International travel

Coronavirus - Family - Hiking - International travel

The calm before the storm?

March 9, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

I FaceTimed my parents this morning. That might be the only way I’ll get to see them for the foreseeable future. On a screen. Strapping themselves into a flying tube packed with 500-odd other poor souls, for roughly a day, might be out of the question long before they’re due to take off in late May. It’s sad, but there’s a very real chance I’ll miss them for the second summer in a row.

When the first Romanian cases of coronavirus presented themselves, my Biziday app alerted me with an ominous chime. For the next handful, only a message flashed up on my screen, which I often wouldn’t see until later. Now I’m not getting messages at all, and probably won’t unless and until somebody succumbs from the virus. So far “only” 15 cases have been confirmed in Romania including five in Timișoara, the same as in the whole of New Zealand. The level of panic is (so far) very low. Very occasionally I’ll see someone sporting a mask. At the supermarket this morning all the shelves were stacked with loo roll. Scented, quilted, embossed, polka-dotted, you name it, they stocked it.

The situation in Italy seems to be something approaching mayhem. This afternoon we had wet weather and I decided to watch the Serie A match between Parma and SPAL, which was a local derby of sorts. I hardly ever watch domestic football these days, but all Serie A matches are now being played behind closed doors, and I figured it would be a bit of a novelty to watch crowdless top-level football, live from Parma which I visited in 2010. At kick-off time all I could see was a large zoomed-in football in the centre of my screen. Apparently the players were on the pitch then, but the Italian Sports Minister had just made an announcement – he wanted games called off entirely, fans or no fans. The game did go ahead in the end, 75 minutes late, and SPAL won 1-0.

Lombardy and the surrounding regions, encompassing Bologna and Parma which were a pleasure for me to visit, are now sealed off. This is (or was) Italy’s economic powerhouse. The impending lockdown was leaked and chaos ensued. It’s been an awful day there, with 133 further deaths. The Wikipedia page on the outbreak in Italy now looks absurd – the initial cases, in their ones and twos, described in great detail, but the entry for 8th March simply states that more than 100 people died in Lombardy alone.

I read a piece by Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, saying that when America is facing an epidemic on this scale, having this particular man-baby at the helm is dangerous. He’s dead right. It’s a shame someone like Krugman isn’t president.

In other news, my student has invited me on another trip to Cuntu (the name is still horrible) and/or Mount Țarcu, where I went last June. He’s planning it for next weekend. It’ll be a damn sight colder than it was then, so I’ve really got to make sure I’m properly prepared. I bought some boots, a bag and some wet-weather gear from Decathlon, the go-to place for this stuff, without completely breaking the bank, but still need a warmer sleeping bag. And absolutely no tinned food this time – there’s nowhere to cook it.

I mentioned to my parents that I’d browsed tents in Decathlon and was amazed just how much tent technology has come on. This prompted Mum to show me photos – the best she could on a grainy FaceTime screen – of our camping holiday in Northern Spain in 1988. Back then you could have a cheap, simple holiday by a Spanish beach without hordes of people. The trip did have its moments, though. Half-way through our three-week stay, my parents had the bright idea to visit Sitges, a resort near Barcelona where they’d clearly had a great time in the seventies before I and my brother came on the scene. Dad drove close to 400 miles, through the night, in his Mazda. Then when we arrived, Sitges had obviously changed. The sea was soup-like. My brother didn’t like to get his face wet, and Mum sensibly stayed out of trouble too. But Dad and I went in, properly, and were sick for the next four days. We went back up north and saw out our holiday up there. We went to and from Spain by boat – 24 hours each way, to and from Santander. The return sailing was rough and my brother got seasick.

I’ll give my brother a call now and see how much he remembers. My guess is a lot – he has very good recall of his early childhood. I’ll also see how much bog roll he has.

