In Which I Visit Vampires And Encounter The Italian Mafia

If this weren’t happening, I might never have known how to start this blog post. Currently, I'm scratching these words out in a 99-cent notebook sitting in the hallway of a public restroom at 3am across from a man wearing a dress. He has his hood up, shadowing slightly crazy eyes and a beard that says Osama. Actually, on that note, I think I’ll move to the baby changing station in the women’s bathroom…

Let me rewind. This is annoyingly "in medias res." 

The first week I was here in Florence, I was sitting on Ginger's bed (Ginger has been an excellent roommate through my entire college career) wearing a towel turban when Hannah and Morgan knocked on the door. (Hannah and Morgan are also study abroad students from my school back in Pennsylvania. In short, they're friends). Hannah was carrying a laptop, a three-foot-long baguette pillow, and a hair-brained idea. By the end of the night, all four of us had 100 euro roundtrip plane tickets from Rome to Romania at the end of February. We would arrive in Bucharest late on Thursday night and return to Italy at 9 pm on Saturday. So. Here we go. 

On the bus to the airport, we all felt a little dubious. 3 for 3?? We’d made our first train, our second train, and our bus?? Things were going too well. Especially since we had to walk the plank of the fated platform 20 at Roma Termini for the second time in a week. The weekend before, platform 20 was only a springboard to seal our demise. Then Rome's Ciampino airport closed over our heads and we joined a constipated line where Ginger and Morgan tried to check in to the flights they had forgotten to attend to. But because they were the very last to check in, they had to pay a fine and get booted to standby. My hope was dripping rhythmically through the hourglass…soon Hannah and I were jammed into a shuttle with all the other Romania-bound travelers watching Ginger and Morgan at the desk through the glass doors. Finally, at the very last second, Morgan’s jaw dropped and she smiled. Hannah and I started jumping, jostling the disgruntled sardines around us. Minutes later we were buckled into our seats in a plane taxing to the runway.  

Romania has gothic-steampunk-bohemian-gypsy vibes and it’s fantastic. Part of me wishes I could spend four months studying there in Transylvania like the girl from Istanbul who I sat beside on the train to Brasov. She had an accent that sounded like saffron plus large brown eyes and a self-conscious smile framed by hair, hat, and scarf. Italy feels more fixy and flaky than Romania. I love Italy but let me illustrate my point – a meal in Florence could be un cornetto vuoto (an empty croissant) curled around a caffè macchiato. In Romania, we ate bean and smoked ham stew topped with red onions in a bread bowl the shape and size of a chimney. It’s hearty food that’s meant to ward off snowy cold and scraping hunger like garlic in the face of a vampire.

I also discovered that toothless beggar women are real. The ones wrapped in headscarves and bent at the waist at 90-degree angles, gripping a cane and a recyclable cup, waiting to catch a few falling lei. They aren’t just in cartoons and fairytales. Some of them flank church steps like guardian statues.

The church we stumbled across during our morning in Bucharest was sharp-edged and ornamented. Its interior was dripping with gold and paint and people were pooling at the bases of crucifixes and saintly windows, crossing themselves and kissing the items before them. While Ginger reveled in the presence of Saint Cyprian’s arm bones, Morgan asked why everyone around us was doing burpees. Good to have a balance of perceptions I suppose.

We were helped by countless people throughout the trip, giving us plenty of opportunity to practice our only memorized Romanian word – mulțumesc. Here’s a small lineup of helpful Romanians.

·       Romulus – the charismatic maître d' of the Van Gogh café in Bucharest, 1.93 meters tall, and dark haired. He was equipped with an iPad in the courtyard, making his way down the queue of breakfasters. “Ladies, do you have a reservation?” When we responded with no he jolted backward with an “ah!” of distress. Then he smiled and unsheathed his walkie-talkie to rattle off something in Romanian about four girls without reservations. “Where are you from??” The states. “Ha, I spent a month in Delaware and tried their drugs. But they weren’t great. I can’t recommend. Here, come inside while you wait it’s cold out here. Any preference about which level you sit on? No?” When we left the restaurant he waved at us over a sea of sitting, eating heads. Iconic.

·       The conductor on the train from Bucharest to Brasov (said “Brashov”) – he checked our tickets and told us through a volunteer translator that we were on the wrong train, a train that would take four hours rather than two. Ah well. Nothing to be done about it now. This portly, gray, ticket-punching man returned half an hour later and ushered us out to meet our initial train which he said would be crossing paths with us at the next station.

