Just when you thought it was safe to access social media
again without being subjected to a drunkard’s ramblings about going on holiday:
hello! To quote Jack the Ripper, “A double event this time!” Specifically,
adventures across the Balkans. No, I can’t promise coherence. This one doesn’t
contain the slightest bit about Bulgaria, so if you want that chapter, then you’ll
have to wait. (It’s a double event because it was the same trip. Not the same blog
post. I’d say I was sorry if I meant it.)
 |
| Vlad whom? No, Dracula was around in the 1970s, he was a great actor. |
I had wanted to visit Romania since I was about 11, and read
Dracula for the first time. Now, I find
that Romanian people get a bit upset when you bring up Dracula, and think that
you’re viewing their country as mouldering old castles and vampires, rather
than the (exceptionally) modern republic that it is now. I didn’t give a
massive damn about vampires running around in Whitby, or old men sucking
virgins’ blood, or lunatics eating flies. I like all that, don’t get me wrong,
but the thing that really interested me was when Jonathan Harker was travelling
through the Carpathians, and seeing huge mountains, and valleys, and peasants
wandering around in their national dress. He ate traditional food, and drank
plum brandy, got dragged into their little superstitions, and it blew my mind. For
a fat 11 year old, in a piddley, boring little village in Kent, it was another
world, and one that I wanted to visit.
Anyway, so, as a grown man on a good salary, I checked with
my Romanian friends, who both said that I should visit whenever I liked, and I promptly
booked my flights out for whenever was cheapest. I pooh-pooh’ed the problem of
getting from one end of the country to its diagonal opposite, letting it be a
problem for Future Mungalo. I tried to be clever when booking my return,
though. I noticed that Bucharest, where I ended up, was quite close to
Bulgaria! So I decided to book my flight back from Varna, a port on the Black
Sea (and coincidentally where Van Helsing and Mina and their crew landed when
they went to destroy Dracula towards the end of the novel). “Oh, what the
hell”, I thought, “Why not visit another country? One with a different
alphabet? One in which you’ll be alone, in a seaside resort out of season, and
where nobody knows exactly where you are? What could possibly go wrong?” Also,
it was far cheaper to fly back from there than it was from Bucharest.
Oradea
So, my flight out to Oradea, in Transylvania, left at 7am.
Using public transport, I had the choice of getting to the airport at 12:30am
or at 6.30am, which is admittedly not much of a choice. It turns out that Stanstead
Airport is one of the least user friendly airports in the country, if not the
world. After I’d had a crap and eaten a sandwich, I had completely exhausted
the delights of the place. And I had six hours left to kill. I drifted around,
and the scene that I saw was more or less like downtown Calcutta, with people,
even families, sat on the floor, shivering, and either trying to sleep, or
looking at you with hungry eyes. It turns out that a new (new to me, at least)
Terry Pratchett book is a great way to both kill time until the gate/pubs open
(if you don’t mind giving yourself piles by sitting on the freezing floor), and
ignore the strung-out Italian guy trying to ask you for a cigarette, more and
more desperately, for a solid ten minutes.
Anyway, eventually, after a fitful sleep on the plane, I
woke up to Oradea airport. The scenery looked good, and I was surrounded by a
hubbub of excited Romaneŝte. The sun was out, and I was in
a new country! I stepped off the plane and my heart sank. What I was looking at
was an ex-military airport. I know former military airports quite well, having
spent what felt like a lifetime in Frankfurt (fucking, bastarding, closer to
bloody Luxemburg than sodding Frankfurt) Hahn airport. I can smell a former
military airport like a stroke victim can smell toast. And it was exactly as I
had been expecting. One customs window open, with a sour looking, (possibly
dangerous) man who may or may not have spoken English. He saw me after half an
hour stood in a queue. I knew that I was allowed to pass because he threw my
passport at me, with its cover flung as an afterthought. But it was all okay,
because as soon as I stepped into the departure lounge, my friend Cristie was
waiting for me!
 |
| You can't put lipstick on a pig. A military airport with an awning is still a military airport. |
Cristie and I were friends in Poland, and we’ve been friends
since. It was like we’d never been away. We drove back to his flat, and visited
a supermarket. I remembered that I fucking love Eastern Europe. We visited a
supermarket, and a lot of it stirred up vague recollections in the lizard part
of my brain. The cigarettes were kept in tiny cages over the tills! The checkout
women were rude, and didn’t have any change! I was back!
