This is a long post for a train journey, but it was a long day and night…

The train leaves at 1 o’clock. At about 2, Elena produces some white bread, a large hunk of roast pork, and half a roast chicken. She insists, with great hospitality, that I have some, telling me that she baked the bread herself, and courteously accepts one of my poor shop-bought biscuits. She also shares some cold, sweet black coffee. She comes from Brasov and is thirty years divorced. As a single mother in communist Romania, she worked and raised a son and daughter. Now she lives in the same apartment building as her daughter, though in her own apartment, and says she’ll be okay as long as she has her health. Medicine is expensive. She agrees that Romania is beautiful, but money is a worry, and she isn’t sure about the future. ‘Hope,’ I try saying. She smiles and laughs and says ‘Always hope,’ which could mean ‘never give up hope’ or could mean ‘always hope, but never get what you hope for’ - or both, I guess. She’s going to Istanbul on an overnight shopping trip for clothes and perhaps a little jewellery.

Evening falls. I can hear New Zealander voices in the next compartment. They sound like the sort of well-travelled retirees who might just have a corkscrew. Thomas and Martin from Laser Books gave me a very nice looking bottle of wine, and while I know it should most definitely not be drunk unchilled, on a train, with bread and cheese and biscuits, I’m really thirsty - the coffee was too sweet and strong to be refreshing.

Having no glass, I drink from the bottle like a complete pig. It’s very, very nice, and sweetish, so it doesn’t suffer so badly from not being cold. Martin, Thomas, I’m so sorry… but maybe you can take some consolation in knowing that your gift helped me out when I had nothing to drink, and cheered me on a train trip that turned out to be a bit tiring.

Leaving Romania and approaching Bulgaria, we have our first passport and customs check. Our tickets have already been checked twice. The Romanian official seems to want a medical certificate from Elena and nags her about that for a while before accepting whatever it is she tells him. He wants me to open my parcels of pictures. Of course, they’re all done up in carboard and packing tape. ‘Do you have a knife?’ I ask. He does. As I struggle, trying to do the minimum damage to the tape, he looks at his watch like I’m holding him up. Well, you wanted to sticky-beak, friend.

He’s accompanied by a really handsome young Bulgarian officer, who is pleasant, smiles, and speaks English. The Romanian asks me a few questions. ‘Why are you taking these pictures to Istanbul?’ he says. ‘I’m taking them home, but I’m going through Istanbul first,’ I answer, truthfully, worried that he’s going to conjure up some kind of tax I’ll have to pay. The Bulgarian laughs and translates. The Romanian seems to get fed up with my attempts to open the second package and leaves me and Elena alone - surrounded by wrapping paper and stray unicorns, but unharmed and untouched for money.

Next door, the New Zealanders are having some trouble. They don’t have a visa. Politely but firmly, the woman tells the officers that when they left home they didn’t need a visa. It seems that now they do. Another officer takes her friend off the train. We wait. And wait. The woman is a bit worried. This happened to them in Tanzania too, she says, and her friend gets a bit hot under the collar with bureaucracy. I can sympathise.

About an hour later, the man is finally brought back in an apparent state of extreme annoyance suppressed by a great exertion of will. Pouring himself a whisky from the Hamper of Life’s Necessities (it also contains sticky tape, which they later loan me to patch my parcels back together), he explains that they took him in a black maria to somewhere, where he was put in a pickup truck and driven to the road border, where, apparently, the necessary paperwork was located.

We finally move off. The guards stay on the train, relaxed now that their job is done. They stand at the window in the corridor smoking, as do a couple of other passengers. I stand there and sip my wine, enjoying the countryside in the evening sun. The officers are interested in the wine, and seem amused by my partaking of it from the bottle. We cross the Danube. The first time I saw it was a couple of years ago in Vienna. It wasn’t blue there, and it isn’t blue here - it’s a very muddy pale brown.

The sun goes down. As shades of pink and amber cover the green cornfields and pass through the windows of the train, the conductor comes up the corridor offering tea and coffee. This, I assume, is as near to a cafe car as we’re going to get. I tell him I’ll take tea. The tea kettle is set up on a portable stove in the compartment he’s riding in. An English woman takes tea too, but in her own compartment. Happy to have my tea with the conductor, a middle-aged Turk who speaks fairly good English, I drink and chat. He admires my watch (which people often do - it was cheap as chips, but it’s unusual looking) - asks to look at it more closely, and then suddenly takes my hand and strokes it in a pervy way.

Damn.

Sometimes I just forget I’m not a man. Or I forget I have a body or a gender at all. I forget what too many men are like. I draw my hand back, finish my tea quickly, decline another cup and return to Elena, who smiles sweetly and somewhat curiously.

