April 11, 2004

Istanbul, Bucharest, Brasov...

After five days in Istanbul, I felt sad to say goodbye. There's just so much atmosphere in that city. Despite the overrated and overpriced tourist attractions, the people and the environment were incredible. The most memorable moment occurred on my last full night at the Orient Hostel. When the local mosques call people to prayer, it is customary to turn off whatever music might be playing so people can hear the call. On this night I took my beer from the top floor cafe of the hostel to the rooftop terrace overlooking Aya Sofia, the Blue Mosque and the Bosphorus and sat in the sun listening to Muslim songs from every direction. It's difficult to see how people might become annoyed by that tradition. I found it beautiful. I met many wonderful people at the hostel including Tyson from Atlanta who is now teaching English outside of London and Chris, a former football player (Aussie Rules) from Melbourne who is travelling around the world and had recently visited North and South America. It was also fun to see Istanbul as a sort of bridge between East and West by meeting people who were on their ways to places like Syria, Iran, and India and people who were returning from those places. I also received a lesson in Anzac day from the Aussies and Kiwis.

From Istanbul it is a slow, painful, 23-hour train journey to Bucharest. It seemed like we never moved faster than a walking pace and stopped at even the smallest out-of-the-way stations, not to let passengers on or off, but just to let another train pass on the one track that runs that route. As expected, the Turkey-Bulgaria border crossing at 3AM is intimidating and scary, like something out of a movie. To make matters worse, there was no dining car and I had forgotten to pack any food. Luckily I only had to share a comparment with one person for most of the time and had the compartment to myself for the rest. The one compartment-mate was a German named Samuel (pronounced Zam-wil) who spoke English quite well. In the first International Yahtzee Olympics, Germany bested the USA but it was close.

Arriving in Bucharest after dark (nearly four hours late) is not the best way to get a good first impression of the city. An American and a Finn happened to be arriving at the same time and we discovered we were all staying in the same hostel. Putting our three brains together we managed to figure out the Metro system enough to get within walking distance of the hostel, then wandered around for a while and asked directions before finding it. Although I had low expectations of the city due to hearing negative things from everyone I had met that had been there, Bucharest managed to not even meet those expectations. There are growling stray dogs and piles of garbage everywhere, the drivers and streets are worse than any other city I've seen (including New York, Rome, Athens and Istanbul!), and almost all of the buildings are just plain ugly.

After checking in to the hostel, the three of us decided to go to a Romainian restaurant recommended by the owner of the hostel. He showed us the menus and explained that although it was relatively upscale, the entrees cost about the equivalent of 3-4 US dollars. We made our mistake when we allowed the waitress to choose appetizers for us. There were a few that interested us (including breaded fried ewe's milk cheese i.e. cheese curds) and when she pointed to six or seven items on the menu and told us "a little of this and a little of this", we agreed. The appetizers were delicious even though we had no clue what we were eating. Then the bill came. Three million Romainian Lei or about US$100. For three of us. When we had ordered three dollar entrees. We looked it over and found that "a little of this and a little of this" had ended up costing us sixty bucks. We tried to persuade her to lighten the total, but we had let her choose and we did eat the food, so our case had a few holes. I left the restaurant with a bad taste of Bucharest in my mouth, but with the knowledge that we could have been scammed for much worse.

The rest of Bucharest was equally unimpressive save the one big attraction - The Palace of Parliament. Everything about the building is incredible. The staggering facts just kept pouring out of the tour guide's mouth: One million cubic meters of marble, a pair of one ton curtains, a 2200 square meter conference room. Unfortunately, it's not enough to save Bucharest for me.

Yesterday I moved on to Brasov in Transylvania. Though it's many times nicer than Bucharest, Istanbul may have set the standard by which all future cities I visit are compared and Brasov isn't even in the same league. There are several nice castles in the area though, but even those were underwhelming. I've met some great people here (including several Peace Corps volunteers from Bulgaria), but I'm looking forward to taking the train to Hungary tomorrow and finally seeing Budapest which I keep hearing great things about.

Posted by Peter at 12:19 PM | Comments (6)