Family - International travel - Life :)

Mum and Dad’s visit — Part 4

June 24, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

In our last two evenings in Belgrade we ate in the main square. It was full of life. Young people who walked fast, mainly. We saw surprisingly few people on their phones. Eating there simplified things: we were starting to get fed up of eating out, which I’ve always thought is overrated anyway. Mum was still grappling with the badly-designed local currency. They have nine denominations of notes, ranging from 10 dinars (worth roughly 8 pence) to 5000 (almost £40). With that many values, it’s impossible to distinguish them all based on colour alone. As for the virtually worthless coins, they were identical in shape and colour, and very similar in size too. On Saturday night we got ice creams from the bar next door to our apartment. The woman who served us, if you can call it that, was miserable. We saw two ice cream prices: 30 and 70 dinars, but I couldn’t work out what the Serbian alongside each price meant. It turned out that the cone itself was 30 dinars and each scoop of ice cream was 70. That was a new one on me.

Serbia beat Costa Rica 1-0 in their opening World Cup game, thanks to a stunning free kick, and we expected to see wild celebrations in town, but they weren’t forthcoming. Sadly they conceded a late goal to Switzerland last night to lose 2-1, and are probably out of the tournament now unless they can pull off a huge upset win over Brazil.

On the last day we went down to the waterfront, and saw some fishermen with a decent haul. By this stage I was feeling a bit claustrophobic. Mum and Dad were quick to judge and criticise everything they saw; many things that annoyed them didn’t really bother me. The city had been ravaged by war only twenty years ago; of course it won’t be like Paris. It’s also much cheaper than Paris, and for that reason, as well as the interesting language, I’d quite like to go back there by myself. Perhaps I could then take the train to Bar, on the coast of Montenegro. That trip is supposed to be spectacular.

On Monday the bus was again an hour late, but at least I had a working phone. We weren’t held up very long at the border this time, but the journey still took over three hours. I had a lesson that evening. The next three mornings I did a spot of fishing with Dad, and was gradually getting the hang of it, but the fish weren’t having a bar of our rubberised sweetcorn bait. We did see people catch sizeable caras, a.k.a Prussian carp, using maggots, which I’ll need to get my hands on.

I had my 71st two-hour session with Matei on Tuesday. I’m running out of things to do with him. I prepared a piece on Ronaldo, who I thought was his favourite footballer. I thought it would be timely after he’d just scored a hat-trick for Portugal against Spain. But either I’d forgotten or Matei had changed his mind, and apparently he can’t stand Ronaldo and instead Messi is his favourite. Oh well.

My parents’ experiences here, and in Belgrade, were pretty positive on the whole. Things inevitably became strained on occasions – Mum doesn’t cope well with stress and that’s just the way she is – but she and I never had any real arguments. It helps that I’m more relaxed myself these days. They left on Thursday. I ordered a taxi, the woman on the phone said “four minutes” before I had the chance to specify a time, and before I knew it they were gone. That was a shame.

Mum and Dad are making another trip to the UK for Christmas, so I should see them then, not that I’m overly enthusiastic about enduring a horribly commercialised British Christmas.

We’ve had thunderstorms lately, and today has seen a welcome drop in temperature. I’m looking forward to everything being back to normal once more.

Family - International travel - Language learning

Mum and Dad’s visit — Part 3

June 24, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

Our first full day in Belgrade was Mum’s 69th birthday. We visited the impressive fortress, on the confluence of the Sava and the Danube. Outside, as part of the military museum, was an array of tanks and guns from various countries and eras. Given Belgrade’s recent bloody history, it seemed a fitting place to find things that go bang.

It soon became apparent what one of the major highlights of Belgrade would be for me: the Serbian language. As far as I know, all the countries of the former Yugoslavia speak very similar varieties of the same language, which I’ll call Serbian here, because Serbia is where I first encountered it. It has a little over 20 million native speakers, roughly the same number as Romanian. Serbian is written using both the Latin and Cyrillic scripts, although there are significant differences between Serbian Cyrillic and Russian Cyrillic. For one, the Serbian variant makes use of the Latin letter J. It also has two letters, Љ and Њ, that are romanised as LJ and NJ respectively, and are equivalent to ll and ñ in Spanish, or lh and nh in Portuguese, or gli and gn in Italian. I was quickly able to read Cyrillic street and shop signs reasonably well, although actually speaking and understanding the language, which is very different from anything I’ve studied before, would take a huge effort. For a start, it has seven grammatical cases, leaving Romanian firmly in the shade.

