Vampire Diaries

Cath was in Bucharest (Romania) carrying out market research. A week later she’d be doing the same again, this time in Poland. In between she’d booked a week’s leave and I was coming to join her for an eastern adventure.

We’d rented a place in Brasov (capital of Transylvania) and this late birthday treat (for me) was going to include a trip to Bran Castle (Dracula’s home) for Hallowe’en. But first we had a weekend in Bucharest. Cath had a room at the Hilton hotel (paid for by her employers) and I was going to join her incognito as her guest. A clandestine rendezvous in Eastern Europe gave off cold war spy vibes, but obviously I would’ve made the world’s worse spy.

For my sins (and the sake of my wallet) I was flying out of Luton airport with Whizz airlines, a Polish cut price air carrier. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but what I got was a three hour flight delay. This was bad news as we’d arranged a meeting point in advance outside the Hilton for a specific time. I couldn’t text to say I was delayed (no international roaming etc. back then), so I did the best I could which was to purchase some internet time at the airport and email to say I was unavoidably delayed.

The flight was uneventful and after I’d cleared customs and whatever, I got a taxi to take me to the hotel. Clearly Cath was not waiting outside for my arrival. I entered the lobby and hoped there might be an easy way to find her whilst retaining my incognito status. There was not. The hotel happened to be celebrating its ten year anniversary that night and as I wandered trying to find my bearings and look inconspicuous, I found myself in a dining area filled with smartly dressed guests who were being serenaded by a passable Freddie Mercury impersonator. I had on jeans, a coat and a battered holdall slung over my shoulder.

I was the sore thumb. I did stick out.

The dining room was a grand affair (the actual building dated back to 1914) but also turned out to be a dead end. I retreated back to the lobby and decided to ask the receptionist if they could put in a call to Cath for me. There proved to be a bit of a language barrier and I’m not sure they viewed me as a priority when other better dressed and more legitimate guests were also seeking assistance. Eventually someone took pity on me and/ or understood my request. Cath’s room was located and a call made. The receptionist, professionally disinterested in my plight, regretted to inform me that there had been no answer.

I was stuck.

At this point I had to contemplate my options. I was alone in a foreign speaking country for the first time in my life. It was late at night (thanks to the three hour delay) and I potentially had nowhere to stay. It was doubtful the Hilton had spare rooms on this particular night and it was even more doubtful that I could afford to book one. Bucharest is a big city, but I didn’t fancy trying to negotiate it in the dark with little more than a flimsy copy of the Lonely Planet to guide me.

I slunk into the furthest corner of the lobby, hoping no one would come and evict me, and managed to kill a few minutes (they seemed like hours) in a general mess of indecision. Just as I was about to set out and throw myself on the mercy of the city, Cath emerged from an elevator discreetly stationed near to but opposite the reception desk. Saved by the bell (or in this case the belle). She hadn’t seen my email and had begun to assume I wasn’t coming. She’d been prowling the floor above by the lifts in the hope of spotting me (unaware that I’d be too dumb to find the lifts) and had therefore missed the call made to her room by the receptionist.

All’s well that ends well. Our stay (mine unpaid for) lasted only the one night. Cath’s experiences in Bucharest had left her wanting to exit the city as soon as possible. Apparently on day one her and her interpreter (a colleague from her office in Montreal who was also a Romanian ex-pat) had been turfed out of their taxi and abandoned on the side of a busy highway with no obvious means of getting back to the city. There had been other events that had left her with a poor impression of the place and while I’d been mildly curious to explore this ‘Paris of the east’, I was happy to expedite our transfer to the quieter realms of Transylvania.

The accommodation we’d booked were luckily able to take us a day early and so it was that we set off for the central train station in Bucharest early the next morning. Romania may have come a long way from its communist past, but you definitely still got a sense of it in places. Our train was old enough to have operated through Ceausescu times. As we took our seats, we watched as an elderly woman joined our carriage with an unfeasibly large and disparate array of luggage that seemed to include several mattresses, all of a matching design, all of which had seen better days (perhaps also during the reign of Ceausescu.)

