Romania

Life :) - Politics - Romania

Mum, and trying to settle in

November 12, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

Mum is in Central Otago on a four-day golfing trip. That gave me the opportunity to talk to Dad last night. Properly. We talked about Trump (good lord!), Brexit (again, agreeing on just about everything even though we voted differently), Leonard Cohen (Dad was quite a big fan), the restoration of Dad’s MGA, the quite magnificent swarm of starlings I saw in town the night before, my challenges here in Romania (there are many), and so on. We talked for an hour and a half and it was great. Most importantly, we talked about Mum. On the train from Deva to Sibiu I received an email from Dad in which he said that life at home was becoming uncomfortable due to Mum’s high stress levels. I replied, including a short paragraph about Mum: “When anything slightly annoying happens, Mum always has to raise the stakes and make the atmosphere unpleasant. It’s all so unnecessary. She’s completely unaware of what she’s doing. Of course if you tell her that, things get very ugly indeed.” Dad read my email out to Mum, omitting that paragraph, but she knew Dad’s password and she read it herself two days later. I phoned them from Sibiu just after she read it and she wouldn’t speak to me. Dad said he forgot to delete the email. I didn’t regret writing what I did, or that she read it, but I still felt sick and didn’t sleep much that night.

I love Mum to bits. That should go without saying. She’s done a heck of a lot for me over the years. But that doesn’t mean she’s perfect. She’s always had a short fuse, and as Dad and I agreed last night, it’s got even shorter of late, to the point where she creates a perpetual state of tension and gloom. If Dad checks the mail and finds a brown envelope, he’s loath to show it to Mum because he knows it’ll set her off. Somebody at the golf club will provoke her one minute, someone at the church group the next, her next-door neighbour the minute after that. They travel overseas a lot but almost anything can go wrong when you’re travelling, and with Mum, the slightest thing can trigger the switch. The episode just before I left where she almost break-danced would have been funny if didn’t reveal that she has a fairly serious problem. And you absolutely can’t talk to her about any of this. Dad can’t. I can’t. Nobody can. In fact it’s very hard to reason with Mum about anything. You might as well reason with Donald Trump (who, thankfully, Mum can’t stand).

Mum is 67. She could easily (and hopefully will) be around for another quarter-century, as her own mother (who had the same short fuse) almost was. She could easily outlive me. We’re in for a lot of screaming and shouting, and perhaps break-dancing, in the meantime.

At times I get down too. Yesterday I walked seven or eight miles trying to find supermarkets where I could put up ads for teaching. I found two, but haven’t had a bite yet. Perhaps I never will. It was a sunny day, I saw some parts of the city I hadn’t seen before, I had a pleșkaviță and two langoși for lunch at Piața 700, so things weren’t too bad. Autumn has been a lovely time of year to see Timișoara. But my confidence is low, I’m struggling to meet people, and at times it feels people are actively trying to avoid having anything to do with me. Learning Romanian has been interesting, in the same way that learning Ancient Greek would be interesting, and so far it’s been about as much use. But I need to keep going, I need to get up early, to walk those eight miles in the sun or the rain or (give it a month) the snow, in the hope that something will happen. It will take time, but I have time. I also want to start writing a book I’d planned to write years and years ago, because I now have time.

I also need to spend less time on the bloody internet. The US election was a huge moment in modern human history, and it’s hard not to read what everybody is saying about it, but gosh all those news sites are a time-waster. Then there’s Facebook. The people at that language school said I should have a page to help me promote my teaching. Not a bad idea, so I set one up, this time in my real name. But I really can’t be arsed with it. I’m interested in engaging with people about 30% of the time and with dozens of people all at once about 0% of the time. I messed around with one or two settings to reduce the creep factor, and I didn’t even provide my email address, instead signing up through my Romanian phone number which is almost a blank slate. I certainly didn’t say which school I went to; why on earth would I suddenly want to connect with my classmates from 20-plus years ago?

I’ll cover the election properly in my next post. Hillary Clinton is currently about 600,000 votes ahead. There are still a couple of million to count but I think she’ll be fine.

Life :) - Other sports - Politics - Romania

Nothing to fear…

November 8, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

My room is in a hotel loft. It’s not what you’d call spacious. But it’s miles better than what I experienced with my flatmate in the first half of the year. Coming home from work and sitting in the car for ages until I finally steeled myself to go inside my own home. Lying in bed and seeing every possible hour tick by on my digital clock: the zeros, the ones, the twos, the threes… My living circumstances had an enormous effect on my move to Romania: I’d planned to join Skype groups and really ramp up my Romanian learning but that soon went out the window.

Just when I was getting fed up of having a shaworma every night, I’ve been given access to a kitchen, so I plan to actually cook something tonight. My life will soon become that little bit cheaper and healthier.

People have been saying I shouldn’t worry about the US election, because Donald Trump (or Darth Trump as I’ve been calling him) probably won’t win, and everything will turn out fine even if he does. I’m not sure on either count. On the first, there are about fifteen additional sources of uncertainty this time compared to 2012. And on the second, it doesn’t seem long ago to me that my brother served in the totally unnecessary and terrifying Iraq war, which probably would never have happened if Al Gore had got in. Yes I’m worried, and I’ll be getting up at 2am to watch the results come in on Romanian TV.

The All Blacks lost to Ireland in Chicago, their first loss to Ireland ever. It’s been quite a week for sport in Chicago, what with the Cubs winning. Now I find myself watching handball and volleyball on TV. I like trying to figure out new sports. (Volleyball I have at least some clue about, but handball…)

Did I really just feel an earthquake?! Are they following me?

