I passed a church service, possibly a funeral, on my way to the train station in Sighisoara. A group of old Romanians in black were standing in a group outside a small church. My suitcase was making an obnoxious clatter on the cobblestone sidewalk, and I was wondering whether to cross the street or to carry it when the church bell started to ring insistently and they filed back inside.
Inside the station, I checked the display, which was an old TV mounted in a corner. All trains but one were leaving from platforms 1, 2, or 3. Mine was leaving from platform 4. I went to find it. Platform 1 was beside the station. Platforms 2 and 3 were the line beyond that. There was no platform 4 -- unless it was one of the disused-looking lines beyond that. I went down into the long, crumbling concrete underpass to see.
Locals ignored the underpass, just walking back and forth across the tracks. Down in it, it was easy to understand why. Crossing the tracks carried a small chance of a grisly death, but it meant you didn't need to go into the underpass -- if it was an underpass, and not the world's longest, most badly-maintained urinal. There wasn't even much graffiti. It was badly-lit, and there was no audience, so the taggers probably didn't see the point; and, anyway, whether you have a can of paint in your hand or not, it's not a fun place to be.
The stairs beyond platform 3 were for authorized personnel only. I took the last set, which brought me up on the far side, beyond all the tracks, amid abandoned equipment overgrown with weeds. A stray dog gnawing itself in the grass looked up inquiringly. Back at the information desk, a nice lady explained that the train to Sibiu was the one waiting in front of me on platform 1, and I hurried out to board it. What the purpose of listing it as leaving from a non-existent platform is, she doesn't reveal.
The train is a "regio" train. "Regio" is shorthand for slow, local, and busted-up, and is whispered fearfully on internet discussion boards, usually in sentences like, "how do I get from x to y without taking a regio". But it was fine, really. It was almost empty, which helped. There was kind of an unpleasant smell, but I couldn't tell whether it was the train or whatever I walked through in the underpass. It wasn't air conditioned, and it was a hot day; but one of the platform doors was broken and wouldn't close, which, as long as the compartment door was also left open, produced a cool breeze. An elderly gentleman in a beret and a purple sweater boarded at one point and crossly closed the compartment door behind him. A few minutes later, realizing that what we were traveling in was basically a mobile solar oven, he rose to sheepishly open it again.
The train stops whenever there are rail works, and there are rail works everywhere. Vast amounts of concrete are being poured into the Romanian rail network, or into things that lie along the Romanian rail network. Crews were labouring all along the line. The machinery is all modern, and everyone wears safety vests, except for one pot-bellied foreman, who is strutting along bare-chested -- the better, possibly, to show off his pot belly, which, here as elsewhere, is a sign of status on work crews (like the silver back hair on old male gorillas; which, actually, this foreman also had, making him a kind of double threat).
The farmers we pass mostly have the lean, tanned faces you get from working in the sun since you could walk. I don't see a lot of faces like them. They remind me of the faces of soldiers in WWII documentaries. They wear thin patterned sweaters and hats. Apart from the farmers, we pass distant towns of red roofs with the occasional tower.
It starts to rain, and our next stop is for a group of people huddled pathetically together in a decayed concrete shelter with half a roof. Some teenagers get on and try to evade the conductor. One of them runs into him, makes an excuse, and goes back to the area between the cars. He stops for a while in front of the broken door, seemingly toying with the idea of jumping out. We're going about 10km/hr, so it's not exactly suicide, but he seems to think better of it and just flees to the next car. The conductor's reluctant to go after him. It would take a pretty much completely heartless bastard to go around chucking Romanian urchins off trains, and our conductor's too soft for the job. They'd need to dig up a lineal descendant of Vlad III, or someone along those lines. Not, of course, that the job should necessarily be done at all.
We have more stops like that. At one of them, a peddler boards. He's wearing a bright green shirt and holding a bulging shopping bag. Avoiding eye-contact, he walks down the length of the car. At each row, he stops, fishes out a bunch of items from the bag, and arranges them on the empty seat by the aisle. It's a strange collection of dollar-store junk that he chooses for me -- playing cards, grooming items, objects I can't identify -- every item neatly wrapped in plastic, with a little green price tag affixed. After a minute or so, he works his way back up the car, sweeping everything back into his bag.
