Cities Not Worth Your Travel Time

There are many cities that I have loved in Europe. My current favorites are Berlin, Barcelona, Budapest, and Dubrovnik. They offer many things to do, beautiful scenery, and a great night life. In Berlin you will find a cool artsy city with amazing clubbing. In Barcelona you have the architecture of Gaudi, beaches, and shot bars. In Budapest you have bath houses for daytime, and ruin pubs (basically the world’s weirdest and coolest bars) for the night time. In Dubrovnik you can cliff dive into the water, hang out with peacocks, and eat amazing seafood before going to a cliff bar. These are cities to spend a good deal of time in.

On the other side of the coin you have Bucharest. Don’t go to Bucharest. As someone who traveled the Balkans and who met many other travelers I haven’t met a single person who liked Bucharest. You have a small attractive and touristy old town surrounded by the world’s shittiest communist apartment buildings. There is very little to do and the night life is as douchey as it gets.

I arrived in Bucharest the day before my birthday. I checked into a hostel that turned out to be in the middle of no where, and it didn’t seem to really have any other guests. It also had a garden that seemed to be infested with the entire world’s population of mosquitos. Nor does anyone tell you that buying bug spray or insect repellent is nearly impossible in a neighborhood in Bucharest. I spent the hours leading up to my birthday crying alone in my empty dorm room covered in mosquito bites. I was kind of having a meltdown. I knew I had to change hostels the next day, but at that moment I blamed all of Bucharest and kind of just wanted out of the city.

I woke up a year older, and went on a free walking tour. I saw the little the city has to offer. Mainly I learned that communism destroys good architecture and then puts up the world’s ugliest buildings. Fuck you communists. I also saw the statue about the end of commuism that the locals call “potato on a stick”. Luckily I made a friend on the tour, and soon switched into his nice party hostel that had a location that didn’t make me feel like I was going to attacked by a stray dog or robbed by a gypsy.

Potato on a stick. Sometimes olive on a stick. The potato is communism.

I spent my birthday night smoking hookah with my new friends (while the boys at the table next to us tried to woo me over). Afterwards we walked around looking for places to party and I had an idea I thought would be hilarious. I decided we should go to a strip club. It turns out they don’t charge cover for strip clubs in Bucharest. There is a reason why. They suck. Basically they are a tiny bar where only three girls take turns dancing. Not attractive women either. Literally the world’s ugliest strippers. They didn’t get naked either. They danced in little dresses that never came off. It was all disappointing. Then the two of them came over and tried to talk to two of my male friends. Charlie got stuck with the stripper who spoke almost no English. They sat awkwardly next to each other for a few minutes. Then she asked if he would buy her a drink. He said no and she left. The other stripper talked to Tudor for a bit, but left as well when he said no to a private dance.

Tudor being super creepy as I smoke shisha.

All while this was going on my friend Trevor and I sat in the middle laughing. We also watched the one redeeming thing this club had to offer. An amazing pole dancer. Now this woman wasn’t attractive, and she was also clothed, but she could pole dance. She spent her whole number doing insane pole tricks. I was honestly impressed. When she finished we paid for our drinks and left. It was an interesting experience to say the least.

The only thing worth doing in Bucharest is the escape room. My hostel ran it. They basically lock you in a room and you use the clues to find how to open the door. Our team got it with eight minutes to spare, and it would have been more except for the fucking briefcase we got stuck on. I found that I am great at escape rooms. Give me a random object and I can usually figure out what to do with it. I kept having to say, “Guys I got it open. Look over here.”

Escape Room!

I did an excursion to “Dracula’s Castle” and random other castles and Brasov. It made me wish I had visited Brasov instead of Bucharest. Transylvania is the gorgeous part of Romania. Visit there if you go to Romania. It is mountains and woods. It was great to be out of the city. Luckily my time in Bucharest ended and I was off to Sofia.

Transylvania!

Boring castle, but the mountains are great!

Romanian Trains Suck

Romanian trains suck. I’m not the world’s largest fan of train travel to begin with, but the Romanian train system did nothing to warm me to them. My train from Timisoara to Bucharest left at five in the morning. Of course they only had one train that left far too early and one that left far too late. Grrr Romania. I barely made my train as the hostel worker who had promised to help me get a cab was still out drinking and only returned at the last minute. The day was not starting off well.

When I get to my train compartment I am with a bunch of old Romanian women who don’t speak English. We smiled and mimed things at each other. And slowly they grew on me. We all laughed at the horrible train curtains that instantly fell off the window and to the ground if you tried to close or open them. Not the world’s best engineering. One woman in particular decided to take on the role of mother hen to me. She tried to include me as best she could, and when they decided to switch to larger empty compartment because ours was freezing she basically forced me to lie down and sleep. She mimed that I could lie down, put up the arm rests to make a bed for me, and even went so far as to grab my feet and pull them up on the seat to show me I could lie down all the way. Sadly my mother hen got off a couple hours later as the train began to fill up, and I realized I had to go back to my own seat.

