Category Archives: blog

Romania 2009: Predeal

I got to the station and mostly by sign language, managed to get a ticket back from Brasov to Bucharest, which was good because I meant I wouldn’t end up stranded in Transylvania.

Then I had nearly an hour to kill before my train. I sat in the little park opposite the station, wandered around the station and finally got on the train. I found a compartment of my own and was joined by some Americans or Canadians. They were glad I didn’t mind English-speakers because they would be talking all the way. Then a Romanian came in and showed us that we have an assigned seat and that while the conductors don’t care if you’re even in the right wagon, you may have a fight with someone if you’re in their seat, so we all moved.

In my correct seat, I did what everyone else was doing and read a book. But the train soon began to empty and I looked out the window. I soon realised that Romanian trains are nearly three times the length of the platform, so if you’re in, for example, wagon 14 of 14, you don’t get to see what station you’re at until you’ve gone past it, and often there are no signs to tell you where you are anyway.

I was under the impression that whatever else is wrong with them, the trains are pretty much on time. It said on my ticket that I was arriving at 12.49, so I was waiting by the door and when we stopped at 12.54, I stuck my head out to make sure it was a station and other people were getting out and not just a place where we had to stop and wait for a signal or another train. It was a station. I jumped down (the bottom step being about four feet off the ground) into long grass and stones and walked two thirds of the length of the train to the platform, praying that the thing wouldn’t start moving until I was well out the way. As I walked, I saw a sign and between the posts, I could see the last three letters were EAL. Even I with my nonexistant Romanian knew that wasn’t the way to spell Brasov. I had got off at least two stops early at a place in the middle of nowhere called Predeal.

Once I’d reassured myself that the train back would be stopping here and I wouldn’t be either stranded or have to waste the day trying to get either to Brasov or Bucharest, I found the tourist information centre right by the station and they gave me some maps and suggested a couple of walks up into the mountains, three hours each. That would take me right up to my train arriving, so I thought I’d just wander up to the foothills of the mountain.

I followed my map and gradually became suspicious that the map didn’t match what I was seeing. Eventually – and I’ve never ever done this before in my life – I discovered I was following the map upside-down.

I went back into town and sat on a shady bench on the hillside before going down to look at the little craft stalls where I bought an enormous chair-leg-style pencil, a wooden box and a green carved flute. I wandered up and down the town, climbed halfway up a mountain and sat by the road looking at the view and being amazed that I was actually there, by myself, up a Transylvanian mountain.

I came back down and went in the Orthodox church, assured by a Romanian at the door that I really was allowed in. It was amazing inside. It was covered floor to ceiling in paintings, like I’ve seen many times before but these were so bright and bold they looked like cartoons.

I was at the station early so as not to miss my train. The train however had other ideas. When it was ten minutes late I started getting twitchy and when it was half an hour late I was wondering what I was going to do for the night, because the 65 lei I had wasn’t going to be enough for a broom cupboard in Dracula’s castle.

Another Romanian, this one with no English, tried chatting and got me to understand that late trains were nothing to worry about. But that still left me bored and hot on a platform. When it arrived 64 minutes late, I discovered I was in wagon 13, seat 56 and I laughed at the sky for it.

The heaters were stuck on in the compartment and with the sun coming in low straight through the window, it was insanely hot. After two hours, I thought we must be coming up to Bucharest so I went out into the corridor and stuck my head out the window. In fact, we were nowhere near Bucharest and I travelled like that for nearly an hour before the train that was supposed to arrive just after seven finally got in at quarter to nine.

I have never ever been so filthy in my life. This is what happens when you stick your head out of a Romanian train window for a few hundred miles.

Romania 2009: Bucharest

This is my second full day in Bucharest and it’s really really hot.

I didn’t particularly like Bucharest when I first arrived and I still don’t like it now very much. It’s too hot, it’s absolute chaos and getting out of the city is almost impossible.