After we’d eaten, and I had a nap, it was time to visit
Oradea itself. It turned out that I didn’t need a bus ticket to get there. Like
in Poland, tickets are not sold on the bus, so you either need to magic one up
from somewhere, or buy one online, I’m
not Romanian, unfortunately (because if I were, I wouldn’t be about to lose my
right to live, work, and travel freely, in 27 different countries. Thank you,
baby-boomers, racists, and Nigel Farage. I wish you the very worst for your
future, because it won’t be as bad as mine). Because I’m not Romanian, I don’t
have a Romanian ID number, so if anyone checked, then they wouldn’t be able to
give me a fine, because fines are administered by ID number alone, so I would
(presumably) either have been arrested, or told to buy a bloody ticket next
time, hopefully in a language that I don’t speak. Thankfully, none of this
happened, and I was allowed to travel unmolested. It turns out that the centre
of Oradea is one of the best places I’ve ever visited!
 |
| Town Hall (I think) |
The architecture is a bit special. In the main square,
you’ve got the town hall, the Black Eagle palace, the Moon Church, the Greek
Catholic church, and a whole load of other incredible sights, all with the Crisul
Repede river rushing past 100m away. To put things into perspective, I live in
a seaside town that they forgot to close down, and grew up near a seaside town
that they forgot to bomb. In short, I’ve always lived in a world of faded Victorian
architecture and 1950s housing developments. Seeing baroque and neo-gothic
architecture was like a beer after a day working in full sun. Inside the
churches was even better. Romania is an Orthodox country, and they do things
differently to the Catholics, or that bloody C of E that I was indoctrinated
by. The decoration inside the churches that we saw was outstanding, with Jesus
and all the saints drawn in the Byzantine style, picked out in gold leaf, and
watched over by some scary-looking, real life nuns. The Moon Church was
particularly good, as it has an astronomic clock exactly like the (world
famous) one in Prague. I liked the one in Oradea better, because it’s higher
up, and more workmanlike – it isn’t fancy, it’s utilitarian. The Greek Catholic
church, incidentally, arose when the Orthodox community was being persecuted,
so, as I understand it, a few people decided to call themselves Greek
Catholics, and then didn’t really change much, and ended up avoiding being
persecuted. They were also legally allowed to build their churches out of
stone, rather than the wood that the Orthodox were obliged to make theirs from.
Then we paid to walk up a fuck-off huge tower. Yes, you read
that correctly. In specific, a 50m clock tower, that would let us see the
entire city. At first, it seemed great! Nice big wide concrete spiral stairs,
handily placed landings and hand-rails. But the higher up we went, the worse it
got. The stairways got narrower, and more winding, and then they turned into
metal, and the view over the bannister gave you worse and worse vertigo. When
you got past the clock’s pendulum, it became honestly terrifying. But it was
well worth it when we got to the top. The views were something else. We could
see all over the city, with the Carpathian Mountains rising in the distance. But,
unlike my country, the air was clear. We could see for miles, unhampered by
exhaust fumes, general smog, and pollution. It was incredible. In my country,
you’d only be able to see that far in a National Park that had a prevailing
wind. But here, it was no big deal. It was outstanding. Just for the record,
trying to get down narrow, steep, spiral staircases is far worse than getting
up them.
