Well we made it to Transylvania! Funny story though, we missed our train… We showed up hours early to buy train tickets at the Bucharest train station, a place our first hostel owner warned us was a trouble spot, and bought thirteen tickets to Targu Mures on the night train. We were told before it only leaves out twice a day and the 10:30pm train was the cheapest, so we went for that one. About 9:30 I took a look at our tickets to check the exact time and realized it said 20:40 (8:40pm)… Uh oh. So, after quite a bit of confusion and discussing the next available train was 7:30am the next morning. We attempted to get back to our hostel but it was too late and bus tickets were no longer being sold. We looked at hostels around the train station but it wasn’t feasible in our budget… so we decided to sleep in the train station! Why not?!
So, twelve hours in an old Soviet style train station with thirteen people, thirteen backpacks, and nothing much productive to do makes for a good time! So we “circled the wagons” and prepared ourselves for a wild night! We knew first off at least half of us had to stay up on guard at a time (the train station is completely accessible to the general public) and we had already seen some characters of interest. Some of us hadn’t slept hardly at all the night before because of other train situations and so they passed out pretty quickly on the old tile floor. The night slowly ticked by and we got more and more ridiculous and basically laughing at anything and everything! McDonalds closed at 1:00am and we began to lament the loss of a toilet. 2:00 rolled around and we began buying rounds of coffee at the NesCafe machine (only 1 lei each – thirty cents USD, not too shabby!).
About 3:00am I as I was started to drift off I awoke to the craziest sound I’ve ever heard – people speaking English to us with an American accent. I opened my eyes to see a guy and a girl asking if we were World Racers?… sure enough there was a group from another squad (L squad I believe) that happened to be jumping a train to Moldova after some time in Greece (yeah, roughin’ it eh?). They gave us some words of encouragement as they had just been to Targu Mures and loved it. Soon enough they were swept away by a train and I was left wondering if that had actually just happened. Everyone else saw it too so I figure it did.
The rest of the night ticked by slowly and we got crazier and crazier. The hours will filled with us guys ushering away the few lingering drunk guys who were keen to chat up a group of 9 stranded girls, and kept tabs on a set of two girls and a guy who were busy scouting out our goods for a few hours. About 5:00am I lost the battle and crashed on someone’s sleeping pad (we share just about anything at this point) and woke up at 6:00am to start the process of boarding the train. Overall it went pretty well, we laughed, we bonded with team Glow (who we’ll be spending the month in Romania with and who are awesome) and had our first exciting/sketchy adventure together!
After 24 hours of traveling: two buses, and two trains (the last a worker’s commuter train which I originally thought had likely been out of commission for the better part of the last century and was left to rot on the far track) we arrived at Targu Mures. I wasn’t getting my expectations up for the actually city, but one day in the place is absolutely beautiful! We took a walking tour of the main part of downtown and it is an amazing beautiful place full of Hungarian and German architecture and looking nothing of Bucharest. Very interesting history in this area of the world with different empires conquering the region of Transylvania and leaving their influence.
Tomorrow we will get busy about our work of hitting the streets to invite people to an event the church here is putting on soon and to a Friday night service they do every week. An update of that will be to come.
