International travel

My third week in Romania has just begun. I’m in Cluj and there’s a deluge. It’s huge. So, with the ugly weather outside, now would be a good time to give some practical information about travelling and getting by in Romania.

This post is about physical money. You need considerably less of it in Romania than in most Western European countries, or New Zealand where I’ve just come from, and that’s a big part of the reason I’m here. To make life a bit more interesting, Romania doesn’t use the euro. Its currency is the leu, which means “lion”. The leu is divided into 100 bani. The plural of leu is lei, pronounced “lay”. There are currently about five lei to the pound, or four to the US dollar. Bani, incidentally, is also the Romanian word for money itself. Romania went through a period of rampant inflation (don’t you just love the word “rampant”?) and in 2005, when the currency seemed to have stabilised, 10,000 old lei became one new leu. The currency code for the new leu is RON, and sometimes you’ll see prices given as, say, “10 RON”. Some tourists have been duped into thinking the RON and the leu are two different currencies.

Romanian money is note-heavy: the smallest note is 1 leu, worth just 20p. That’s the complete opposite of what I remember from my childhood: the pound note was eliminated when I was very small, making the smallest note the fiver, so I hardly ever touched a note until I was a teenager, except when I lived in New Zealand where $1 and $2 notes were still in use. The largest Romanian note is 500 lei which you wouldn’t want to lose; it’s worth more than the biggest American bill. Every denomination of note or coin begins with a 1 or a 5 with the exception of the 200 lei note. The lack of intermediate values like 2 or 20, and the relative lack of coins, seem to be a hangover from the old “rampant” currency. The notes are identical in size to euro notes, presumably so vending machines and the like can be easily converted when Romania switches over to the euro, but I can’t see that happening in the next few years. Although the 5 and 10 lei notes are a bit too similar to my eyes, all the notes are nice to look at, with each one featuring a famous Romanian figure. The coins, what few there are, could certainly have been a bit less boring.

Prices are given to the nearest ban (0.01 leu) but totals are rounded when you come to pay. Unlike New Zealand, there doesn’t seem to be a standard for rounding, even in individual stores. Some places round everything up, and even though we’re only talking about a couple of pence here and there, I don’t like the message that sends out.

I hated the whole rigmarole of tipping when I visited the US last year. It became my second most despised thing about America, right behind guns. The Romanian word for “tip” is “bacșiș”, which comes from Turkish. I’ve hardly been in any restaurants, so I don’t know what the protocol there is. Taxi drivers seem to expect a small “rounding up” tip, but also try to scam the bejeesus out of you, especially in Bucharest.

From what I’ve seen so far, cash is king here. I’ve stayed at two places so far that have only accepted cash. I’m guessing that’s some kind of tax dodge.

This rain is really rampant now.

I’m just about to leave Bucharest. I’d give it a 4 out of 10. It’s as if there’s something I’m supposed to have “got” about Bucharest and for whatever reason I just haven’t. The old town was lovely, especially that beautiful old church, but that part only covers a few acres, which are surrounded by many square miles of congested streets and insipid apartment blocks. The Ceausescus have an awful lot to answer for. This place could have been beautiful. I visited the ridiculously huge Parliamentary Palace, once I found out where the entrance was. Its history – entirely within my lifetime – was very interesting, but my overwhelming feeling was one of anger. What absolute bastards. Yesterday I went to the Romanian Village museum, where traditional houses had been transported in from different parts of the country, and a geological museum which I enjoyed even though most of the exhibits hadn’t been updated since the Cretaceous period. I realised how much geology I’d forgotten. The high-ceilinged main hall with dodecahedral (!) cabinets containing crystals of all shapes impressed me a lot. After that I walked several miles and took a few trips on the metro, trying in vain to find a laundromat. They just aren’t a thing here. I did however find a replacement for my suitcase which has finally had it.

