Traversing Transylvania in the dead of night & general wrap-up

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.

Romania, day 5 – Sibiu

Manhole covers in Sibiu.

One thing I noticed about the pigeons and sparrows here was that they’re all very thin. I’ve never seen such emaciated birds in my life. The ones in London and Taipei, and all the other cities I’ve been to, are so rotund they practically can’t get off the ground. The sparrows in Taipei positively look like Snitches or blowfish, they’re so fat. In the future, I will use this as a standard to determine whether a district is wealthy or not – the skinnier the pigeons/sparrows, the less well off it must be.

Witnessed England being crushed by Uruguay yesterday, which I watched with the girls in our kitchen last night. I don’t need to turn on the TV, or go on facebook, even, to tell when a goal has been scored. The noise last night was something dreadful. I didn’t realise that the World Cup would be played during my masters year in London, but it is a fortuitous twist of fate, and one I’m happy to have been privy to. Did I mention how interesting it was, being in Romania while the madness of FIFA began spreading itself like rabies? In our Brasov hostel, a bunch of guys would huddle over the television set every night. My first real shock came when the invincible armada of Spain turned out to be not so invincible, suffering a crushing defeat at the hands of the flying Dutchmen. And then there was Portugal against Deutschland on the 14th, which was…whew. And so begins the Decline of Iberia.

We spent the whole day walking around Sibiu. It’s a very picturesque little town, idyllic yet bustling with energy, which won the much-coveted title of Europe’s Capital of Culture in 2007. Our hostel (about 8 pounds a night) was located slap bang in the middle of the old city centre, the Piata Mare/Piata Mica (pronounced like “piazza,” with a wee sound of “t” right before the z). There’s always some sort of event going on there. When we first arrived, there was some sort of concert/festival/carnival, which went on and on for the duration of our stay. Joanne was very excited about this.

This reminds me of the Wizard of Oz

We rented bicycles at the Hotel Ibis, about ten minutes walk from our hostel, which cost 8 lei for two hours and is a LOT cheaper than renting it at the tourist office in the piata. We cycled for about forty minutes to a lake, which was beautiful, but a bit crowded.

Not the most beautiful lake I've seen, but it does have a certain je ne sais quoi

I don’t think I mentioned this before, but it’s also one of the major defining parameters of our Romania trip. The people here act like they’ve never seen East Asians before. Everywhere we walked, people would slow down and stare at us, and even point at us. Some of them would even take pictures. The teenagers would, in some instances (once in every town at the very least) jump in front of us and call us names. I felt like we were a walking zoo, or as if there were horns sprouting out of my forehead. Both of us found this VERY unamusing. It can really ruin things and your whole travel experience per se when all the people do is stare, stare stare. I do not think Romania is too high on the tourist friendly scale (again, thanks to the negativitybias effect of bus 780 – you’re going to haunt me till the end of my days) and the environment is especially hostile for people who look noticeably different azn. During the whole of our trip, we did not see one single black/Indian/Muslim/any other race/colour other than white. The teenagers are plain xenophobic. Then again, their adults are wonderful (except again for the ones on the bus). When I was in Rasnov, a man told me that I was the most beautiful person he’d ever seen in his life, and that he had lost his heart to me. I was flattered, although sceptical – I don’t think I looked my best after a whole day of climbing and sweating.

So, yeah. If you look Asian, or not white, you’re going to stick out like a sore thumb, and boy don’t they let you knowit. We’ve had people coming over to us at restaurants and approaching us on the street, asking where we’re from. (“China? Japan? The land of the chopsticks? Chopstickland?”) I personally would not recommend Romania to anyone Asian, unless you’re travelling with a group of at least 7 people or you have a burgeoning desire to challenge yourself and push your limits. It’s not a trip for the faint of heart. Even then, you will be gawked at, but at least when you’re in a large crowd, the teenagers probably won’t be so inclined to use google translate to call you a slant-eyed monster in Chinese and Japanese (apparently these are the only two countries in East Asia) while you’re on the bus, minding your own business. I’ve never had a problem with my race before. Hell, I LOVE being so ostentatiously Asian azn. But in Romania, when people consistently look at you like you’re some character from Hellboy, it’s really annoying. To be honest, me and Joanne were relieved to be going back to multicultural, melting-pot London after 8 days of being goggled at. I actually think I could write a whole blog post on the racism we encountered in Romania. Even the people who mean well can come across as very offensive. One of the people who came over to give us the Spanish Inquisition in a restaurant told us that he’d worked in the States for ten or more years, that three of his ex girlfriends were Asian sinophile and that he still couldn’t tell the difference between all of us. I had a cow or three when he guessed Vietnam and the Philippines after China and Korea fell short. The ball really dropped, though, when he excused his ignorance by saying, “Well, you all look the same, you know – the Chinese, the Filipinos, the Viets and the Koreans. Exactly the same.” I felt so insulted, even though I knew he didn’t mean any harm, and retorted rather stiffly, “Well, we can say the same about you people, you realize – you Romanians, Serbs, Slovaks and MAGYARS all look alike to us azns, too.”

Back to Sibiu. The old town was beautiful. This is their main church. Note the colourful tiles of the roof.

This is the old town – see the windows, which look like peeping eyes? It’s a very common feature of Sibiu’s houses.

The Piata Mica.

On our way back, we were fortunate enough to encounter their parade.

 

See the "Banca Transilvania" in the background? It's a blood bank

And we got a lovely view of the piata bathed in the light of the late afternoon sun.

Dinner in a bar off the Piata Mare. I had polenta, again, and Romanian meat rolls (sarmale) – the vampires continue to dazzle me with their culinary skills. sparkle sparkle, glitter glitter.

Again, I realise this picture is really bad, and again I excuse myself by the fact that I was starving at the time.