In Brasov we availed ourselves of the services of a cheerful local taxi driver. He was young and handsome and reminded me a lot of Tim’s friend Dave (last known location Peru, where apparently the local drugs were dangerously good in quality). This ride was the first of many adventures for us. At one point the driver’s side wing mirror fell off and our driver nonchalantly hopped out from the car, scooped it up and casually fixed it back in place. After several failed attempts at locating our accommodation we ended up having to call the proprietor and get him to direct the driver there, like a novice pilot on his maiden commercial flight being guided down by air traffic control.

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Brasov was a vibrant city, blessed when we arrived with a fresh coating of snow. It came surrounded by mountains. On one side they’d erected their own version of the famous Hollywood sign, spelling out the name of the city in huge letters. There was a cable car to take you up there and it was worth it, more for the views you got than for the sign itself.

In the city there were plenty of old and impressive buildings, including the imposing gothic black church. Our favourite spot was the Scottish pub, something of a local tourist attraction. It made a change from the obligatory Irish bar (Brasov had one of those too) and was a roomy and inviting tavern that had been decked out with copious amounts of Scottish memorabilia.

Eating was a problem in a country that considered meat a central ingredient of all dishes, but I navigated through it as best I could. Meanwhile our private accommodation also offered good views, perched as it was high up on the edge of the city. Some of the neighbouring houses looked like they’d been constructed from Lego, with their shiny red roofs. Nearby a cock would wake us at dawn most mornings. There was a charm to the rough nature of some of the surrounding streets and the battered old cars often seemingly abandoned in the snow. There was even a charm of sorts to the assorted selection of obviously pirated DVDs that accompanied the TV and home entertainment system provided in our bedroom.

We made it to Bran Castle for Hallowe’en, via a rather bumpy coach ride. Out in the courtyard it was a depressing mass of stalls selling cheap memorabilia, the tackiest of souvenir t-shirts and the like, but inside the castle itself was impressive with its secret passageway and narrow stone staircases. Rooms were spartan and it was hard to imagine how life must have been lived all those years ago. It was certainly an appropriate setting for Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

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We visited other places. Sighisoara. Hărman. The ski resort at Poiana Brașov, mostly deserted since the ski season was yet to get underway. We took a grander cable car high up into the Carpathian mountains. Unsurprisingly, nature’s scope and scale moved me more than any man made constructions could, however impressive. That was a literal as well as metaphorical high point, but I enjoyed all of it, despite the cold and the sometimes rudimentary transportation. I’d recommend Brasov, a place that seemed to be thriving when we were there, filled with history but also enervated by a lively student population.

Eventually we had to head back to the capital. Cath didn’t fancy another torturous train journey, so we took advantage of the offer from our hosts to drive us there (for an appropriate fee). Driving in Romania was not for the fainthearted, but we made it safely. It was interesting to listen to the car radio, blasting out a mix of the local Manele music (a bastardised form of traditional Romanian folk music)  and international hit songs, which at that point mostly consisted of Rihanna’s ubiquitous Umbrella.

Our final night was spent in a more modest hotel than the Hilton and I had to be up by four a.m. the next morning to take a taxi to the airport for an early flight home. Cath saw me off from the steps of the hotel and then returned to bed. Her flight to Poland was much later in the day.

That was not to be quite the last time I saw Cath. There was still a (Wham style) last Christmas to come in Penzance. (It was cold. In my flat, we left the oven on overnight after cooking a cheesy apple bake and managed to blow the fuses and kill the appliance. This meant we subsisted on takeaways for the rest of the stay. Watching fireworks set off from locations all around Mounts Bay as we saw in the new year offered us some optimism, but a trip to old haunts in St Ives had an inevitable elegiac quality to it.)

But if not the end, parting in Bucharest was close to it. There were no flight delays this time, but arriving in Luton on an early November morning I still had a long coach ride back to Penzance ahead of me. Whether Manchester or Luton, that seemed to be a theme of those times: living remotely came at a price.