Wednesday, August 10, 2005

Budapest, Hungary to Bucharest, Romania:

Sixteen hours on a train can pass fairly quickly when the scenery doesn't change much and you are sharing an eight-person compartment with only one other passenger --- who doesn't speak the same language you do.

My train left Keleti station on schedule at 8:30 AM. For the first three hours I shared a compartment with an old, rail-thin Hungarian man, whose stern weather-beaten face made me wonder what events he'd seen and what trials he'd lived through. Then he pulled out his cell phone and started shouting abusively at somebody for a full half an hour. This snapped me out of my naive, sleep-deprived reverie very quickly. For all I know, the guy used to torture people for a living.

The eastern plains of Hungary are green and grassy and largely undeveloped. You can spot horse-and-cart drivers and people moving loads on mules and donkeys. We stopped for a short while at the crossing to Romania at Arad. The old man had left shortly before and a middle-aged Romanian woman came on and took his place. When some other people peered into our cabin, she encouraged them to move down the hall to find other free seats. In fact, she kept this up aggressively throughout the rest of the ride, so that only in the last few hours did we have two more people share the eight-person room with us. She tried to speak with me once or twice and, though she seemed very friendly and gregarious, I was relieved when she finally gave up and streched across her hard-defended four seats to take a long nap.

I slept a little, then managed a lot of reading. I couldn't focus entirely on my Imre Kertesz book and was simultaneously trying to read (1) "The Aristos," by John Fowles, (2) "Haroun and the Sea of Stories," by Salman Rushdie, and (3) "The Power and the Glory," by Graham Greene. I normally can't make the switch between four books, but they were all so completely different (not deliberately) that I managed. The Kertesz book is by a Jewish holocaust survivor, the Fowles book is an atheistic philosphical work, the Rushdie book incorporates many Hindustani elements (among plenty of other things), and the Greene bookis about the Mexican persecution of a Catholic priest in the 1930s.

The train stopped in Brasov at about 10 PM, which was my signal to check my map and work out how late we were. It seemed it was only about one hour. I hadn't realized the train would stop in Brasov at all, and was tempted to get out there and stay for a few days, but the train moved on again before I made a decision. Brasov has been described as the "Prague of Romania," and also, unsurprisingly, as the "New Prague." It is a Transylvanian city not far from Bran Castle and a recommended stop if you are visiting the country. Unfortunately, I would miss it. Maybe next time...

We pulled into Bucharest's Gard du Nord at about 12:45 AM. This is never a great time to get into a train station in an unfamiliar foreign country and Gard du Nord definitely didn't prove an exception to the rule. A number of shady guys offered me taxi rides and followed me a bit, but I ignored them and rushed off to try to find a place to get some money. I found an ATM but it was out of order, of course. Fortunately there was still a currency exchange open, charging the usual extortionate rates (I wondered if they broke the ATM, which was directly across from them). I changed one of my $20 bills for about $16 worth of Romanian Lei and went out onto the street to find a taxi driver who was actually driving a taxi --- not loitering in a train station at 1 AM.

The driver I flagged didn't speak a lick of English but, Romanian being a Latin language, a little bit of communication with Spanish (and my knowledge of maybe 100 Italian words) was possible. "Conosc," the driver insisted, telling me he knew where my hostel was. He then drove us in circles and stopped to ask directions from three different people. My meter ran the whole time. When I noticed that he had moved back and forth down the same street four times, it finally occurred to me that he was ripping me off. I had him stop and show me where we were on my map. "Conosc," I told him, then directed him to take a left turn. It took us (me) about 30 seconds to find the hostel after that. The meter read 120,000 Lei --- about $4.00. As I pulled the money out, the driver said something, turned around in his seat, and showed me a 500,000 Lei note. I didn't quite understand each word he said, but I fully understood the message: "This is what you should give me." He wanted about $16. The actual cost of the ride, without going in circles and stopping four times, would have been about $2 (for about 5 minutes in the car instead of the 15 it took us).

I gave him the 120,000 Lei on the meter and walked away as he continued to appeal for more money. He was still talking when I shut the door to the hostel behind me.

I had reserved a bed on-line at "Elvis' Hostel and Villa." The place wasn't anywhere near full, however, and, somewhat upsettingly, there weren't any signs of the owner, Elvis (an Australian). He seemed to have left the building --- to a New Yorker to manage for a while. I was disappointed to learn that the hostel didn't have any private lockers for luggage storage (though they had small ones for storage of passports, cameras, etc...). It also had only two showers for over 20 guests. Nevertheless, it worked in a pinch. For 12 Euros you received a bed, free laundry, 2 hours of internet per day and even one daily beer. It was also clean and featured wall murals of countless bloody naked people being impaled on stakes by Vlad Tepes. What more could you want?

For the time being I skipped the laundry and internet (and most definitely impalement). I had a beer, then went to bed.