After a couple of hours touring the south-Romanian countryside we
entered the suburbs of Bucharest. This is where we got our first taste
of Romani culture. As we crossed several intersections of "highway" and
more local roads, our car was repeatedly approached by bands of Romani
hawking some of the most random things. Having traveled through quite a
few countries where people selling things street-side was normal, this
place won the prize for strange and random. Some examples of strange
things being sold at street corners, to traffic, included: socks,
underwear, housewares (ie ladles and spatulas), and even typewriters!
Like, this guy was walking around with a typewriter trying to sell it to
some passer-by driving in a vehicle! I guess everyone has to make a
living somehow.
Marco was tight for time and had to get to the Bucharest airport to drop off the rental car and catch a flight, I had little to no clue where I was going, so I tagged along. We said our goodbyes and swapped Facebook info. And once again I was alone in a strange land with no real plan to speak of. A quick stop at a tourist info desk in the airport got me on a city-bus to the centre of Bucharest. As I stepped off the bus, the uniqueness of Romanian life was presented to me in living colour... I pulled my packs on and looked up to see an intoxicated fellow jeering at a group of young ladies. When his comments did not get the desired effect (I'm not entirely sure what a group of young women would find at all appealing or interesting about an intoxicated guy cat-calling them) he proceeded to drop his pants and vigorously wave his phallus at them. Welcome to Bucharest I guess.
At this time I was pretty much a blank slate as to what to do with myself. I was still groggy from sleeping on the bus and the megalithic cold-war communist architecture of downtown Bucharest was quite overwhelming. I mean, they have buildings that literally span two city blocks or more. I reached into my pocket and found a pamphlet from the X-Hostel in Varna. I recalled that Chitty and his pal were going to be heading up this way in a day or two and said they'd be staying at the X-Hostel in Bucharest. So I checked out the pamphlet map and set out to find my next lodgings. After nearly two hours wandering around Bucharest, my legs and my navigational ego gave up. I flagged down a cab, shoved the pamphlet into the cabby's hands and gesticulated that I wanted to get there. He looked at me with the universal, culturally transcendent look of disbelief and confirmed that this was indeed where I wanted to go. A little more cajoling got the cab moving... for like three, small city blocks. Turns out I had been walking circles AROUND the very street that the hostel was on... duh. So I tipped the cabby large and got myself a dorm-room bunk at the hostel.
Not really having thought about what to see on this leg of my journey I took advantage of the free hostel internet, caught up with some friends on the ol' Facebook, did a little bit of blog writing, and tried to determine where my yet-to-be-earned-credit-dollars would be best spent in Romania. By now I had made it from Ruse, Bulgaria to Bucharest, Romania and was tired, so called it a night. The next day I decided that two things needed to happen. First, although I had bought new socks in Istanbul, my shoes still remained really funky, so I needed to remedy that. Second, check out Bucharest. Thanks to my geo-political privilege it wasn't hard to find folks who spoke enough English to help me navigate my way around the city. It took a couple of hours to find some shoe-spray which solved my foot-stank issues after which I meandered around soaking up some of the architectural sites in the city. But, alas, anything involving people, like locals, that a tourist like myself could enjoy, wasn't happening till the weekend, and it was mid-week. So after a short day, I called it an early night.
Day two in Bucharest was more of me wandering around feeling lonely and getting ready to move on. I stuck it out till the end of the day when I came across a memorial for Vlad the Impaler (aka Count Dracula) and decided to head for my next destination... Transylvania. I checked out of the hostel close to noon the next day. I had literally JUST paid my bill and was walking out of the place when who do I see walking in? The kiwies! Chitty and his pal had just arrived. Traveling around the world this kind of stuff happens more often than one might think. So we exchanged high-fives and a few stories, I told them where I was headed next, Brasov, and they said they were headed there as well... in a few days. The hostel staff were very helpful in directing me to the appropriate buses and subways to reach the depot where I would hop the bus to Brasov.