After much angst, we did in the end find a good restaurant for celebrating Mum’s birthday. We all had something filling and pork-sausagey. We were getting accustomed to terrible service by now, but our waiter (an older bloke) was excellent. The next day we visited the nearby automobile museum, which was brilliant. It had shining examples of makes such the Aero, a Czech-manufactured car that I’d never heard of. We could have done without the yapping, pooing dog that was allowed to roam free the whole time we were there. Later that day a black cloud descended on us, as we worried how we would get back to Romania without a working phone that the bus company could use to contact us. We bought a sim card from the Serbian equivalent of a dairy, but I had no luck getting it to work. I had all kinds of fun and games trying to use Google translate to figure out the Serbian instructions. After dinner, which consisted of pizza slices from a kiosk and a wonderful chocolate dessert, we caught the second half of the thrilling 3-3 draw between Spain and Portugal, the match of the tournament so far.

Dad said he didn’t sleep a wink that night. He was worried that without a phone we’d never get back to Timișoara. He had visions of being stuck on the side of the road in the pouring rain, with the stress levels unbearably high. The next day was Saturday, the phone shops shut in the early afternoon, so we urgently needed a connection, for our sanity as much as anything. The lady at the first phone shop was breathtakingly unhelpful, but we had much better luck at the second shop and were soon up and running at very little expense. Having breathed a huge sigh of relief, we walked through the city, with the intention of visiting the national museum to give us all a better handle on the region’s troubled history. But it was closed, as it has been since 2003. We changed course and reached St Sava’s Temple, which we thought would be spectacular. And old. Instead we found a post-WW2 edifice that had ridiculous amounts of interior scaffolding to keep it from falling to pieces. When we got back to our apartment, we met the old man who gave us a bottle of Serbian schnapps that I’m now working my way through. He made it very clear that he didn’t like Tony Blair.

International travel - Life :)

Just dropping in…

June 15, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’m writing this from Belgrade, where I’m staying with Mum and Dad. It’s Mum’s 69th birthday, the first anniversary of the Grenfell disaster, and the first day of the World Cup, which saw Russia thrash Saudi Arabia 5-0. In a few days I’ll write some proper-ish posts of my time with my parents in Romania and Serbia.

International travel - The UK

UK trip – Part 1

April 13, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’m back in Timișoara after a few days in the UK, and I’m happy to be here. The city is green all of a sudden, and temperatures have rocketed into the mid-20s.

Just before I left for the UK I made a trip to the Easter market. I bought some colourful wooden eggs and hand-painted fridge magnets showing the name of my home town, for my aunt’s benefit in particular. I also bought a plate of hot mămăligă with sausages and cheese. I asked for 300 grams but got (and paid for) a lot more, and had nothing but my bare hands to eat it with. With my bus to the airport imminent, this was a challenge.

My experience at Timișoara airport was quite stressful. I hadn’t printed my boarding pass, despite doing the online check-in business, because I couldn’t figure out how. The only way I could avoid a €42 charge was to bring up the boarding pass on my phone somehow. I got there in the end, after farting around with the WizzAir app. I thought I’d been careful to ensure I had no liquids over 100 ml, but that damn bottle of pumpkin seed oil, five times the limit, totally slipped my mind. When I told them it was oil they dropped it into a hole which I thought would lead to oblivion, but in fact it was some kind of scanner. My precious oil was given the all-clear. (At the UK airport I’m sure it would have gone straight in the bin.)

After an uneventful three-hour flight, I touched down in wet, miserable Luton. My plan had been to take a taxi the few miles to Hitchin and then catch a train to Cambridge. Getting a taxi wasn’t as simple as hopping in: I had to enter a black and yellow cabin or shed, and order from there. “Could you tell me the postcode?” I hadn’t a clue. They looked it up on their system. “That’ll be thirty-three pounds and…” What? They said the traffic was so bad that my ride would take an estimated 51 minutes. I could just about have walked it in that time. Instead I bought a National Express bus ticket from an extremely helpful woman, after attempting to buy one from an overly fussy machine that wouldn’t take my £20 notes because they weren’t smooth enough.

