We'd been through a station but we didn't trust train people. I said we should hide in the woods until morning and then get another train. We went to the woods. We were wandering all over. John was concussed and so wasn't really in control. We heard dogs barking. He thought they were wild dogs. I thought maybe the police had set the dogs on us thinking we were Polish people crossing the border. John climbed a tree. I said this wouldn't save us and we went back to the line. We looked at some carriages for transporting stuff and thought about sleeping there but John was in a bad way so we went back to the station.
(clock foward 1 hr)
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The station master was very surprised to see us. He was 23 and called Sorree. He had short straight dark clean hair, and a tidy guard's uniform. However he also had trainers on. We told him that we'd jumped off the train, he gathered that it was the number 26. He took John to a well for a wash. It was a virtually dry hole with a bucket that he lowered a long way down and eventually came up with just a few drops of water. While they were there I drank water out of his coke bottle. It wasn't very nice. He made me a cup of coffee. He used a drop of water from the coke bottle to wash the only cup with his finger. He poured water into a small jug and boiled it on the only ring. 10 minutes or so later he poured the water into the cup with a few coffee grains. He put some damp sugar in. It was horrible but necessary. I shared it with John. Later John drank out of the bottle explaining we'd had so many injections before we came away that we were immune to everything. He was wrong. Sorree made a phone call. I asked if it was the police and he said it was the local one. I don't think it was. Sorree went away and came back with two large 40 year old women and two kids. One kid (age 14), Catalin gave us his name and ddress to write to him in English. First he gave the station 'Birzava, Arad, Romania' and another name (his brother I think, who was the other kid). Then he changed it and gave us a different address. One woman dressed John's head wound. She spoke some English so I spoke to her and explained the situation. They were shocked. Catalin spoke French so John spoke to him (he was much better at French than John. Well John disputes this. The kid spoke more fluently but didn't have as good a vocabulary). They went away and came back with food. More stodgy bread and green peppers. There was nice cold battered meat. And some cheese I think but John ate that. He said it was more mild stuff like they gave us at the police station. They went away and came back with more. Mashed beans, that tasted a bit like baked beans. John said we needed to eat. Just to ignore the taste and ram it down. He tasted the stuff which the woman called bacon. He amused himself by telling me that it was delicious and to eat it. It turned to be lard and was horrible. Now and again people offered John the hos- pital but he declined it. He talked to the boy about what to do next. The boy said it would be 'prudent' to travel by day and 'plus plus prudent' to get an aeroplane. John was scared of planes, but was rather concerned at the emphasis the boy put on saying don't catch trains. A lot of people over the next few days blamed it on gypsies, saying avoid people with dark skin but actually I think that most of the trouble we had was with lighter skinned people. Sorree said that he would travel with us to Sumeria the following day and put us on the train to Bucharest. He told us to sleep at the table. John lay on the table leaving me nowhere to sleep. Sorree directed me to the waiting room. John and I both went in there and slept on the benches. Sorree put the light off.
At about 04:00 people arrived. They bought train tickets and went out. I went to the toilet. Well I went to the place that was called the toilet but it was just four stainless steel walls with a horrific smell and a mad screeching cat inside, so I went against the wall. More people arrived. One was in a train outfit with his wife. He didn't leave. He slept in the waiting room. I thought we'd probably be safe there with him. More people arrived. I tried to stay awake but found it dif- ficult. John says that he stayed awake. At about 05:30 we went back into the office and slept there. Sorree just ignored us. He had been very chatty before but now he wasn't. (Actually it wasn't 05:30 it was 06:30, I hadn't realised I should have put my watch forward when we entered Romania.)
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When we awoke again there were a few people around. There was one guy who was big, aged about 40 in a shirt and jacket walking up and down outside the door. (I won- dered why, in such hot weather, everyone wore trousers. It turns out that it's because of the mosquitos. I got a lot of bites. Sorree spent a lot of time hitting them). There was another guy who immediately looked like a thug. He was introduced to us as an electrical engineer. Everyone seemed to look to him for guidance. He and Sorree talked a lot in Romanian. We asked Sorree what they were saying, but the guy told him not to say. We often tried to get the conversation around to how we were going to get from Sumeria to Bucharest but they just wanted to talk about British pop music. We went out to the line and found my glasses case and talked about whether we felt safe. We didn't. Catilin arrived. The electrician stopped him and talked to him. They looked at us. After that Catilin, who we'd talked to for ages the previous night and got on really well with, refused to acknowledge us. His brother was wearing expensive western cycling shorts.
