My trip from Czech Republic to Bulgaria was a comfortable one. First I took the Student Agency bus from Prague to Vienna and there I took the plane to Sofia. On the bus you get free coffee, tea and hot chocolate and the cuisine from Austrian Airlines is one of the best in the world. Exactly on time I arrived in Sofia, where I was going to take a bus to the city center. During my first moments in Bulgaria I already encountered something that is typical for this country. In front of the final shop on my way towards the bus station there was a sign "public transportation tickets" with an arrow pointing towards the store. When I got in there however, a young, uninterested guy told me that the tickets were "finished" and that I should buy them from the driver. So I waited for the bus and asked the driver. Of course this man could not speak English (very handy if you are a bus driver on an airport shuttle bus), but when we, me and two Austrian tourists, asked him for tickets towards the city center, he managed to say: "Tickets? No tickets!". He didn't seem to understand our followup questions and after a few moments he helplessly pointed towards the seats, indicating that we could just sit down. Later we found out that it was actually quite normal that the driver didn't have tickets, as the locals that got on this bus didn't seem to be so surprised by the fact that they didn't have to pay for this bus ride.
A weekend in Sofia
In Sofia I had arranged a Couchsurfing host: a Belgian guy named Simon, who was living in Sofia for a few months to do an internship. The first night I had to stay in a hostel however, as Simon had already made other plans for this Friday night. The hostel with its very friendly and helpful staff was great, unlike the fact that I had to share my bedroom with 17 others.. When I went to bed, the room was still surprisingly quiet. Until the moment that a bald man with a beard walked in, lay down on his bed, started his laptop and started watching golf (?!) until 1 in the morning without headphones. Luckily after 15 minutes I came up with the idea of putting in my own headphones, which significantly reduced the amount of noise around me and allowed me to have a decent sleep.
The next day I met up with Simon and together we took a city tour through Sofia for three hours. The tour was great: we saw all highlights, learned everything about the history of each building (our guide was an enthousiastic history student) and found out how Bulgaria saved its jews during World War II (a very nice story, ask me about it!). In the evening we went to an international dinner party for exchange students in Sofia, together with two Italian friends of Simon. That night I learned 3 things:
1) Italian men are real animali. The only things they want to talk about are girls (or as they like to call it: pussy) and football. Moreover, when they get drunk they can't stop singing Italian songs. Not even inside a taxi. Which is quite embarrassing.
2) Even though most girls in Bulgaria dress very sexy, some girls still seem to think that it's a good idea to wear their grandmother's old tablecloth to a party. As you can imagine, this doesn't look good. But no matter how bad it looked, the amount of jokes that the animali made about the girl that was involved in this fashion crime and the amount of money they offered me to "fuck" her were way out of line.
3) I have officially reached a new level with my skills of speaking the Lithuanian language: I can now impress Lithuanian people (ok, I admit, I mostly try this out on girls) with my knowledge of their language by mixing not only random but also appropriate Lithuanian words/sentences into the conversation. Of course the animali thought I should take one of these girls home tonight and they told me that Simon could then stay at their place. I thanked them for the offer, but told them that it was not necessary as I was not interested in these girls. And really, right after I said this, one of the guys started making inappropriate comments about one of them...
Below you can see a picture of Simon, the two animali and me.
On Sunday morning I hopped on the train to Bucharest. I got off the train at border town
Ruse, as I was told it's cheaper to do the last part by bus. At the
train station a man walked up to me and after finding out that I wanted
to go to Bucharest, he told me that there were no more buses today, but
he was going to Bucharest today with his family (which was nowhere to be
seen) and he would take me there for the "same price, same price". I didn't trust this man and his stories, so I went to the bus station in Ruse, thankfully close to the train station, only to find out that there was in deed just one bus per day from Ruse to Bucharest, which left at 6 in the morning. I really don't understand why the website autogari.ro had told me that there were 3 buses per day on that route. (Later someone told me that such things are normal in Romania.)
Anyway, I went back to the train station, walked past the man who kept on yelling "same price, same price!" up to the counter for international train tickets. The ticket to Bucharest was cheaper than I expected and the train was still there, so in the end I managed to get to Bucharest fairly easily.
Good times in Bucharest
At the train station in Bucharest I met my Romanian colleague Alexandra: she is working for the same client as I am, only she is part of the French team, which ironically exists of only Romanians. I was going to stay with her for the coming days. On our first whole day together she showed me the city, together with her friend Dana. After we felt that we had walked enough, we went for a very strong local beer in a nice pub in the center of the city. The beer was called "Stejar", which means "oak" in Romanian. And the beer was really as strong as an oak. After two of them, Ale said she was feeling a bit dizzy and after three of them I became a fanatic fan of FC Braşov, which was playing a game on tv. I was really puzzled when they came back to 2-2 from being 0-2 behind, but still lost the game with 2-3. And they didn't lose against one of the big teams from Bucharest, no, they lost against the minnows of Concordia Chiajna for crying out loud! Despite the fact that my new favourite team had lost so dramatically, I still had a good time that night with Ale and Dana.