I arrived at my parents’ flat in St Ives just before ten in the evening and went almost straight to bed because I’d be meeting my university friend in London in a matter of hours. The next morning I got amazing customer service once more, this time from the bloke at the ticket desk at Cambridge railway station. (After 18 months in Romania, all British customer service suddenly seems bloody awesome.) By not catching the next available train I saved £16. My friend and I met at the British Museum, where we spent some time chatting while browsing the Chinese section and the exhibition of coins and medals. The British Museum is a remarkable trove and it costs absolutely nothing to visit. From the museum we meandered over to a nearby pub, where I found out my friend had been vegetarian for eight years. I had my first fish and chips since 2016 and it was wonderful. From there we made our way to Regent’s Park via a board game shop. He seemed impressed that I knew the difference between Ameritrash and Euro games. We chatted some more in Regent’s Park, grabbed something to eat (a Thai green curry in my case) and then it was time to go home. We were extremely lucky with the weather, but my “run” of blue skies was to end after just one day.

International travel - Life :)

A short break with some tall people

April 21, 2017 plutomanby 0 Comments

My brother called me yesterday morning to wish me a happy birthday. He said he got a Facebook message saying that it was Hitler’s birthday which reminded him that it was mine too. I’m not that keen on this whole birthday thing anymore. That’s half the reason I came to Romania; I could feel the years gradually slipping away.

Flying out of Timișoara is almost as easy as flying from Timaru. My flight landed at Stansted on the dot of six but I didn’t get to St Ives until after nine; I just happened to miss both the train and the bus by a couple of minutes. By that stage I was ravenous and grabbed a curry. My brother (6 foot 3) and his girlfriend (6 foot 1) arrived the following evening. She’s lovely, perhaps too good for my brother if anything. The next morning he went into town to get a haircut, while she and I had a chat. Without my prompting she brought up Brexit, saying how upset she was with the result, unlike my brother. She works as a podiatrist and gets a huge amount of satisfaction from her job but is frustrated by cuts to the NHS and feels it’s only a matter of time before the whole thing is privatised.

On Thursday I spent some time in Cambridge and picked up about a dozen language-related books from charity shops. My favourite is The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language by David Crystal, an impressive tome that hasn’t lost its relevance despite being thirty years old. The next day, Good Friday, I caught up with my university friend and his French girlfriend in Camden in London. Camden Market is really a series of massive alternative markets that would be right up my street if they weren’t quite so packed with people. In the past I used to go there for a short time if I just wanted a quick visual hit. I’d like to go back there but will try and avoid doing so on a bank holiday again. I took the train back to Cambridge at about four; any later I’d have needed to get a taxi home from either Cambridge or Huntingdon, and I don’t feel I can afford that kind of expense at the moment. (My brother and his girlfriend like to eat out in situations where I wouldn’t dream of it, and the cost of that did add up for me.)

Most of the time I just spent in St Ives with my brother and his girlfriend. Sometimes I’d go for a walk to get out of their hair. I realised how unused I am to spending whole days with other people, even people I get on with. My brother is very happy and, outwardly at least, has bucketloads of self-confidence. I’m hardly immune to swearing but he swears a lot, and makes a lot of black-and-white sweeping statements that could make him seem a bit of a dick to someone who didn’t know him better. (I’m guessing he tones his brashness down among people he doesn’t know.) He’s has quite conversative views on a lot of subjects, most notably drugs. So we’re very different people. Maybe being so different, and inhabiting two very different worlds since we both left home in 1998, has helped us to get on well. I look at my cousin in Wellington and her three younger sisters; the four of them have gone down similar paths: they’ve all got degrees from Canterbury, they all got married between the ages of 27 and 30, they’ve all had successful careers, two of them in finance, two of them in law. And they see plenty of each other. But after decades of competition in just about every aspect of their lives, they’re not exactly the best of friends now. It also helps that my brother’s and my sense of humour overlap quite a bit.