 |
| Beautiful cityscape, Carpathians in background |
Then, it was time for the Citadel. The Oradean Citadel has
been standing since the 11th Century, and has obviously been torn
down, and built up, and generally edited over the past millennium. I almost
didn’t notice it, because its view from the road was blocked by a block of
Soviet-era flats and a huge, 21st Century cathedral. Isn’t that
brilliant? You take a building as old as the town, and then block it in with
horrible high rises and a brand new cathedral. Anyway, the Citadel is
brilliant. The moat used to be full of thermal water, which made the Mongol
invaders (who tried to wait until it froze in winter) go home bored, or
something. Since then, it’s been assaulted by the Austro-Hungarians, the
Ottomans, some peasants, and Napoleon. The citadel is currently a huge, white,
pentagonal building, which is well worth the walk. There are no suitable places
to urinate anywhere near it, especially for tourists, and it is deeply frowned
upon to pee anywhere near it. I didn’t pee there, it’s not true, it is
bullshit. I did not pee there, I did not… Oh hai, reader! Don’t even ask.
On the way back, we saw a tram! It was like seeing an old
friend. I loved travelling on them every day in Poland. It was exciting. Will
there be a seat? Will I be next to a pissy old tramp, an attractive young
student, or a nun of indeterminate yet advanced age? Fuck me, I’d missed trams.
We almost ran to catch it, but it turned out that this was not a well tram. It
limped along, making metal-on-metal screeching noises, and would then give out
a huge amount of sparks from somewhere underneath, jerk away at a reasonable
speed for about ten metres, and then go back to making horrifying noises. Not
catching that tram is my only regret from Oradea. It looked exciting.
Anyway, more by accident than design, I had ended up in
Oradea on Hungarian National Day! Oradea used to be part of Hungary, and has a
huge Hungarian population. Quite a few of them were dancing traditional dances
in the city centre. Those that weren’t Hungarian I met when we went out drinking
that night. Even those who weren’t of any kind of Hungarian stock were
celebrating, probably because they knew a Hungarian, or their aunt by marriage
is Hungarian, or they just wanted to celebrate something. I work with a lady
from Hungary, so I allowed myself to join in on the celebrations. And it was
incredible! I drank a lot of beer, I met some Romanians, I met some Hungarians,
I met a few who were pretending to be one or the other. I met a university
lecturer in Orthodox Christianity, the curator of a museum, and a whole bunch
of wonderful people. And then I fell asleep on a table because I had slept only
on the 3 hour flight, and I usually like 9 hours at the bare minimum. One of my
last memories was adding water to my whiskey (as is traditional in Scotland,
where the beverage came from), and one guy’s eyes nearly popping out of his head.
“Your ways are not our ways!” as Dracula himself put it.
 |
| Quite a nice museum |
The next day, or the day after, Cristie and I wandered
around the city with his brother. (My memories are hazy.) It was at that point
that I saw how absurdly well connected Cristie was with everyone. If we weren’t
stopping to talk to the Head of Medicine at the university or whatever, then we
were going to the theatre to pick up some free tickets for his mum. He was like
a Mafia Don or something. It was incredible. I knew that it was something else
when he took me to the Vivarium in the new museum, which wasn’t even open to
the public. They had the lot! Hedgehogs, axolotls, piranhas, tarantulas,
quails, and a snake that only ate insects! Let me tell you this: there is
nothing eerier, nor more exciting, than being in a museum of any kind which is
not open to the public. The lights are dimmed, but you can do anything, go
where you like, whatever! If you’re not supposed to be somewhere, then it’s
generally only exciting for that very reason, but I did get to see the hedgehog
from a different angle, before any member of the public saw it from the proper
angle, which I suppose is always a talking point. Also, I could have put my
fingers in the piranha tank, but I figured that both my mum and fiancée would have gone
ape if I had.
Incidentally, in the bit that was open, the museum had an
interactive Leonardo da Vinci exhibition. This next bit is even less funny than
the rest of this blog, but my god, that man had a mind! If he’d been around
during the age of nuclear weapons, we’d either be dead or at complete peace,
considering just how brilliant he was. Most of the exhibitions were taken from
doodles in his margins, but they were brilliant! What a man. Just google them.