I’ve spent two mornings wandering around. I’ve been to the Piata Romana and seen the wolf statue, I’ve wandered endless streets and squares (and squares here are like massive roundabouts only they have nothing in the centre and there are no rules. Crossing the roads is lethal. I read that there were stray dogs but I wasn’t expecting so many of them. Everywhere you go, there’s dogs wandering around the pavement, sleeping in the shade, howling all night. Any other time I might almost be tempted to talk to them, here I cross the road to avoid them. They’re not vicious, they don’t really even look at people, but they make me nervous.

Romanian language isn’t so bad. I can’t understand a word spoken but reading it is just about manageable. It’s a bit like if French, Spanish, Italian and Catalan all had a baby and then tried to teach it German. I couldn’t read a book in Romanian, but I can recognise signs like “station” and “ticket hall” and various other tourism basics.

I was in a room on the top floor of the hotel the first night but the women’s bathroom was being renovated, so they decided to move me down to the fourth floor where it wasn’t. On the fifth floor I had a small shared balcony, a view over the road out the front, roottops, buildings and a lot of sunshine during the day.

On the fourth floor, I have a higher ceiling and a functioning bathroom but I have no balcony and my view is of ruins although I can also see a now very appealing Ibis hotel and probably the Gara de Nord.

A lot of Bucharest is ruins. In the 70s and/or 80s, a lot of the city was pulled down to build a modern metropolis but I gather the dictator who was doing it got exiled or killed before it was even nearly finished. That’s how the dogs ended up on the streets, owners whose houses got bulldozed for this project had to throw out their dogs and they ended up multiplying and becoming pests.
Anyway, a lot of Bucharest seems to have been interrupted mid-destruction and the majority of the rebuilding never got done.

I have a ticket tomorrow to Brasov, which is in southern Transylvania. I don’t yet have a return ticket, but if I end up spending the night somewhere other than here, that’s not exactly a tragedy.

I have no plans yet for Sunday, but my Monday plans are to go straight to the airport and maybe do some shopping there before coming

Finland 2008: Day 6 – Seuresaari

I got up this morning, walked to the station, for several reasons and was extremely hot by the time I got there. I left all my stuff in a locker and good thing I did because I´ve gathered a lot of stuff by now.

I did the shopping thing and then I got my bus to Seurasaari, which I´m probably spelling wrong and I have no idea how to pronounce where I got menaced for a piece of chocolate by a squirrel and generally pursued by some very very tame birds.

It was lovely there and I´m very glad I went. It would have been a pity to have missed it because it was just really nice. It was a little wooded island joined to the mainland by a bridge and there was nothing there except old wooden buildings. I think it´s sort of an open-air old-timey museum in the summer but in the winter it´s just deserted except for too-tame wildlife.

I came back into the city centre, got the tram down Aleksanterinkatu, which is one of the main streets here and saw the cathedrals which are both very impressive. Then, having travelled up and down the street in both directions, I eventually found the information centre, which wasn´t nearly as good as I´d hoped but did have a leaflet on Seuresaari for destruction for my book.

I also had a heart attack in the middle of the road when my wallet wasn´t in my left inner coat pocket where it´s been for the last five days. Luckily, I´d put it in my bag, who knows why. It had my locker key in it, that means absolutely everything I´d brought is locked away. It is now hanging around my neck, guarded by a dragon.

It feels a bit early to be going to the airport but it´s pretty dark already, at 3.42 and it´s getting wet as well.

Finland 2008: Day 5 – Helsinki

I had a lazy morning this morning – after four very busy days, I just wanted a day off. But this afternoon, I forced myself to go for a walk, managing to get back on the tram that goes past the hostel by magic. I didn´t get off there, though. I went past the main station and wandered around that area. It´s damp and grey and getting dark and Sunday afternoon. It´s not too cold though, I have my hat and scarf out of habit but I´ve only got my hands up my sleeves out of habit, not because it´s too cold.

