colinmalloy.net/travel

Originally posted: 2007.5.29

Like any good traveler, I did a little pre-trip shopping. So I went to the Match next to my apartment (a Match is like the illegitimate child born of a wild night of romance between a 7-Eleven and your average grocery store). There I bought only the essentials: chips, soda, pretzels, and (the oh so delicious) Nutella. As I left the Match, I noticed my bus was approaching the stop across the street. I booked it over there, running through oncoming traffic, barely making it across in time to wait for the bus while it was caught at the light.

I met up with my friends (Andy, Yvonne, JiPi, Natalie, Becky) at the train station and boarded my train. We found our sleeping compartment and just hung out. The compartments hold six people, and although there were six of us, only five had tickets for the same compartment. The sixth person bought her ticket separately and had a nicer, cozier (and more expensive) compartment in another part of the train. So when we got to our compartment, the sixth occupant, known here as “Hungarian Jerk Lady,” was already there and on one of the top bunks trying to ignore the six America college students being loud and obnoxious below her. We tried to let her be and to not be too much of a pain, but she was a jerk from the start. As soon as we arrived, she repeatedly gave us nasty looks for not going to sleep like her… at 6 pm. Then at 7:30 pm, although we were still quite wide awake and talking amongst ourselves (in nice, quiet and unobtrusive American college student voices) she decided that it was time to turn the lights out. So we were stuck clueless in a compartment that was pitch black (have I ever mentioned that once summer is over, the sun sets at about 4 pm in Hungary?). Luckily, we used our amazing deductive reasoning skills and figured that turning the lights out was Hungarian Jerk Lady’s way of telling us that she wanted us to be louder and even more obnoxious. We proceeded to grant her request.

She got her comeuppance though. At around 8 pm the border patrol came by to check passports. The agents need light to do this. So they turned the lights back on and when they left, we decided to not turn the lights off again.

• Annoying Americans: 1
• Hungarian Jerk-Lady: 0

Then Jerk-Lady turned the lights off about half an hour or so later.

• Annoying Americans: 1
• Hungarian Jerk-Lady: 1

A bit later we migrated to the dining car. None of us had ever eaten anything on a train before (which was actually not as amazing an experience as we’d thought). After perusing the offerings, we decided that we would leave having still never eaten anything on a train. Instead we bought some beers. While drinking, Natalie “pinged” my beer. That’s when you hit the bottom of your bottle against the rim of someone else’s bottle. This transforms a once harmless and innocent bottle of beer into a raging volcano. I tried to chug as much of the beer as possible, but before I could get it in my mouth, half the beer was already on my face, the floor, and my pants (crotch area no less). I was none too pleased with Natalie after my beer decided to collect its wits and calm down. Later, I did think it was funny, but I smelt like beer so I was still a little annoyed.

Now that we had some alcohol in us, we felt justified in being extremely loud and obnoxious. We resumed annoying Hungarian Jerk Lady until we went to sleep around 10 pm. Wait, what?! You say, “You went to sleep at 10?!” That’s right. When the sun’s already been down for six hours and you’ve sat in the dark talking for hours on end, your body decides that it makes the decisions and when it wants to sleep, it sleeps. Most people found it difficult to sleep on the train and didn’t get much sleep the night. I, however, slept like a baby until 5 am when we arrived in Brasov - our destination in Transylvania.

At the train station we arrived at a moral quandary: Chelsea (from another group of BSM students who had arrived in Brasov the day before) was supposed to meet up with us, but never showed up. The question: do we wait for her for another hour in case she has her time zones messed up or do we try to find the hostel ourselves? Well, it wasn’t so much of a moral quandary as it was a disagreement between the nice people and the impatient. After a bit of waiting, the impatient prevailed and we made a (rather futile) attempt to find our hostel. Predictably, we didn’t find it since we didn’t have a map and didn’t know our way around Brasov at all. So we went to a restaurant for breakfast. After eating, I bought a hat and scarf from a street vendor. They were very pastel colors: pink, blue, yellow (perfect for Easter) and totally awesome (what can I say? I have good taste in hats). A while later we found the hostel by asking a cab driver for directions. It turned out to only be a block away from where we’d been walking in circles.

After we met up with the other kids, we headed out as a group of eight to Bran Castle. I was under the impression that one of the others knew how to get there. I felt justified in this impression since I was told we simply had to take bus 16. What I didn’t know was that after we took bus 16 out to the end of the line in the middle of nowhere (quite literally - few buildings, no people, no businesses), and no one knew the rest of the way. After an hour or two of arguing, asking locals, and wandering aimlessly, we boarded a near-impossibly crowded bus that would take us out to Bran Castle. Once we arrived at Bran, the group of eight split in half because my group of four was annoyed with the other four for not knowing where to go. We would have looked up the directions ourselves (and should have anyway), but we were lazy and thought they knew where to go.

