Seeing this (scroll down to the seventh snippet of news, about the Frenchie at Romanian monasteries) made us at once jump with joy and remember one of the most surreal moments of our life so far in Romania.

It goes back to the days when Romania joining the European Union was beyond anyone’s wildest federal fantasies, a time when foreigners were routinely skinned for every penny they had, at every opportunity.

Legally.

The story is this: we were staying at a rather good hotel (the Sport) in Poiana Brasov. It was not state owned (it had already been in private hands for some time), and was used (we think it still is) to host tourists from Britain skiing in Poiana on package tours.

Yet ridiculously, they (like many other hotels, museums and state institutions at the time) practised double pricing: Romanians paid one price, foreigners not from former socialist countries paid another, higher price.

On this particular trip, we went with an English friend who happened to be married to a Romanian. They naturally shared a room.

And then, at check out time, all hell broke loose.

We – being 100 per cent foreign – had been presented with a bill for the foreigner price. We were not happy, but that was how it was. We paid.

Our English friend and her Romanian husband on the other hand posed a problem: what price should they pay?

The hotel’s solution was to give them two bills: one each. She got a bill for half of the foreigner price, he got a bill for half of the Romanian price.

A fierce lawyer who never minced her words she went (quite rightly) beserk. Not necessarily because of the price she had been asked to pay (had she been in the room alone or with another foreigner she would have happily paid the foreigner price). No, she went beserk over the sheer stupidity of charging two people a different price for a night they had just spent in the same bed.

She got nowhere, but made her point. Double pricing ended more or less everywhere shortly afterwards (maybe word got round that she was on the loose) and quite frankly we had not heard of the practice for some time now. That it was still going on – in a monastery of all places – comes as a shock.

So well done SOLVIT (a substance which almost certainly works wonders on leaky bathrooms too).

Poiana Brasov. Photo by CodGabriel@Flickr

We used to have a genuine soft-spot for Poiana Brasov, a legacy of a winter a decade or so ago when we would ski there every weekend. As soon as we’d finished work on a Friday we would head off for Brasov, eat at Taverna (then just about the only decent restaurant in the city); stay at the Postavarul (the cheapest sleep in town) and drive up to Poiana very early on Saturday morning, usually in time to get the first cable car up the mountain. That way you would usually be guaranteed at least a couple of hours or so of relatively queue-free skiing. By 11am however the queues would be of basic-foodstuffs-during-communism proportions, and the appeal of skiing in Poiana evaporated.

But we were back the next day, and the next weekend. We skied in Poiana not because is was particularly good, but because it beat the hell out of a winter weekend in Bucharest, and because well, it was there: not three hours away. It would almost have been rude not to go skiing.

The truth is, skiing in Poiana Brasov then was a fairly lousy experience. And while the resort itself – as we saw this weekend on a short research trip ahead of the publication of a new Brasov & Poiana Brasov In Your Pocket Mini-Guide – has never looked better, old problems remain.

Poiana Brasov. Photo by CodGabriel@Flickr

And how many kilometres of piste have been added to the measly 13 km Poiana Brasov had in 1990?

None.

The only investment in the skiing infrastructure has been the installation of a new gondola lift three winters ago. And while it has eased queuing a fair bit, it simply means more people sharing the same, very limited ski area.

Yet the biggest gripe we would have about Poiana right now are the prices.

Try looking for a hotel or apartment over Christmas or New Year. You will find nothing for less than €100 per night. All for 13 kilometres of piste.

There was a time when Poiana Brasov was cheap and cheerful. Now it must rank as one of the most exclusive ski resorts in the world: only the wealthy can afford to stay there.

As for us, we’re off to Bansko in Bulgaria, with a still modest but much more respectable 60 km of piste, and where paying for a week’s accommodation for a family of four will not hugely affect your financial standing for the rest of the month.