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Bucharest, Romania
44° 26' N 26° 6' E
Jan 28, 2007 14:19
Distance 0km

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Other entries in Bucharest

Tea, Philosophy, the Night Train and the Bogies

Text written in: English

Despite staying up so late I had to get up in the 9:00 to greet Alina at the door of my hostel.  This left me just enough time to gorge on the hostel breakfast. She wasn't sure where we should go so we hopped a bus to the victory plaza. She was worried about not having a ticket so we looked around a short bit for a booth. I don't like it when you cant get tickets on the bus, its especially hard for a foreigner.

When we got to the victory plaza we looked around a bit for a coffee place and found a chain type place that was even smaller than normal due to it being a chain restruant. I paid for her coffee because she contributed too much to the cab ride the night before.  We sat and talked and talked. She was very good at making me talk about myself.  I learned towards the end of the conversation that she had a background in psychology. I wish I were a better listener but she was hard to compete with. It was the best conversation I'd had in ages. I think the conclusion that she helped me come to is that you should persue what you are looking for in life, ruthlessly, no matter what the odds are.  That I am entitled to what I want seems to go a bit too far. Perhaps thats something teenagers believe until life shoots so many of them down.

When we left the cafe it was clear that we had talked for a long time, we shared a nice hug and then I decided to walk the 15 minutes back to my hostel. For some reason it was a bit cold, the only post office I had managed to find was closed because it was a weekend. I had walked quite a bit in the preceeding two days so I took some lazy time at the hostel.I spent some I  spentquality time trying to find sources confirming the timetable for the overnight train to Chisinau in Moldova.  I found two votes on the internet for 19:00 train ride and one vote for a later train.  I made time for a chess rematch, which I won when my opponent fell apart in the endgame.  He did that for both games.  He was certainly a strange character. I packed everything up at the prodding of the hostel hostess and I wasted some of the day away while waiting for my chance to visit the train station.

I left for the train station around dinner time giving myself an hour inside the train station to wait in line and figure things out. I had a guy who spoke english following me around wanting to give me a cab ride to Brasov, I told him that he couldn't take me where I was going. I knew I didn't have enough for a ticket and I had a firm price in mind that the ride was supposed to cost so I looked around for an ATM when I got to the train station, generally its not so smart to use them at train stations since there are always too many people around. What was interesting is that the atm was located in the zone that you needed a train ticket to get into, it didn't take much convincing for the man to let me through and I was glad for a country with more flexible rules.  There wasn't much of a line in the ticket house.  Like so many train stations there at least a few different places you can buy a ticket, different windows for different purposes, a special set of windows for international tickets.  And whats funnier is that there usually isn't much signage and without language ability I have never been good at figuring out the right window.  If the lines are short its no problem just get in a line and they will tell you the right place to go, when the lines are long its more problematic.  There actually was a clearly labeled international ticket window, but I didn't see it until I was directed to it.

All said I had a ticket and was waiting nearly 50 minutes before my train left.  This seemed like a first for me to have so much time.  The bad thing is that it was cold and a wind was blowing through the waiting area.  There were plenty of kiosk's to buy things from so I splurged a bit with some nice chocolates and some premium beer. The guy at the kiosk had an arab look to him, and spoke enough english to encourage me to buy a bunch more, I appreciated his dedication. So it was waiting, and it was a busy train station in a way that made me weary of pickpockets so I found an emptier place to stand down a little bit on one of the platforms.  25 minutes till departure the train pulled in and I didnt waste time walking towards my car and boarding the train. The train car was certainly a soviet era russian design and it brought back memories of train travel in Russia.  The whole train was 4 person sleeping compartments and the ticket was 28 dollars for the 11 hour ride. Considering the kilometer distance 11 hours was a bit of a disgrace.  The price was still at least 30% more expensive than an equivalent ride on a train in Russia, perhaps because it was an international train. It immediately became clear that the train would be mostly empty.  In my car there were only about 9 people including 2 boyfriends saying goodbye to their Moldovan girlfriends.

I had the compartment to myself and it felt like luxury with fake flowers on the table and a carpet on the floor.  The car had two men in charge of it, they didn't have uniforms.  They had just bleech mopped all the floors, so the car was pleasantly clean. There wasn't much going on, so I drank a beer and watched a little of the darkness before calling it a night.  I used my sleeping bag instead of the thick mattress bed.  I slept like sweet death, babies don't sleep so well.  With the gentle rocking and rythmic sounds of the train hotel.  My only worry was that the train would stop and I would be forced to share my room with some noisy or smelly neighbors.  I had heard that the train was crossing the border at 6:00, but when the train stopped at 3:00 and there was a knock from the border guard at 3:00 I was a little surprised.  Between the Romanian and Moldova border controls the process seemed to take a long time. I was impressed with the Moldovan guard, he had a lap top and some other fancy gear, much nicer than any of the other boarder guards I had encountered in Eastern Europe. A woman came by and asked me if I had any guns or drugs and I said no and she asked me to open the seat to glance at my bags. Later another woman came by, seemed curious at my nationality and told me she was a doctor and asked me if had any sickness, which I didn't. It was the first time there was a real medic at the boarder. China had sars fever forms and with any outbreak I am sure they might have had thermometers at the ready. So nearly 2 hours later the train started driving back and forth a few times through the rail yard until we seemed back in the middle of nowhere.  Through this whole process I was in a half asleep daze.

Because Russia used its own special rail guage any international trains entering or leaving Russia or its former satelite states has to have the wheels or bogies changed.  Basically they jack up the entire train a couple of jack points for each car and remove the wheels and put a new set on. The trains wheels are called bogies.  The process took about an hour and I since there wasn't much to see I woke up only to confirm that indeed the train was jacked up so that they could change the wheels. The process wasn't quite as loud as you would think.  I slept till about 8:30 and roused so that I could see the train pull into Chisinau.