Talking about living in a different world, we turned up at my aunt’s house in Earith on Saturday morning. It was half-ten. She was half-cut. I don’t know how much she’d already had to drink but she was only semi-coherent. She gradually sobered up, then gave us all a glass of quite expensive Marlborough riesling. It’s puzzling why she spends twelve quid on a bottle of wine when she only drinks it for the alcohol content. Her garden looked lovely as it always has done. She then showed us her new sporty black Audi A7 with a three-litre engine that she only uses to go up and down the road in. She said, “Why can’t I have fun?” but to my mind that car is an obscene waste of money. I get on fine with my aunt; she isn’t a bad person (not now she isn’t, anyway – in her mother’s final years she was positively evil) but she’s never had any purpose in life and never listens to anyone but herself on any subject that even vaguely matters. My aunt married into the RAF at a young age, and since then everything she’s done in her life has purely been play. She conveniently shipped her kids (work!) off to boarding school when they were eight. She’s got no concept of actually having to earn money to make ends meet and mocks people who have “boring” jobs that pay the bills. Even now she gets her husband’s healthy pension. He sadly died of lung cancer in 2002; he never smoked but she smoked like a chimney until e-cigarettes came along. This total lack of purpose has contributed to her drink problems, which were in full swing even when my uncle was still alive, and other mental health problems including multiple suicide attempts. In October she’ll turn 70. She said that when she lived in Italy she gave a few English lessons and described them as “money for old rope”. (I don’t think it was just money either. I think she got the odd shag chucked in.) She probably thought my attempt to make a living from lessons was ridiculous. When we got back to St Ives we tried to guess how much her Audi cost and were open-mouthed when we saw prices ranging from £48,000 to £62,000. I’d guessed something in the low forties, which would have still been vastly more than my aunt has earned in her entire life.

Stansted is a bit of a nightmare these days; it’s expanded so much from how I remember it. I got back here at 11:30 on Sunday night and that felt pretty good. This is the closest place I have to home.

Wow, a snap election. I didn’t see that coming. They don’t quite do snap elections in the UK like they used to in New Zealand.

International travel - Romania

Rifts in Romania

October 30, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

My train from Arad (with its clean, modern station) to Timișoara was remarkably cheap: just under NZ$3 for an 80-minute ride at a leisurely pace. I was in a compartment with a man and a woman, both in their late fifties, who were having a vigorous debate about life since Ceaușescu. They disagreed vehemently on just about everything, except that things had gone backwards. I wasn’t able to follow the ins and outs of the discussion and certainly didn’t add very much to it. Much is made in both New Zealand and the UK of a generational divide, and there’s no doubt it exists. Some younger people in Britain wouldn’t even talk to their parents after the Brexit vote. But in Romania the gap is as wide as, well, as the one between a Romanian train and the platform. It’s massive, thanks to the 1989 Revolution and the sheer speed at which the internet spread here. And at 36, I seem to be living right on the fault line.

So here I am. This hotel isn’t far from the place I stayed in on my arrival in Romania (and will go back to on Wednesday), and is therefore within striking distance of perhaps the only laundromat in a land of 20 million. “Wash and dry in one hour!” If only. I had to wait for all the intimidating young people with their fancy phones to finish their loads first, while feeling the pressure of more intimidating young people desperate for me to finish mine. Getting my washing done was twice as costly as the train ride. The bottle of red wine I bought today was somewhere in between.

My hotel room isn’t great. The bathroom smells, despite strips of paper declaring that it has been dezinfected. (That’s similar to another mangling of the English language I see at train stations: reziduary waste. Where they got that from I have no idea. Simply “waste” or “rubbish” would have done the job.) There are large yellow signs next to the plug points saying “230 volts”; I clearly need to take extreme precautions before plugging anything in. My bedside lamp is purely ornamental. I haven’t got a fridge. And worst of all, I only have two towels instead of the customary six or eight. How will I cope?

The taxi driver in Timișoara asked me “Numero quattro, si?” Getting to the point where people think I’m Italian when I speak Romanian is what I call progress. But at the hotel I didn’t do so well. It’s a typical story. I field the first two or three simple questions, then I get a wall of words thrown at me, almost as a test, which I fail miserably, and any further words I receive are in English.

