by 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.