When night falls Elena changes into sleeping clothes, makes her bed with the sheet and light coverlet provided, and lies down to sleep. Rather than disturb her with the light, I make my bed too and exchange my shirt for a pyjama top. I leave my jeans and belt on. Even though there’s a catch on the door, I’m not going to feel safe in just pyjama pants.

I lie awake for a couple of hours, doze a little, then it gets cold. The train isn’t airconditioned, which didn’t matter when you could open the windows. But it isn’t heated, either. I drink some wine and put my jacket on, but I’m still cold. Then a man comes by to check our tickets. A couple of hours later, more men come down the corridor, talking loudly in between checking passports. Elena appears to be an expert at getting back to sleep again after these interruptions, but I can’t. It’s midnight. I’m cold. I’m pissed off. I lie awake. At about 2 am, just as I was starting to doze again, the conductor raps on our door. We’re coming to the Turkish border and we have to get off, he says. I take the opportunity to put on a bra and shirt under my jacket, and my scarf and warm gloves.

There’s another train. We have to wait for its passengers to be processed before we can go through. The New Zealanders got off somewhere in the middle of the night.

We wait. The English woman is married to a diplomat and lives in Yemen. She says Yemen is one of the few countries that really hasn’t made any progress at all for about 5000 years, but it’s an interesting place. She and Elena and I eat biscuits. I drink.

Altogether, we’re at the border for about two hours. The guy who stamps our passports can’t stop yawning.

I lie down in my clothes, scarf and gloves, but I can’t get warm and I don’t get back to sleep. I have no idea how people survive in real cold. Bogdan said something about vodka being the only way. Yet another man comes by to check tickets or passports - I can’t remember which. Wearing Mother Russia’s face I shove it at him and snatch it back gracelessly.

The sun rises.

‘Guten morgen,’ says Elena, smiling like a saint.’ ‘morgen,’ I say a bit feebly, blinking in the sun.

A little later she sings out, ‘Senora…’

‘Si, senora?’

She has more bread and roast pork for me. I feel so grateful. She gives me her phone number and tells me to look her up if I’m ever in Brasov again. I will.

We come to the outskirts of Istanbul and spend an hour going at a slow pace through the huge and rather ugly city. With a population of about 20 million, Istanbul is twice as big as Bangkok. It has a weightiness and sense of Jovian gravity like London and the dusty concrete look of Los Angeles. I can’t say I take an instant liking to it, even with the blue Sea of Marmara sparkling beyond the shore.

At Sirkeji railway station on the European shore, on the south side of the Golden Horn, Elena and I say arrevederchi with kisses, and I walk past the Victorian-looking Orient Express restaurant, wanting to get to my hotel, the Buyuk Londra, aka the Grand Hotel de Londres, recommended to me by my French translator, Jean-Francois le Ruyet, for its interior decor.

The 6-sleeper has two couches that convert to beds below, and two beds above. I can’t for the life of me see where the other two people are supposed to sleep. It’s all upholstered in tawny plush that has seen better days, and like far too many seats on public transport everywhere doesn’t seem to be designed for the human body. There’s no aircon and no cafe car. I’m glad I brought some food with me - half a loaf of bread and some cheese I bought in Sinaia, both of which are surviving well, and a packet of cream biscuits. I wish I’d brought water, though. I’d just assumed an international train would have drinks available on board. Silly me.

At least it isn’t crowded. There were no 2 or 3 sleepers simply because there aren’t any on this train, so all of us in our sixes have plenty of room. My companion is a young-elderly Romanian lady, Elena, who will be my good friend on this trip. Despite not speaking each other’s languages, we manage to have some quite long conversations, Elena speaking Italian, me speaking something that certainly isn’t Italian but which seems to be close enough - although I’m pretty sure I accidentally told her I was a lawyer. I hope she didn’t think any the worse of me for it.

To be continued…

I have two missions this morning before the train goes: post those books and find those Chirnoagas. The first mission fails. ‘You cannot post them from here,’ says the girl in the post office near the station. ‘Go to 62 Vulcanescu Street.’

I go there. 62 is a dental clinic. I must have misheard. It wouldn’t be possible that 62 Vulcanescu Street is where you send all customers with inconvenient requests…would it? Bamboozled by the impossibility of posting two quite small packages from one capital city to another, I get the metro (grotty, but cheap, like Prague’s, which I’ll take over posh and expensive any day) to the gallery.