Finland 2008: Day 4 – Tampere

I couldn´t quite figure out how to get a local bus to some of the Helsinki suburbs so I went to Tampere today instead of tomorrow. Another train and this time I definitely had a return ticket, after the woman who sold me the ticket yesterday being more concerned about my pronunciation of Turku than whether I came back again.

It was cold in Tampere, but that wasn´t surprising. It´s further north than anywhere I´ve been so far and it wasn´t nearly as nice today as it was earlier in the week. I hadn´t seen any rain but some of the roads were wet – but the wetness stopped so suddenly I´d concluded that they must have been washing them.

It was definitely raining in Turku. I´d talked to a girl on the train who was studying to be a teacher and she´d suggested I go to the Moomin Museum, so as soon as I arrived, I found the information centre and got a leaflet about it. Unlike Turku, the route couldn´t have been easier. I followed the high street straight down until I reached a “double road” and it was just on the other side. I found the building itself easily enough but the Moomin bit is underneath and not very well signposted unless you walk around the place.

It was cute. The Finns like the Moomins and this museum was built to feel like a forest, with magic lights in the trees. It had a lot of original pictures and things from the artist all over the walls and they´d built 41 little mini scenes from various books. They also had a little stage and a dressing up cupboard so children could act bits out if they wanted to. The only problem was that no photos were allowed, and they had the usual Finnish set-up of museum workers sitting around keeping an eye on you, and they were more than ready to jump on you if you got your camera out. I got some postcards and wandered back out.

It was freezing. I took a couple of photos and headed back down the main street, stopping every now and then to go into a department store to warm up – that´s the amazing thing about Finland. No matter how cold it is, five minutes in a shop warms you up ready for the next half an hour. By now it was really raining and by the time I got back to the station, I didn´t really feel like going anywhere except back to Helsinki. I looked through the guide book, and it seemed there wasn´t a lot more to see, other than shops and art museums and everything else was around the city rather than in it, so it was ok to come back.

I got on the train and found a good seat only, five minutes later, to be removed by a Finn who managed to make me understand that even though I´d been there five minutes already, it was his seat and he would like me to move. I did but if anyone had asked me a second time, I may have been a little less tolerant of the Finnish seating system.

My new seat was bad. It was backwards, which I don´t mind, but it was between two windows and the one I could actually see was blocked by the woman in front hanging her coat there. As soon as she got off, I took her place, which not only had a big window but also it was facing two other seats so I had more legroom.

My jeans were wet halfway up to my knees and because I kept crossing my legs, by now they´re damp all over. I´ve figured out how the internet works at the station – you buy a ticket for €2 for an hour and it gives you a username and password and you can use it at any Sidewalk Express place for seven days, so I don´t actually have to sit here for a whole hour. I´m going back to the hostel soon and I´m going to eat some bread and marmite and have a nice warm shower.

Finland 2008: Day 3 – Turku

I got my first long-distance train, to Turku which is on the west coast, or Åbo as it´s called in Swedish. The Swedish is actually much easier to follow than the Finnish and most signs are in both. Sometimes there´s English but it doesn´t necessary make sense.

I walked through lots of little streets and more by luck than judgement found the market square, then the Tourist Information where I got a map and found how to get to the castle.

There were lots of tall ships on my way down to the castle, proper wooden ones that looked like they were falling apart and huge great iron monstrosities, as well as the usual collection of the military ships.

I liked the castle. It´s been put together bit by bit over about the last thousand years and you don´t go with a guide, although there are plenty of people in national costume waiting to point out the route, which crosses over itself hundreds of times. Unfortunately, it closes at 2.30 which seems daft.

I got the bus back but made the mistake of getting off at the market square because everyone else did instead of waiting until the station like I knew I should have done. Luckily, I could remember how I got there in the morning, right up until I found myself on completely the wrong road, with traffic going in only one direction instead of the two I definitely remembered crossing.

