For whatever reason, I booked the train trip to Romania starting not from Budapest's main station, but from a small one a few minutes away. It may have been because it left there first, and I wanted to leave as early as possible, because hanging around for an 11PM departure is usually pretty awful.
This station, Kelenföld, was unsettlingly dark and quiet. It was Saturday night. A few people sat on the benches outside. The station building was empty except for two teenagers, who were making out. The listings seemed to say that the train would be leaving from platform 15.
I reached platform 15 through an empty, graffiti-covered concrete tunnel. On the tracks beyond rested disused, brightly-painted electric locomotives. They were strange, 1950s-science-fiction things, and the way they lurked in the darkness had a way of suggesting that the whole thing was some kind of sinister dream. The fact that I was the only person waiting for this train also started, as the departure time got closer, to make me a little nervous. Now and then, a few people would emerge from the underpass and stand around by the stairs; but they'd always turn out to be waiting to meet people on arriving trains.
When the departure time passed, I started to think about finding a room for the night. Then, they abruptly announced that the Dacia Express to Bucuresti would be 30 minutes late. I've never been so happy to hear a delay announced. It was the first credible evidence that the train really did exist, and it duly pulled in half an hour later.
The compartment was a clean little cabinet of wood veneer with three heavy steel locks on the door. It smelled a bit like an old sofa just before you decide to throw it away. We passed through Budapest's main station, Keleti, and perhaps two or three more people boarded. The Dacia Express to Bucuresti is not a popular train. But it really exists, and I celebrated that fact by drinking the last of the tiny bottles of red wine I'd bought at the St. Pancras Station M&S. Then I consoled myself for the ordeal by drinking the can of Lowenbrau I'd bought from central Europe's sketchiest kiosk in the underpass at Kelenfold. Then I went to bed.
Then, Hungarian border guards pounded on the door and asked for my passport. After I sank back into a deep sleep, the Romanian guards dropped by to stamp my passport again and to welcome me to Romania. They really were welcoming; you can be unhappy about the fact that stocky Romanians in military uniforms are hammering on your door at two in the morning, but you can't fault their attitude.
I woke up at dawn, and, not wanting to miss my stop, stayed up and read the Bucharest travel guide I'd brought along. It pointed out that the time zone changes when you enter from Hungary and that visitors coming from Budapest by train should be sure to change their clocks in order to not miss their stops. This seemed significant. In the event, though, we were at least 90 minutes late getting to Sighisoara, so it was of no use at all.
The writers of the Bucharest guide seemed to have trouble working up a lot of enthusiasm for Bucharest, which seemed ominous. Guide writers will usually natter on pretty chirpily about absolutely anywhere that's not in an active war zone or overrun by killer monkeys; when they're ambivalent about a place, it usually means you're dealing with something pretty awful. I'll see in a few days.
Entering Transylvania, it was sunny and warm. There was no sense of dread, and no sign of ancient evils awakening or of a nutty, musical "Transylvania 6-5000" situation breaking out.
A lot of infrastructure's being built in Romania. A lot of bridges, especially. Vehicles were a mix of old communist-era comedy cars and new ones, with only the occasional horse and cart. Now and then, a shepherd would appear, driving a flock along the tracks. Very small towns with mystifyingly tall blocks of apartments. Just countryside, then a clump of high-rises -- a young woman messing with her hair on an eighth-storey balcony in the middle of the Romanian countryside. Then farms again. Very green, with patches of wild poppies.
Around 10:30AM, the attendant came by to tell me we were going to be late. I'd already worked this out, because a) I'm very quick, b) the planned arrival time was 10:21, and c) it was impossible that anyone could plan to drive a train as slowly as ours was going. He also handed me a plastic bag containing my breakfast. Breakfast on the Dacia Express was the saddest meal I've ever been offered: A bottle of water; a bottle of iced tea; a tube of cheap butter cookies; a small packet of jam; an empty plastic cup; a tube of instant coffee; a stirrer; a pack of non-dairy creamer; a packet of sugar. I wasn't even sure how it was supposed to work. I think you dip the biscuits in the jam, snort the instant coffee, and then put the plastic bag over your head and end it all. Luckily, I'd had the foresight to eat a whole package of stroopwafels first thing that morning.
