My Hovercraft is Full of Eels

To Greece by train - and other journeys of the mind, body and soul

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Brasov to Budapest

August 4th, 2009 by jane · 2 Comments · Greece, trains, travel

Our couchette (cuşetă in Romanian) was already occu­pied by 2 Romanian men and one teen­age lad (one of their sons?) already in bed when we got on at Brasov, so quite strange shar­ing such a small space with 3 people we had­n’t met and wer­en’t sure we shared any com­mon lan­guage with. 

It was a hot hot night. Air con­di­tion­ing not work­ing well and the Romanians wanted the win­dows shut, so not the best sleep.  Woken 5ish by bor­der guards.

In the morn­ing i man­aged to chat a bit with the older guy in German.  He’s going to Budapest to work for a month on a ship doing 7 day cruises down the Danube,  I think he said from Budapest to Dachau, but haven’t checked a map yet to see if that makes sense.  He’s then tak­ing 2 weeks hol­i­day. So that’s why the bor­der guards were check­ing his papers so thor­oughly — that very offi­cial look­ing let­ter he handed them togeth­er with their pass­ports must have been in con­nec­tion with a work per­mit or the like.

I’m left won­der­ing what the work situ­ation is like in Romania and how many men and women have to make simil­i­ar trips for work.  Also what about the teen­age lad who can­’t be more than 15 — has he come to work too? It felt a bit too nosy to ask.

We part on very friendly terms: “Auf wier­der­se­hen, au revoir, bye bye”

So we are now in Budapest.  It feels so west­ern these days.  I was last here in 1989 and miss the excite­ment in the air of those times.  Now it’s all H&M and Ikea.  Looking for­ward to vis­it­ing the large covered mar­ket tomor­row before head­ing west, west, and west again.

Room here is lov­ley and look­ing for­ward to a good sleep tonight.

(Please excuse dodgy punc­tu­ation- work­ing out thsi Hungarian key­board is quite challenging)

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2 Comments so far ↓

  • Martha

    I think it was 1989 or 1990 when we last vis­ited Budapest too Jane. It must be quite dif­fer­ent now but prob­ably more English spoken.

  • Mary Jane

    Sounds like a cramped sleep­ing arrange­ment. I guess there were 6 beds or you had to double up!

    MJx

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