day 52 bucharest

It’s 8 in the morning and I’m sat having just arrived at a hostel out of the pouring rain. It’s been a different 36 hours. In the morning yesterday I woke up earlier then everyone to go down to the train station and get my train ticket to Bucharest. The woman behind the counter was very Serbian and didn’t have a lot of patience and yelled out 3 sets of numbers, I tried asking what they corresponded to and then she yelled out seat, couch, cabin, I panicked and just went for the cheaper option, which was 32 euro, not thinking that it might have been a good idea to get a couchette for a 13 hour overnight train. I went back to the hostel and waited for kate and ducky, before going to the nikola tesla museum, which was possibly the smallest museum I have ever been in. as luck would have it we arrived at the same time as a coach load of greeks, so where a tour is usually max 5 people, we had a tour of 35, fucking great. It was really small and wasn’t explained very well, and they had dedicated over half the museum to a portrait of nikola teals (the blue potrait) which they didn’t have! He sounded like a pretty cool bloke, and was accredited in inventing the radio and the remote control, plus he did have a very cool brown moleskin suit with a cracking tie and bowl hat. After that we headed for the centre and the restaurant which we ate at, ordered the same thing (the stew in the bread basket) and what came was something different, turns out the day before I asked for one thing and pointed to another thing, which was a disappointing as the thing I actually ordered was no where near as good. I got some food before leaving to get the ten to 4 train. I got to the station with 10 mins to spare, however couldn’t find the train as it was all in Cyrillic and not making any sense to me, though I decided to jump on to the only train that had it’s motor running and found 3 Scottish girls and checked it was the correct train. I ended up in a cabin with a Russian girl called olga, who was a English and Spanish teacher on her way to spend a month in Valencia. The train ride was really cool, lots of different sights, fields of sunflowers, then the lightning started. It was cool to see the lighting having been at the tesla museum, and as olga had left I joined the 3 Scottish girls. They thought there were a food cabin on board, however was not so shared some food with them and had a chat. I also started on a book which really enjoying so far, absolute power by david Baldacci, a political thriller which is awesome. I went back to my cabin to sleep laying sideways across 3 chairs, where one of the Scottish girls joined me as wanted to stretch out. Slept pretty damn well considering the jerkiness of the train, the rain coming in through our window (when I woke up there was an inch of standing water on the floor) and the worry of just being on a night train. Woke up just after six to the sound of barking dogs (I read in my lonely planet that Bucharest has quite a few stray dogs) and turns out we had arrived. I woke up Tilly (the Scottish girl sharing my cabin thing) who in turned went next door to wake up her friends, as they wake up and get their things together one of them was missing a purse, luckily during the night she took out her money, phone and passport, however she lost her railway pass, though it only had 3 days left on it. Leaving them (they were going to brasov) I met an american bloke from California called Austin, who was getting out his lonely planet looking for the hostel he had booked, so I joined him. We decided to walk there which seemed a good idea, till it started pissing it down like a mofo. That and we walked to the wrong hostel, though found it in the end and I have a bed for the night, yay. Talking to Austin who was on the same train as me, he said he was sleeping when this dude came into his cabin with a electric screw driver, undid some panels and just started pulling out cartons of cigarettes. He then went into the roof and started pulling out shit loads again. Crazy shit. We were stopped for about 45mins by customs as different people came in, asked questions and tapped around the cabin, but found nowt where I was staying, though I did get moved twice by this very sketchy train conductor at 2 stations when what seemed like his friends came on board bit black bin bags and selotape. Bucharest seems pretty interesting, let’s hope it is.