Misery Loves Company
Welcome to my random musings about the world, on a weekly-to-occasional basis.
Where we are: We’re still in Prague. Our luggage is still in Vienna. I’m enjoying this beautiful, historic, and well-preserved city very much, in spite of the cheap replacement bra I’m wearing.
Misery Loves Company
Lest you think I’m always flexible and laid-back when things go sideways, let me set the record straight.
Under the right circumstances, I can rival a toddler in need of a nap. And now we know just what those circumstances are.
For reasons that I fail to understand, when we were in Romania a couple of weeks ago, the train we took from Sighisoara (adorable little tourist town, one of the top tourist draws in the country) to Bucharest (the capital) didn’t have a first class car. It’s a five and half hour ride, and seems like a significant route; you’d expect it to be well-serviced, with plenty of options—like first class.
But no. Princess spent two weeks dreading this loooong ride in second class. She knew what was coming, and what was coming was no air conditioning.
I started watching the weather forecast a week out (remember that heat wave across Europe?). The high in Bucharest the day of our train ride was 104.
The worst thing, I think, was the anticipation.
The second worst thing was the fact that the train was two and a half hours late arriving in Sighisoara. We had checked out of our hotel, so we were stuck at the hot, grubby, uncomfortable train station. By my calculations, with the new arrival time, IF the journey went smoothly, we’d arrive in Bucharest around 7pm. We had originally planned to just wait and eat a late lunch in the city, but when I realized that wouldn’t be till evening, I kind of flipped out.
A Lisa flip-out involves a lot of cursing, a lot of stomping around, and a lot of extremely curt interactions with strangers who really don’t deserve my wrath. It wasn’t as if the woman at the ticket desk could make the train arrive any faster. [At the moment of this writing, I still reserve the right to be nasty to the people at Austrian Airlines, who have been holding our luggage hostage for 6 days now. They definitely deserve my wrath.]
Then I picked a fight with my long-suffering husband, because clearly someone needed to DO something. Finally, with his encouragement, I left, and stomped around the industrial wasteland of the train station, looking for some kind of food and trying to calm down. The only thing I found was the bus station, which looked even less appealing.
The blazing sun finally clarified my thoughts enough that I could make sense of my melt-down, and think about problem-solving. I wanted three things: ice, caffeine, and food to eat on the train. I was afraid the heat on the train was going to leave me with very little tolerance for hunger.
I figured out how to check our bags at the station, and we took a taxi back into the center, where we had iced coffees, used a nice clean toilet, and bought several Romanian pastries for the ride—basically pretzels with sweet fillings.
And let me just say: it was a good thing we did. If I’d been hangry on top of everything else, things might have gotten ugly indeed. It turned out there was intermittent AC on the train, but it only worked sometimes, and then not very well. The window in our compartment wouldn’t open, so when the AC was off, we (and our stoic Romanian compartment-mates) just stewed. I spent a lot of time standing in the passage, because at least those windows were open.
Would I go to Sighisoara again? Sure—it’s a beautiful, well-preserved walled medieval village. But I’d rent a car and drive from Bucharest. And I probably wouldn’t go in July.
After we had survived and stepped off the train into the oppressive heat of Bucharest, Lee (who prides himself on remaining calm—I’m pretty sure it’s just to annoy me when I’m losing my shit) said, “That is just not a reasonable way to transport humans.”
At least I wasn’t the only one who was miserable.
Take care,
Lisa
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