After miles of farms, we pass a vast, derelict industrial site, overgrown and collapsing on itself -- part of the iron curtain's vast rust stain. As the train rolls around a bend, we can see the enormous array of shining new solar panels being installed just beyond it. The Canaletto-painting towns of Transylvania are set in a post-Soviet industrial wasteland. The wasteland is more interesting, in its way, and seeing it is more urgent; the remains of the Soviet/Ceausescu era are going to be ground down and built over as quickly as possible, while the old town centres will just continue to be re-plastered and re-painted.
We get to Sibiu. The pension's a long way from the station, so I negotiate with a cab driver for the trip. And taking a taxi in Romania turns out to be another thing the internet's unnecessarily worried about. (Actually, one trip probably doesn't put me in a position to say that; only that it's certain that not every cab driver in the country will stab you with a screwdriver and steal your identity.)
The room at the pension's sort of interesting: All the upholstery is gold, the curtains are gold, everything except the wall-mounted TV and the cabinet holding the minibar fridge has braidings of fake gilt or old copper, and the light fixtures are half-domes of gold wiring holding dozens of crystals that rattle noisily whenever anyone walks upstairs. The web-site says rooms are furnished in 'Egyptian' style, but it's more like what you'd end up with if you had to furnish a bedroom for Louis XIV with a budget of $200.
Sibiu has a beautifully restored medieval centre. On my side of it are two (restored) walls, one within the other, with what was once a broad ditch -- and is now a long, skinny public park -- in between. Sibiu's main square is an enormous open space lined with grand buildings. Outside the palace of art, a square, sky-blue palace, is a folding sign for a reptile expo. There's a low-res photograph of a cobra blown up to huge size, and the lettering is in dripping red, as though "reptile expo" were words traced out, in his own blood, by a dying man who had made the mistake of messing with the mighty cobra.
Past the lovingly restored centre, you walk down to the lower town, which is patchily-restored. Beyond that, you get to the end of the zone of restoration, and end up in a kind of demilitarized zone, demarcated by construction barriers, that separates the tourist town from the rest of Sibiu. There's a huge market, full of beautiful-looking produce, vendors slurping soup between customers, Roma women in headscarves, and kiosks with plastic tables where men empty beer steins at 11 in the morning.
Inside the station, I checked the display, which was an old TV mounted in a corner. All trains but one were leaving from platforms 1, 2, or 3. Mine was leaving from platform 4. I went to find it. Platform 1 was beside the station. Platforms 2 and 3 were the line beyond that. There was no platform 4 -- unless it was one of the disused-looking lines beyond that. I went down into the long, crumbling concrete underpass to see.
Locals ignored the underpass, just walking back and forth across the tracks. Down in it, it was easy to understand why. Crossing the tracks carried a small chance of a grisly death, but it meant you didn't need to go into the underpass -- if it was an underpass, and not the world's longest, most badly-maintained urinal. There wasn't even much graffiti. It was badly-lit, and there was no audience, so the taggers probably didn't see the point; and, anyway, whether you have a can of paint in your hand or not, it's not a fun place to be.
The stairs beyond platform 3 were for authorized personnel only. I took the last set, which brought me up on the far side, beyond all the tracks, amid abandoned equipment overgrown with weeds. A stray dog gnawing itself in the grass looked up inquiringly. Back at the information desk, a nice lady explained that the train to Sibiu was the one waiting in front of me on platform 1, and I hurried out to board it. What the purpose of listing it as leaving from a non-existent platform is, she doesn't reveal.
The train is a "regio" train. "Regio" is shorthand for slow, local, and busted-up, and is whispered fearfully on internet discussion boards, usually in sentences like, "how do I get from x to y without taking a regio". But it was fine, really. It was almost empty, which helped. There was kind of an unpleasant smell, but I couldn't tell whether it was the train or whatever I walked through in the underpass. It wasn't air conditioned, and it was a hot day; but one of the platform doors was broken and wouldn't close, which, as long as the compartment door was also left open, produced a cool breeze. An elderly gentleman in a beret and a purple sweater boarded at one point and crossly closed the compartment door behind him. A few minutes later, realizing that what we were traveling in was basically a mobile solar oven, he rose to sheepishly open it again.