On Tuesday I was going to work at Accenture in Bucharest. You may wonder: why would one work during his holiday? Well, first of all out of curiosity: I was really curious how my colleagues in other country were doing their job. Besides that, this day didn't count as a holiday, so I could be travelling in this region one day longer. After work we went out with three girls of the French team and two of our global process experts, of who I got to know a whole different side that evening.
Transsylvania
I was now heading for Transsylvania: the region that is famous for being the home of count Dracula. My first stop here was the town of Sinaia: a peaceful place in the mountains and home to one of the most beautiful castles I have ever seen: Peleş castle.
At the train station I took a picture of the city map (a trick I learnt on one of my previous travels), so I was able to choose a nice route through the whole town and included stops at a nice park and the old monastery. In the park I had a memorable moment: I changed my winter jacket for my summer jacket and never changed back. After a couple of hours I got on the train to Braşov.
In Braşov I had to change my plans many times due to the fact that public transportation in Romania is not functioning the way it should be. This translates into minibuses that are full and leaving half of the people behind with no alternative way of getting to their destination for the next hour(s) and a huge crowd waiting for the only train from Braşov to Sighişoara that runs between 10 in the morning and 3 in the afternoon. I took this picture of the crowd that was waiting at the train station, just to give you an indication:
As you can imagine, it was not going to be easy to find a seat on the train. I accepted the challenge though, used brute force to be among the first to get in the train and secured two seats for me and my friend Orsi, who I met up with the night before and was now taking the same train to go home for her Easter holiday.There were many gypsies on this train, which was a new experience for me. They were loud, sounded like they were drunk (on the middle of the day) and the ones that were late for the train were trying to talk innocent people out of their seats. Also the villages in the area around Braşov were interesting for me as a foreigner. In these villages it's normal to see people driving around in carriages that are pulled by horses and the houses are in a poor condition. All of this combined with the lack of job prospects on the countryside helped me understand why so many people from this region give anything to move to the big city or even abroad.
Oh, and Bran castle (which is really not Dracula's castle) and Sighişoara were pretty nice. If you want to see pictures, you can find them on Facebook. They are starting around the photo of me with the players bus of my beloved FC Braşov. :)
Entering Moldova
On Saturday at noon I got on the bus to Chișinău: the capital city of Moldova. I was prepared for a long and boring bus ride, but it actually was quite interesting as during the whole bus ride they would show Russian tv shows and movies. Things went pretty smoothly at the border, so the bus arrived one hour early in Chișinău. Unfortunately some guy in the bus gave me wrong directions, so I ended up at Gara de Sud instead of the central bus station, which is a difference of roughly 10 kilometres. I forgot to take a picture, but at that time Gara de Sud was a sad, dark and most of all rainy place and I was not pleased that I ended up there. In the beginning the only living beings I could see at the bus station were a Romanian-Moldovan couple that didn't care much about this lost foreigner, but a few moments later I found another lost soul that was sitting at the back of the bus: a Moldovan student who thought she would meet her father at this station, but it turned out that he was waiting for her at a different place. The battery of her phone was dead, so she was very glad that I allowed her to use my phone to call her dad and in return for that she asked her dad to take me to the city center. The city center was too crowded because of Easter celebrations, so in the end he even dropped me off at my hostel, for which I was really thankful.
The city of Chișinău was quite boring, as everybody was celebrating Easter inside and at home. I met up with my friend Nicoleta in the morning. Sadly we couldn't have lunch anywhere as all places except for McDonald's were closed and also she had to leave quite early for her granny's birthday, leaving me with a whole free afternoon in an empty city. I decided to get on the bus to Cricova, as it was not too far from the city and I heard it was the home to a big complex with wine cellars. At first I couldn't find them and I was already past the end station and on my way back to Chișinău when I saw a sign that could indicate that the wine cellars were near. I got off the bus and walked in the direction that the sign was telling me to. In the end I found one entrance to the cellars, but as expected it was closed. The nature in this area was pretty beautiful though, so I kept on walking to take some pictures. In the end I may have even seen ghosts there. At one moment I walked past a man that was walking really slow and saw a car driving towards us at the other side of the lake. I then got off the path to take some pictures and when I got back to the path both the man and the car weren't there any more. Were they products of my imagination, was there a logical explanation such as an exit that I couldn't see or was there really something mysterious going on? I guess we'll never know...
On my final day in Moldova I met up with Nicoleta again. This time we visited the botanical gardens and ate at Andy's Pizza, the most famous pizza chain in Moldova, before I had to leave for the airport in the early afternoon. This day concluded my travel through the southern Balkan, which had been a real eye-opener for me. I saw a lot on this travel, met several interesting people and also learnt more about the region than I expected. A special thanks goes out to everybody who made this travel possible!
I would like to finish this long post with the song that followed me throughout my whole travel through Romania. Every time I saw a music video on tv or heard a song on the radio, it had to be this song. So if you would like to hear what is currently on top of the Romanian charts, click here to watch the video. For your information: the title means something like "Get out!" in Romanian.
Talking about music from other countries: I'm already working on creating a new edition of my online song contest. Stay tuned for more information. :)