I wandered, I walked past lots of wooden houses nestling among concrete towers and eventually, I found a likely-looking round and guessed from a sign that the station might be to my right, which eventually, it was. I got back on my train and by the time I´d gone about twenty minutes, it was already getting dark and it was pitch black when I arrived in Helsinki. By now I´d worked out the tram system and had no problem getting back.

The problem was when I got back because it was really really noisy. The people outside my door had turned the TV up to “ear-popping” and they didn´t shut up until nearly two in the morning and then were off again before eight.

Finland 2008: Day 2 – Suomenlinna

I started the day by wandering around Helsinki, having got off the tram after two stops. I hadn´t really realised just how much Helsinki is by the sea and everywhere I turned, I seemed to run into more water. I found the Subway I´d spotted from the bus last night and although I recognised a lot of places on the way to the station, I couldn´t find the station itself so I got on another tram, this time with a ticket.

I had decided to go to Suomenlinna and managed to find a map that showed me how to walk there. I missed the boat because I was trying to figure out the ticket machine but that gave me time to eat my bread, from the market hall by the sea, and get a seat on the next boat.

I really liked Suomenlinna. It´s a sea fortress built on several islands which are all connected by bridges and it seemed I had picked a good day to wander around. It has some amazing views and there are so many little islands and bits of rock sticking out of the water.

It did concern me a bit how soon the sun was setting – it was definitely beginning to get low by about 1.30.

On the way back, I was brave and stayed outside on the boat to take some photos. I went back to the hostel via the bookshop and I was amazed how many books there were in English, and in German.

Switzerland 05-06: Rigi

After failing to get here on Saturday, I was determined to make it up this mountain.
If I’d been doing exams, I wouldn’t have been able to leave so early, not that I can remember what time I did go. Probably pretty early, as it takes over an hour to get to Neuchatel from Les Verrieres.
I got the train to Olten, changed to the Luzern-Milan train and stayed on there all the way to Arth-Goldau, which I was pleased to realise was in Schwyz canton – another one ticked off on my list.
There are two ways to the top of Rigi, both rack railways. There’s one up from Vitznau and one from Arth-Goldau and as Vitznau didn’t look too easy to get too, I took the obvious route.
The platform for Rigi was at the end of one of the main platforms and up some stairs. I bought my ticket in English, because I have no idea how to do it in German, although I don’t like using English abroad.
At first I thought I was going to go up in an open wooden carriage but that train didn’t seem to be running and we were herded onto an ordinary one.

You could see exactly where you were going because the summit was to our right and we were going to go round in a sort of U shape to get up there.
It’s not the highest mountain I’ve ever been up but you could feel the mountain coldness in the air and while I was on the train, I was very glad I’d brought my coat.
It took around half an hour to get to the top. At the station below the top, the line from Vitznau came in, on red trains. The Arth-Goldau ones are blue.

The view from the top was incredible. There were patches of light mist, but you could see for miles. I could see the Oberland giants and billions of peaks to the south-west behind Lake Luzern.
And Peedee’s amazing zoom:

Behind Lake Zug on the other side was flat land for miles.

I sat on the grass for a while and looked out at the view. There was only one problem. Peedee’s guidebook said there is snow on the peak even in summer. Of course there wasn’t and it was far too hot for a fleece jumper and a long coat. Ick.
Then I walked down behind the little chapel into a field, for lack of a better word, with a fence around the edge. A sort of bump-shaped field. And when I looked over the fence:

A 1000 metre sheer drop.
I guess I knew there was a drop like that somewhere because you can see from the ground that Rigi looks like someone sliced the end off with a sharp knife but it’s quite scary when you’re looking straight down it.
Then I couldn’t find a seat on the train on the way down so I stood behind the driver and looked out of the front.

And also thought that if he was to die right there and then, I could probably drive the train down to the bottom…