Flying machines, weaponry that wouldn’t be invented for half a century,
pendulums, mining tools… outstanding.
Train
After that, I bought two bottles of Romanian wine, and got
ready to leave. The rain had set in. I was ready for my 14 hour train journey
across Romania! It was no longer Future Mungo’s problem, but Present Mungo’s. Unfortunately,
it was in the dark, so I didn’t have a chance to look out of the window (to see
all the wonders that Jonathan Harker saw, of course), but Cristie had found me
the service with a sleeper carriage. I am eternally grateful that he did,
because I was in a warm, snug little room, with a load of beds in the walls, a
little window, and a big sign telling me not to smoke anywhere on the train, or
I would be shot, or some such unpleasantness. In an unintentional parallel to Dracula, I had a “small flask of the
plum brandy of the country” to drink, made by Cristie’s father. It’s called palinka, and I both love it and hate it
in equal measure. I’ve drunk palinka on
many occasions. The first time was on my very first day at university, when a
mad Hungarian got me to drink some of hers. It knocked me dead then, and has
always done the same since then. It’s great value: you drink a shot, and you
can still taste it the next morning. The more you drink, the easier it gets.
The very first day I met Cristie, he got me to drink a shot of it, and roared
in triumph when I did. Cristie’s
father’s palinka has always been
dangerous, but it is wonderful stuff. My compliments to the chef! You know it’s
good when your memory of one night is drinking it, falling down the stairs, and
then an utter blank.
 |
| My room! The bit on the left is the other bed. |
On the train, I drank the red wine, and a mouthful or two of
the palinka when we got to the first
stop – I think Timisoara, but I’m not sure. I popped out for a smoke, seeing as
you can smoke on Romanian platforms (I would like to put a big FUCK YOU in,
especially for the guy in the booth in Woking at 2am, who cussed me out over
the tannoy in 2012 for smoking basically on the tracks, in a deserted station.
I hope your role has given you a lot of joy over the years, you absolute
jobsworth), and then realised that, after halfway through my wine menu for my
evening, that I wouldn’t be able to smoke for… a while. There was a smoke alarm
in the sleeper car. I know this, because it was staring me out. I paced the
train frantically, and then eventually didn’t
notice a smoke alarm in the toilet. It was brilliant. It was like a free bar. I
drank a bit more palinka, laid in bed
with a book, and then fancied a cigarette. Scurrying down to the khazi, I
opened the tiny window, hanging my hand (and cigarette) out exactly as I had
been told to never do from a moving train, and started smoking, blowing the
smoke out into the freezing, damp wind whipping past the window. Halfway
through my cigarette, the train started to slow. Panicking, I chucked my fag
out, and ran into my bunk to look innocuous, probably holding my book upside
down. It turned out that this was another stop – also potentially Timisoara –
and I could smoke there! I rolled another, and ended up talking to the guard
and a passenger. The passenger was explicit that I should not, under any
circumstances, smoke on-board. He laughed as he said that, and added that it
would cost me 50 lei to find out from
the guard where to smoke. Do you think I paid him? No. This was a holiday on a
budget, and why pay for cheat codes when you can find them out manually?
I went back to bed with the palinka and the new Pratchett that I had carefully purchased from
an Aladdin’s cave of books in Brighton, and before I knew it, we were in
another town. I was drunk enough to enjoy the unique feeling of being in bed in
a train station. I lay there with my book, and looked through the window at the
passers-by, with the blankets up to my chin to deflect the steely glares. And
then someone joined me.
