Postcard from London
So let me see. Last time I wrote, I was in Cluj. It was Thursday. That was just before my final and most infamous encounter with Romanian buses. In Romania, there are a lot of small private bus companies. Most of them don't have a web presence. But if you don't like the price or the schedule for the train, all you have to do is call around and you can usually find a minibus going in the direction you want at a convenient time.
So I decided to stay a little longer in Cluj and take a night bus to Budapest so that I didn't waste a whole day on the train. The hostel very obligingly set me up with a van heading out late in the evening and arriving very early in the morning. When I hooked up with the van, I was delighted to find that another young woman and I were the only two passengers. How nice that we have all this space, I thought. I wonder how the driver's making a profit with only two passengers paying the equivalent of $30 CDN for an all-night trip?
Silly me. The obvious answer didn't occur to me until after we'd crossed the Hungarian border, and given some bland replies to the questions of the border police. It seems that passengers were not this particular van's primary source of revenue, shall we say. That became apparent when we broke our journey at a skanky truck stop right over the border and a number of shaggy people materialized out of the darkness. The driver hopped out, popped open the hood, and handed them a set of packages that had been nestling next to the engine block. That, my friends, is how contraband crosses borders.
My travelling companion just snorted and said "beez-neess". I counted myself lucky that a) nobody searched our van thoroughly and b)that I don't work for the Immigration Minister. It would be more than a little uncomfortable if one of his henchminions was busted for running drugs in Eastern Europe.
Otherwise, things have been comparatively quiet since then. I had a nice leisurely day in Budapest poking about in the National History Museum. Inlaid crowns! Saddles plated with carved ivory! Charters in Latin! Exquisitely embroidered dresses! Jewels! Swords! It's a fun place to be an historian, especially since most of the displays are labelled only in Hungarian, so you have to use all your interpretive skills to figure out what you're looking at.
Flew into London this morning, and I'll be flying home tomorrow night. At this stage London feels like I'm cheating. They all speak English here.
So I decided to stay a little longer in Cluj and take a night bus to Budapest so that I didn't waste a whole day on the train. The hostel very obligingly set me up with a van heading out late in the evening and arriving very early in the morning. When I hooked up with the van, I was delighted to find that another young woman and I were the only two passengers. How nice that we have all this space, I thought. I wonder how the driver's making a profit with only two passengers paying the equivalent of $30 CDN for an all-night trip?
Silly me. The obvious answer didn't occur to me until after we'd crossed the Hungarian border, and given some bland replies to the questions of the border police. It seems that passengers were not this particular van's primary source of revenue, shall we say. That became apparent when we broke our journey at a skanky truck stop right over the border and a number of shaggy people materialized out of the darkness. The driver hopped out, popped open the hood, and handed them a set of packages that had been nestling next to the engine block. That, my friends, is how contraband crosses borders.
My travelling companion just snorted and said "beez-neess". I counted myself lucky that a) nobody searched our van thoroughly and b)that I don't work for the Immigration Minister. It would be more than a little uncomfortable if one of his henchminions was busted for running drugs in Eastern Europe.
Otherwise, things have been comparatively quiet since then. I had a nice leisurely day in Budapest poking about in the National History Museum. Inlaid crowns! Saddles plated with carved ivory! Charters in Latin! Exquisitely embroidered dresses! Jewels! Swords! It's a fun place to be an historian, especially since most of the displays are labelled only in Hungarian, so you have to use all your interpretive skills to figure out what you're looking at.
Flew into London this morning, and I'll be flying home tomorrow night. At this stage London feels like I'm cheating. They all speak English here.