Iasi to Bucharest April 16, 2005

This post is written from memory; the original notes were lost. And I didn’t have the blog set up in those days.

Well, the train from Iasi to Bucharest turned out to be a bit of a comic episode. We decided to go to the train station the night before to get our tickets since it seemed that the train schedule would have us leaving Iasi at 6 am. We figured it would be complicated to get the tickets so getting them the night before made sense. So… before we headed to dinner we went to the train station and the fun began.

We waited on a long line to buy the tickets. Eventually it was our turn, but the person at the counter only spoke Romanian. Several people tried to help us out but their English was quite thin and it was never clear if they understood us or if we totally understood their responses. We knew there were two different trains. One left at 6 am and one left at 6:10 am. The 6 a.m train was the “fast train” and the 6:10 train was the “local”—or so we thought based on what we could see posted on the walls of the station.

So we kept saying “Fast train! Bucharest! 6:00” But it was unlikely that anyone understood. Finally a young woman came to the counter to help us out and she told the person at the booth the tickets we needed. She then showed us where on the ticket we could find the car# and our seat #s. We would be in a little cabin with 4 people, including the two of us. All seemed good, but we were a little skeptical. We then went out for dinner (tickets safely tucked into our wallets).

The next morning we got to the station extra early, in spite of having the tickets, and navigated to the track number written on the tickets. We found the track and the car and I said to Adrienne “I think this is the wrong train.” It was very old and rickety; the cabins were old with less than modern conveniences. “This cannot be the ‘fast’ train!” To which, Adrienne said very clearly: “Here’s the ticket. It says this track. It says this train number and this cabin.” I thought we should go back to the ticket window to find out but Adrienne was convinced that we’d miss the train. From the window of “our” train, I could see a shiny new train on another track. I said we should investigate because that was likely our train. but I didn’t want to argue, so we sat in the cabin. It was about 5:45 a.m. The other two passengers came into our cabin. They didn’t speak English but Adrienne cheerfully said “I guess the train will leave soon, since it’s 5:45 and it leaves at 6 am.” There was no response.

At precisely 6 a.m. that bright, shiny new train sped out of the station and we were just sitting in our aged train. We were definitely on the local train (which would take about two additional hours to get to Bucharest.) And at about 6:10, we left the station on the slow boat to China! or rather the slow train to Bucharest. It was a pretty boring train ride but we did see a lot of countryside… which at this time of year was pretty dry and grey.

We got to Bucharest at about 4 pm or 5 pm and took a taxi to the hotel. We met up with Adrienne’s friend and a young Romanian woman she had befriended and headed to dinner. I don’t remember much about the meal or the restaurant.

More tomorrow,