I must say I’ve felt very safe in Bucharest, and I’ve seen quite a bit of it now. Bucharest is divided into six sectors. My hotel is just off an arterial road that passes between Sectors 1 and 2. (If this was, say, Baltimore instead of Bucharest, the road itself would be in Sector 5 or something.) I’ve visited every sector now except 6 which is where my bus leaves from. As well as being safe, I haven’t had to spend too much (I’ve been careful not to be scammed by taxi drivers), and it’s for those reasons I give the city a 4 out of 10 and not a completely disastrous score.

A rooster woke me up this morning. In the middle of Bucharest. I can see roosters outside my window now. I bloody love Romania.

Next stop is Cluj, a nine-hour bus ride away. I’ll try and while away that time with a Romanian novel and, um, a dictionary.

Travelling by bus is not the sexiest mode of transport, and so it proved yesterday. My taxi dropped me off at one of Timișoara’s bus stations in the pouring rain. I stood in a packed waiting room, hoping I’d eventually board the correct vehicle. The bus was small. It left on the dot of 1pm, as scheduled, but at 1:05 there was a loud ‘clunk!’ that came from underneath. We made a detour to the garage and the problem was fixed relatively quickly. As we travelled through the countryside, visiting small towns and villages, I marvelled at the beauty of it all. The ornate patterns, the bright colours, and yes, the buildings in a state of disrepair. The beaten up old Dacias, the faded, half-peeling hand-painted signs: I love all that stuff. At Lugoj a bunch more people got on and suddenly the experience wasn’t much fun at all. The bus was heaving. We arrived in Deva at 4:45; the trip had cost me just £6, or actually £7, hang on a minute, £8. Sorry, I’m trying to keep up with the plummeting pound but I can’t type fast enough.

Deva has been a bit disappointing, truth be told. The weather has been dull. This morning I took the cable car up the volcanic hill to the old fortress, and that was great. I didn’t at all mind that hardly anybody else was doing the same thing. I enjoyed the view of the town, which splits in two: a pretty part and an ugly one. As I walked down from the top of the hill I saw narrow streets full of beautiful, and often quite creative, houses.

Eating out is nerve-racking. (Should there be a W in that? I’m never sure.) I tentatively order something in Romanian, the 20-year-old replies in English, I persist with Romanian, but give up in the end, wondering why I’m even bothering. Tonight I went to some fast-food joint in the pretty part of town. “Ten minutes,” he said. “Please sit down.” Gah, stop it! When it came to the fillings, he said “tomatoes” and then “varză”. Cabbage, I said. You don’t know the word for cabbage, do you? Until you know the English words for all the fillings, you bloody well speak to me in Romanian. “Ardei”, “ceapă”. See, you haven’t a clue, and you’ve been learning English for how long?

It dawned on me today that my endeavours to learn Romanian, as an English speaker, are of the order of ten times harder than the other way round. Romanians are small malleable children when they begin learning English. They aren’t hard-wired 36-year-olds. They have almost limitless resources at their disposal, including all their classmates who are doing the same thing. And you can’t get away from English. There’s so much of it, wherever you look, that you can’t help but learn some. In bricks-and-mortar Romania, all content, all substance, is pretty firmly in Romanian, but so much of the embroidery is in English. At the laundromat all the instructions on how to use the machines were in Romanian but dotted around were slogans in English like “Wash all your worries away”. English songs, movies, TV, you can’t avoid it. And then the online world, where so much actual content is in English, is another matter entirely.

All of this makes me fear for the long-term future of languages like Romanian, and gives a sense of the uphill battle I face going the other way. I think the people at my hotel in Timișoara saw that and recognised that I’ve achieved a fair bit, considering. I felt buoyed after that conversation the last night I was there. Maybe this English teaching in Romania ridiculousness is actually going to happen.

Tomorrow I’ll take the train to my next stop. I’ve got high expectations of you Sibiu, so please don’t let me down.

Update: A bear that was on the loose in Sibiu has sadly been shot dead after a failed attempt to tranquilise it.