A dinosaur or a city in Romania?

Trip Start May 06, 2007
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Trip End Jul 24, 2008


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Flag of Romania  ,
Thursday, November 22, 2007

The train ride from Budapest started out uneventful until the train approached the final stop in Hungary before entering Romania.  The platform was covered with a large mass of people and a much larger mass of bags, boxes, and every other container imaginable.  As soon as the train stopped, there was a mad rush to get all the bags, etc. onto the train through every available door and window.  The tattered bags were threadbare in many places stuffed full of something that looked very heavy.  Two women in their 50s with red hair that was obviously dyed entered the train compartment I was sharing with an older man and proceeded to spend the next 30 minutes arranging the bags and boxes on the overhead shelves as if it was a Tetris game where any free space would cause them to lose and start over.  I tried to talk to them, but neither of them nor the other man spoke any English.  I managed to understand that they were Romanian and going home to Bucharest, but couldn't figure out anything else they were saying.  The best I could make out is that the bags were full of groceries and supplies since I saw 6 2-liter bottles of pop peaking out of one bag and laundry detergent in another.  The only explanation I could come up with is that it must be cheaper to buy these things in Hungary and then bring them to Romania, though with the cost of the train tickets added in I can't really understand how it works out to be cheaper overall.

As soon as we crossed the border I could see an immediate difference in the condition of the houses.  Even the poorer neighborhoods on the Hungarian side didn't look like they were in very bad shape while the houses on the Romanian side were much more rundown and falling apart.  Many of them had chickens running around the backyard.  On the road next to the train tracks, we passed by a number of people riding in horse-pulled carts, many Romanian's only form of transportation, though this is rapidly changing.  A few months ago Romania banned horse-pulled carts from major roads in an effort to curb traffic accidents (the official reason) and to try to modernize the country now that they are part of the EU (an unofficial reason).  I've read a number of newspaper and travel blog articles recently about the changes Romania is encountering because of it's new EU membership and will be very interested to see how this affects the country in the coming years.

By the time the train reached Sighisoara (pronounced sig-hi-so-ra, kind of like it's a dinosaur) it was already dark.  I checked into an empty hostel (I had the 5-bed dorm room to myself) and spent some time walking around the town and seeing the major site, the citadel, at night.  In the morning, I walked up the hill to the citadel and visited the history museum located inside the main tower.  It had really pretty views from the top, but otherwise was lacking in interesting exhibits.  After a couple of hours I had seen enough and headed back to the hostel to pack up and figure out how to get to Brasov that afternoon.  I had a bit of an adventure trying to find a bus that supposedly existed somewhere other than the main bus station and after walking around trying to find a seemingly non-existent bus stop on the other side of town I decided to suck it up and take the train an hour and a half later.

I decided to wait at a picnic table outside the train station.  While I was sitting there, a young woman (she looked in her early 20s) and her baby daughter came and sat at the table next to me.  Although she didn't speak any English and at that point I didn't even know how to say thank you in Romanian (the first word I try to learn in every country I visit), we attempted to have a conversation.  She was very interested in my Sudoku book and we took turns saying all the numbers in English and Romanian.  Then she wanted to look at the pictures and maps in my guidebook.  I also turned to the small section of Romanian vocabulary and attempted to teach her the English words while I tried to learn the Romanian translation based on her pronunciation.  Eventually it was time for my train, so our little exchange had to come to an end.

It's really interesting how different Romanian is to the languages of the countries surrounding it.  It seems to have much more in common with Spanish, French, and Italian than with Polish, Hungarian, or Serbian.  I was pleasantly surprised that I could understand some signs and even a little bit of what people said because of its similarity to Spanish - a nice change from being lost in translation in all of the other European countries I've been traveling in.
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