Well, I’ll try to keep this to just the highlights – but I just returned from an AMAZING trip so I could be blogging in installments.
It all began on a Tuesday afternoon –thankfully my students keep me informed of things, because the other teachers certainly don’t. Tuesday the 22nd we had a performance at school, and everyone was to wear their uniforms (sailor shirts and skirts, suits for boys). I had to dress “smart” for the day as well. I was bummed by this because I wanted to head to the train station directly after school. The performance was a reenactment of sorts of the 1956 revolution that was being celebrated (memorialized?) the next day. It was interesting in every way possible… first of all – the fact that they are celebrating the time that the Russians invaded, not when they left, is interesting to me. The performance started with the national anthem, which is possibly the most depressing song I have ever heard in my life. I was told later that it is more of a prayer (because their country needs all the help they can get?) and that makes more sense, but it certainly doesn’t get people fired up. Then, the 11th grade class performed their play of the invasion. It was fairly theatrical, there were special theater lights and a set and everything, but there were also more guns than I have ever seen in a school performance. There were machine guns, pistols – anything you could imagine, to mimic the Russians invading. It was interesting to see all the violence with the sounds and such. One of my students translated as best she could for me – it was interesting.
After the performance, there was a presentation of winners of an art contest. The pieces were to commemorate the invasion – with winners in several categories. The top winners, got a cake- a cake that they had to share with their class. Zsófi (one of my 9th grade students) won and had a lovely cake that she shared with all of her classmates. Interesting prize, but appreciated by the students. Afterwards we had 30 minute classes and actually got done with school early. I had time to get home, change, grab my things and head to the train station. Unfortunately I almost missed my train because Boo decided to pee on the floor while I was standing there. She’s got a mind of her own – but I panicked briefly, as I had two 9th grade girls coming to take care of her, and they didn’t deal well with cats peeing.
At any rate, I got to the train station (with a TON of luggage) and made it to the train. I rode to Budapest with some of my students and we chatted about lots of things on the way – sweet girls!
In Budapest, I met up with Megan, Jake and Jacob and we headed to our train. 13 hours to Bucharest, Romania… with a stop to pick up Vivvi on the way. We were very confused about the seating since Jake and Jacob had a sleeper car, Megan and I did not, we had to switch trains before getting to Sofia, and we weren’t sure what exactly was going on. We settled in on the train, and with so many hours ahead of us, we didn’t know where to start.
About three hours later, we picked up Vivvi near her home town, and prepared for the duration of our first train ride. It was interesting since it was an open train, you had to be mindful of your belongings at all times. Especially when strange Romanians named Danny come on the scene. He heard us speaking English and gave me a card for some Kiwanis group from Ohio and told me to say hello to them. He hovered around our group telling us about how he lives in a “scary movie” and pulled a bunch of random things out of his “mailbox” to show us. At one point in the night, he was approached for not having the appropriate ticket and not enough money and was kicked off the train… phew – we could finally relax.
The next morning we arrived in Bucharest, Romania. We were happy – not only to get off the train, but to be able to explore the capital of Romania. We had to deal with some ticket issues, and buy seat reservations for the rest of the trip so those things happened first. None of us had ever been there, so we stored our bags, and set out to explore. We didn’t see a whole lot. Bucharest seems to have been left behind in any sort of restoration projects from the recent past. There were bombed out buildings right next to functioning ones. It just seemed run down and not real clean. We weren’t all that impressed – except for the Snack Attack place that we found. Excellent food and drinks – a welcome treat. Romania had a lot of trash along the roads (at least this part did) and seemed at first glance to be more poor than Hungary. We liked the Bulgarian countryside much better than Romania.
We boarded our train to Sofia for another lengthy ride. I don’t remember how long it took, but we had to go through Romania to Bulgaria – it wasn’t quick at all. Each time we crossed a border, we needed to brandish our passports, tickets and be alert enough for the ticket checker to connect all three parts. When we crossed into Bulgaria, we had a border patrol guy who had a really long pinky finger – we called him crack hands (long nail to be able to gather the crack and snort it).
In Sofia, we arrived at 10:30pm and immediately went to the international ticket office to inquire about tickets to Istanbul. We went through a circus of events changing money, buying tickets, using the ATM, covering the costs of tickets – and we decided that we were going to leave three days later at 7:15. Good – we were going to be able to make it to Istanbul!!
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