Quik Thinking

Anytime one travels internationally, there are two things that always need to be worried about: obtaining cash and finding toilets. While it is sometimes possible to rely on traveller's cheques, the sort of places that accept those tend to be the places I generally wish to avoid. I thought that I'd be able to use my CitiBank card at foreign CitiBank ATMs for free but they actually charged me more for using their ATM than other banks did! 

And, unlike South/Central America, you can't just use the greenback with impunity in Eastern Europe. Instead we had to hit up local ATMs in every country we visited. The airport in Budapest played a mean trick on us. None of the ATMs would dispense any cash to foreign bank cards so everybody had to use the currency changers. By contrast, the ATMs at the train station in Sofia readily gave us cash, although it took me a while to figure out what the UI meant because it was in Cyrillic. Istanbul's ATMs were hit-or-miss but enough of them worked that we didn't starve.

As for toilets, we discovered that there are no free toilets in Eastern Europe! Instead you can just pay to use toilets in subway stations or restaurants. On the plus side, they cost very little and I actually preferred being able to shell out 30-50¢ to use a clean toilet instead of having to by something I didn't really want just so I could relieve myself.

One element that viscerally dominated the history of every single place we visited was the legacy of the Roman empire. Not only did the Romans build the original city of London (then called Londinium), they also founded Budapest, had a major settlement in Plovdiv and even controlled Istanbul for a long time. I'd always known that the Roman empire had been an impressive phenomenon but seeing their legacy everywhere I went on the trip really hammered the point home. Those Romans were crazy!

We hadn't been in Hungary very long when somebody mentioned that the Magyars, who form the dominant ethnic group in Hungary, had close ethnographic ties with the Finns. I was surprised to hear this because I'd never thought of those two countries as being particularly close, either geographically or culturally. My skepticism was blasted to smithereens when we visited the ethnographic museum, which happened to be hosting a special exhibition about the Finns and their longstanding kinship with the Hungarian people. It was a captivating museum although, having grown accustomed to the high level of professionalism in North American museums, I kept noticing the typos that marred most of the write-ups there.

The inspiration for our trip had been a novel about Vlad The Impaler called The Historian that was set in Budapest and Istanbul. Being able to visit "Dracula's Castle" in Transylvania, therefore, was a special treat. As it turned out, of course, Vlad never actually lived there - although it is likely that he did spend a few days there at one point - but the tourism has transformed the town surrounding the castle into a pretty cheesy caricature. This is unfortunate because Castle Bran does actually have an interesting history quite apart from all the vampire lore. Apparently it was built by the locals in the 14th century and eventually gifted to a queen whose subjects adored her.

By the time we reached Plovdiv I had gotten quite obsessed with the ethnography of Eastern Europe so we paid a visit to the ethnographic museum there as well, only to discover that it had no write-ups for any of the exhibits! In retrospect, I think I learned more about the ethnography of Bulgaria during our day-trip to the monastery than I could have in a museum. The people were impressively devout in their veneration of Mary, waiting patiently in long queues to pray before her statue. I'd always assumed this behaviour was characteristic of Catholic tradition but I guess the Eastern Orthodox church shares those customs with Catholicism. Of particular note were the gipsies in attendance, since their ancestors migrated there from India many centuries ago and never fully integrated into the local culture.

Istanbul's ethnographic museum was very far from our hostel so we never made it there but we did instead visit the archeological museum, which rivals even the British Museum in London with the overwhelming breadth and depth of exhibits it had on display. While the Brit came upon its treasure trove by purloining priceless artifacts from everywhere the British Empire conquered, Istanbul acquired its cultural wealth by sheer dint of having been an integral part of just about every major empire to ever have occupied Europe. Staring from the stone age, we walked through the bronze age, the Mesopotamians, Sumerians, Trojans, Romans and Byzantines before ending up with the Ottomans.

Aside from sampling the local cuisine, one of the other primary goals of visiting exotic locations is observing and interacting with the locals. In the arc we traced from Budapest to Istanbul by way of Transylvania and Bulgaria, I noted some interesting things that I will now share with you.

Wandering around Eastern Europe this summer, the biggest challenge we faced was the language barrier. Aside from other tourists and the few people working in the tourism industry, nobody else spoke any English. And there's really no reason they should have, since they didn't generally need to use it. We certainly hadn't made much effort to learn the local languages. Mind you, it would have been quite an undertaking to learn four different languages just so we could use each for a few days. But none of that logic made it any easier for us when we wanted to ask for plain old tap water at every restaurant we visited. Even my normally effective use of miming failed us. After watching me pantomime the act of turning a tap to fill a glass with liquid and drink it, they always assumed we wanted beer.

