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| A bird's eye view of Rasnov from the fortress. It seemed suitably nostalgic for this particular entry. |
My last chapter on Romania, for the time
being. For once, I am at a loss for words. I feel that I haven’t said a tithe
of what I’m thinking. And I may well have to do an epilogue/wrapup of this
entire trip.
I have very mixed feelings towards Romania.
Safe to say, they would be a lot more positive if not for the bus 780 incident
and the inbuilt tendency we have for a negativity bias (I keep falling back on
this, don’t I), as well as the various racially charged encounters we met with.
Another thing is the fact that my timing
couldn’t have been better/worse (depends on how you look at it). All I can say
is, it affects your perspective dramatically if you actually know someone who’s
from the country you’re sightseeing in. If you’re on good terms, it
automatically enhances your experience – or it sets you for a huge letdown,
depends which way the pendulum swings. If you’re on good terms but the country
turns out to be a craphole (to the point where your friend’s awesomeness can do
nothing for the general lousiness of his native town/country), it actually
makes you view him/her in a less positive light. Which is not fair, but if
there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that life is rarely fair.
I also realised that I haven’t talked that
much about gypsies. Before I came to
Romania, my only impressions of gypsies were the romanticised images we get
from Notre Dame de Paris and Carmen: beautiful, passionate, black-eyed women
with a love for freedom. The reality is harshly different. A blogger named JS
Bangs has it spot on when he describes how he feels about fictional gypsies as
opposed to real ones:
“Before coming to Romania I thought of
gypsies basically the same way I thought of pirates: something exotic and
alluring that existed only in distant times and places. I was very excited to
see real, live gypsies when I came to Romania. But discovering the actual
situation of the gypsies in Romania was a rather rude shock.” (source)
Technically, you learn to avoid them, and
give them a wide berth, but you still can’t help observing them with
fascination (from a healthy distance).
I don’t have many photos for this entry,
since there was basically nothing left on the itinerary. We took the night
train from Deva to Bucharest, which lasted 8 hours and cost 20 pounds. We had
booked beds, and while neither of us got much sleep, it was an awe-inspiring,
humbling and exhilarating experience. The heady, raw sensation of hurtling
through the night-clad plains and hills of Transylvania, through the shadowy
wild crags of the Carpathians, peering out of the window and watching the land
beyond the forests roll behind you into the far, far distance, was
otherworldly. You have the feeling that anything can happen. The fact that I
was reading Dracula and had just gotten to the part where Lucy Westenra turns
into a vampire, did not help my adrenaline levels – I jumped every time the
train ran over an uneven welding, or someone walked by our compartment.
There were 6 bunks in our compartment, and
we’d both booked the lowest bunks since we were too lazy to climb. This is my
bunk.
The ladder leading to the upper bunks.
The corridor, which was actually sort of
creepy..
Despite the fact that there were 6 bunks,
there were only four of us there, all women. And in spite of the fact that
there were only 4 people, it was still quite a squash. I can’t imagine what it
would be like to have SIX people crammed in this tuna can.
Joanne and I had been agonising over how we
were going to get to the airport once we’d reached Bucuresti Nord. There was no
way in hell we were going to take bus 780 again. I would rather pull out my
toenails, one by one.
Luckily, some people we’d met at the Sibiu
hostel had informed us that the train was a very viable option, which is what
we did. We bought our tickets at Bucuresti Nord once we’d arrived, and they
weren’t expensive by much to be honest. You take the train (about forty minutes
journey) to the Aeroport station, then a minibus takes you to the airport,
which is about 10 minutes ride. The train station sells these tickets together,
priced at 7 lei. No scammers, extortionists or pot bellies, plus the journey
was much more comfortable. I repeat, for all of you who are flying to Bucharest
and figuring out how to go from there, TAKE THE TRAIN. I can’t emphasise this
enough. It’s only costs 1.5 lei more which is not that much to be honest, and
an unbelievably small price to pay for your general state of well-being.
Something rather odd happened on our
journey from Bucurest Nord to Aeroport. There was a boy sitting across from us
in our compartment and we ended up making a bit of small conversation. He asked
us polite questions like where we were from, what we were doing in Romania (cue
the incredulous look when we said we were tourists) and how we liked it. The
food was fantastic (another wtf look) and the Carpathians were lovely, we said
diffidently. He smiled, rather wonkily, and said that it was fine we liked Romania,
but he personally didn’t care much for his country. We were really surprised,
since the vast majority of all the other Romanians we’d encountered were almost
fiercely patriotic. (Again, there’s a wealth of information and opinions on the
status quo of Romania and its citizens/immigrants, as well as their own
attitudes towards their nation/identity – just type keywords such as Romanian
reputation in the EU, so I shan’t comment on this, not in this post anyway.)
Anyway, before we’d started talking I had been listening to another Romanian
pop song I’d caught on air, Ipotecat by Delia. I had this song on replay – it’s
ridiculously catchy. You might be able to get the general gist of the song from
this stanza that Delia croons in her soft voice:
Viața le împarte mereu așa
Life always deals it out like this
Totul se întoarce asupra ta
What goes around comes around
Poți fugi, dar nu te poți ascunde
You can run, but you can’t hide
Soarta te găsește oriunde
Fate can always find you
(There’s a full version of the lyrics, both
original and translated, here.)
Understandably, we were extremely
taken-aback by his admission of how much he disliked his country, and asked him
why. After some false beginnings and sheepish grins (his English was not that
fluent), he took out his phone and used the google translate app to express
what he wasn’t able to say in English. (Google translate again – the Romanians
really like this invention.) When he was done, he held out his phone to me, and
for reasons not wholly comprehensible to me, these words will always be seared
into my memory:
“It is a country full of thieves and
liars, like that song you like so much.”
I don’t know why these words made such a
huge impression on me. Probably the fact that he was an untypical Romanian, his
passive-aggressive tone that even google translate couldn’t mask, the strong
words and his expression – half disparaging, half resigned, a smattering of
vaguely amused – as well as the aggregation of all that had come to pass in the
past few weeks: my Romanian friend, their bad rep, the way people responded
when we said we were going there, all the things that had happened to us and
that eureka moment when we realised that people were not wholly unjustified in
their prejudice. I know that’s a terrible thing to say, but again, no smoke
without fire.
We got to the airport without incident, and
went back to England without a hitch. I arrived back home at about 5pm (set the
clock back 2 hours to Greenwich mean time), my mind full and my thoughts tangled.
It was fantastic to be back on good old British soil – Joanne said that it felt
as if we had returned to civilisation. It was certainly lovely not having
people goggle and make the occasional racial slur wherever we went, to be
normal again.
I am still not wholly sure what to make of
Romania. What I do know is that it completely bamboozled my expectations, and
was nothing at all like what I had imagined it to be. To be honest I’m not sure
what I had expected it to be, but it certainly was not what I found. I’m not
sure if that’s good or bad. Perhaps both. What I do know is that my opinion of
it has changed drastically; for me, it only used to be the land beyond the
forests and Wallachia, the last stronghold of Christianity against the Ottoman
Turks. Now, it’s a place with mind-blowingly fantastic food, and equally
shocking poverty and desperation. One thing’s for certain, the Romanians don’t
do things by halves. For them, it’s all or nothing. Perhaps that’s both their
strength and weakness. One other thing I know for sure is that I don’t regret
this trip, not even one iota, in spite of all that happened. It’s one of the
best and most meaningful things I ever did in my life, and I’m so glad I went.
Romania is like nothing I’ve ever encountered: simultaneously exotic and
dangerous, beautiful and lethal, proud and vulnerable. And maybe, just maybe, I
will be back again.
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