Breakfast without a coach party! Breakfast where I had a seat and there was space down the narrow aisle to get the food! Oh, the small things you learn to appreciate!

Today’s adventure was to Brasov. In 2009, I jumped off the train 20 miles early at a small town in the Carpathians called Predeal so today’s job was just to successfully get to Brasov. The first hour was mostly just not very much to see, with the occasional power station but an hour in, the mountains rose up and that was great, although the train then stopped every ten minutes all the way to Predeal. A lot of them were covered in orange and brown trees with the occasional dark green one but some of them were absolutely sheer bare rock and you could imagine Castle Dracula perched on top of them with nothing but a thousand foot drop underneath. Actually, I almost began to wish I wasn’t going to Brasov but stopping in this autumnal wonderland.

But Brasov was quite nice. I bought a day bus pass (which I utterly failed to validate) and saved myself the 45 minute walk down to the Old Town which was a lot more medieval and just a lot more laid back than Bucharest. Kind of like Poland, if Poland had a habit of Dracula-related things. Well, actually, there was Dracula’s Restaurant and in the middle of the square was an undead horse and carriage to draw people’s attention to Stoker’s pop-up wine bar. And there was a great big Gothic church! It was 20 lei, I think, maybe 25 lei to go in. Not so Gothic inside and not worth the admission price for the interior. Worth it to save me sixteen years of wishing I’d gone in, though.

The narrow interesting street leaning off the opposite end of the main square turned out to kind of be an ordinary high street but it eventually led me up to the walls of the city and to the cable car that goes up to the panoramic restaurant. That was definitely something I wanted to do! It took 45 minutes to an hour to queue, which was mostly because there’s only one cash desk and the poor woman couldn’t get through everyone fast enough. The cable car was going up barely three-quarter full.

Now, there’s an excellent view from the top but the only place you can actually see it is from is the landing platform of the cable car. I walked around the top and over the top and through the panoramic restaurant and I just couldn’t comprehend that there’s nowhere to look at the view unless you manage to get the front window seats at the restaurant. 45 lei is an excellent price to save me 16 years of planning to come back and go up the mountain but it’s not a great price for a view you don’t really get to see.

Then I had an other hour basically to wander around Brasov before I had to get the bus. I tried again to validate my day ticket, which wasn’t playing nice with either the contactless pad or the stamping slot. Seeing me standing there looking bewildered, a man invited me to come and sit next to him so I did. Probably shouldn’t. He talked at me in Romanian, all the more as he discovered that the only word of Romanian I can pick out is “gara”. A boy standing nearby assured me it was fine that I couldn’t validate my card but then when my drunken seatmate kept appealing to him for translation as I failed to understand him, he just stared straight ahead. The drunk man tried to give me a present, I think. Maybe a plant, wrapped up in a plastic bag? Anyway, he kept asking me questions very seriouly and I kept having to say “I don’t know, I don’t understand” but when he kept going, I eventually said out loud “My Romanian is not getting any better as this conversation goes on!”. A woman opposite said that he wanted to get up and get off the bus, so I got up but it turned out he didn’t – but it got me away from him and my ticket-saviour murmured to me that he was just drunk and talking nonsense. Then someone in a wheelchair got on so we all shuffled around and drunk man got off and I found myself a seat. As we approached the station, a woman who’d been close enough to witness everything leaned down and said “this is the train station”. I said “thank you” out loud and not out loud “I know, I’d figured that”. There’s a really handy map with a moving bus logo where you’d normally have the next stop announced but also I could recognise it. I may not be able to validate a day ticket but I can get around by bus.

I was at the station with plenty of time for my train back to Bucharet but just like last time, it was delayed. There are no announcements or boards or anything on the platform. There’s a departure board in the main station hall but I wasn’t running backwards and forwards to that. When I looked, it said nothing about the train to Bucharest but claimed that the incoming train from Cluj Napoc was going to be 50 minutes late. Luckily one major difference between 2009 and 2025 is that I have a smartphone now and there’s a handy website that lists each train so I could see that it had been late departing pretty much every station since it left Cluj Napoc 11 minutes late at 10:33 in the morning. It had got up to 19 minutes late at its 2nd stop, caught up at Sighisoara and somehow left Augustin 43 minutes late, getting in to Brasov 64 minutes late. In 2009, I’d have just stood on the platform and hoped a train was coming. In 2025, I could watch the delay grow as I waited and then see that it moved from platform 5 to platform 4 – which I’d expected, because by the time the train was actually on its way in, there were two unrelated trains already parked at platform 5, one of them with the loco detached. I was a bit dubious about the train when it came in – IR1734 also had IR1735 on the window, so I initially ran away, thinking it was the wrong train, but everyone who’d been standing on the platform for over an hour got on so I had a second look. IR1734 in one direction, IR1735 in the other. I found my seat and the woman sitting in immediately moved to sit next to rather than opposite her husband and no one else turned up to turf me out of it, which seemed a second good sign that I was on the right train. The conductor scanning my ticket and it beeping in approval was a third good sign. We made up a lot of time and were only 50 minutes late by the time we left Ploiesti, the last stop before Bucharest North. Then we crawled through the outskirts of the city and were a whole hour late by the time we finally got in. That was 9:40pm, nearly three hours after finally leaving Brasov. But the two people sitting opposite me had been there since Sighisoara, at 2pm and yet never moved in the three hours from Brasov.

So I walked back home an hour later than planned, ate the bread and cheese I’d planned to eat on the train and now it’s bedtime.