After a pleasant bus-ride through the Romanian countryside, we entered Transylvania. Having been through Europe a few times already, the terracotta rooftops were beautiful, but not as breath-taking as they had been thirty-odd years ago when I first saw them on a family trip to the Czech Republic. Nevertheless, the feeling such towns inspire when viewed from above is timeless... the sense that people had lived in terracotta-topped-towns here for over a thousand years was palpable. There's just something about medieval inspired architecture that does that to you. I caught a local bus into the town centre and consulted the print-out I acquired from the X-Hostel in Bucharest about possible hostels to patronize. I soon shifted over to my Lonely Planet and made a mental plan of the places I would inquire at based on my current location and the straightest possible path from where I was to the furthest potential lodgings from where I stood. After two or three... "mehs"... I found my home for the next few days.
A funky little place with three or four floors of quality budget-traveler accommodations and entertainment, I can't for the life of me remember the name of this place. Their tourist desk was very helpful in terms of figuring out which Transylvanian sites I should see on my time-$$ budget. I settled in to my dorm space with a shower, some internet, and then a casual walk around the town of Brasov. Now I know I said these latest blog entries were to be more anecdotal than historical, but I just couldn't resist... So, here I was in Brasov, Romania and I got to thinking, surely there's got to be something of note in this quaint little Transylvanian city. And wouldn't you know it... there was!
Strada Sforii "Rope Street", the third narrowest street in all of Europe, was initially developed in the 15th century as a corridor that firemen could use, and it is first mentioned in 17th century documents. Its width varies between 111 (43.7 in) and 135 (53.1 in) centimeters, and it is 80 meters (262.4 feet) long. Sweet! Glad I got that one off my bucket-list.
Next up, and hard to ignore as it dominated the city's roof-scape, was the Biserica Neagră or Black Church. Built in the late 14th century by Bulgarian workers in the Gothic style, the cathedral is Romania's main claim to fame in terms of Gothic architecture and the largest Lutheran place of worship in the region. I've seen lots of cathedrals in my travels, and this one was undergoing renovations. But there's at least one novel story attached to this place. According to popular legend, a German child was disturbing the Bulgarian builders or told them that one of the walls was leaning. An annoyed Bulgarian pushed the child off the church tower and then immured his corpse in the church to conceal his crime. Charming. Also, the Black Church has a 6-ton bell, the largest in Romania.
Just around the corner from the cathedral I found the Piața Sfatului, the Brasov Council Square. In the center of the square lies the Council House, built in 1420. The tower, called the Trumpets Tower, is in fact much older, and was once a watchtower for approaching barbarians before being incorporated into the main building. It was the place where an alarm was sounded when danger menaced the city. What you see today is largely the result of an 81-year renovation after the great fire of 1689. Looks like I showed up at just the right time too as they have a ceremonial changing of the guard which I was about to witness. After the changing of the guards, I wandered through the pedestrian part of town before heading back to the hostel and calling it a night.
In the morning I decided to hop back on the tourist track and check out some of the ruins/castles in the area. Although, to my dismay, Vlad the Impaler's castle ruins (Dracula's castle man!) was way out of the way and amounted to little more than a ruined staircase to nowhere. So, I settled for the Transylvanian tour. First stop for the day's excursion was Peleş Palace aka Peleş Castle, nestled in the Carpathian Mountains.
Commissioned as a royal hunting preserve and summer retreat by King Carol I in the late 19th century, the castle cost the equivalent of about $120 million US to build and is situated on an existing medieval route linking Transylvania and Wallachia. The intricate detail put into every aspect of its construction is apparent in the murals decorating its interior and exterior walls as well as the finely crafted woodwork and sculptures all over the place. During the construction phase Queen Elizabeth of the Romanians wrote in her journal of the scale of the operation: "Italians were masons, Romanians were building terraces, the Gypsies were coolies. Albanians and Greeks worked in stone, Germans and Hungarians were carpenters. Turks were burning brick. Engineers were Polish and the stone carvers were Czech. The Frenchmen were drawing, the Englishmen were measuring, and so was then when you could see hundreds of national costumes and fourteen languages in which they spoke, sang, cursed and quarreled in all dialects and tones, a joyful mix of men, horses, cart oxen and domestic buffaloes."