·       The conductor passed us off to a round-faced woman in a beanie who guided us to the exact platform, explained our situation to the new conductor, and then helped us find our seats before going to find hers. This new train had compartments with sliding doors and left me in expectation of a trolley chattering down the corridor laden with treacle tart and chocolate frogs. This new, rapid, bullet-ride still took four hours to get to Brasov, but if we had to be on a train with the max speed of a “mall choo-choo” (as Ginger put it) I’m glad it was on a route through the Carpathians.

·       The bronzed woman with candy-apple lips and a long black mamba braid that I sat by on the train -- We shared no words due to languages that couldn’t be exchanged, but she enthusiastically shared her circular pretzels with me. She waved her hand at the newly opened snack bag, crowfeet lines fanning down her cheeks, and then jabbered away to her adult son. I don’t actually know if they were pretzels but I am sure they were more Romanian than the “traditional snack” Hannah and Morgan bought predeparture which turned out to be baby food. The girl across from my friendly seat neighbor had classic dark hair and fierce black eyebrows, arched like confident strokes of calligraphy. Her porcelain reflection frequently made eye contact with me in the window even as her eyes stared through the glass. I know that means she could see me. Ginger hates it that when you catch the eye of a reflection you make eye contact with the person. No one has ever given her a satisfying answer as to how it's possible. It's vaguely unnerving though. 

We arrived in Brasov after dark, ate one of those hospitable dinners, fiddled around with our Airbnb key, had to make one call to our hostess (whose name was Diana and who Morgan renamed 'Lady Di'), slunk through the pitch-black courtyard, and made it to our cute/chilly apartment totally wiped. Ginger took a shower while the rest of us tried candy bars and mulled over travel plans. When she walked back in dripping wet, she held up a peace sign. "Two things. Number one - the water is either painfully cold or uncomfortably cold. Number two - the seal around the shower is broken and I appear to have flooded the bathroom."  After midnight, when three of us had taken showers, the pipes in Lady Di's palace began to protest with a deafening, high-pitched squeal. "What is that??" I asked Morgan who'd just emerged in pajamas. Ginger shot under the covers "It's the mosquito king!!!" I jumped on the icebox mattress as well, burrowed under the covers, and then turned to look at her. "We've been here for 24 hours now. This has been worth it. But I can't remember a single thing we've done." Very intently, Ginger responded with, "We've eaten two meals." When I cracked up, she asked, "Am I wrong?" No. "I'm so glad I spent three billion dollars to be here." And then I laughed till tears welled in my eyes.

To see Brasov in daylight required a 6:30 am start. Hardly another soul was awake and there were certainly no stores open. But strolling around in newborn morning air wearing fingerless gloves and carrying canvas duffle bags with brass buckles was idyllic. The more we saw the more we wanted to stay.

Later, I asked Ionut, our Uber driver, how he felt about Romania being associated with Dracula as we drove to Castle Bran – supposedly the fortress that inspired Bram Stoker’s famous Victorian novel. Ionut’s kind eyes flickered to the rearview as he listened to my question and then landed back on the road that cut through blue-brown fields. “I watched the movie when I was seven years old and was absolutely terrified. I will never go into that castle. Never. But I can wait for you outside? Would you like it?” Gotta say he's missing out. It's beautiful in there and the curator was genius.

Over the entrance to the castle is an old medieval German inscription that says, "If a bird builds a nest/ To lay its eggs in it/ Then, it never flies away again/ But stays in it/ On the eggs in its nest/ Even while strangled." After self-touring Castle Bran and getting ripped off by paying extra to see the dungeons (an elevator to a bathroom-less basement with a few screens and yet another gift store) we meandered around Bran. Most of the time we spent searching for bathrooms but once that tourist destination was checked off the list, I bought two skirts, Ginger bought an embroidered backpack, Morgan purchased mulled wine, and Hannah got a sandwich. We took our goods to a mountainous park where we sat on chiseled stone steps that led to Queen Marie's buried heart. And then Ionut's wife, Simona, sped us to the train station where we fled to Bucharest. Here I'll add another to the list of helpful people. My 2nd class seat was directly across from Francesca, a 17-year-old Romanian girl who helped all four of us find our assigned spots. She was the second oldest in a series of 7 kids whose names started with an 'F'. Francesca was bubbly, open, dominant, nervous (as it was her first time traveling alone), and fascinated by anything to do with the exotic US of A. She introduced me to her "Invisible Strength Theory" where things are connected by some unseen force. "Like us--what are the chances that I would sit right across from you on this trip and so I could feel relaxed instead of freaking out for two hours?" Before we disembarked, she gave me her Martisor bracelet - a silver clover on a red, elastic string. Martisor is a Romanian holiday that takes place on March 1st (the Friday we were there). It's a tradition for the guys give flowers (or bracelets with talismans) to girls and it marks the arrival of spring. "Keep this. I want you to have it. Now you can remember me in America." She gave us all hugs before we left the station. 