Update: No it wasn’t an earthquake. They’re pretty rare in this part of the country (but fairly common in the south-east).

This comment for me sums up the US election (except the idiotic part; that’s part of Trump’s shtick):

This election must be so tricky for our US cousins.

On one hand, there is a racist, misogynist, inarticulate, ignorant, homophobic, bullying, sexual abusing, idiotic, populist, inexperienced, hateful fascist.

On the other hand, is an articulate, experienced politician who sent e-mails from the wrong server.

Such a tough one. Dunno how our US friends will know which to choose.

Life :) - Other sports - Politics - Romania

My cup of tea

November 5, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve been in Romania almost a month and haven’t had a single cup of tea yet. Well actually that’s not quite true. I’ve had the odd herbal or fruit infusion, with ‘odd’ being the operative word, but not a single cup of NBT: normal bloody tea. But today I was in Auchan, a large French-owned supermarket, and I found a packet of Earl Grey with a picture of Big Ben on the box. Hooray! I haven’t had a cup yet because I haven’t been given access to the kitchen yet, but give it time. (I know, when in Romania and all that, but a cuppa is a fairly basic human need.)

The marketing manager at the “promising” language school asked me what I do in my spare time. I mentioned tennis. He said he played too, and added that he was “really good”. I said that in that case he’d probably thrash me. He then said that he was carrying some excess weight. Then he talked about learning English. “I didn’t learn much because the teachers were poor. I was the best in my class though, and always got ten out of ten of course.” He said Timișoara had much more to offer culturally than either Bucharest or Sibiu, and of course he was born in Timișoara. He described my Romanian as “very poor” before upgrading it to just “poor” on the evidence of about ten words in total. If you multiply his ego by about twenty you get…

Donald Trump. The US election is just four days away, and as I’ve said before, Trump could easily become president. Only it’s even more likely now. FiveThirtyEight are saying he has a 35% chance of victory. The odds and the map are changing all the time as new polls come in, and it feels more relevant to me than on previous occasions because I’ve actually been to America. (It’s 14 months since I was there. Campaigning had already begun. The whole process is a disgraceful waste of time and money.) I see both North Carolina and Florida have flipped from pale blue to pale pink in the last few minutes. Trump is still behind Clinton by about three points in the national polling average, but (1) that gap could close before Tuesday, (2) even if it doesn’t, there could be a modest polling error, and (3) he could conceivably lose the popular vote by a point or more and still win the election; the Electoral College favours him. So in other words, it’s on a knife-edge. I wonder if their estimation of Clinton’s chances – roughly two out of three – is a touch on the high side. If you’re 4-3 up in a set of tennis, you’ll win about two out of three times. (I’m assuming here that you have a 50:50 chance of winning each point whether serving or not – a reasonable assumption for me, but not for, say, a Wellington regional player, and certainly not for the marketing manager of that language school before he put on those extra kilos.) But imagine you’ve been 4-1 up and have lost the last two games. Momentum is against you; the trend is not your friend; your opponent, like Trump, has the wind in his sails. I think that’s the situation Clinton is in.
My cousin, who I met in upstate New York last year, is contemplating leaving the country if (in his words) the idiot wins.

The Cubs won the World Series for the first time in 108 years (!), and even then they almost let it get away. By all accounts Game 7 was one of the great baseball games and the Cubs’ win one of the great moments in baseball (maybe American sport in general, but my knowledge of the other three major American sports verges on non-existent).

The markets in Timișoara are fantastic (I’ll talk about them in another post) but the one in Oradea, near the fortress where I stayed, still wins.

Life :) - Romania

Why am I doing this?

November 4, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

On Wednesday I went back to the hotel I started off in. I didn’t know whether the manager, the boss, really wanted to see me again. I can’t quite make her out. The rooms here have names, not numbers. She said my room was called something like Dali or Dally and was on the first floor. I found an empty room called Darling (of all things) with the key in its lock, and even saw a map showing no other rooms beginning with D. It must have just been her accent (her mother tongue is Hungarian). I piled my junk into the Darling room and went back downstairs. I was told to be careful with the skylight. Skylight? It turned out there was a Dali room, not far from Darling, but the map only showed a few rooms. (Room numbers are a great idea, aren’t they? Big businesses, especially really unfriendly ones, love to name their rooms. One company I worked for had ghastly names like the Synergy Room. Even after years, people still couldn’t remember that the Synergy Room was the second room past the lift on the fourth floor. If they’d just called it 4B, which is a much nicer name anyway, life would have been easier for everybody.) So I had to swiftly move all my stuff, some of which I’d already unpacked, from Darling to Dali. I certainly couldn’t dally. The Dali room, where I’ll be staying until 2nd December, is bigger than I feared it might be, but doesn’t have the facilities I was promised (I need to ask about that). It does have a TV however.

On Tuesday I visited six language schools in the city. I received a very positive response from the first one. They currently have no native English speakers among their staff, and before they’d even looked at my CV, they wanted me to run conversation classes with their advanced students. I sat down with two of their senior staff for 45 minutes. They want me to promote myself, and to be honest that’s not something that comes easy to me. I also received advice about accommodation in Timișoara. It seems I’m better off using Airbnb instead of renting an apartment where I’d likely face a 25% price hike as soon as I open my mouth. All in all, things sounded promising.

Sometimes, when I’m buttering bread with my penknife or finding somewhere to put the soap so it won’t slide off, I wonder why the hell I’m doing all of this. But then I think I could be in some god-awful meeting in the Synergy Room.

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.

International travel - Romania

Rampant Romania 1: Money

October 22, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

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.

International travel - Romania

Won’t be booking a rest again for a while

October 21, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

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.