First, I woke up in a station one morning, othe ther guy in compartment also asleep, checked my phone, it was 5:15am, train was due into Bucuresti Gari de Nord at 6:25am, so went back to sleep. Woken a few moments later by a grumpy old lady conductor shouting to get off as we were in Bucharest... Hmm, didn't realise we had changed time-zones berween Serbia and Romania and I lost an hours sleep ;-( Impressed we still arrived 10 minutes early, wouldn't happen in GB.
Secondly, I didn't know what anyone was saying. After about 3 weeks in Slavic speaking countries where I could at least identify some of what was going on from my bit of Russian knowledge, suddenly, it's all change... Romanian is a Latin based language, a bit Italian sounding at times but with some additional Slavic sounds you would not get in Italian in French. So I didn't know whether someone was saying 'hello', ' can i help you', 'do you know which bus goes to Piata Revolutii?', 'do you need a room' or 'get your hands off my daughter', it was a bit dis-orienting for a while.
Thirdly, they have 2 sets of banknotes, following a renumeration a year ago where they dropped four zeros of the value of everything and started printing new bank notes.. They also however continue printing the old bank notes, as you still get these out of cash machines a year later. Well I thought that wouldn't be so bad, my maths is ok and it's easy to divide by 10000... No, it seems many still like to talk in old values which is easy enough until you realise that some vendors, not all mind you, verbally drop one thousand from the cost of something when talking in old values, which I didn't realise at first. So for something costing 3 new Lei, which would still be priced at 30000 old Lei, I would get asked for 30. So I was thinking, 30 Lei, thats a bit much for a couple of bananas and a yoghurt, so thought it must be 30 bani (= 3000 old lei. 100 bani = 1 leu), which wasn't right either so they just generally grapped a few notes/coins out of my hand and all got resolved, amicably and correctly I must add. Then some of course did talk in new numbers, so at times you just had no idea, what anyone wanted. Even after a few days, I still had moments of madness.
Left: The main square in Brasov has a vibrant cafe, restaurant scene.
Right: Peles castle at Sinaia
Some observations on Romanian life:
Very faithful towards their christian orthodox religion, it was an odd site when the majority of passengers on a bus started crossing themslevs whenever the bus passed a church. On one road there were two churches and one side and another on the another in ashort distance that always caused some frantic crossing activity.
In Romania horse and carts are still used as a form of transport for many people, even through towns and not only for ferrying tourists around like in many other European cities these days.
Don't try sending a package abroad from Romania. I tried in one PO and was told I had to go to the main Post Office in town. At the main Post Office I was told I could not send international packages there and had to go to another P.O. for which I was given an adress. At this one after lengthy queueing and crowding, I got to the desk (which had signs saying international postage and post restante etc, so looked promising) and had a grumpy young lady who could not help in English, French or Russian and just scowled miserably at me. I didn't bother finding out if she knew any Welsh or Dutch ! So I used the most useful Romanian phrase I knew, Cit costa? (how much?) and she then disppeared for a good 6 or 7 minutes, in fact I never saw her again. Luckily another lady appeared who spoke English and kindly informed me I had to use counter next door to send internationally and that it was now closed (closes at 1400) and I would have to come back tomorrow. Unfortunately tomorrow (today I am no longer in Romania).
Although I had a couple of frustrating experiences, such as an attempted pickpocketing at Brasov station that I noticed and prevented - I had nothing in that pocket either so obviously had not done their observation work very well - and the P.O. story above and the howling young mothers begging on the metro, Romanians were very freindly and a number of times went to great lengths to help out. The girls at the hostel in Brasov (Hostel Kismet Dao) were superb and did everything to help anyone and also knew everything you could possibly want to know about places to visit, busses, trains etc... top marks to them.
Left: St Nicholae Church, Brasov
Right: The Council House in Brasov's main square
There are many interest places to visit in Romania and the more I read and heard from other travellers, the more I wanted to see. However this time I had to limit myself. Despite the occasional frustrations, this a country well worth visiting if you like nature, castles and monastries. There really is loads to see.
No comments:
Post a Comment