 |
| It would have been nice to be able to see what was out of the window |
He was wonderful. He spoke fluent English, and we discussed
many things. I can’t remember most of them, because I was pissed. I do
distinctly recall two things: the first is telling him that I was happy to
smoke out of the window in the pisser, and his look of fear both when I left
and returned. The second is his reaction to me opening the second bottle of
wine: “wow! You’re thirsty tonight!” He refused the palinka, saying that he didn’t drink it by choice. He did once
shout at me for leaving my baggage unattended though, telling me that it wasn’t
safe. Like I say, he was an excellent man to be sharing with, but I had my passport
and money with me, and if anyone wanted to rob a stranger’s bag for an EU/UK
adaptor, some socks, a t-shirt, and a few books, then I would be happy to just
give them to the thief, if he was willing to ask. But seriously, it was a bit
of luck that I was with him, because he woke me up ten minutes before we hit
Bucharest. He cared, and if you’re reading this: hope you’re okay. Thanks for
keeping an eye on me. Good luck with everything you do.
Bucharest
Halfway down the second bottle of wine of my journey, I had
received a message, telling me where to wait for my friend Clau in Bucharest
(also a friend from Poland with whom I had stayed in touch). I had not charged
my phone, so I woke up with the vague idea that I should meet him under some
kind of sign. I also woke up so hungover that I couldn’t speak, or unglue my
lips from my teeth. I felt like death. I somehow bought a Fanta from a kiosk,
and then walked out of the station, only to be confronted by a big billboard! I
was also confronted by an Arctic wind. I stood under that big billboard for 20
minutes, in a freezing, terrifying, alien, capital city, before venturing back
into the station to charge my phone and check on my friend. It turned out that
I was (and still am) a useless waste of space, because he meant the big
billboard by the McDonalds in the station (very hard to miss), and had been
waiting for about an hour.
 |
| View from the flat window |
We got an Uber to his flat, and it was like being in a
timewarp. He and his partner Teo had had a flat together in Poland when we were
all living there, and had had me and my flatmates over for a special,
home-cooked Easter dinner. At that time, they had been absolutely brilliant
hosts. We had turned up with about six bottles of wine (one, incidentally,
called Blood of Dracula, and they
hadn’t minded a bit). We got hideously drunk, and went home, extremely drunk on
wine and full of great food. Arriving there was like a timewarp, because it was
like I’d never left that night. They were both still exceptional hosts, and it
was like I had never left, and had instead woken up to the hangover from that
Easter meal. I may as well have just passed out on the sofa, considering how
much things had changed.
 |
| Here's a photo that doesn't do this church justice |
I woke up some hours later, feeling much better. It was time
to see Bucharest! It turned out that I’d brought the weather with me. Oradea
had started out sunny, but had eventually got colder and wetter. By the time I
woke up, Bucharest was covered in snow. Now, I was prepared for South Eastern
Europe. ‘Southern Europe has sun, and it hardly ever snows’, was my logic. I
did not think to question why it was that the Romanian national drink wasn’t
beer or wine (which they make admirably), but rather a 70% brandy designed to
keep you warm. I very quickly found out, that afternoon. It was freezing cold,
with a kind of compacted snow and ice combo underfoot, which is absolutely
lethal when you’re wearing tennis shoes, as Clau called them. They did nothing
to protect my feet from the cold, and had absolutely no purchase on the ground.
But man, it was worth walking around, just to see the place.
 |
| It's a remarkable building |
The order in which we saw things has kind of blended in
together. But rest assured, I did see some incredible stuff. By far and away
the best was the Romanian Palace of Parliaments. Oh boy, but that blew my mind.