When we got back on the tour bus I struck up a conversation with a British tourist named Melissa. Turned out she too was a teacher taking some time to explore abroad. We hit it off and ended up being travel buddies for the next few days. Our next stop for the day was at Bran Castle, one of Romania's most famous tourist attractions. This fame is partly due to its rather dubious promotion as "Dracula's Castle". The area has no connection with Bram Stoker's novel, which was set far to the north of here, and only the most tenuous of links with Vlad the Impaler. He may have attacked it once, but even this seems to be far from certain. Oh well, it was still a nice example of medieval architecture and had plenty of neat artifacts on display.
The first documented mentioning of Bran Castle is the act issued by Louis I of Hungary on November 19, 1377, giving the Saxons of Kronstadt (Braşov) the privilege to build the stone citadel at their own expense using their own labor force; the settlement of Bran began to develop nearby. In 1438–1442, the castle was used in defense against the Ottoman Empire, and later became a customs post on the mountain pass between Transylvania and Wallachia. It is believed the castle was briefly held by Mircea the Elder of Wallachia during whose period the customs point was established. Up until the 18th century the citadel was a strategic military point. The artifacts inside were enough to make any fan of medieval warfare drool.
After a lunch at a local village eatery our tour group hopped back onto the tour bus and meandered through the Transylvanian countryside to our final destination for the day...the Rasnov Fortress. Built in the 13th century during the reign of the Teutonic Knights, the fortress played a key role in protecting the villagers living in the surrounding Transylvanian countryside from the seemingly endless stream of invaders that plagued the area during medieval times. Some of the sieges lasted decades forcing the villagers to turn the fortifications into dwellings. The citadel was conquered only once in the early 1600's due to its lack of a well. The invaders discovered the path to get to a nearby secret spring and used it to breach the fortress.
Following this defeat the denizens of the citadel decided to dig a well in the rocky soil within the walls. I don't know why it is that so many historical monuments around the world often come with grizzly stories included. Perhaps it's a testament to the dark side of human nature, maybe all large projects (historical and contemporary alike) require some form of blood-equity. Whatever the case, this fortress had its tale. So, once the villagers discovered that there was no groundwater near the surface of where they started their well (the well ended up being 146 metres (479 ft) deep) they decided to put some Turkish POWs to work. The legend goes that they promised the prisoners their freedom once the well was completed. The two captives dug for 17 years before accomplishing the task. No one knows if they were ever released.
Back in Brasov Melissa and I were spent after a full day of sight-seeing. We went to a local grocer, bought some baguettes, cheese, meat, and beer, and made ourselves a simple dinner. We had done a fair bit of walking during our tours, so called it an early night.
The next day the rain and lightening paid us a visit. I guess I shouldn't be surprised seeing as we were in the Carpathian Mountains and spring had barely sprung. We entertained ourselves in the hostel entertainment room till there was a lull in the storm and decided to wander the streets of Brasov. Melissa hadn't yet seen anything in the town, so I showed her the stuff I had already seen. In addition, we were told that the lookout from Teresa Tampa might be worth a gander, so we hopped on a gondola to take us up. We still had a bit of a walk to get to the lookout... it was better than sitting in the hostel. We cut our exploration of the area short as the mists started rolling in. We ended up hiking down one of the many trails on the mountain before finding our way to a cafe and then back to the hostel. We were done with Brasov and Transylvania in general. As both of us were traveling alone and headed in the same direction, we decided that we would spend the next day journeying together to our next destination... Budapest, Hungary.