At other times we felt like we were being swindled when I am positive that we inadvertently agreed to things we did not understand at all. Righteous indignation is hard to summon up in the face of complete and utter vocabulary failure. There was the time at the crepe place in Budapest where the staff didn't seem to grok the idea behind receipts. Accustomed to the enthusiasm with which North American cashiers issue receipts and the reliability with which I have always been issued what I pay for, I was thrown for a loop when they didn't hand me a receipt for my order and then later disavowed all knowledge of having taken such an order. Another time, in Istanbul, we got duped into spending more than we'd expected at a Hamam because nether of us had any idea what we were agreeing to when they asked us questions in Turkish. Fortunately, I think we were taken for no more than $20 over the entire trip.

All of this did, of course, make me very appreciative of the tour guide from the hostel in Brasov, who spoke excellent English and seemed more than happy to answer my endless stream of questions about the Romanian culture and history. And sometimes the language barrier did not prevent me from socializing, like when I drank wine in a park with a random French couple. I speak less French than they did English but given enough wine that didn't seem to matter as laughter sounds pretty similar in either language.

My one linguistic victory involved picking up the Cyrillic alphabet over the course of 3 days through sheer osmosis and deduction. I began trying to learn it by matching patterns on the few pieces of text I saw in both English and Bulgarian and then moved on to forming hypotheses that we tested at medium risk to our schedule. By the time we left Bulgaria I was pleasantly surprised to discover I could phonetically read most of the Cyrillic signs we encountered. Still had little idea what most of it meant but the bar had been lowered a great deal by that point.

One of the salient pleasures of travel is sampling the local foods. Despite mild trepidations about a meat-heavy diet, I was curious to try Eastern European food. In Budapest the food tasted great but was often counterbalanced by rather poor table service. At some of the less touristy places, English menus were hard to come by so we took to just pointing at stuff. We were occasionally charged for bread, which surprised us because we were used to bread being a freebie, although the cost of bread was always trivial (about a dime per loaf). Grocery stores seemed to have roughly the same assortment of food that one would expect to find in the US. Brasov has a panoply of local restaurants that are are reasonably priced and tourist-friendly. Although there was little else to see and do there after the first day, we were certainly not bored by the restaurant scene in this little town. In fact, it would put any American town of comparable size to shame in a heartbeat. In Plovdiv the food was thrillingly cheap and the open-air farmer's market delightful. We discovered tasty new fruits whose names we learned only through sheer happenstance. There was a fruit expert at our hostel and he identified them for us as Chokeberries and Cornelian cherries. Although we ate a lot of different things in Istanbul, my memories are dominated by two items in particular that we ate repeatedly: lahmacun (Turkish pizza) and baklava. I was always amused by the fact that "vegetarian" lahmacun inevitably tasted like lamb!

One of the other popular activities while travelling is trawling for bargains and souvenirs. Because we had to carry everything on our backs, I wasn't inclined to acquire anything large or heavy but it was hard to resist picking up a few little things. I was delighted to find a pair of pants in Plovdiv that fit me perfectly and cost only $15. And while we were at the monastery near Plovdiv, I bought a jar of locally made marshmallow paste. In Istanbul I found a jar of chilli-infused nut-butter that proved to be delicious and I'm now struggling to pace myself so I don't consume the entire thing at once. I also ended up with a t-shirt that says "Istanbul" in a font that looks a lot like Arabic.

We stayed in hostels while travelling through Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey. Here's a quick recap of my experiences with them.

Plumbing has always been a pivotal issue for me when evaluating places to stay and this is equally true with hostels. While I'm generally capable of sleeping on any reasonably soft horizontal surface if the lights are out and nobody is talking, I cringe at the thought of using a toilet or shower that is breeding new forms of life or lacks decent water pressure. I'm also finicky about having hot water on demand and being able to control the temperature easily. So I definitely appreciate good bathrooms in hostels. Fortunately I was not disappointed by any of the three at which we stayed.

We slept in bunk beds in all three hostels and I always took the top one because Eliza was mildly concerned about falling out and I like climbing. In Romania we shared a large dorm room with several others but noise was never an issue. In Bulgaria we were assigned to a 4-person room but nobody else ever turned up so we effectively had a private room, which was great. In Turkey we ended up sharing a 4-person room with a middle-aged French couple who proved to be the worst shower hogs I've ever met but at least they didn't disturb us while we slept.