At 09:30 Sorree started running around packing up. I was confused as I thought we were an hour early. the train arrived. We went to get it. I fell over as my legs were shaking with fear and weakness. No-one came to my aid. We got onto the train. We were taken to the top front deck of the double deck train, by Sorree. We met his friends. A mad man who thought he was the ticket col- lector. Another train man. Now and again they went out for a smoke. John kept drifting off to sleep. He said the previous night that he kept passing out and seeing double. I spoke to Sorree about his upbringing. He'd been to school, university and train school. He was 23 and had been a signal operator for a year. We talked a lot about what we saw out of the window too. The fact that all the crops were dead. Everything was dry as there'd been no rain for weeks. This year like the last had yielded no crops. A big friend of his appeared who hardly spoke English. He had hands that looked as though they'd been put in a vat of boiling oil. Sorree told our story to him, as he did to many people. They were inter- ested in our money. It was difficult as we wanted to buy someone to escort us to Bucharest but we didn't want them to think we had enough money to mug us for. The mate tried to buy some English money from us. I offered a travellers cheque but John didn't want to rip them off as they wouldn't be able to use it. We needed some Romanian money for the taxi otherwise we'd be stuck at Bucherest station at night. We asked them if they knew anyone who could escort us. Sorree and his mate had a big argument. Sorree said that he had to go back to work so couldn't he take us. The mate told him he could say he was ill, or swap shifts or something, and take us to a Bureau de Change and then we could pay him. Then they changed the subject. As the man left they had the same row again.
Next we met the real ticket collector. At the next stop they bought a couple of melons and fed us. Next we met the two people sitting opposite. They had a political debate. They dismissed one of them by saying that he was a socialist. The debate was basically about whether it was better now that Ceaucescu was dead. It happened two years earlier. But his brother is still alive running the country from the luxury of prison and nothing much has changed. I got talking to the guy sitting opposite this one. He spoke pretty good English. They were all train engineers. A few conversations happened together. I told this guy that we wanted a bodyguard, to sort of get him to persuade Sorree. It appeared that Sorree had decided to take us. Then we were told the ticket man would take us. We'd have to stay at his house and go the next day though. The guy I was talking to said that that was just wasting time. That we'd be getting there when it was still light (probably true if we got the train half an hour earlier and now the clocks had changed) and that the taxi drivers were OK if you didn't go with a gypsy, that there was a police station there, it was a well lit safe place and when you arrived there there were four big hotels right in front of you as you walked out of the station. A room would cost about 800 lei. He said the ticket conductor was taking an indirect route there. We were just about persuaded. Encouraged by this guy who seemed to understand exchange rates Sorree swapped our &Lsterling.5 with 400 lei of his so that we could catch a taxi. It later transpired that the exchange rate is 700 lei =&Lsterling.1 and that I'd given him a couple of weeks wages. Still he might have being doing us a favour giving us as much as he could for as little as we could give him.
As we got off the train at Sumeria we were introduced to a 31 yr old woman engineer named Piloiu. She said some- thing like 'I may be a woman but I'm still a good engi- neer'. Sorree said she would take us to Bucharest. He said good-bye. Corina took us to the station master who didn't have anything for John's head. He looked at our Interrail tickets and made a phone call. The only time our tickets were questioned. But I think we still needed a reservation. He gave us two proper tickets. Corina took us to the works canteen. She bought us virtually half a loaf of bread each, some soup, and some more beans of the flavour we'd had the previous night. I can't remember what else but it was quite a lot and we didn't have time to finish it. She told us about herself. I think John asked her his standard question about how the Olympics were going. She gave us her address and asked us to send her a telegram to say we'd arrived safely. The 'accelerata' train arrived. She said that she wasn't coming with us, even though earlier she'd said she would if we wanted her to and we'd said we did. She took us through the train to the platform and down to our car- riage. She came onto the train and told us which were our seats. We said good-bye.
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| Our carriage contained one man and three women. The man and his wife were George (actually Constantin but he asked us to call him George because, I think, he thought it was a good English name that we could say and remember) and Goby (Gabriela) from Brasov. The girl was a medical student aged about 22 I think, called Diana who was from Orsova. She had tied back long blonde hair and quite western summer clothes. She had some English (Polish language) books with her. |
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