The family that ran my pension in Sighisoara were just getting home from church as I was letting myself in through their front gate. They showed me to a big, clean, mostly-empty room with a religious picture, an icon, actually, hanging above the bed. The bed was made with two separate bedsheets, folded away from each other, one for each side of the bed. An aid to chastity, maybe.
A few minutes from the pension, a pedestrian footbridge (also used as needed by motorcycles and probably any other vehicles that will fit onto it) crosses a small river with weed-covered banks. Beyond that is the old town of Sighisoara; the less-old lower city, and the fortified medieval hill-town.
Sighisoara is the birthplace of Vlad III "the Impaler", a 15th-century ruler with an unpleasant hobby whose patronymic, "Dracula", was lifted by Bram Stoker for a book he was working on. As a result, there are a lot of tat stands in Sighisoara selling Scream masks and vampire-themed postcards. It's also one of those places where you need to keep moving; otherwise, someone in a silly period costume will come up and try to show you where Dracula was born or where you can get good pizza (actually, the house Dracula was born in also has a restaurant, so...) Stoker is largely responsible for the fact that the name Transylvania, which just means "beyond the forest", has all kinds of associations with monsters, evil, and the undead. This is pretty unfair. A classic Victorian horror novel might easily have been set in, say, Saskatchewan, and Saskatchewan would now be a byword for zombie centaurs, or whatever else the novelist had come up with.
The other sites in Sighisoara include some pretty remarkable medieval towers, each named after the professional guild responsible for it. Also, two large churches that charged admission (2 lei; about $0.70). An old woman sits out front and collects the fees and hands out laminated descriptions of the interior in various languages. One church has a crypt; it's a small, empty cellar, but I thought I'd better have a look. Coming to Transylvania and not visiting a crypt would be like going to Naples and not having pizza.
The second church was that of the Transylvanian Saxons, Germans who had lived in the area since the middle ages. It predates the reformation, went Lutheran at some point, and is now used by a surviving community of "evangelical Saxons" (evangelical about Christianity, probably, and not about being Saxon). It has a monument with a list -- flanked by iron crosses -- of the community members who died in WWII, when an under-equipped Romanian army fought on the Axis side, mostly in a making-up-the-numbers capacity, before switching sides towards the end. Beneath that is a list of the victims of the postwar deportations, which is about a third as long as the other.
I was in Sighisoara only for a night. In the morning, I went and caught a train to Sibiu.
This station, Kelenföld, was unsettlingly dark and quiet. It was Saturday night. A few people sat on the benches outside. The station building was empty except for two teenagers, who were making out. The listings seemed to say that the train would be leaving from platform 15.
I reached platform 15 through an empty, graffiti-covered concrete tunnel. On the tracks beyond rested disused, brightly-painted electric locomotives. They were strange, 1950s-science-fiction things, and the way they lurked in the darkness had a way of suggesting that the whole thing was some kind of sinister dream. The fact that I was the only person waiting for this train also started, as the departure time got closer, to make me a little nervous. Now and then, a few people would emerge from the underpass and stand around by the stairs; but they'd always turn out to be waiting to meet people on arriving trains.
When the departure time passed, I started to think about finding a room for the night. Then, they abruptly announced that the Dacia Express to Bucuresti would be 30 minutes late. I've never been so happy to hear a delay announced. It was the first credible evidence that the train really did exist, and it duly pulled in half an hour later.
The compartment was a clean little cabinet of wood veneer with three heavy steel locks on the door. It smelled a bit like an old sofa just before you decide to throw it away. We passed through Budapest's main station, Keleti, and perhaps two or three more people boarded. The Dacia Express to Bucuresti is not a popular train. But it really exists, and I celebrated that fact by drinking the last of the tiny bottles of red wine I'd bought at the St. Pancras Station M&S. Then I consoled myself for the ordeal by drinking the can of Lowenbrau I'd bought from central Europe's sketchiest kiosk in the underpass at Kelenfold. Then I went to bed.
Then, Hungarian border guards pounded on the door and asked for my passport. After I sank back into a deep sleep, the Romanian guards dropped by to stamp my passport again and to welcome me to Romania. They really were welcoming; you can be unhappy about the fact that stocky Romanians in military uniforms are hammering on your door at two in the morning, but you can't fault their attitude.
I woke up at dawn, and, not wanting to miss my stop, stayed up and read the Bucharest travel guide I'd brought along. It pointed out that the time zone changes when you enter from Hungary and that visitors coming from Budapest by train should be sure to change their clocks in order to not miss their stops. This seemed significant. In the event, though, we were at least 90 minutes late getting to Sighisoara, so it was of no use at all.