It’s not a particularly beautiful building, although it has a kind of distant,
bleak handsomeness about it, like Morrissey, or the Yorkshire Moors. But it’s
fucking huge! It’s the biggest administrative building in the world. It has
three museums, the Romanian Senate and the House of Deputies, as well as a
conference centre. Even so, 70% of it is empty. The heating and lighting bill
costs as much every year as that of a fair-sized city. 400 rooms of its 1100
are used. Even looking at it in person, it’s hard to understand the real scale
of it. It’s like it’s further away than it is. And that’s just the outside,
it’s got a nuclear bunker underneath it, along with seven other subterranean
levels. It was constructed by Ceausescu at a time when Romania was bitterly in
debt, and stands as a monument to his mad ideas and mismanagement of a great
country. He modelled his renovations of Bucharest on Pyongyang, for crying out
loud! He demolished a whole neighbourhood to make room for the Palace, and
another one for the boulevard that leads up to it, just to emphasise the
building’s majesty. We didn’t go inside, but just the outside was something
else, it really was.
 |
| Not a miners' strike in sight |
The Hall of Records (I wish I’d found a way to sneak in and
enter myself as a 1992 birth to Romanian parents so that I could escape the
horrific, xenophobic mess that my country has become, but it was a Sunday, and
the Hall was shut) is just over the road. So is the Ministry of Intelligence,
if I remember correctly. Walking around Bucharest, I found that, amongst the
Communist architecture, there are some incredible sights. For one thing, the
Romanian National Bank is a wonderful sight, and I’m one of the only
non-Romanians that I know that has seen the oldest glass dome in the whole
country. It’s on top of a building (that could be a museum, but I’m not 100%
sure). One of my favourites was the Athaneum. Constructed in a kind of
neo-Classical way, it houses a grand entryway and a big auditorium. It’s also
constructed entirely of marble inside. In fact, two kinds of marble. One is
Romanian, and the other is Italian. But the best bit is inside the auditorium
itself. Around the entire ceiling is a painting showing the proudest moments in
Romanian history. It was outstanding, even if you don’t know much about the
people who are portrayed in it. We couldn’t do it in the UK. In my country, it
would literally be the Battle of Agincourt (probably our proudest moment),
syphilitic Henry VIII telling the Pope to get bent so that he could chase pussy
without being excommunicated, a bunch of fishermen having to rescue our entire
army from Northern France because we fucked up on a frankly alarming scale,
Winston Churchill selling out Poland to the Soviets like a gangster, and us
winning a war with a far-flung nation for some cold draughty islands that
nobody but penguins lives on, so that a mad, evil, despotic old bitch could get
a boost in the polls. Bonus points for the Queen’s uncle hanging out with
Hitler, and thoroughly enjoying himself.
 |
| Glass dome |
 |
| Here's the statue on a nicer day |
To be fair, that area of Bucharest also has the worst statue
I’d ever seen. It’s supposedly called the Memorial of Rebirth. To give you an
idea, I Googled “Bucharest potato statue” to find more about it, and Google
gave me exactly what I wanted to needed on the very first hit. It looks like a
potato on a big spike. If you prefer, it could also look like an olive on a
cocktail on a stick, or a testicle on a skewer. It’s supposed to represent
those 1500 people who died during the Romanian Revolution in 1990, but you’d
have to be told. Everyone hates it, to the extent that it needs guarding round
the clock, to protect it from vandalism. Even the Mayor of Bucharest said that
he hated it and didn’t understand the symbolism. It was drawn up by someone who
designed chairs and lamps, rather than a proper sculptor. But even that statue is
so shit that it’s endearing. It’s the sculpture equivalent of The Room or Bob
Dylan’s voice. I don’t even think the guards like it much, seeing as it was
vandalised in 2012, by someone who somehow threw some red paint on it so that
it looked like the potato was bleeding. It hasn’t been cleaned off yet, so
presumably, the consensus is that the paint improved it. Also, that potato is
very high up its skewer, so I have no idea how the vandals managed to do it
without the guards noticing this ladder. I suppose it’s valid for that alone. I
thought it was supposed to be
bleeding.
