(Editors Note: After promising not to say Casablanca was the best part of the trip thus far, I have let Josh guest blog today’s excitement. After all he came all the way out here to join me, and when a member of the New York Times offers you a free byline how can you say no. Take heed, Barry Locher. Yours isn’t the only media outlet I have connections with. You don’t treat me right and I’ll start offering my powerful public influence to the Gray Lady.)
Dave is…
In Luck.
For the last several days I have been a participant-observer in Dave’s travels across Europe. More or less, I serve as an intern: I do the dirty work – carrying the water bottle, the loaf of bread, the conversation – in exchange for real life experience. He has even agreed to allow me to serve as a guest blogger! And I was blessed with a strange, wonderful day to write about. –Josh
Despite the charms of the citadel in Sightisoara, the story of the day Dave and I spent there is really about the Eastern European bus system, a portly woman named Maria, and an uprising that has come to be known (in small circles, at least) as the Brasov Spring.
I woke up early and, having learned that meals are few and far between when traveling with the ascetic Dave, shot into the kitchen to wrest a few pieces of toast from the chattering, smelly Italians that had occupied it. Dave and I then brushed our teeth, donned our sweatshirts, and headed for the train station. Two and a half hours later we disembarked in Sightisoara.
There is not much to say about the town and the citadel that won’t be better expressed in photographs, but I will say that it was sunny, cool, and quiet (except for the requisite techno music blaring at the pizzeria where we ate lunch, and the honking wedding procession).
We saw the home of Vlad the Impaler, (the inspiration for Dracula),
walked up one hill through a covered wooden tunnel,
and another through fields past giggling Romanian children, who gleefully fulfilled our stereotypes. When we had seen what there was to see, we parked ourselves at the train station bar, drinking beer, chatting with Canadians, and waiting for the 5:36, unaware of the fire brewing the hearts of the Transylvanian transit riders.
A drunken Romanian man with a bump on his head and a bottle of what looked like his own urine in his hand greeted us in Romanian as we sat down on the train. He passed me the bottle. I passed it to Dave, misinterpreting his words to mean, “I have pissed in this bottle. Please throw it out the window for everyone’s sake.” No, he wanted us to drink it! Dave sniffed it and sipped it, and I followed suit. With that, it became clear how our companion had gotten so drunk. I spent the next two hours removing his hand from my knee. When we arrived in Brasov, he shook my wrist and tottered off.
We have a patron saint who hangs out in the train station here. Her name is Maria, and she is a middle aged woman in a leather jacket who emerges from nowhere with some small piece of sage advice every time we end up there. When we first arrived in Brasov, she showed me that I was holding a round trip ticket to Budapest – not a one-way ticket as I thought – and thus saved me the $45 I was prepared to spend to get back. This time, I felt someone trying to open my backpack, turned around, and there she was. Soon we were laughing and buying her chocolate.
Our bus pulled up and we moved to get on. A quick aside about Eastern European buses: they operate on an inefficient honor system where it’s harder to actually buy a ticket than to skip the fare. You have to buy a ticket that is not available on the bus, and then stamp it on a machine on the bus. There is rumored to be a heavy fine for those who don’t have a properly stamped ticket. But most times, no one checks, and so most times we don’t pay.
But Maria insisted we buy tickets. She grabbed two lei from my hand, bought us a paper ticket, and pushed us in the way of the bus, saying she’d prefer that we bring her tourists the next time, no chocolates. We waved, jumped on the bus, and stamped our ticket – incorrectly, from lack of practice.
Somewhere along the ride, we found ourselves surrounded by a pair of severe women with official hats and badges, demanding to see our tickets. One wore an ominous cast on her hand, and both were clearly holdovers from the days of Nicolae Ceausescu. Our improperly stamped ticket disgusted them, and they closed in around us, insisting that we give them our passports. We protested with shocked looks on our faces, our hands flailing in an attempt to convey innocent ignorance. Violence filled the air.
But we were in luck. The voice of the people rose from the back of the bus. One rider came to our defense. Others followed, and a full-throated shouting match ensued. We couldn’t understand a word, but our hearts glowed with the love of the proletariat. The two policewomen retreated to the front of the bus, screaming in protest, but it was obvious that they would not win. The battle did not end until they had been pushed back onto the street.
One of our saviors smiled and winked. “Guys, make sure to stamp your ticket correctly next time,” she said.
And neither of us ever rode a bus in Romania again.
Ed: It was indeed a tense standoff between the forces of oppression and the unconquerable human spirit with the highest of stakes (a hefty fine for the two of us) and so of course I forgot to take photos of the confrontation. Sorry. My thanks to Josh for overcoming my shoddy photography to bring this site some much needed journalistic credibility.
I enjoyed this posting. Not as much as I enjoyed realizing that you were, in fact, not dead. I was beginning to wonder… As it turns out, I’d forgotten about wheredaveis.com entirely. I got so excited to keep you updated on all the cherokee-love developments, that I forgot about your whole soul-searching, pre-presidential wanderings. Silly me. Hope all is well and that you remain alive.
I found myself in a very similar ticket situation on my first day in Budapest several years ago. Unlike you, Agata and I hadn’t even bought a ticket for the train and we were stopped in the station after detraining. We did our best to plead ignorance but to no avail. We got slapped with a fine of $5 each. I remember thinking in the days that followed that I wished I had run from the scene. No one could’ve caught me. I find myself replaying every encounter with an authority figure in this same fashion.
[...] joined me during my backpacking trip for a week of adventure in Transylvania. In fact he wrote a guest blog about how we inadvertently instigated the Brasov Spring, that beautiful day when the proletariat [...]