Only ten days until America goes to the polls. This is not a done deal, folks. The race has tightened perceptibly in the last three days or so, and now the FBI is investigating Hillary Clinton’s emails again. I’ve been on the losing side in every election or referendum I’ve cared about since Obama was re-elected four years ago, and the stakes then weren’t anything like they are now, so I must say I’m a little nervous.

International travel - Life :) - Romania

My new home

October 29, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

There’s definitely been an upswing in my mood since I last wrote. I persisted with the woman at the hotel in Timișoara, and she replied properly, giving me some advice on dodgy Romanian landlords and basically telling me to knock on the door of every language school in the city. She offered me a small room in the hotel for 250 euros a month (just NZ$400) including expenses, and I accepted for one month. I’m going to Timișoara tomorrow but will be staying at another hotel for four nights before moving into what I expect to be little more than a cubby-hole, though I will have a shower, a fridge and basic cooking facilities. So Timișoara will be my new home for the foreseeable future. I wouldn’t say it’s my favourite city of those I’ve visited – that would be a toss-up between Sibiu and Oradea – but it’s where I was lucky enough to make a connection. Because it was the first place I visited in a country I was very much looking forward to seeing, everything all seemed new and exciting there, a bit like Boston did when I went to America last year. And just like Boston, I spent long enough there to at least sort of get to know it. It’s nothing like Boston though, let’s face it.

Arad, where I’m staying now, isn’t far from my new home and in some ways it’s a smaller version of it. I like it. Today I visited the water tower, partly because of a tip-off I got from someone in Bucharest that it would be interesting and its owner doesn’t speak much English. The water tower was built at the end of the 19th century and hasn’t been operational for 60 years. It now functions as a five-storey museum, showing the history of the city, some artwork and the fire and water services. You can enter the tank at the top through a hole which has been cut out. The owner explained the history of Arad to me and then let me get on with it, but after I came down we had a 15-minute chat in Romanian, my longest yet. If only I could manage that every day. They had a wine festival in one of the main squares. I only had one glass of mulled wine and (for the first time) some sarmale. I’ve been having a few tummy troubles and didn’t want to push it.

Yesterday’s near-three-hour train journey from Oradea, which cost just 18 lei (NZ$7 or £4), was interesting to put it mildly. The guy opposite me had a BO problem and fidgeted constantly. The guy across the aisle drank beer from a 2.5-litre bottle and some clear liquid, which I soon found out to be palinca, from another big plastic bottle. Behind me was a large contingent of gypsies, the equivalent I guess of a whanau. One of them, a girl of five or six, walked up and down the train, saying “Da-mi un leu” or “Give me a leu.” One leu isn’t very much, but it’s the principle I don’t like: a child learns at a young age that you obtain money by begging. The guy with the bottles wanted to talk to me. He didn’t make a lot of sense. I wasn’t sure whether that was a language barrier or a three-sheets-to-the-wind barrier. He offered me some palinca – heaven knows where it had been – and I settled for just a capful. The train stopped at numerous towns, villages, hamlets, rusty signs…

I can bring up maps on my phone, but I struggle to get an idea of scale in a completely unknown place, so last night I dragged my suitcase and carried my other bags more than a mile from the station to the hotel. Tomorrow I’ll get a taxi for the return trip.

One thing Romania is not is boring. It’s raw, it’s unsanitised (not like that), it brims with life. And now it’s my home.

International travel - Romania

Isolation

October 27, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

Recently I’ve bemoaned my failure to converse in Romanian. But today I realised that I haven’t properly interacted with anybody in any language for some time. It’s either five days or eight, depending on what you count, and it’s starting to get to me. Isolation was my number one fear. Even I need human contact from time to time. It’s not that I’m staying in my room, though I felt like it today. I’m just not meeting people. It hasn’t helped that I had half a bottle of cheap Romanian red wine last night and it gave me a headache.