We decided to sleep in and check out as late as they would let us before hopping a train to Budapest. At this point I had given up on ever seeing Chitty and his buddy again, they didn't even know which hostel I was staying at. But lo and behold, just as Melissa and I finished paying our bills and huffing our packs on, who should walk up to the hostel front desk? The kiwies!! Un-freaking-believable! We exchanged a few brief words, but, alas, we had a train to catch... well, we needed to get last minute tickets, which meant we had to be at the station early. We gave them a quick run-down of the what-to-sees around Transylvania and off we went. It truly is a small world on the tourist track.
We made it to the train station with some time to spare. As I learned early on in my travels through countries with weak currencies, it's best to get rid of your cash while still in the home-country because finding anyone willing to exchange it outside the borders is difficult at best. I still have a bunch of Indian Rupees I was never able to get rid of after leaving India. So we spent whatever Romanian Leu we had remaining on snacks for the 12-13 hour train ride and set up camp on the platform. Now, two days earlier on our tour of the Transylvanian countryside Melissa and I tried to get some tour-group cohesion going. Both of us had experience with this and knew that getting a bunch of travelers on the same page more often than not leads to good times and tall tales. The only other native English speakers in our tour group had been three young (and I mean like 18 years old) Aussie girls on their European grad-trip. Try as we could, they seemed pretty insular, maybe they were just shy and wide-eyed having never traveled before. They stuck to themselves on the tour and at the hostel despite our efforts to engage them.
The reason I bring this up is because as we were waiting on the train platform a couple of young (like 8-9 year old) Romani kids approached us looking for handouts. They appeared truly pathetic and heart-wrenching. Sadly, we had just spent the last of our hard currency on snacks. I had like a few coins that I gave them, but that was it. The poor little guys were very determined to pull on our heart strings to get some more, but we literally had nothing left and they didn't look like they took Visa. Just as the boys started escalating their antics in the hopes of shocking some more money out of us, who should step onto the platform? The three Aussie girls. Now, admittedly, what we did next was questionable, but it truly seemed like the only option left to us. We tried our best to communicate our lack of hard currency for the boys and they were about to literally start urinating on one another in an effort to extort money we didn't have (I am not exaggerating here, the older one was unzipping his fly while the younger was assuming the position - dreadful). So, we pointed out the three Aussie girls and indicated that far greener pastures lay in their direction. I don't know who to feel more sorry for, the Romani waifs or the poor green-to-traveling Aussie girls. By the looks of it the girls shelled out some Euros and the boys performed a variety of gymnastic maneuvers in exchange until the train arrived. Farewell Romania!
Marco was tight for time and had to get to the Bucharest airport to drop off the rental car and catch a flight, I had little to no clue where I was going, so I tagged along. We said our goodbyes and swapped Facebook info. And once again I was alone in a strange land with no real plan to speak of. A quick stop at a tourist info desk in the airport got me on a city-bus to the centre of Bucharest. As I stepped off the bus, the uniqueness of Romanian life was presented to me in living colour... I pulled my packs on and looked up to see an intoxicated fellow jeering at a group of young ladies. When his comments did not get the desired effect (I'm not entirely sure what a group of young women would find at all appealing or interesting about an intoxicated guy cat-calling them) he proceeded to drop his pants and vigorously wave his phallus at them. Welcome to Bucharest I guess.
At this time I was pretty much a blank slate as to what to do with myself. I was still groggy from sleeping on the bus and the megalithic cold-war communist architecture of downtown Bucharest was quite overwhelming. I mean, they have buildings that literally span two city blocks or more. I reached into my pocket and found a pamphlet from the X-Hostel in Varna. I recalled that Chitty and his pal were going to be heading up this way in a day or two and said they'd be staying at the X-Hostel in Bucharest. So I checked out the pamphlet map and set out to find my next lodgings. After nearly two hours wandering around Bucharest, my legs and my navigational ego gave up. I flagged down a cab, shoved the pamphlet into the cabby's hands and gesticulated that I wanted to get there. He looked at me with the universal, culturally transcendent look of disbelief and confirmed that this was indeed where I wanted to go. A little more cajoling got the cab moving... for like three, small city blocks. Turns out I had been walking circles AROUND the very street that the hostel was on... duh. So I tipped the cabby large and got myself a dorm-room bunk at the hostel.
