We just needed to cross the bridge and we were in Romania. Very straight-forward.
Our driver wanted to drop us in the outskirts somewhere but there must have just been a misunderstanding as he didn't complain when we told him that we wanted to go to the train station. And complain he might have as the traffic was terrible. He did a remarkable job not hitting anything. Even Neil thought he was going to hit a few cars.
Here's Neil thanking him at Bucharest station.
We had a few hours to kill before our train to Brasov. Well we thought we did, but later on in the day the trains took a lot longer so we ended up with about an hour. Oh, Bucharest station dispels the myth that everyone in Europe speaks English. All signs in Romanian and the woman selling tickets didn't seem to know any English at all - just as it should be.
In our hour's wait we still wanted to fit in a trip to the huge governmen building built by Ceauşescu. The second largest building in the world. The first taxi driver we asked said he could get us there and back in time so off we went.
The building certainly is tmpressive though apparently Ceauşescu had a couple of suburbs flattened to make room for it - including several churches.
The driver stopped and pointed out a row of fountains stretching back down in the middle of one of the roads leading off the palace. In fact they stretched as far as the eye could see.
Well, he then got us back to the station in time but not without also having to do some remarkable driving' driving up some narrow street on the wrong side of the road to push in at the intersection, that sort of thing. Extremely aggressive, but anything less aI don't think we would have made it. We also had to push in at the left luggage office. Luckily I knew the Romanian for we don't have any time!
Train to Braşov was pretty uneventful, except we had so much luggage there really wasn't any room for it. Typical, I took too many photos of churches and not enough of what is really interesting! But at the time you don't think of these things when you've got Neil trying to squash some woman's handgag in the luggage rack with his huge suitcase.
We were met at Braşov station by an Esperantist. We had planned to stay at a hotel but she didn't seem to understand the concept. There were five of us but she seemed to have an apartment with no beds and no doors to any of the rooms.
Anyway, she had also cooked us tea and we got straight into the bottle of rakia which we had been given in Polski Trambesh.
But before that I'd gone to the corner shop for some beer. I asked what beer they had and I got the reply închis. I then asked whether it was Romanian beer and I got the same reply - închis. Oh well, I thought, i've never had it before, I'll have 1/2 a dozen of them.
It turned out that închis is Romanian for closed. Here's a recreation of what it must have looked like.
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