We explored the Dracula market a bit before heading up to the Castle. Oh, did I not mention that Bran Castle is associated with Dracula? That’s right, it is. The real guy, Vlad the Impaler (nice name by the way). Although he never actually lived in the castle, he was in Bran (the town) and/or Brasov for a while I believe. Anyway, in order to bolster tourism, the town makes every effort to make sure people associate the two with each other. Yes sir, the market was kind of (and by “kind of” I mean extremely) ridiculous. You could buy costumes, swords, fake teeth, masks, etc. They sold “Dracula Blood Wine” and I even saw at least one bottle of Dracula vodka. It was pretty funny. All the stores in the area had silly names like that too: Dracula Market, Wolf Store, Dracula’s Restaurant, etc. Come to think of it, those names weren’t even imaginative. I could think of better Dracula names than that.

After having our fill of the market, we moved on to the castle. It turned out not to be that special really; just old and mildly interesting. Afterwards, we climbed a tall, steep hill next to the castle. The side of the hill was wooded, but it came out to a pasture-like area on top. From up there we had a great view of the mountains and a part of town. There were some cows on the side of the hill and cow pies everywhere (it was interesting explaining to JiPi, who is from Quebec and whose native tongue is French, what a cow pie is). It was very peaceful up there. After we climbed back down, we explored town a bit more, bought some ice cream and then returned to Brasov - all the while keeping an eye out for Dracula. At one point we saw an old, black coffin on display somewhere and figured that must be his bed.

In town we found another BSM student wandering around, picked her up and went out to dinner together. We went to a French restaurant: Bistro de l’Arte. As the pompousness of the name implies, the food we ate was delicious, expensive and came in small portions. Since none of us were satisfied with our meager meals, we went to a pastry shop afterwards to get some dessert. The pastries were scrumptious - as they usually are in Europe. Then we returned to the hostel. I read St Augustine’s Confessions until I couldn’t stay awake any longer and drifted into a lovely sleep.

The next morning we gorged ourselves on food the hostel provided us: hard-boiled eggs, bread, and Nutella. I tell you, Nutella is universal and amazing. Go buy some if you can. Now. You won’t regret it. Unless you don’t like chocolate or hazelnuts, that is. After breakfast, Andy Z, Andy P, Sam, Yvonne, Natalie, and I went hiking in the hills of Brasov. We picked a random path and hiked as far up into the mountains around town as we could. Then we picked another random path and repeat ad infinitum. I didn’t think ahead when packing for the trip and brought only sandals with me. This didn’t stop me from hiking, but it did make things interesting. At some point along the way, I think I stepped in something slightly poisonous because my big toe started to throb and swell a bit. It didn’t hurt very much, so like the trooper that I am, I continued hiking. After hiking for a little while we reached a small meadow. There we sat down and enjoyed some food: cookies, chips, and wine. I mostly ate cookies, and boy, they were delicious.

We then hiked back to town and found a place to get lunch. We ate the most amazing pizza at this restaurant called Pizza Roma. The pizzas were big and ridiculous. I ordered a four topping pizza or something. My impression had been that they served normal, everyday pizzas, but when they served mine, the toppings partitioned the pizza. Ham covered one quarter of the pizza, mushrooms another, then the other two sections were bell peppers and pepperoni. It was neat, but I didn’t understand it. One kid’s pizza was crazy. He had a Hawaiian pizza or something and they just covered the entire thing with ham - literally. Check out the upper right corner of the pizza picture. After we ate the pizzas, we all ordered banana splits (well everyone except one kid who decided not to give in to peer pressure… what a loser). They were delicious. It had probably been a decade or two since I’d last eaten a banana split.

After lunch, our group splintered again. Most everyone returned to the mountainside while Natalie and I broke off to wander the town because we weren’t well equiped to hike (I had no shoes). We visited a couple of “fashionable” stores. In them I saw a bunch of ugly clothes being sold for upwards of $100-200. For instance, I saw dumb pair of jeans with stupid pictures and logos sewn onto them and random holes torn into them being sold for over $150. I could get the same crap from Value Village for $2. I’ll never understand fashion.

So after getting lost in the city and miraculously finding our way back, Natalie and I regrouped with our friends from the mountain and we went out to dinner before catching our train. On the way to the restaurant, we stopped at a non-stop (24 hour convenience store for Europeans). My friend Andy Z bought a 2 liter of beer in a plastic soda-style bottle. We thought it was so funny that JiPi and I each bought a liter of beer for ourselves (and ours came in plastic bottles as well). We saved these beers for the train and proceeded to a steakhouse for dinner. The steakhouse was a great idea. We all had to get rid of our Romanian money, but were too lazy to go to the trouble of exchanging. Instead we just took all we had left and bought some great steak dinners. They were expensive by Romanian standards, but very cheap by American ones. It was genius I tell you, genius.

After eating we took the bus back to the train station. On the train, Andy, JiPi and I acted silly because of our beers (or rather used them as an convenient excuse to act silly). We built a fort by hanging a blanket in our compartment. We christened it Fort Ghetto and wrote up some laws that were dumb and immature. Then we declared war on the other compartment and half-heartedly annoyed them until it no longer amused us. A little after midnight, when we’d all finished our beers (even the two liter), we fell asleep to re-awaken in Budapest, ready to go straight to class straight from the train station.

PS - Forget Dracula, I was disappointed when Blackula didn’t make an appearance in Transylvania.