n the moment before the train passed into the tunnel, I stole a glance at the couple sitting across from us. Both were tall with hair slicked back from widow’s peaks. They wore capes with high collars and the man’s incisors gleamed threateningly.
“There are no vampires in Romania.” The man’s voice was chilling in the darkness. He’d obviously seen me look across and knew immediately what was on my mind. I guessed this wasn’t the first time a tourist had looked sideways at him.
When the train came out of the tunnel, I felt very silly. Neither of them was particularly tall, though the young man wasn’t far off six feet, and neither had widow’s peaks or long incisors. They weren’t even wearing capes. In fact, the man had unruly brown hair and his girlfriend’s long locks might have been permed. Both were wearing jeans and t-shirts.
“Sorry. I’m a bit jumpy. We just came from SighiÅŸoara and the whole town was crawling with teenagers dressed in black.” The black had been Metallica and Megadeath t-shirts, but even vampires couldn’t go around in long capes and high collars these days.
“Oh, were you there for the medieval festival? That’s not something I’d expect tourists to go to.”
I wanted to agree that we weren’t your everyday tourists, preferring to join in the local culture of places we visit, but the truth was that today we were amateurs. It was our first trip away together and, looking back, it was too early in the relationship to be going so far out of our comfort zone. Tensions had run high from the moment we arrived in Budapest and the mistakes weren’t helping. Primary among them was forgetting the cardinal rule that you should never arrive in a new place on a Sunday.
We’d been unable to get a night train to Cluj-Napoca, so we took one that went to SighiÅŸoara, thinking to catch a local train the next morning. But that requires money. So does food and despite the mass of teenagers that had descended on the town, none of the currency exchange booths were open and it took us four hours of wandering in the rain to find a bank machine that would let us withdraw cash.
“It was an accident. We didn’t know anything about the medieval festival, but that would explain the music we heard.” It was like something from a Robin Hood movie using what sounded like a mandolin and a flute. “I wish we’d had more time to look around properly.”
The four of us chatted for a while about what we might have seen at the festival and the unseasonal rain. It seems that we’d chosen the only summer in memory that it had rained constantly. Most of the east was flooded, apparently, but we weren’t planning to go too far east. Finally, I drew the conversation back to where we’d started. “Why do you get annoyed by vampire comments?”
“Because it’s not even our legend. It’s just a butchering of our history. Some English tourist came to BraÅŸov and thought the castle looked threatening. He put that together with an inside out version of Dracula and came up with this ridiculous story.”
“I didn’t realise that Dracula was a real person. Who was he?”
“Dracula actually means ‘son of the dragon’ because his father was a knight of the Order of the Dragon. His real name was Vlad Å¢epeÅŸ and he was a hero of the resistance against the Ottoman invasion in the 15th century. He was famous for torturing his enemies by driving a wooden steak through their spine.”
“I see what you mean by inside out. He was a kind of anti-vampire.” If Romanians didn’t like the story, it ruined my plans to use a vampire as the image to represent their country on these pages. I’d have to keep searching.
“Yep. Foreigners always get us wrong. It’s the same with the gypsies. They don’t actually come from Romania.”
This was new to me. I’d never heard that gypsies did come from Romania. If they came from anywhere in particular, I’d have guessed Spain or Italy, but I couldn’t say why. In Europe, though, it’s apparently a common misconception that gypsies come from Romania.
“They’re originally from India, but they base themselves in Romania now because the government gives them a lot of freedom. They can come and go as they please while the rest of us are stuck here. And they don’t have to pay taxes.”
The girl proffered a bag of tiny apples and insisted we take one each. They’d already told us that you need to be careful of the meat sold by peasants, but that fruit was safe and always good. I bit into a crunchy little apples and found it had all the flavour of its cousins in Belgium, packed into something with half the diameter. It was a while before I could speak again.
“What do you mean you’re stuck here? One of my colleagues in Brussels is Romanian and he’s not a gypsy. Besides, I thought communism had fallen. How can they stop you leaving?”
“Oh, we’re allowed to go, but we have to show that we have enough money. Can you imagine how difficult it is to raise 500 Euro? The average salary is only 100 Euro and that’s barely enough to survive on.”
The Romanian currency is actually Lei, and even the smallest coin had a few trailing zeros, so I was glad that he was doing the conversion for me.
It seemed that it was rare to have a salary in Romania too. The man had studied Civil Engineering at university, but until he could ‘sign’ his own projects, he would just get whatever money the actual signatory handed down to him. Signing meant planning and recommending a project, getting approval and taking responsibility for the result. It sounded like a dangerous game to me, but our new friends assured us that all the work was done by new graduates and the signatories kept most of the spare cash for themselves without any real risk.
“So the gypsies can go out, steal in other countries until they have enough cash to get by for a while, then come back here and live comfortably while the true Romanians struggle.”
This was my first glimpse into the unrest in the country. Gypsies seemed to be at the heart of most of it. Famous for stealing in the rest of Europe, they generally limited their activities to begging in Romania out of fear of losing their refuge. And so we were safe from both vampires and gypsies, but I didn’t need them. It turned out I’d brought enough demons with me.
The word ‘holiday’ conjures up images of sun, parties and relaxation – a good time for all. But we weren’t just holidaying. We were ‘travelling,’ and that word can be associated with concepts like language gap, culture shock and just plain stress. In this case, it was compounded because I was travelling with four French people.
I had some doubts when Akasha told me how many were coming but, to date, her friends had been very good about including me in any conversations. Not that I understood much of what they said, but every now and then they’d stop to give me an update in slow French or even in English. With that, and a little time alone with Akasha in the evenings, I’d survive. But when we caught up with her friends in Cluj, the horror story began. Jesse and Lestat were nice enough from what I could make out of their rapid French, but Mekare didn’t even bother to look at me. As soon as she’d greeted the others, she began a 5-hour tirade of the problems of her 30 hour bus trip. And Akasha was so excited at seeing her friends again that she didn’t think to introduce me.
I knew from what Akasha had told me before that short, freckled Jesse had spent the last 4 months studying farming in Romania and that skinny, blond Mekare was between jobs and living in Toulouse. Gangly Lestat was a friend of theirs from university prep school, also between jobs. Akasha herself was working for a non-government organisation in Paris to represent cattle farmers in science and government policy. Her muscled yet curvaceous figure, vibrant hazel eyes and a thousand different smiles make it difficult to remember the others clearly. She seemed like my perfect match, with her love of travel, culture and outdoor activities – but even that’s not enough in situations like this.
For most of the week, they walked in a bunch that excluded me and spoke in rapid-fire French that I had no chance of catching. Jesse spoke to the locals and translated for the others. No one thought to translate for me. We spent so much time on trains city-hopping that I could never follow the itinerary and I soon began to feel like a five-year-old in the back seat of the car. My conversation was limited to asking ‘are we there yet?’ and ‘where are we going now?’
I saw an amazing array of interesting things, but it felt like I was watching them through the window of a moving vehicle.