Not really having thought about what to see on this leg of my journey I took advantage of the free hostel internet, caught up with some friends on the ol' Facebook, did a little bit of blog writing, and tried to determine where my yet-to-be-earned-credit-dollars would be best spent in Romania. By now I had made it from Ruse, Bulgaria to Bucharest, Romania and was tired, so called it a night. The next day I decided that two things needed to happen. First, although I had bought new socks in Istanbul, my shoes still remained really funky, so I needed to remedy that. Second, check out Bucharest. Thanks to my geo-political privilege it wasn't hard to find folks who spoke enough English to help me navigate my way around the city. It took a couple of hours to find some shoe-spray which solved my foot-stank issues after which I meandered around soaking up some of the architectural sites in the city. But, alas, anything involving people, like locals, that a tourist like myself could enjoy, wasn't happening till the weekend, and it was mid-week. So after a short day, I called it an early night.
Day two in Bucharest was more of me wandering around feeling lonely and getting ready to move on. I stuck it out till the end of the day when I came across a memorial for Vlad the Impaler (aka Count Dracula) and decided to head for my next destination... Transylvania. I checked out of the hostel close to noon the next day. I had literally JUST paid my bill and was walking out of the place when who do I see walking in? The kiwies! Chitty and his pal had just arrived. Traveling around the world this kind of stuff happens more often than one might think. So we exchanged high-fives and a few stories, I told them where I was headed next, Brasov, and they said they were headed there as well... in a few days. The hostel staff were very helpful in directing me to the appropriate buses and subways to reach the depot where I would hop the bus to Brasov.
After a pleasant bus-ride through the Romanian countryside, we entered Transylvania. Having been through Europe a few times already, the terracotta rooftops were beautiful, but not as breath-taking as they had been thirty-odd years ago when I first saw them on a family trip to the Czech Republic. Nevertheless, the feeling such towns inspire when viewed from above is timeless... the sense that people had lived in terracotta-topped-towns here for over a thousand years was palpable. There's just something about medieval inspired architecture that does that to you. I caught a local bus into the town centre and consulted the print-out I acquired from the X-Hostel in Bucharest about possible hostels to patronize. I soon shifted over to my Lonely Planet and made a mental plan of the places I would inquire at based on my current location and the straightest possible path from where I was to the furthest potential lodgings from where I stood. After two or three... "mehs"... I found my home for the next few days.
A funky little place with three or four floors of quality budget-traveler accommodations and entertainment, I can't for the life of me remember the name of this place. Their tourist desk was very helpful in terms of figuring out which Transylvanian sites I should see on my time-$$ budget. I settled in to my dorm space with a shower, some internet, and then a casual walk around the town of Brasov. Now I know I said these latest blog entries were to be more anecdotal than historical, but I just couldn't resist... So, here I was in Brasov, Romania and I got to thinking, surely there's got to be something of note in this quaint little Transylvanian city. And wouldn't you know it... there was!
Strada Sforii "Rope Street", the third narrowest street in all of Europe, was initially developed in the 15th century as a corridor that firemen could use, and it is first mentioned in 17th century documents. Its width varies between 111 (43.7 in) and 135 (53.1 in) centimeters, and it is 80 meters (262.4 feet) long. Sweet! Glad I got that one off my bucket-list.
Next up, and hard to ignore as it dominated the city's roof-scape, was the Biserica Neagră or Black Church. Built in the late 14th century by Bulgarian workers in the Gothic style, the cathedral is Romania's main claim to fame in terms of Gothic architecture and the largest Lutheran place of worship in the region. I've seen lots of cathedrals in my travels, and this one was undergoing renovations. But there's at least one novel story attached to this place. According to popular legend, a German child was disturbing the Bulgarian builders or told them that one of the walls was leaning. An annoyed Bulgarian pushed the child off the church tower and then immured his corpse in the church to conceal his crime. Charming. Also, the Black Church has a 6-ton bell, the largest in Romania.