After going to see the Arc of Triumph, we ended up walking
through a huge park, still in the snow and ice, a lot of it virginal. It seemed
like a park that you couldn’t escape from. It was huge. I can’t begin to
describe the scale of it. I wasn’t entirely sure why it was that we were
walking through it, and then we got there. Five years previously, on some
drunken night in Poland, I had made Teo promise to take me to the Kretzelescu
Palace when I finally got round to visiting Bucharest. I must have forgotten by
the time I woke up, but she didn’t. She remembered, and took me there. I tell
you, all my Romanian friends are incredible. When she showed me the Kretzelescu
Palace on her phone, I thought it was one of the most beautiful buildings I had
ever seen (so much so that I forgot the entire exchange, and the building’s
existence). And it was even better in person, especially in the snow. I remembered
why I wanted to see it. There are all sorts of beautiful buildings hidden away
in Bucharest. Some of them are Orthodox Churches, some are administrative buildings,
some are palaces, but they’re all absolutely beautiful. I have a weakness for
Romanian architecture, probably because it’s a Romanian that got me interested
in architecture in the first place (thank you Cristie, love you man <3). I
tell you, if I could see the Kretzelescu Palace very day, I probably would.
 |
| Not my photo. Watermark may be a a giveaway |
Then we went to a little coffee bar that sold beer (they
generally do, there). The coffee and beer weren’t anything hugely special, but I
saw a poster that I would have thought I had hallucinated if I hadn’t taken a
picture of it. It was a poster advertising КИНО!
Specifically, a КИНО covers band,
which had played there in 2013. If you don’t know who КИНО are, then I will sound like a horrific hipster. КИНО are a Russian band from the mid to
late 1980s that I fell absolutely madly in love with when I was about 15. I have
never met anyone else who actually liked them. Even the Russian people that I’ve
met only say that their dads like КИНО. And
then there they were, in a bar in Bucharest, being approximated by a covers
band. If the tram was like an old friend, seeing that poster was like seeing an
imaginary friend. Here’s a link or two to my favourite КИНО songs, if anyone is still reading.
 |
| He died in 1990, so I don't even get a chance to visit Russia to see him live |
On the last night, we walked what felt like miles through the snow
to visit a cat café! They’re advertised on Facebook sometimes, and I have always
wanted to visit one. A big warm room, full of cats? I’d walk through broken
glass to visit one of those, that’s actually my idea of heaven. I wouldn’t
suggest that you start at the one that we visited in Bucharest. I won’t even
dignify it with a name-drop in here. Now, maybe I’m biased, but I would think that,
if you were to open a cat café, you’d be sure to look after the animals
properly. Secondarily, you’d want to choose cats with the right personality to
enjoy being around a load of strangers all the time. Lastly, as a café, you’d
expect the drinks to be good, or at least passable. This one managed none of
those things. It did, however, have an overpowering smell of cat piss. Now, I won’t
say that the kitty cats were mistreated. I wouldn’t like to think such a thing.
But they were all skinny as rakes, seemed nervous, and were extremely unwilling
to interact with humans. Also, the beer they served me wasn’t particularly
brilliant, and neither was the hot chocolate, by all accounts. 2/10, would not
recommend to anyone.
And then I had to leave. I went on to Bulgaria, and this post is
already much too long to tell that tale. I left Bucharest at 4am or somesuch
with a heavy heart. I was wearing Clau’s sweater that he was kind enough to ‘lend’
me.
 |
| Here's a TripAdvisor certificate, hung over the fire escape plan. It tickled me at the time. |
How will I leave this post? A word of wisdom. If someone’s
mum cooks for you, then eat it, if only through politeness. If someone’s mama cooks for you, you’d best make sure
that you’re in the front of the queue when the food is coming out. Use your
elbows, if you must. If someone is called mama,
their food will be outstanding. Even if it’s something that you don’t usually
like, if the cook is called mama by
anyone, then you’ll be in for a treat.
NB: Big thanks to Cristie, his mum, his brother, his father
(for the palinka), Cristian, and everyone else I met in Oradea, for making me
feel so welcome. Obviously, a big shout out to Clau and Teo for looking after
me, showing me such awesome things, and generally making my stay there a treat.
Love you guys <3