Although I brought the OLPC XO with me, it's track record at using wifi was most discouraging so we tried to pick hostels that offered a shared computer from which to get our Internet fixes while travelling. In Romania the computer worked just fine when I used it but there was often a lot of contention for it due to the number of people staying at the hostel. In Bulgaria the computer worked fine the first day but subsequently got infected by a virus and couldn;t access Bulgarian websites. You wouldn't think this'd be a problem for us, except that teh Googles has an annoying habit of automatically redirecting browsers to the local version of their home page. At least we were able to use Facebook. In Turkey we randomly ditched the hostel we booked because nobody was at the front desk to check us in and ended up staying in a nearby hostel whose proprietor seemed nice. They didn't have a computer for guests but he was happy to let us use his, although on the 2nd day his DSL connection went down and it didn't start working again until the day we left.

One of the advantages of hostel accommodations is the company. We met some pretty interesting people while hanging out at the hostel in both Romania and Bulgaria, although not so much in Turkey. I noticed that just about every British traveller seems to smoke, despite that not being the case when I was in London itself. Perhaps the particular demographic of Britons who tend to stay in hostels has a proclivity for smoking. It was also interesting to talk to travellers form other European countries, nearly all of whom spoke English fairly well.

At the beginning of the trip we were both pretty worried about being robbed but the atmosphere at every hostel we stayed in made me feel pretty relaxed about that, although we did use lockers when in the dorm room in Romania. Most hostels frown upon bringing outside guests over so, despite the high guest turnover, you do get a moderate sense of familiarity with the faces around you.

After my disheartening discovery that Budapest does not have laundromats, I was overjoyed to discover that the hostel in Romania would actually do our laundry for us at no additional charge and jumped at the offer. In the end I had to spend a fair amount of time disentangling my clothes from the pile of clean clothes they dumped on a table and I did lose one shirt - fortunately not one I was particularly fond of - but it was nice to have clean clothes again. Eliza, not being as lazy as me, just hand-washed her clothes everywhere. I actually ended up buying some new clothes in Bulgaria and Turkey, which allowed me to make it back to London without having to hunt for a laundromat again!

We either walked or took public transit everywhere we went [except for a single ill-fated adventure involving a free cab ride that I shall describe in another post]. In London I rode the Tube to work and back every day. This gave me a feel for what it's like to live in London. It also filled my head with thoughts of the black lung as I flirted with asphyxiation in poorly ventilated underground trains. I initially chalked this up to the fact that London has the oldest subway system in the world but that excuse stopped holding water when I saw the Metro in Budapest, whose subway system was built only a few years after London's but felt vastly more spacious and cleaner. I actually liked the Budapest Metro very much and it had only one problem that I discovered while riding it: if you enter from the wrong side on one of the 3 lines, there's no way to get to the other side without using another token. We did not see a subway per se in Istanbul but we rode the light rail system, which was always crowded despite being scarcely faster than walking. It reminded me of the VTA light rail that runs between San Jose and Mountain View, which I fondly refer to as "the choo-choo train" because of it's absurdly slow speed.

Although I never had a chance to experience riding one of London's famous double-decker buses, we did ride buses in 3 other cities.Budapest, and Brasov have similar systems that involved purchasing tickets in advance and validating them on the bus while Plovdiv still relies on a conductor to sell you a ticket upon boarding. The human touch is a bit friendlier but it does seem rather inefficient, although I guess that this trade-off looks different depending on the cost of labour. We tried to travel on foot for short distances (within a couple of miles) but after a long day of walking we sometimes found ourselves taking the bus just so we could rest our feet!

Since I'd never tried crossing borders by train before, we decided to travel within Eastern Europe exclusively by rail. And because these trips tend to be quite long, we thought we'd avoid wasting daylight hours in trains by taking them at night. So armed with terrifying stories of hapless passengers being gassed and robbed blind at night, we resolved to barricade our doors and sleep with our passports and money hidden on our persons.

All this paranoia was quickly eviscerated shortly after we boarded our first night train in Budapest when the conductor proved to be fluent in English and very kind while our sole cabin-mate, a 20-year-old Austrian student, told us he'd taken night trains in Eastern Europe many times and they were totally safe. Even when we were roused from our slumber in the middle of the night (twice) by the passport officers, I found no cause for concern.

