The woman at the ticket office in Sofia was apologetic.
She confided that our train was Russian,
headed for Moscow.
Our cabin, she
warned, was the last in the car, next to the toilet.
But the tickets to Bucharest cost half of what it would have
cost through the Rail Europe website.
Our bunks were narrow and the mattresses were lumpy but the sheets and
duvets were crisp and clean.
True, the toilet was never pristine and got worse as the night went on,
but we had the entire cabin to ourselves.
With earplugs to shut out the train noise the swaying and
bumping of the car lulled us to sleep until the Bulgarian immigration guy burst
in sometime around 2 AM demanding our passports. He was soon followed by his Romanian counterpart and, just
like that, we were welcomed to Romania.
Bucharest looked pretty good after eleven hours on the train,
even in the early morning gloom.
After our first taste of Romanian food, an Egg McMuffin, we took a cab
to the Hilton. When we don’t have
a place to stay and arrive early, we usually head to an upscale hotel near the
action, drop off our luggage, beg a map, and scout the area. Gabriel, the Hilton’s concierge, made a
couple of calls then actually walked us around the block to the more affordable
Ambassador where we settled in and cleaned up.
We didn’t waste any time and started exploring “the Paris of
Eastern Europe.” The buildings are
neoclassical, not the Soviet-style I expected. The main streets are filled with designer stores for the
fashion conscious, interspersed with sex shops and moneychangers, not unlike
Paris. There are several
good-sized parks scattered around and a lot of interesting street sculptures. The older parts of town are a warren of
narrow, winding streets with taste tantalizing, and affordable,
restaurants. Romanian doesn't use Cyrillic and is
considered “vulgar Latin.” Although I can’t
understand the spoken language, I can actually read some of the signs, which
makes getting around a bit easier.
We spent the afternoon at the National History Museum. It shouldn’t be surprising that the
Romans played a big part in the early history; the country is called Romania,
after all. We were surprised to
see a 19th Century replica of Trajan’s Column as the museum’s
centerpiece. It depicts in amazing detail the many, many battles Trajan fought
and usually won, many against the Dacians, as the Romans called Thracians in this
part of the Empire. While we can’t
wait to see the original in Rome we were able to see the bas-relief sculpture
up close today.
I think Bucharest is going to be one of my favorite European
cities and maybe the biggest surprise.
