Below Belief

I wake up in the morning surprised to find that where there were blokes sleeping yesterday, now there are girls. Lots of them. They are mostly Australian and American but we have a train to catch and have, unfortunately, no time for socialising.
We have heard the Hotel Astoria does great breakfasts, but are disappointed to be told by the rather rotund porter as we try to get in that it is after 10am and thus ‘Breakfast is off’. We settle for all we can realistically afford : a slice of pizza on the street and head for the OTP Bank where Chris eventually purchases some English money which we are assured is the only thing which will get us into Turkey. He tries asking for some Romanian Lei too but this just makes the cashier fall about laughing. We cut the train times a little fine and arrive on the stinking platform with 5 minutes to spare. We are depressed to realise that we have an eight hour train journey in front of us and yet all that our money will stretch to is two rather dried salami rolls and some sprite. We forecast a long and uncomfortable trip.
Inside a stuffy carriage and just settled down, we discover we are on the non-Cluj-Napoca section of this, the train to Cluj-Napoca. We are forced to shift all our bags down the train to an even stuffier carriage occupied by a Romanian girl who tells us, in broken English, that she has been playing volleyball for Budapest for the last two years but now must return home. Chris and I wonder if the translation is quite correct. Perhaps she is a volleyball international for Romania, but it seems unlikely. I vaguely remember German aural tests where the only thing I could think of when asked ‘what do you like doing?’ was ‘Ich spiele gern Tennis’ even though I had played it perhaps twice in my life at that point and wonder whether this is a similar situation.
Our tickets and passports are checked an uncountable number of times and at the border station we are given entry/exit cards for Romania which we must keep. One particular guard checks our tickets and, with prompting from the girl, we thank him in Romanian – ‘Mortsumeska’. He smiles and translated by the girl, responds with, ‘My pleasure.’. It is a touching moment for Anglo-Roman friendship.
Later, several shady characters present themselves and their briefcases full of inflated currency trying to sell us Romanian Lei. Chris says he remembers sitting in the thermal bath yesterday and wondering where we’d be in 24 hours time. As it turns out where we are is equally wet, not quite so comfortable or warm but seems to have just the same number of dodgy blokes lurking around. Finally, a soldier comes in to check our carriage and under the seats – presumably looking for the hoards of passport-less Gypsies who accidentally slipped through the net of all previous checks. There are none in our carriage, we’ve looked.
At ten o’clock we roll into Cluj Napoca, where it is dark and rainy. We feel powerless as usual in a new country, since we have no money and surprisingly the taxi driver we find is reluctant to accept dollars. We end up walking the mile or so into the centre and the nearest hotel. Crossing the river, we stand at a pedestrian crossing watching the Dacias flash by in clouds of oily smoke. The rain splashes down into puddles filling the deep ruts in the road and we feel instantly at home. A little old lady, hunched over her heavy bags and wearing about eight layers of clothing stumbles across the road and nearly gets run over by a particularly speedy car. We locate our hotel, the Vladeasa, and wait in the reception area which is straight out of the 1960′s. The little old lady who nearly got knocked over turns up behind us and sits down – very strange. The rate for a double room for a Westerner (twice, I notice, what a Romanian is charged) is 92,000lei or £22. Not too bad. As we are paying I notice the old lady shuffling up the stairs. We are shown into a sparse but clean room and the receptionist shows us the showers down the corridor. As we return to our room, the old lady bursts round the corner and with surprising speed, forces herself into our room. She stands in the corner whimpering, pretending to cry and clearly begging to stay the night. She looks confused and sad. Despite our claims that she cannot stay, she will not leave. It takes all the shouting of the receptionist to send her off down the corridor, but afterwards she returns and scrapes and taps on our door, trying to get in. We can do nothing except lock the door and wait. We crash on the beds and decide that Cluj-Napoca probably has worse things in store than this when daylight comes around.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 31st, 1996 at 2:16 pm and is filed under Europe. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.