Arriving in Romania was a relief, after our long day of travel.
Team Rise Up (the team of 7 I’m traveling with) woke up and were on the move by 9am on saturday morning.
After saying our goodbyes and packing our things, we made our way, by subway, to the train station in Bucharest. We arrived about an 90 minutes early and passed the time by playing cards and enjoying french fries from McDonalds, believe it or not. The first train we took was very nice, something like the west coast express but one story, complete with upholstered seats, a shelf to put our backpacks on, and a washroom. Our trip was quite smooth, passing little towns in the countryside acres and acres of sunflowers, corn, and hay fields as far as the eye could see. We would stop occasionally at small brick and stucco train stations, that dripped with history, and seemed to ache to tell a rich story of travelers coming and going.
I felt trapped inside a novel written about country living. I can imagine this book, filled with illustrations of horse-drawn wagons, roosters and chickens waddling through the streets, and tin shanties where young boys schemed to steel an apple off the corner store apple-crate display. You know, Oliver Twist…
Our second train however, was not all that impressive. It was kinda like riding in the back of an old school bus, that stunk of aged leather, urine, and all around dirty grunge. It was hot, so your legs and arms would peel away form the brown leather benches as you got up, (one of my favorite feelings… NOT).
Oh, the best thing was washroom, that had no lock on the door, a broken porcelain toilet that had no seat, was literally falling off its base and required no water to flush, there was simply a hole in the floor below. We did have our own car tho, and the train conductor would not allow anyone else to come in our cart and join us.
Early in the ride, people would venture into our cart and try to sit with us, but a man instructed by the conductor would come in and physically pull them out. Every stop we made would echo the first, people wanting to come in our cart and then being ushered out. As the train jolted back and forth, the team and I wondered why this was happening, and we felt uncomfortable being secluded in this way. We could see down the passageway into another cart and saw young women and children standing. It's very difficult to stand stationary without falling over, the train seemed to be on a suspension system that would often bottom out.There was enough room for 16 more people in our cart, so we asked the man why he was ushering them out.
In broken english, that sounded something like a russian accent, he replied “Gypsy…” as he spun his fingers and wrist implying them steeling from us.
Wow, all along this man was protecting us, It’s incredible how God is already protecting us in the little ways. Here we thought that being secluded to the back cart was bad, or that we had done something wrong to deserve the end cart, the stinky, dirty end cart. But God can take the uncomfortable situations in our lives, and turn them into great stories.
Can’t wait to share more stories! thanks for reading.
