hailed from Transylvania. Really, we deserved every drop of hootch we got along the way to recover from all the tragedies we vicariously suffered through. 

In Romania we loved the beautiful towns of Sibiu and Sighisoara. In Sighisoara we missed seeing the house where Dracula was born because a movie was being filmed and they’d closed it off for visitors. Fortunately, we had a liqueur and brandy tasting to cheer us up. We hadn’t had lunch yet and our stomachs were empty, which helped raise the mood quickly. 

A highlight was our visit to the home of a Roma family in Transylvania and learning more about their culture and lifestyle. (You can read a story about this on my blog here.) Not all Gypsies are beggars living in the streets of large cities. It’s always a good thing to be disabused of your prejudices and preconceived notions. 

We stayed in excellent hotels and lodges, as well as in a humble hostel run by a monastery. We ate fancy restaurant food as well as simple village fare. We saw exquisite as well as cheery architecture, visited opulent cathedrals as well as the modest underground monastery chapel in Orhei Vechi, not far from Chisinau. The vino flowing across the miles was a charming mix of the good, the bad and the holy. The holy being the wine we tasted in a monastery, blessed by the priests. Unfortunately, the blessing did not transform it into nectar of the gods, but the dinner there was quite gourmet, all prepared from food grown by the monks without chemical assistance. 

We also visited Transnistria, which is a rather unique place, as most of you will already know. It is also home to the famous Kvint brandy factory and would you believe, we went there for a brandy dégustation – seven varieties of brandy. It was very informative, interesting and intoxicating. It was also lunch time, but fortunately there was food. We eventually struggled out of there, back on the bus, across the border that is not a border, and traveled down to the Purcari wineries in the south of Moldova where we were treated to . . . you guessed it . . . a wine tasting. Of ten types of wine. Not just any old village plonk, either. No, we got to sip the wine of kings, queens and tsars. Our livers got a workout that day. 

I’m going to stop here. There was more, much more, but I don’t want to give away everything, because what you should do, really, is check out Ways Travel’s website at www.ways.md .

Wendela Kilmer, Netherlands

19.10.2014

This is just a brief note to let you know how much my wife, 10-year old son and I enjoyed our 5-day trip through Transylvania last week with Ms. Victoria Odobescu as our tour guide. The trip was a wonderful experience - thanks largely to Ms. Odobescu's meticulous planning, organization, and creativity. 

We have been on many tours in the past, but this one was by far the most delightful and educational. We will remember it for a long time to come. Ms. Odobescu is a consummate professional and deserves to be recognized as such. I will certainly recommend your tour company to friends and family.

Javier Trevino, USA

05.09.2015

Natalia – is not just the best guide, but a reliable person with whom you never worry about the tour. When we need an English-speaking guide for the program, we never think whom to call. For us the most important thing is to know whether Natalia has possibility for that period. 

Only working with her we are sure that the work will be perfectly done. She knows a lot, the tourists are always satisfied. 

Anastasia S.

07.02.2014

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