In fact, the scariest part of that train ride happened before we actually began moving. I wanted to eat some canned fish and Eliza insisted I do it outside the cabin lest it smell of fish all night. So I sat on the steps leading up to the car while we waited at the station and began opening the can. Suddenly I was startled by the sound of sliding metal and the door snapped shut a fraction of a second after I whisked my legs out of its path!

The train trip from Romania to Bulgaria was less pleasant because we tried to sleep in seats instead of getting a couchette. While Eliza managed to pull this off, I ended up staying awake the entire time. It didn't help that the conductor kept asking me for my ticket at every station. The toilets on that train dispensed with plumbing in favour of holes in the bottom of the toilet through which we could see the tracks below. Beats having it get clogged, I suppose. When the Romanian passport office collected everybody's passports for inspection, he had trouble finding mine in the stack and so handed them all to me so I could locate mine. I greatly regret not being more thorough in my perusal of that stack.

When we got to the Turkish border, everybody had to disembark and buy visas. Of course, they only took cash, in Euros, despite Turkey not being in the EU! Eliza had previously told me that visas cost 10 British Pounds but when we got to the counter the slimeball behind it refused to accept the 10 GBP note she handed him, instead writing "15" on a piece of paper and flashing it at her. He also gestured at the piece of paper tacked to the window and upon glancing at that we noticed that the prices were all listed in only USD and Euros. She tried explaining that 10 GBP was equivalent to 15 Euros but he would have none of it. In desperation she handed him an additional 5 Euros (the last of her cash), which he finally accepted in return for a visa.

Having watched Eliza get swindled, I handed him 15 GBP right away, only to be rebuffed and directed toward the price list again. Apparently Turkey charges Canadians 45 Euros for a visa! Shocked by this, I asked him where the ATM was but he said there wasn't one. At that point I started to worry because I was stuck at the Turkish border in the middle of the night with insufficient cash to buy a visa and no ATMs around. My deus ex machina came in the unlikely form of a loan from a German traveller whose t-shirt had a University of Waterloo logo emblazoned across it. It turned out that he had spent a year there as an exchange student!

While most of my experiences with US airlines (Virgin and Horizon excepted) have been pretty lousy, I've been fortunate to have had great experiences flying on foreign airlines like Cathay Pacific and Japan AirLines. I'm pleased to report that British Airways continued that trend with exceptionally friendly flight staff. Their sole departure from perfection involved making their way down the lone aisle at a snail's pace hawking merch on the flight from Istanbul to London. [And even that proved to be an opportunity to chat up an attractive British woman.]

 Although I stuck with British Airways for most flights on this trip, we did take EasyJet from London to Budapest. Given the budget nature of that airline, I'd been expecting a pretty spartan experience but was pleasantly surprised to discover that it wasn't at all unpleasant. Furthermore, because they don't have a first-class cabin, we got to sit in the very front of the plane! The staff were pretty chill and even crowdsourced their translation by asking for a volunteer from amongst the passengers.

 When I arrived at Hheathrow the 2nd time, I decided to try a little experiment. Instead of listing my port of departure as Istanbul I put down Constantinople instead to see if anybody would catch it. Nobody did. I also managed to accidentally get several bottles of liquids through security despite having my carry-on baggage randomly inspected in Istanbul. Pretty incredible!

I had been planning to do a single write-up about my experiences
travelling around Eastern Europe (Budapest, Transylvania, Bulgaria,
Istanbul) for two weeks but after looking through my notes I realized
that such an effort would end up being quite a tome. Instead I am
going to do a series of shorter entries covering different aspects of
the trip, comparing them across cities as needed, starting with a few
general thoughts on doing a multi-country trip.

 Previously I have always confined myself to a single country per trip.
This time I was visiting four (if we exclude the UK), each with a
different language and currency. That proved to be rather exhausting,
although we managed (just barely) to use up all our foreign currency
as we departed each country. In the future I think I will try to at
least keep the language consistent across my entire trip. That way I
can learn some of the basic vocabulary beforehand without getting
confused.

 Living out of a backpack for two weeks also means that there is a
limited selection of clothing to wear. That's not terrible as long as
laundry facilities are available periodically and the climate doesn't
vary too much between regions, which can happen even at similar
latitudes with sharp changes in if the elevation or distance from
large bodies of water. For instance, I had assumed that summer in
Eastern Europe would be hot and a sweater would be unnecessary but in
Romania I felt uncomfortably chilly because we were high in the
Carpathians.

 On the bright side, at least I didn't need to get any vaccinations for the trip.