When I got back to my compartment a man was sitting in my seat. I tried to motion that it was my seat. He pointed for me to sit elsewhere. A few moments later as I’m sitting in the seat he’s designated he reaches in his shirt and begins to pull out his necklace and show his friends. It is a large golden swastika necklace. I had seriously just tried to recover my seat from a Nazi. Somehow on this trip I keep running into people with swastikas. The men drank for a bit, and finally got off at another stop. Only one young Romanian man remained.

A few minutes later another older woman and her disabled daughter enter our compartment. The young man and I were both sitting by the window so I thought we were good since the easiest seats to reach were right there for her daughter. Not so. This woman began screaming at me in Romanian. I honestly didn’t have a clue what she wanted. I got up. I tried to move to my original seat, but that pissed her off more. Finally the man points at the seat by the door and says he thinks she wants me to sit there. Then I have the awkward encounter in trying to change places with her daughter who is on crutches in a very small space. Luckily I was able to get seated and the woman and her daughter spent the better part of the ride arguing with each other. Every once in a while a man would come into our compartment and lay out a myriad of objects on the empty seat. Then he would walk off. The others would peruse the little toys and knick knacks and pick something out to buy. When he came back the man bought a lighter, and the woman a cell phone case. I honestly wonder if people try to just pocket the items without paying. Who knows? Another random thing I never understood at the time was we passed fields upon fields of sunflowers. Some of them were bright and alive, and some were dying and wilted. I thought, “What the fuck do they need with all these sunflowers?” They were just dead half the time so they weren’t selling sunflowers. I now know the answer. Thank you google. They are now the world’s largest exporter of sunflower seeds. The more you know.

I’ve learned a lot on this trip, but mainly I’ve learned that Romanian trains suck. But even my experiences with Nazis and mean Romanian women were rivalled by my train out of Romania where I ended up in a desolate car late at night in a compartment where the light didn’t work. I just spent the whole time praying to God I wouldn’t miss Sofia, or be robbed.

Dealing With Fear When Traveling

What do you do when you’re lost or confused in a foreign place? My favorite thing to do- sit down and cry like a baby. Just sob huge self pity sobs in some foreign train station. And when you’re done you can pick yourself up, and figure your shit out. Possibly you won’t even have to if some random stranger decides to take pity on you and try to help you. This happens more frequently if you’re a girl. No one likes to see single lost girls crying. If you’re a guy though they’ll probably just stay far away from you. People don’t like to approach crying men. Eventually you’ll get it out of your system and start to figure out what the hell you’re doing. I’ve been lost many places, but I’ve never stayed lost. If you keep trying you’ll eventually find something.

Recently I was in the train station from hell. It is the train station in Arad Romania, and I have learned most travelers who have had a train change here have at least been tempted to cry. It is tiny, completely under construction, and almost no one speaks English. I got off my train here, and attempted to make a seat reservation for my next train. All that I accomplished was having an asshole Romanian man cut me in line, and then having the Romanian ticket agent yell at me in Romanian over the construction going right on behind me. A man tried to translate for me, but even in Romanian she didn’t understand my request. I later learned that the tiny shitty train I was about to ride how no sort of seat reservations. It was a free for all. I sat down in a seat wanting to cry and already just done with Romania even though I had just entered it. I let myself have my half hour of self pity, and then I went and found my train. Even crossing to my platform was a difficulty. There was no where to cross and finally I found you had to walk to the end of the platform and then climb across the tracks to the next platform. Arad really has their shit together.

The best way to find your train is to point at trains or tracks and ask everyone you can “Timisoara?” Hopefully someone will know the answer eventually. In my case I found an equally confused German family (the father turned out to be Romanian), and we let the dad figure the rest out for the lot of us while the mother decided to mother hen me. You can generally point at things anywhere and ask if this is what you’re looking for, or where something is. Once you find someone going the same way you just hold onto them for dear life and follow. There’s ease in numbers, and sometimes you have to weld yourself to others when you are a solo traveler.

The Rose Garden.

I made it to Timisoara though. And my hostel was gross. Friendly, but gross. Showers that looked like they’d never been cleaned, and bed sheets that were so much smaller than the bed that you were just sleeping against the old vinyl mattress. Oh shit Romania was not having a good start. But then nice things happen. I found a rose garden that was filled to the brim with roses and I sat and just read. Then I found this newly built children’s playground and played like a child. I climbed rope structures, and waited for water to gurgle up and touch my hands out of the fountains with delight. I listened as gypsy music floated up over the wall of a nearby building while I spun round in some sort of spinny chair. I found that there is good to be had even when you’re having a bad time.

Then I went to a street cafe and felt like a king as I had milkshakes and lemonades while sitting on a comfy couch seat. By the evening I was in a good mood, and my hostel decided to take us out drinking. We went to a very Romanian backyard bar where we got eaten alive by mosquitos and yelled at by the bartender for something to do with moving a log seat from one table to another. We never really got why. Between bars our guide took us to a playground, and we all played like children piling onto the seesaw, and climbing up and down the fortress. By the end of the day I remembered what I love about traveling. And then I got on another shitty Romanian train.

Crazy eyed in a playground.