Leaving Bucuresti - And Not Before TIme

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Got up a bit before 6am to get to the station for the 6:40am train. Said good bye to Julia and timed a bus to the station pretty well. The board wasn’t yet saying what platform my train was going to be on, just that it was late. But of course the dickhead taxi drivers were everywhere and hassling the shit out of me. After walking up and down a few times I went and grabbed some Maccas for brekkie. By the time I finished the train was up on the board and I checked out the platform. There was a train there but no one getting on or off so I wasn’t sure what was happening. There was supposed to be a 30 minutes stop here, so I walked up and down a few times to stretch the legs a bit before getting on the train for a 26 hour ride north to Kiev.

Then the main taxi driver that had been annoying me ran up saying the train was leaving and I had missed it. I could see a train going but wasn’t sure it was mine. He was gibbering shit in my ear about being able to get to the next town the train stops at before it gets there, save me wasting my money on the ticket. I thought to myself he was full of shit about my train having left, let alone being able to get me through the hell that is Bucuresti traffic to the next town before the train gets there. He was really trying to get me worried, trying to make me panic. I just said firmly “If I have missed it, I’ll just have to catch the next one”.

Went to the information booth (who better than Ukraine actually spoke English) and asked the lady if the Kiev train had indeed left, which it had. Then the driver started on again about driving to the next town and I was shaking my head at him. I looked over his shoulder at the info booth lady and she was shaking her head too - but I guess was too scared to speak up.

Then some other bloke came up out of nowhere and started joining in on the conversation which I thought was a bit strange. As I asked the lady when the next train was going (which turned out to be the next morning, one every 24 hours) I could feel a very slight pull on my backpack, and the info lady motioned to my right with her eyes. I whipped around and an old lady that was right behind me turned to face the window and muttering something, like she was trying to get to the booth to ask the lady something. The old hag had been trying to open my backpack, and again the info lady was too scared to say anything but had alerted me with her eyes. The old hag had managed to half undo the short ropes on the zip handles that I had wound together.

Now I was pissed off. Perhaps pushing my luck a little, I told the other bloke that had wandered in as a decoy for the old pickpocket to piss off, told the taxi driver to get the hell out of my face and go and annoy someone else, and went and bought a new ticket for the next day’s train and transferred my sleeper reservation. Didn’t cost much, 40 lei.

Went back to the hostel a little pissed off and jumped online. I was feeling a bit of the stress from the car driving a few days earlier and really needed to get out of Bucuresti, the feeling that the place just didn’t like me wasn’t going away. Turns out you can take one stop along the way on a ticket you buy in Romania. So I decided to go to Suceava, where I had planned on going to the evening of when I drove the car. Train left at 2pm and takes 6 hours to do the 450 kms, which was a decent chunk out of the 26 hours to Kiev, so I got to the station in time to get a ticket and jump on. Because I already had a ticket and reservation for the Kiev train, it cost me just 1.80 lei to do what was in effect transfer my ticket for the portion of the trip to Suceava from the tomorrow’s train to this afternoon.

Was in a booth with 2 hot girls and a middle aged lady. One girl looked like your typical Bucuresti girl, which is a great thing - attractive, dark hair and eyes, fit body, tight clothing and FMBs. As Kris used to say “they dress like hookers but the good thing is they aren’t hookers”. The other girl looked very different but was even hotter, hazel eyes and light brown hair, didn’t have dark skin either. It didn’t occur to me later that she was ethnic Hungarian as opposed to Romanian. Turns out she did a bit of modelling and had been in Bucuresti to shoot a commercial for a phone company.

They all got off at various spots along the way so by the time the train arrived at Suceava I was by myself and of course without any idea how to get to the hostel. The map I had was pretty sketchy. And to add to my situation I didn’t have any lei left, just left over Euro. I had read the train station was on the outskirts of town so I asked a taxi driver if he knew how to get to the “High Class Hostel”. “Of course” he replied, seeming a bit amused that I had accidentally greeted him with “good morning” in Romanian instead of “good evening”. We drove into the main part of town and around, pulling up outside the “Classic Hotel”. Just great. I explained where I wanted to go but he had no idea what I was talking about, so had to ring base and get instructions. Then he said “Why didn’t you say ‘pension’?” Dickhead.

So I got stung there not just for driving further than was required, but also for the crappy exchange rates that the taxi drivers give you for paying in Euro. the owner of the hostel was away visiting friends in Sweden as it was low season and just her dad was there. He spoke some Italian but no English, got some instructions to me via Monica over the phone from Sweden and the rest was by hand gestures and some Italian words I understood. Served me up a pretty tasty dinner of what I assume was Romanian dishes and I went to bed not long after.

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