I met happy Roma
O Roma, where do you come from
With tents happy on the road
When I took "the Tour," night trains were a cool way to save on hotels. I would pull into, say, Venice, ramble around for ten hours, then instead of paying a million dollars for one of their aquarium rooms with orca bodyguards, I'd hop on the train and snooze til Prague. The train is a moving hotel!
Less spry this trip and more capable of affording tiny bases, so I'm taking the night trains to cover long distances, so I can max out the daylight hours I'm in places. It's cool to have a place to dump off the backpack of books.
The cab took some twists and turns and I let myself think he was driving me a clubhouse where they pluck American chickens, but the train station was around one of the corners. Even at 1am, the station was packed with folks buying each other hot chocolate, adjusting one another's straps, making out, and sleeping on pillows made of their folded coats.
I was scheduled to change trains in something called Brasov, so I had to make sure not to sleep through that. Nine hours to Brasov, so few worries. Pathetically, it took me until just then to realize Hungary and Romania are in different time zones. They're so close and one is right on top of the other, but for whatever reason, the time zone blob is gerrymandered to make them different.
My two days in Cluj were in a different time zone, a different time zone!!
Sat on the cold platform and read Boys of My Youth (Jo Ann Beard), a super book of memoir essays about a chick growing up in the Midwest. Quite enjoyed her descriptions of getting ready to go to parties with her cousin and worrying about one another's hair and if their cousin would try to kiss them.
Then the train came, and I grabbed a seat. Then a whole family crammed themselves in there with me, and it became a nine-hour math problem concerning where to put your legs. Black out the window, so no view. Drifted in and out of sleep. Awoke whenever I kicked someone or they kicked me.
Mostly a dozy haze until Brasov. At one point they offered me some bagel chips. I ate one. A cover of Alice Cooper's "Poison" leaked through one of the girl's ear buds. I'm hearing all these weird covers, and it's adding to the otherworldliness of the trip. In Europe they eat salad as the last course, and 'Poison' has a female vocalist.
As the sun came up, I got to see mist curling around beautiful, still little villages, tiny hamlets robed in light fog.
Switched trains at Brasov. Only a few minutes to figure out the platform. I knew the words from the last train station. Linia means "platform," so I looked for which linia would have the train to Bucharest. They have two big boards, color coded to mean "arriving" or "departing." Yellow means departing. White means arriving. Yellow board said Bucharest on Linia 3, so through the tunnel, fool. You have two minutes!
Grabbed a seat and thought, "Every departure is someone else's arrival, man. Think about it! I mean, really get in there and mull it over, man."
Started reading, and the ticket man didn't speak English, but he made signals that meant, "Wrong seat you. Go your seat." I got my stuff. A group of superdrunk looking weirdos with long mustaches and orange pants made "bye bye" waves at me. A supermodel with braces said in English, "You are in the wrong car."
Got my stuff, overtook the ticket taker, moved through the car and into the next one. Usually, you buy a class of ticket and can sit in any seat in a car of that class. I figured in my rush to get on, I must have gotten on the wrong class, but those plum-wine soaked haystackers who waved at me weren't first class. Their cranberry bog overalls were so last season.
Grabbed a seat, sat down, started reading. Ticket taker came in, saw me, and made noises that could only mean, "Still wrong seat you. I tell once! I need broom?" Got back up, and I was like, "Sorry, sorry," What can I be doing wrong?
He had roused a whole bunch of folks in both cars he'd visited, and we all trudged like homeless Roma to the next car. I found a seat and stopped again, but I was like, "I've seen this Benny Hill skit. He's going to come back and chase me away. He's like some kind of Romanian Javert. He won't stop chasing me. It's what he does, it's all he does!"
Just kept going through the moving cars along with the procession of the damned. Some of them spoke English, and I heard them say, "I don't know where to go. Where do we go?" The ticket made no sense to me. All I knew was it was a second class ticket, and I couldn't see what was written on the outside of the train cars, since I was in it man. Think about that. Like, really get in there and mull it over, man. Sometimes we get so inside a train, we can't see the outside!
Ran into another ticket taker who walked me to my seat and set me down in it. How did he know? I just knew it was three hours to Brasov, and I wasn't going to get up again.
Two dudes were speaking English in this section. Is that why he put me there? They couldn't have been different. One was a marvelous old man with a backpack, and one was a braggy dude from Las Vegas.
Old Man: "I try to stay in hostels, since they're very affordable, and you meet so many nice young people. Wait, is this Sibiu? I'm getting off at Sibiu. Of course, staying in hostels has its drawbacks. At 4am, they'll start a pillow fight. I once asked them to be quiet, and they just handed me a pillow."
Braggy: "I only stay in hotels. I'm from Vegas, and we got hotels there. I don't know if they got any hostels. we had thirty million visitors last year. I don't trust that number, because I think they count some people twice, but it's a lot. There's something called the Convention Board, and they give the official count of the tourists, so they said thirty million."
Pulled the handle of a one-armed bandit and three yawns came up.
The keen eyes of the old man saw I was reading a book in English, and he asked me where I was from. I think he was trying to rescue himself from having to hear more statistics from the Convention Board. I told him Seattle, and he was like, "There's very good sailing there. Do you sail? You have to take it up. Of course, only nice people sail."