Just around the corner from the cathedral I found the Piața Sfatului, the Brasov Council Square. In the center of the square lies the Council House, built in 1420. The tower, called the Trumpets Tower, is in fact much older, and was once a watchtower for approaching barbarians before being incorporated into the main building. It was the place where an alarm was sounded when danger menaced the city. What you see today is largely the result of an 81-year renovation after the great fire of 1689. Looks like I showed up at just the right time too as they have a ceremonial changing of the guard which I was about to witness. After the changing of the guards, I wandered through the pedestrian part of town before heading back to the hostel and calling it a night.
In the morning I decided to hop back on the tourist track and check out some of the ruins/castles in the area. Although, to my dismay, Vlad the Impaler's castle ruins (Dracula's castle man!) was way out of the way and amounted to little more than a ruined staircase to nowhere. So, I settled for the Transylvanian tour. First stop for the day's excursion was Peleş Palace aka Peleş Castle, nestled in the Carpathian Mountains.
Commissioned as a royal hunting preserve and summer retreat by King Carol I in the late 19th century, the castle cost the equivalent of about $120 million US to build and is situated on an existing medieval route linking Transylvania and Wallachia. The intricate detail put into every aspect of its construction is apparent in the murals decorating its interior and exterior walls as well as the finely crafted woodwork and sculptures all over the place. During the construction phase Queen Elizabeth of the Romanians wrote in her journal of the scale of the operation: "Italians were masons, Romanians were building terraces, the Gypsies were coolies. Albanians and Greeks worked in stone, Germans and Hungarians were carpenters. Turks were burning brick. Engineers were Polish and the stone carvers were Czech. The Frenchmen were drawing, the Englishmen were measuring, and so was then when you could see hundreds of national costumes and fourteen languages in which they spoke, sang, cursed and quarreled in all dialects and tones, a joyful mix of men, horses, cart oxen and domestic buffaloes."
When we got back on the tour bus I struck up a conversation with a British tourist named Melissa. Turned out she too was a teacher taking some time to explore abroad. We hit it off and ended up being travel buddies for the next few days. Our next stop for the day was at Bran Castle, one of Romania's most famous tourist attractions. This fame is partly due to its rather dubious promotion as "Dracula's Castle". The area has no connection with Bram Stoker's novel, which was set far to the north of here, and only the most tenuous of links with Vlad the Impaler. He may have attacked it once, but even this seems to be far from certain. Oh well, it was still a nice example of medieval architecture and had plenty of neat artifacts on display.
The first documented mentioning of Bran Castle is the act issued by Louis I of Hungary on November 19, 1377, giving the Saxons of Kronstadt (Braşov) the privilege to build the stone citadel at their own expense using their own labor force; the settlement of Bran began to develop nearby. In 1438–1442, the castle was used in defense against the Ottoman Empire, and later became a customs post on the mountain pass between Transylvania and Wallachia. It is believed the castle was briefly held by Mircea the Elder of Wallachia during whose period the customs point was established. Up until the 18th century the citadel was a strategic military point. The artifacts inside were enough to make any fan of medieval warfare drool.
After a lunch at a local village eatery our tour group hopped back onto the tour bus and meandered through the Transylvanian countryside to our final destination for the day...the Rasnov Fortress. Built in the 13th century during the reign of the Teutonic Knights, the fortress played a key role in protecting the villagers living in the surrounding Transylvanian countryside from the seemingly endless stream of invaders that plagued the area during medieval times. Some of the sieges lasted decades forcing the villagers to turn the fortifications into dwellings. The citadel was conquered only once in the early 1600's due to its lack of a well. The invaders discovered the path to get to a nearby secret spring and used it to breach the fortress.
