Below Belief

We rise late and without more insect bites, this time having killed all the mosquitoes before going to bed. Realise that the beds are possibly the worst we have ever slept on, but reserve the right to take this back when we get to Wolfson court, our hall of residence for next year.
At breakfast, some of the builders are already well into the vodka. We settle for the tea this morning which is far more palatable than the ness but equally sweet. Showers and long-winded jokes about blank Czechs and slippery Poles mean we don’t leave the hotel until 12pm. However, since we have already exhausted Cluj’s attractions, it’s not as though we don’t have time to spare. We get little help with how to spend our day from the tourist office in town, though they are friendly, English spoken and willing to sell us a map.
We decide to mull over our options at the Hotel Continental which we have to persuade to serve us lunch. In overly grand surroundings, and alone in a spacious dining hall, we are served by a Manwellian waiter who cannot do enough to help. We have goulash soup and pork escalope but at £4 each, pay dearly for the service. In the hotel bar, I notice a bottle of vodka costs 4000lei (80p) so it is little wonder that this country, like so many Eastern ones, has problems with alcohol.
We leave and chance upon a bookshop selling English books. Our passion for reading has only been partly filled by the lonely planet with its brisk, concise facts and so we can hardly resist making a purchase. I buy an autobiography about a BBC director general – all very high-brow stuff – and Chris goes for the slightly less impressive ‘Tom Brown’s Schooldays’. The long journey begins to look decidedly better.
So overjoyed are we with our purchases, that we spend most of the afternoon sitting on the grass at the top of the citadel – out of the smog – reading them and falling asleep in the sun. Romania is so much more bearable in the sun. At 4pm, we return to the busy streets to watch the Rock at the cinema. Outside, we are first distracted by a stuntman who abseils down the front of the cinema and proceeds to eat a sandwich on the way. he receives great applause from the crowd who gather beneath him, even though he also drops and smashes a glass of orange juice which he should have drunk.
The cinema is huge and after convincing the ticket girl that we want two tickets rather than five, we sit down and really enjoy the film. It is bizarre to imagine that only seven years ago, these people would have had no access to films like this. What impression must they have of America, the place they see so much of and yet have no chance of ever going? We walk to the station where we find a good bar and sit down to order a beer. The prices are much higher than expected, possibly because we’re westerners but more likely because this is the station. We have just enough money left for two beers. We’ll have to change more dollars for the food we had hoped to purchase in Bucharest tomorrow morning. We are just working out how to sustain two beers until 9pm when a man comes over and sits at our table. He seems to want to buy us some beers. Recognising the pattern, we explain that we have no money to return the favour, but he shrugs and suggests it is ‘hospitality’. Conversation in mixed and equally poor French and Romanian doesn’t really entertain us. At one point we think we’ve established that he is going to visit his Grandmother in the Mountains near Transylvania but this is more than a little tenuous. Trying to understand him is a bit like playing charades with blindfolds. He urges us to share his vodka, which we do, but he moves on to trying to beg another drink and our being rich seems to feature frequently in his confused conversation. He has clearly lost the plot. It is a shame that what started out as apparently open-friendliness had to degrade to this, but we genuinely have no money and make our excuses to leave.
We have such a varied impression of Romania and our time here has been so interesting. The people are easily the friendliest we have met – so willing to smile and help where others have frowned or resented. But we cannot help but feel sorry for them and the lack of opportunity they have been given. Romania is a place we are not sure we want to return to. There is a feeling of helplessness for us being here, that nothing we can do can make things better for the people. It is 19th century England in all its harshness but with the West permeating every level with its promises, its glitter and its greed. Can the East turn out as anything more than just a cheap copy of the West? The future, it seems, has already been mapped.
In the waiting room back at the hotel, we meet a Romanian doctor and his wife and daughter who luckily can speak German well. They have been on holiday in Cluj, and are travelling, like us, to Bucharest tonight. We talk to them about England, Romania and tourists. He thinks Ceausescu was very bad, naturally, but believes things are worse for the people now than when under his rule. He says he works ‘lange Tage’ for very little reward and most people are very poor. The train is crowded – seven people in our eight berth carriage – and all hopes of a good nights sleep go out of the window. Next to Chris is the man who helped us in the ticket office, Csaba, a Hungarian Romanian working for a British software company and also in the Medical library. He knows Sally Woods. Small world. He tells us entertaining stories. In particular, we find out about the far-right mayor of Cluj who ordered the huge archaeological dig in the main square so that he can prove that Cluj is of Roman rather than Hungarian origin. He is widely disliked but won by 100 votes in the recent elections. Alexandria, the daughter of the doctor, comes to talk to us and practice her English. She offers us bread, bananas and a foul concoction of ness made with cold sprite not water. We drink for politeness alone. She is going to study philosophy next year at University and is interested and amazed at the amount we have written in our journals. I tell her we are too.
Our carriage proves very difficult to sleep in comfortably. The bench seats are at just the wrong angle. Seven pairs of legs are fighting for space and I alternate between hunched forward and slumped sideways without any luck in either position. At Brasow, Csaba leaves and this gives Chris and I the luxury of a whole three seats between us. We share the pleasure of curling up horizontally for the last two hours. At 6.18am the nightmare is over and a new one begins…

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