I smiled, because that was funny to me. All the best people sail, you know. It's just what one does when one has kindness to dispense. One gets on the water.
He went on to say, "It's true. Only nice people sail, and the not-nice people use motorboats. Ah ha! Is this Sibiu?"
We had a cool conversation about travel, but Braggy kept interrupting to tell us he was there on business. Owns an apartment in Bucharest. He was pretty weird, and had the energy of a drug user, but I was, I suppose, pretty desperate to have a conversation in English.
Great conversation with the Pillow Fighter about how he had renounced his Dutch citizenship at a young age, and they wouldn't give it back to him. Apparently, with a non-EU passport, you can't travel in the EU for more than three months, and then you have to take three months off. So he keeps having to dip into non-EU for three months. So he wants his Dutch passport back, so he can stay as long as he likes.
I told him it was like working for Microsoft, how they make you take a chunk of the year off after you've finished a contract, and he went off on the distribution of wealth, with much interruption from Braggy about how rich some people are in Vegas. Then Braggy suddenly asked me what I'd seen in Romania so far.
I told him Cluj was beautiful, and that I'd loved the countryside from the trains. When I said I saw a fascinating gypsy enclave, he got super hostile. He was like, "They're not from here! They're from Pakistan! Just look at their skin, look at how brown it is! They call themselves Roma, and so when I tell people I'm from Romania, they say, 'oh, you're a Romy,' and I get mad and tell them I'm not a gypsy!"
 |
| Romy! |
It was kind of hostile. Like, I get it. I'm a tourist who's doing the equivalent of saying, "Oh, I saw some beautiful wallets down at the Seminole Indian reservation, just stunning craftsmanship. Those people are so clever." Like, there's definitely a remove between visiting a place and living there. Or, in this guy's case, living in Vegas and being unable to ditch his prejudice. I'm sure his grandmother raised him to hate gypsies. I'm sure he used gypsies to make himself feel like he wasn't the lowest guy on the totem pole. I'm sure many people do.
Later in the day, (Spoiler warning, I make it to Bucharest), I saw one gypsy girl helping another into a trash can. She boosted her up, and then held her legs so she didn't fall in. They were smiling and laughing the whole time. I saw them camping in fountains and fishing in the muddy Danube on a highway overpass. Always laughing and smiling. It's like the cities exist just for them to hunt in. It's like the city is their forest, full of things to make a life with.
I guess the difference between them and, I guess, homeless people in the US seems to be this is their culture. The kids are cracking each other up while they're begging on the corner. These girls seemed to be having the best time. Like, I'm completely naive. These are my unconsidered, first-blush unfiltered opinions. I'm sure someone with some knowledge would call me an asshole, but it feels like this living off the city is an actual culture they embrace, as opposed to the US where begging is constant shame.
I've never seen a bum smile while he looks through the trash. When you see children forced to beg in the US, they look miserable. We pity them and don't hide our disgust, and they hate themselves for it, because they feel like they could be or should be us. The gypsies don't care if you hate them. What does it matter what some City Person thinks? Might as well ask the opinion of the mudskipper I just dragged out of the riverbed.
I saw a gypsy woman feeding her kid with some bread sticks she had hidden in a cinder block. Why buy a Coach bag, when there are so many stone purses just lying around? It just seems like a total freedom from possessions and bullshit. Ugh, I'm ridiculous. I'm sure I'm "noble savaging" them, but that's going to be the focus of my reading when I get back. I want to know more about urban gypsies. The end.
Anyway, the punchline to the train story is the ticket guy showed up again, and threw Pillow Fight and Braggy out! They were in the wrong seat! Both of them protested that they couldn't understand their tickets until they were out of my hearing. Just... so funny.
They were replaced by a scholarly looking Romanian dude reading an Orhan Pamuk novel in the original Klingon.
Bought some berries from a dude offering cups of berries to each cabin. There were fat sweet blackberries on the top of the cup, but as I got down, it was small bitter berries. Ah, the old Big Berry/Small Berry trick.
At Sibiu, there was a slap on the window. It was a piece of paper with something scrawled on it, and I heard Pillow Fight yell, "AT HOTMAIL!!" as the train pulled away. I didn't even get close to making out what it said on the paper, and that is a cat-poster type shame, because I quite liked him. Wish we'd thought to exchange info earlier.
Got to Bucharest, figured out how to get to the apartment and walked there. Cool, beautiful day. Really lucked out with the weather on this trip.
Hilariously, it's on Transylvanie Street. "Funky" place with crazy tiles and curtains. Nice girl, Patricia, let me in, showed me where the tea pot was. I thanked her and crashed. Just drooled all over myself catching up on the bad train sleep.
Woke up around 5pm and figured I had two hours of light to get to the Lipscani area, the old part of town. Traced it on the map, old-school Magellan style, and found a massively popular, twisting, thriving area with stone streets and endless cafes. People laughing, people drinking and planning. I bought a kebab with french fries wrapped up in it (when in Romania...), and watched stray dogs submit themselves to one another.
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