Following this defeat the denizens of the citadel decided to dig a well in the rocky soil within the walls. I don't know why it is that so many historical monuments around the world often come with grizzly stories included. Perhaps it's a testament to the dark side of human nature, maybe all large projects (historical and contemporary alike) require some form of blood-equity. Whatever the case, this fortress had its tale. So, once the villagers discovered that there was no groundwater near the surface of where they started their well (the well ended up being 146 metres (479 ft) deep) they decided to put some Turkish POWs to work. The legend goes that they promised the prisoners their freedom once the well was completed. The two captives dug for 17 years before accomplishing the task. No one knows if they were ever released.
The next day the rain and lightening paid us a visit. I guess I shouldn't be surprised seeing as we were in the Carpathian Mountains and spring had barely sprung. We entertained ourselves in the hostel entertainment room till there was a lull in the storm and decided to wander the streets of Brasov. Melissa hadn't yet seen anything in the town, so I showed her the stuff I had already seen. In addition, we were told that the lookout from Teresa Tampa might be worth a gander, so we hopped on a gondola to take us up. We still had a bit of a walk to get to the lookout... it was better than sitting in the hostel. We cut our exploration of the area short as the mists started rolling in. We ended up hiking down one of the many trails on the mountain before finding our way to a cafe and then back to the hostel. We were done with Brasov and Transylvania in general. As both of us were traveling alone and headed in the same direction, we decided that we would spend the next day journeying together to our next destination... Budapest, Hungary.
We decided to sleep in and check out as late as they would let us before hopping a train to Budapest. At this point I had given up on ever seeing Chitty and his buddy again, they didn't even know which hostel I was staying at. But lo and behold, just as Melissa and I finished paying our bills and huffing our packs on, who should walk up to the hostel front desk? The kiwies!! Un-freaking-believable! We exchanged a few brief words, but, alas, we had a train to catch... well, we needed to get last minute tickets, which meant we had to be at the station early. We gave them a quick run-down of the what-to-sees around Transylvania and off we went. It truly is a small world on the tourist track.
We made it to the train station with some time to spare. As I learned early on in my travels through countries with weak currencies, it's best to get rid of your cash while still in the home-country because finding anyone willing to exchange it outside the borders is difficult at best. I still have a bunch of Indian Rupees I was never able to get rid of after leaving India. So we spent whatever Romanian Leu we had remaining on snacks for the 12-13 hour train ride and set up camp on the platform. Now, two days earlier on our tour of the Transylvanian countryside Melissa and I tried to get some tour-group cohesion going. Both of us had experience with this and knew that getting a bunch of travelers on the same page more often than not leads to good times and tall tales. The only other native English speakers in our tour group had been three young (and I mean like 18 years old) Aussie girls on their European grad-trip. Try as we could, they seemed pretty insular, maybe they were just shy and wide-eyed having never traveled before. They stuck to themselves on the tour and at the hostel despite our efforts to engage them.
The reason I bring this up is because as we were waiting on the train platform a couple of young (like 8-9 year old) Romani kids approached us looking for handouts. They appeared truly pathetic and heart-wrenching. Sadly, we had just spent the last of our hard currency on snacks. I had like a few coins that I gave them, but that was it. The poor little guys were very determined to pull on our heart strings to get some more, but we literally had nothing left and they didn't look like they took Visa. Just as the boys started escalating their antics in the hopes of shocking some more money out of us, who should step onto the platform? The three Aussie girls. Now, admittedly, what we did next was questionable, but it truly seemed like the only option left to us. We tried our best to communicate our lack of hard currency for the boys and they were about to literally start urinating on one another in an effort to extort money we didn't have (I am not exaggerating here, the older one was unzipping his fly while the younger was assuming the position - dreadful). So, we pointed out the three Aussie girls and indicated that far greener pastures lay in their direction. I don't know who to feel more sorry for, the Romani waifs or the poor green-to-traveling Aussie girls. By the looks of it the girls shelled out some Euros and the boys performed a variety of gymnastic maneuvers in exchange until the train arrived. Farewell Romania!
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