Like a man with a swollen lip
Posted in Europe | By tim |
It does indeed! I wake up having been bitten by a hellish mosquito of some sort on the lip, temple and neck. My lip is swollen to three times its normal size and I look like some bloated elephant man and feel really stupid. I hope desperately that it will subside naturally but this doesn’t stop me feeling that I have suffered a near terminal lip-inflation. Unfortunately, I can imagine better places than Cluj to obtain medical treatment.
Outside, daylight does nothing for the hotel. The builders who have been bashing and crashing since 7.30am are doing something to the walls. They have made so much mess, it is difficult to see if they are actually demolishing the hotel around us, or just rendering the walls. Whatever, their plastering technique seems to rely heavily on slapping on as much as possible and then, when it’s dry, carving it back flat. Breakfast belies the chaos outside and is hot – omelette with salami and salad. Unfortunately, since coffee is scarce here, the drink is Ness Cafe (not Nescafe), a dreadful coffee substitute made from ‘vegetable extract’ of unknown origin and served thick and sweet.
We leave in search of the Medical library where Sally Woods, someone a friend of Chris’ knows and who may be able to help us find alternative accomodation, works. When we do find her office, she is away in Bucharest so we decide the hotel will have to do and return for a look around the town which is pretty in parts but full of terrible pollution. Our morning is spent searching for the best way to get our hands on some money. We settle for $150 dollars from my visa account and split the proceeds. The book tells us getting a cash advance on a credit card is nigh on impossible in Romania, so we feel triumphant to have proved them wrong. What we end up with is a huge wad of thick, dirty notes too big to fit in my wallet. We go out in search of food and find a place called the Brerarie which has an empty self-service restaurant serving congealed sausages in gravy, plus a simple restaurant. We choose the latter, but no sooner have we sat down than a fat, unshaven man in a black leather jacket comes over and joins us at our table. He speaks in slurred German which is what initially gains him our attention. After this, our meal goes downhill and with it our at first good impression of the Romanian people. He just won’t go away and can’t even translate the menu for us. The waitress seems unphased by our plight but we have to buy two cokes before we can easily make our excuses to leave. The man just keeps asking us to buy him schnapps. We move on to the Hotel-Melody where, apparently, by night residents can enjoy an erotic show, but which by day seems perfectly respectable. The chicken we try to order is ‘off’ so we order steak instead. It turns out to be very tasty and at £2.50 each, pretty cheap. The meal lifts our mood from the depressions of the morning and we resolve to spend the afternoon enjoying what Cluj can offer.
We realise now that the guide books, which said we’d always be travellers rather than tourists in Romania, were right. There are very few Westerners here and the people seem very friendly towards us because of their curiosity. Disregarding the old lady and the drunkard, everyone has been eager to help us. In the banks and station office, there were always at least three people behind the counter helping us at once. Perhaps they have not yet learnt how to rip-off tourists. For now, it’s a refreshing change. We decide, however, that refreshing and interesting though it may be, we will curtail our stay here to two nights before heading off to Istanbul. The grass seems, from our current viewpoint at least, to be very definitely greener in Turkey. At the CFR train ticket booking office where we wait in a stuffy queue for twenty minutes, we are dealt with by a rather large lady who seems to have no idea what an Interrail ticket is. We enlist the help of a young Romanian behind us who speaks good English and eventually determine that all the couchettes have gone for tomorrow and it’s seats for us for the night. Good thing is they’ll cost 6p for both of us.
We leave the smog and confusion of the city for the airy views of the Citadel, a monument on the top of a large hill overlooking the crowded streets. The city is far more impressive from up here but we laugh once more that we have in fact exhausted all of Cluj’s tourists attractions without visiting any and still have another night to spend here. On our return through the town to the hotel, I notice once more how strikingly different we are to all the locals. I stick out like a man with a super-inflated lip, or a moose on the cattle train to Minsk. Later in the self-service restaurant next to the hotel, where the food is actually quite good, we meet an American called Charles. If we are to believe his hints, his three months in Europe and five weeks in Cluj have been spent solely in the search for cheap women and erotic clubs. He is staying in some seedy hotel and plans to go to a club tonight where you pay $50 for ‘the whole night’. We consider him to be the worst possible kind of tourist and make our excuses as he slopes off in his spooky mac. An onerous journey to Istanbul lies ahead of us tomorrow and now all we need is sleep.
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