The first thing upon landing in Romania: the light in the Cluj airport bathroom not working. A woman was having fun next to me about it and when we both got out of our dark cubicles, she told me, as a form of explanation: 'Romania!'. It's just that I used this excuse so much, that I don't believe it anymore. True, maybe in other countries light is provided to find your toilet, but I wasn't so ready to use the name of my country in a complaint tone as an excuse this time. The flight was on time, we landed at a European looking airport, and my luggage, as always, was on time and untouched. True, it took my brother an hour to cover the remaining 50 km separating us from him, but well, Romanian roads are, as we'd like to call them, 'work in progress'. I would complain more about Romanian drivers and impatient overtakes on curves than that.
First stop on our Romanian tour - Cluj Napoca. Busy, filled with cars, communist blocks in the outskirts but some beautiful Austro Ungarian buildings in the Centre. My brother liked the theatre, while I tended to see it as too much of an eclectic mix. I would like to mention at this point that it rained buckets the first two days, and although the photos won't show it, we were usually under an umbrella or avoiding a water-filled hole...
Our guide, Luana, took us to a hidden canteen around the centre where they served good and cheap Romanian food. Hungarian-run and Western-looking, it was nice to see such a place in downtown Cluj. They turned the inner Courtyard of an old building into a restaurant by covering it with a pyramid shaped glass cupola.
We stopped at the birth place of Matei Corvin, son of Iancu de Hunedoara and it was strange to connect facts that students learn during their history lessons to the real places and names of that era. We are taught to do it for international history (what happened in Europe when the Chinese invented paper?) but not enough for our own history I believe. Cluj is nice, clean, but extremely hectic. Beware...
We played the Romanian Loto - no I'm not rich, we did not win, unless you think I'm writing from the Bahamas. We stopped at a library where a national newspaper was displaying books and CDs that are usually sold with the newspaper itself - a wonderful occasion to discover the whole collection of Jules Verne in the format I read it in my childhood.
And that is it for Cluj. Provided I do not start work soon, I will try to share some thoughts on the rest of the country...