Ginger started running something like a fever as we made our sluggish way to the Bucharest airport in the evening. I stopped at a "Luca" for the third time to get a meal/snack. (My mom is convinced it was just a hotdog stand, but it wasn't. Truly. It was a restaurant with super cheap, delicious food that looked like high-quality hotdogs. Trust. And if even if it was a hotdog stand it wouldn't be just a hotdog stand, you know what I mean?)

We made out second flight without a hitch. Landed in Rome as planned. Got on a bus as planned. But it was the wrong bus, as unplanned. Classic though. None of us were suprised. We asked a man with curly hair, kind eyes, and a Roman nose where we were going. We were going to the metro on the southwestern outskirts of Rome. Goody. The metro was faster than any bus. I chugged my coke as we cut back across the city underground.

The man with the Roman nose reappeared before we reached the Bologna station. "May I ask where you're trying to go?" Yes. The bus station. We showed him the address. "Okay good. The lines split here so you'll have to get off and wait for the next train or you can walk. Either way, it'll take fifteen minutes." Thank you so very much. Two ladies with kind eyes and a small shaggy dog stood up across from us. "We're getting off here and walking in that direction if you'd like to come with us." One woman was from Brazil and the other from Lithuania but they had met each other as au pairs in Pennsylvania. This night was the first time they'd reunited in twenty years. It started sprinkling as they waved us goodbye. I broke into a run once the bus station was located. Hannah, who never rushes, always asks, "why are we running??" and I always want to answer "Because we can't fly." But really, it's just cause I'd rather be an hour early than have our plans leave without us. Running burns off the nerves. We found our red, four-euro, double-decker, night bus.

Things were comfy, warm, and sleepy until 2 am when we were booted to the curbside and discovered we were not a ten-minute walk from home. Instead, we were at an abandoned bus station outside of Florence in Scandicci, a two-and-a-half-hour walk from home with two-and-a-half-hour hours till public transportation opened. The tram was down, the trains were down, the buses were down, the Ubers were nonexistent, and no taxi company would respond to our cries for help. The hotels, hostels, and various sleeping places were another lengthy trek away and also irresponsive. The singular place that might've been a feasible option cropped up only on Ginger's Apple maps. It was called Pop Apartment, had zero reviews, was apparently 80ft away, and was completely invisible. I laughed till I needed a bathroom.

Thankfully(?), there was a bathroom in the building behind us. This utilitarian building had one entrance, a tiny foyer, another door, and then a long hallway with a family restroom, a men's bathroom, and a women's bathroom branching off of it. This is where the guy in the dress comes in and we all move back to the women's restroom. But the guy in a dress was a lesser concern. The greater problem was in the foyer where a group of men who knew each other, all dressed in black with their faces covered from the nose down kept showing up one by one, blocking our only method of escape. By now it was around 3 in the morning. Suddenly, there was shouting and slamming of doors and the women's bathroom door flew open into the opposite wall. Ginger had locked herself into a stall (probably an intelligent move) and Hannah, Morgan, and I froze staring back at at the policeman in the doorway, my toothbrush hanging from my mouth. He blinked. "Maybe just...leave the door open" is what I think he said. After that, he and the conspiracy in the foyer disappeared. Then I called my parents. (Just for the record, laughing is not a way to react to all problems. I understood that we were in a perilous doozy but I kept Iaughing I think as a coping mechanism. However, if you call your parents before getting robbed, raped, or murdered - just don't laugh. It will not help ease their levels of stress and anxiety. It only accelerates premature aging.) They convinced us to go outside and at about 3:30 am a taxi pulled up to drop off two irritated young Americans who slid from the backseat either sleep-deprived or hungover. We launched ourselves to the roadside and were all over that cab like ugly on a monkey. Each of us paid the best eight euros of our lives and the shining knight and his commercial chariot delivered us home at 4 am. I read a quote once that said "Sometimes your knight in shining armor ends up being a retard in tinfoil." I haven't any clue what kind of man that random, middle-aged, Italian cabbie was but if he's wearing tinfoil, the scales won't be falling from my eyes any time soon. 

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