The writers of the Bucharest guide seemed to have trouble working up a lot of enthusiasm for Bucharest, which seemed ominous. Guide writers will usually natter on pretty chirpily about absolutely anywhere that's not in an active war zone or overrun by killer monkeys; when they're ambivalent about a place, it usually means you're dealing with something pretty awful. I'll see in a few days.
Entering Transylvania, it was sunny and warm. There was no sense of dread, and no sign of ancient evils awakening or of a nutty, musical "Transylvania 6-5000" situation breaking out.
A lot of infrastructure's being built in Romania. A lot of bridges, especially. Vehicles were a mix of old communist-era comedy cars and new ones, with only the occasional horse and cart. Now and then, a shepherd would appear, driving a flock along the tracks. Very small towns with mystifyingly tall blocks of apartments. Just countryside, then a clump of high-rises -- a young woman messing with her hair on an eighth-storey balcony in the middle of the Romanian countryside. Then farms again. Very green, with patches of wild poppies.
Around 10:30AM, the attendant came by to tell me we were going to be late. I'd already worked this out, because a) I'm very quick, b) the planned arrival time was 10:21, and c) it was impossible that anyone could plan to drive a train as slowly as ours was going. He also handed me a plastic bag containing my breakfast. Breakfast on the Dacia Express was the saddest meal I've ever been offered: A bottle of water; a bottle of iced tea; a tube of cheap butter cookies; a small packet of jam; an empty plastic cup; a tube of instant coffee; a stirrer; a pack of non-dairy creamer; a packet of sugar. I wasn't even sure how it was supposed to work. I think you dip the biscuits in the jam, snort the instant coffee, and then put the plastic bag over your head and end it all. Luckily, I'd had the foresight to eat a whole package of stroopwafels first thing that morning.
The family that ran my pension in Sighisoara were just getting home from church as I was letting myself in through their front gate. They showed me to a big, clean, mostly-empty room with a religious picture, an icon, actually, hanging above the bed. The bed was made with two separate bedsheets, folded away from each other, one for each side of the bed. An aid to chastity, maybe.
A few minutes from the pension, a pedestrian footbridge (also used as needed by motorcycles and probably any other vehicles that will fit onto it) crosses a small river with weed-covered banks. Beyond that is the old town of Sighisoara; the less-old lower city, and the fortified medieval hill-town.
Sighisoara is the birthplace of Vlad III "the Impaler", a 15th-century ruler with an unpleasant hobby whose patronymic, "Dracula", was lifted by Bram Stoker for a book he was working on. As a result, there are a lot of tat stands in Sighisoara selling Scream masks and vampire-themed postcards. It's also one of those places where you need to keep moving; otherwise, someone in a silly period costume will come up and try to show you where Dracula was born or where you can get good pizza (actually, the house Dracula was born in also has a restaurant, so...) Stoker is largely responsible for the fact that the name Transylvania, which just means "beyond the forest", has all kinds of associations with monsters, evil, and the undead. This is pretty unfair. A classic Victorian horror novel might easily have been set in, say, Saskatchewan, and Saskatchewan would now be a byword for zombie centaurs, or whatever else the novelist had come up with.
The other sites in Sighisoara include some pretty remarkable medieval towers, each named after the professional guild responsible for it. Also, two large churches that charged admission (2 lei; about $0.70). An old woman sits out front and collects the fees and hands out laminated descriptions of the interior in various languages. One church has a crypt; it's a small, empty cellar, but I thought I'd better have a look. Coming to Transylvania and not visiting a crypt would be like going to Naples and not having pizza.
The second church was that of the Transylvanian Saxons, Germans who had lived in the area since the middle ages. It predates the reformation, went Lutheran at some point, and is now used by a surviving community of "evangelical Saxons" (evangelical about Christianity, probably, and not about being Saxon). It has a monument with a list -- flanked by iron crosses -- of the community members who died in WWII, when an under-equipped Romanian army fought on the Axis side, mostly in a making-up-the-numbers capacity, before switching sides towards the end. Beneath that is a list of the victims of the postwar deportations, which is about a third as long as the other.
I was in Sighisoara only for a night. In the morning, I went and caught a train to Sibiu.