Oradea, where I am now, is a reasonable size, with a population of around 200,000. It’s close to the border with Hungary. And it’s beautiful. The central square (Piața Unirii, as always), the main street (Strada Republicii) and numerous surrounding buildings have had a lot of money spent on them, most of which has come from the EU. Some are still being worked on. Probably the most famous building, the Palace of the Black Eagle, is very pleasing to the eye. A decent-sized river, the Crișul Repede, wends its way through the city. (The Daily Mail would probably like to run a story on how much EU money has been spent on this obscure place in Romania with accompanying pictures comparing Oradea with, say, Great Yarmouth on the east coast of England. Or at least they would have done before the EU referendum.)

My hotel is built into the fortress which is in the shape of a five-pointed star. My room is enormous. And breakfast, while not quite as good as in Cluj, certainly isn’t bad. I’m sold on Romanian breakfasts now.

I wish I’d seen Oradea earlier on, because now I’m beginning to flag. I’m taking the train to Arad tomorrow and will spend two nights there before going back to Timișoara where all I’ll have to sort out is a new life. Shouldn’t be too challenging.

Ten hours is a long time to spend on a bus, as I did between Bucharest and Cluj. I paid 103 lei for the privilege, including one leu each time I needed to pee.

International travel - Language learning - Romania

I’m sorry I haven’t a Cluj

October 24, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

This is my last evening in Cluj, or to give it its full name, Cluj-Napoca. Cluj rhymes with “luge”. My hotel is on Strada Căii Ferate, or Railway Street. But what’s up with that name? Railway in Romanian is cale ferată, literally “iron road”. (The French term, chemin de fer, means the same thing.) But we want to say “Street of the Iron Road”, so we need to articulate the noun cale (“road”) and put it in the genitive case which indicates belonging. Cale is irregular, and it turns out the articulated genitive form is căii. As for the ferată (iron) bit, well that’s an adjective, and because cale is a feminine noun that we’ve just put in the genitive case, we need the plural form of that adjective, and that’s ferate. Got that? Good.

Yes, Railway Street. So I’m very close to the station, and that means it gets a bit noisy. It’s also rather warm in here, but less so than when I walked in and the heater was fully on. The fridge was switched off when I arrived and I haven’t tried turning it on because the wiring at the back looks potentially lethal. I’m enjoying the breakfasts here: lots of salamis and other cold meats, cheeses such as feta, eggs (either boiled or scrambled), and vegetables such as tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers. Yeah, I know tomato is a fruit. Not an English breakfast, not a Continental breakfast, but a Romanian breakfast. I’ve had much the same everywhere else, but it’s tastier and better presented here.

I like Cluj, and wish I’d come here straight from Sibiu instead of going to the capital. In some ways it’s better than Timișoara, a similar-sized city. The clock has been advanced ten years. The trams are more modern (Timișoara, I think, had cast-offs from Germany), the buildings in better condition, the main park that little bit tidier. I read that Cluj is the coolest town you’ve never heard of, and while it’s got a cool name that makes the awful title for this post possible, I’d still say Timișoara is cooler. It’s got all that street art that Cluj doesn’t appear to have, it’s more random, it’s more raw. But if you want to know whether something is cool or not, I’m probably not the man to ask.

Cluj is the capital of Transylvania and possibly the cultural capital of Romania. So you get lots of theatre, opera, and all that stuff. Today (Sunday) there was an interesting craft market, aimed in part at tourists.

I wish I could spend longer here, but I feel I want to get down to business fairly soon. Tomorrow I’m taking a three-hour train trip to Oradea where I’ve booked three nights. From there I intend to spend two nights in Arad before settling in Timișoara.

I emailed the woman at my hotel in Timișoara, the one who said she was impressed with my Romanian, chatted to me for ages about language schools and a property boom in the city, then gave me her business card. I wrote my email partly in Romanian. It wasn’t a five-minute job. Neither was her reply. It must have taken her all of 15 seconds. She just said she’d pass my details on to one of her contacts. She hit the ball to me, I returned it, and then she just whacked it over the fence for the neighbour’s dog to chew on. Game over. I don’t have all that much human contact, and while that might have been the most important chat I’d had all month, she might have had half a dozen just as important (if not more so) that same day. Or she might just have been busy. Making human contact.

Our bus got stuck in traffic and the journey from the capital took a few minutes under ten hours.