theatre of the absurd: Romania, part I

You know all about my love story with Romania, which began three years ago.

It does help to write these things down, because I have a far clearer idea now of what happened and how I felt about events and people, rather than vague snapshots. This was my conclusion of Romania on 11 July 2014:

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.

I knew I'd be back, either way. There were still so many places I hadn't been to, so many people I'd yet to meet, and Transylvania beckoned. It still does. I don't know when, but these things have a way of happening, so we will see. Also, to differentiate between this Romania trip and the one in 2014, I will be tagging all of these entries with the tag Romania #2.

It all happened when me and Lital were talking, and we were saying that we needed to meet up, and someone - probably me - said, "Well, why not make it Romania?" And then the other person agreed, and I began looking into all the places I wanted to visit. I will have to say that Romania was pretty hit-and-miss this time round. Cluj-Napoca was okay, Sighisoara was heaven on earth, every single aspect of it, and Oradea and Alba Iulia were underwhelming. Less than underwhelming. I'd be willing to give Oradea another shot as most of our negativity towards the place was based on the horrendously bad weather and the hotel we stayed at (I always enjoy racism), but there are so many other places in Romania that I'd like to visit that I don't think I'll have any more time for Oradea. Strictly Transylvanian, then. I have yet to visit Bistrita, Constanta, Iasi, Craiova, Suceava and perhaps Timisoara. Someday in the future, before I turn 30. Maybe it'll take another 3 years. We'll see. In any case, I still have some lei left over.

Anyway, I took a cheap flight from Budapest to Cluj-Napoca, which cost something around 9 euro I believe. There was a slight hitch on my flight to as I'd a) really left it slightly too late, and b) I couldn't find my boarding pass. Fortunately I remembered what Lital had told me about the boarding pass now also being available as a mobile app, so I hurriedly downloaded that and ran through security, border control, and then finally to the plane. I've pushed aeroplane boarding times so many times on this trip that it's long ceased to be funny, and for me, the closet type A, it's something I really need to stop doing, for my health. I met Nicole from Melbourne just as I was about to board, and the two of us really hit it off, and we ended up having a beer or three on the 40 min flight to Cluj. In Nicole's words: "we went up.. and then we went down." I was reading some reviews on a hostel I stayed at in Sarajevo, which will come in later entries, but one comment, which is pertinent to what I'm writing here, really stayed with me: "Sarajevo tends to draw travellers who have similar personalities." I felt the same way about Romania, and in retrospect, I've always met the more interesting people in cities and countries that are off the beaten track - Wroclaw, Romania per se, Gdansk, Sarajevo.

I don't know how much sense I'm making here, but it was good to be back in Romania, and it was refreshing to sniff the freezing, crisp Transylvanian air. Cluj-Napoca was significantly less beautiful than Sibiu, but there was an energy to the city that I enjoyed. More importantly, I enjoyed the fact that people did not look at me like I had grown a second head. In Romania, for the first time, I did not feel like a foreigner, and that's more than I can say for my previous sojourn here, or in Alba Iulia and Oradea. Especially Alba Iulia.

In any case, I was here, in Cluj-Napoca, the city where one of my favourite historical figures Matthias Corvinus had been born; he the son of John Hunyadi, one of the most celebrated kings of medieval Hungary and Vlad Dracula's counterpart in almost every single way imaginable. How could I not be drawn to this city? I would return here a week later.