The Red Lake – First day

This is the first post in a series documenting my trip in the Red Lake region from Romania.

The posts in this series are marked with the tag "Red Lake Trip".

The journey started at home. Packing things up and preparing for the trip. Then I got on the A1 highway, where after getting in the Hunedoara county, right after entering the Alba county. I made a break for around an hour and a half, during which I slept cause I was tired from waking up at 6:30 AM instead of waking up at 9 – 10 AM.

After I woke up, I got back on the highway. Where I entered the A10 highway to go to the A3 highway which brought me closer to the destination without using national roads or county ones.

The landscape as viewed form the pension.

But eventually the highway ended. I was forced to use the national roads, but at least the view was awesome! I'm talking about hills and mountains, and also lakes... Sadly I don't have any pictures from the road, but at least I have some from my walk after I registered at the pension, so I'm gonna add some here! Even though I don't have photos from the road, the view from my walk was very similar.

Once I got at the Red Lake, I stopped to a restaurant. I got a steak hamburger, which was really good! I recommend going to this restaurant 100%, even though the food was about 53 RON (~10 Euros), I still recommend checking them out!

A picture with some local houses.

After eating, I got to the pension I was tired, but not tired enough. So, I've taken a walk until I got to the entrance of a village name Trei Fântâni (English: Tree Fountains), the walk until there was beautiful! Lots of beautiful sinecry, lots of beautiful and small houses... Everything was like I was in Switzerland or any other country known for it's mountains.

The Bicăhel River.

During my walk, I've also found a tiny little fountain. The water was extremely cold, but at least it tasted good! After drinking some water, I've walked for about 500 meters and got to the entrance of Trei Fântâni (English: Tree Fountains). Also when I came back to the pension, I stumbled across a river, the Bicăhel River.

And that's it for this day! See you in the next post!

By the way, I made this post in a new format that I've talked about more in detail in this post.

Tell me if you liked it or not in the comments bellow or send email me at businessiulian@gmail.com!

I've decided to do some changes to the blog

Since I started this blog all the way back in November 2023, I've never posted a post with an image. I did that to make this blog look as close as it can to a 2000s blog. But that will change today!

I realized that putting little icons and images in a block of text, really changes the mood of it and it adds to a enjoyment of reading.

I think that more blogs and websites in general should do the same.

If you're opposed to this decision, please tell me in the comments or send me an email at businessiulian@gmail.com.

I started exploring the "dark web"

 A couple of days ago, I installed the one and only Tor Browser, with the intention that if in the near future the internet in Romania (by extension the European Union) becomes locked down like it is now in the United Kingdom, I would still have some freedom of speech.

Little did I know that I would go down a rabbit hole so deep, that it became a pleasure to explore it. Now just to defend myself, in the time I was on the Tor network, I did not explore illegal content and I don't intend to use the Tor network to cause harm. This is only out of curiosity and ambiguity.

If you want to know what the Tor network is and how it works, check out this Wikipedia article right here. But if you're too lazy to do so, here's a brief explanation from me:

The Tor network is a network composed of millions of computers "talking" to each other, creating a separate network independent from the internet we all use on a daily basis. On the Tor network websites are not accessible using a normal TLD (top-level domain) like .com, .org, etc. Instead, websites are accessed using a .onion domain, this domain is composed of a hash generated by the server. This makes the Tor network private and inaccessible using a normal browser.

 Now that that's out of the way, I'll start documenting my findings! Because the "dark web" is speared, I can't use Google or any other search engine to search stuff, so I use Torch instead.

My first finding was by searching for a term which most people consider controversial... "furry". Upon searching for it, lots of websites popped up. After scrolling a bit, I've found a website titled "S-Config" (which has a normal counterpart as well) is a blog run by someone called S (as I understand). The website has a very "emo" look, like the ones from the 2000s (no offence to it). And in general, it seems like a very interesting website nonetheless!

After visiting S-Config, I searched the term "Google street view", which brought me to a transcript of a 2016 podcast called "Security Now!" and I'm gonna say it... HOLY YAP! Even I don't yap that much! Anyways, it was interesting seeing it and torturing ChatGPT into summarizing it!

The podcast talked about how Adobe Flash will die, and how a telemetry code was found in Microsoft's Visual Studio 2015. Other than that, they talked about data breaches, software bugs from big companies, how anyone can hack into a camera and watch you, etc. Now the interesting part was that they also talked about how this will become the norm in the future, and they were not wrong!

Flash is dead, telemetry is just everywhere, data breaches happen every week, software bugs are a daily occurrence, and Chinese cameras that connect to strange servers are popular now!

So yeah, these were the 2 things that caught my attention. I hope to find more stuff like this in the future, it really brings me back to the days when Flash games were a norm and exploring the internet wasn't a weird thing.