The train stops whenever there are rail works, and there are rail works everywhere. Vast amounts of concrete are being poured into the Romanian rail network, or into things that lie along the Romanian rail network. Crews were labouring all along the line. The machinery is all modern, and everyone wears safety vests, except for one pot-bellied foreman, who is strutting along bare-chested -- the better, possibly, to show off his pot belly, which, here as elsewhere, is a sign of status on work crews (like the silver back hair on old male gorillas; which, actually, this foreman also had, making him a kind of double threat).
The farmers we pass mostly have the lean, tanned faces you get from working in the sun since you could walk. I don't see a lot of faces like them. They remind me of the faces of soldiers in WWII documentaries. They wear thin patterned sweaters and hats. Apart from the farmers, we pass distant towns of red roofs with the occasional tower.
It starts to rain, and our next stop is for a group of people huddled pathetically together in a decayed concrete shelter with half a roof. Some teenagers get on and try to evade the conductor. One of them runs into him, makes an excuse, and goes back to the area between the cars. He stops for a while in front of the broken door, seemingly toying with the idea of jumping out. We're going about 10km/hr, so it's not exactly suicide, but he seems to think better of it and just flees to the next car. The conductor's reluctant to go after him. It would take a pretty much completely heartless bastard to go around chucking Romanian urchins off trains, and our conductor's too soft for the job. They'd need to dig up a lineal descendant of Vlad III, or someone along those lines. Not, of course, that the job should necessarily be done at all.
We have more stops like that. At one of them, a peddler boards. He's wearing a bright green shirt and holding a bulging shopping bag. Avoiding eye-contact, he walks down the length of the car. At each row, he stops, fishes out a bunch of items from the bag, and arranges them on the empty seat by the aisle. It's a strange collection of dollar-store junk that he chooses for me -- playing cards, grooming items, objects I can't identify -- every item neatly wrapped in plastic, with a little green price tag affixed. After a minute or so, he works his way back up the car, sweeping everything back into his bag.
After miles of farms, we pass a vast, derelict industrial site, overgrown and collapsing on itself -- part of the iron curtain's vast rust stain. As the train rolls around a bend, we can see the enormous array of shining new solar panels being installed just beyond it. The Canaletto-painting towns of Transylvania are set in a post-Soviet industrial wasteland. The wasteland is more interesting, in its way, and seeing it is more urgent; the remains of the Soviet/Ceausescu era are going to be ground down and built over as quickly as possible, while the old town centres will just continue to be re-plastered and re-painted.
We get to Sibiu. The pension's a long way from the station, so I negotiate with a cab driver for the trip. And taking a taxi in Romania turns out to be another thing the internet's unnecessarily worried about. (Actually, one trip probably doesn't put me in a position to say that; only that it's certain that not every cab driver in the country will stab you with a screwdriver and steal your identity.)
The room at the pension's sort of interesting: All the upholstery is gold, the curtains are gold, everything except the wall-mounted TV and the cabinet holding the minibar fridge has braidings of fake gilt or old copper, and the light fixtures are half-domes of gold wiring holding dozens of crystals that rattle noisily whenever anyone walks upstairs. The web-site says rooms are furnished in 'Egyptian' style, but it's more like what you'd end up with if you had to furnish a bedroom for Louis XIV with a budget of $200.
Sibiu has a beautifully restored medieval centre. On my side of it are two (restored) walls, one within the other, with what was once a broad ditch -- and is now a long, skinny public park -- in between. Sibiu's main square is an enormous open space lined with grand buildings. Outside the palace of art, a square, sky-blue palace, is a folding sign for a reptile expo. There's a low-res photograph of a cobra blown up to huge size, and the lettering is in dripping red, as though "reptile expo" were words traced out, in his own blood, by a dying man who had made the mistake of messing with the mighty cobra.
Past the lovingly restored centre, you walk down to the lower town, which is patchily-restored. Beyond that, you get to the end of the zone of restoration, and end up in a kind of demilitarized zone, demarcated by construction barriers, that separates the tourist town from the rest of Sibiu. There's a huge market, full of beautiful-looking produce, vendors slurping soup between customers, Roma women in headscarves, and kiosks with plastic tables where men empty beer steins at 11 in the morning.