Yes, she has some left. They’re beautiful, hugely imaginative and accomplished. Some of them remind me a little bit of Rosaleen Norton. And they’re not expensive. Even so, I was only going to buy one, but as the gallery owner offers me a discount, I buy two. One is, in fact, a unicorn, done in a very free, energetic style, like a rapid drawing. Although some villains have cut off its horn, the unicon’s power seems undiminished. One of the humans is dead and you get the feeling that the other one, clutching the horn in his ugly hand, will soon be taking a dirt nap too. She tells me Chirnoaga is old and ill with Parkinson’s disease and doesn’t work anymore. I wish I could’ve met him. As it is, I get all inspired and start drawing a bunch of pictures. Dammit, I think I do want to go back to art school…

Michael and Marius see me off at the station. Sorry - again - to be leaving, I board the train, which is…

The ‘R’ train back to Bucharest is better than the last one, with very comfortable chairs, tables, and a cafeteria car. I check into the same place near Gara de Nord. The reception clerk looks at me as if he’s surprised anyone would come back to this grubby hotel, but it’s very convenient, the hot water works, and the linen’s clean, which is enough. At night, Mireille comes and helps me buy a ticket from a large, very grim woman in a tight blue singlet. Mireille says it doesn’t matter if you’re a foreigner or a local, you’ll get the same Soviet-era attitude. I have to remind myself again of the suffering these people have been through, and that for many Romanians things are still far from rosy. Mother Russia tells us that there are no 2 or 3 sleeper compartments available, only a six, which surprises us both, but never mind - it’s much cheaper than the plane.

Argh! I’ve just spent about an hour trying to send some books back to BKK from Sinaia, because my suitcase is getting way overstuffed and heavy. First, the post office doesn’t sell bags and boxes, so I had to go to a newsagent, who was pretty good at interpreting my mime for “I want the squishy kind of bag”. A lot of young people here speak English, but few older people seem to, especially outside Bucharest. Sometimes French works. You’ve also got a chance with German and Russian. But there isn’t a culture of smiley nicey-nicey customer service - people here don’t seem shy about letting you know with their body language and tone of voice that they really wish the stupid foreigner would go back to wherever she came from. Actually, they seem pretty rude to each other, too. Oh, well, at least it’s human and honest… On the other hand, I’ve found that the people who aren’t stuck in crappy service jobs are often very nice to you. A young woman in the post office queue kindly acted as my interpreter. It turned out that I couldn’t send my books, as the individual packages were too heavy, though they weighed less than a kilo. Maybe it’s some rule of the carrier pigeon’s union. So I’ll have to post them from Bucharest, or just buy a bag to carry them in, which would probably be cheaper than posting them.
I could lighten my suitcase by drinking the two bottles of wine I’m carrying in there, I guess…

Anyway, enough griping. These minor inconveniences are the price you pay for being in a place that isn’t swarming with tourists and infested with McDonalds and Starbucks.

Yesterday Bogdan and Mireille drove me to Hasdeu Castle (http://www.cimec.ro/Muzee/hasdeu/index.htm) in Campina, a town north of Bucharest. Built by a scientist whose genius daughter died at 18 of tuberculosis, the house-sized castle is a strange place, but not the ‘creepy tribute’ that Lonely Planet calls it, I don’t think. In one of its rooms, Bogdan Hasdeu and his wife would supposedly communicate through a medium with the spirit of their daughter. You can see examples of ‘channelled’ writing and also some music that they believed Julia wrote from beyond the grave. Who knows whether her spirit really did talk to them - but I thought it was a magical and moving place. Its slightly occult decorations (before the communist era, I was told, they were more Christian, but were painted over) give it the air of a small temple. And it is a temple - to love and grief and hope, a small monument to the tragedy of being conscious creatures who know our lives must end - or that was what I felt. To someone with a more religious outlook, or just with more confidence that the end of the body is not the end of the soul, it might figure more as a sign of the spirit’s immortality.

We also visited the museum of painter Nicolae Grigorescu (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolae_Grigorescu), who started out as a painter of icons but changed his style and became associated with the Barbizon school. His paintings are reminiscent of Corot, Manet, and, strikingly to my Australian eyes, the Heidelberg school. My favourite paintings were his landscapes, with their somewhat impressionistic yet at the same time very exact evocations of light, atmosphere, season and time. His drawings show that he was an excellent draughtsman, and his paintings, for all their roughish brushwork, have backbone.
He was very fond of a white ox named Snowdrop, who he kept in the garden outside his window. He was in love with Millet’s daughter, but on the whole, I think trouble comes of making a living human being your muse - a cow is a much better idea!

We drove on to Sinaia, which is further north. It’s another very attractive town, with one particular gobsmackingly beautiful attraction: Peles Castle. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pele%C5%9F_Castle )
It really is a fairytale castle - not from a fairytale with ogres or dragons or even knights, but one with romance, secret passages, minstrels and garden parties. The building (in superb condition) has, rather than battlements, an elaborate wood-faced upper part and tall roofs. It also has the kind of nooks and crannies every girl would want in her castle - here a courtyard, there a little round terrace, here a four-sided fountain with elegant gargoyles. The terrced gardens are pagan and charming, the stone figures smaller and more graceful than the musclebound kind you see in Italy, and baskets of stone fruit as a recurring motif, along with satyrs, lions, and a beautiful youth holding a cornucopia. The background of woodland, rising to forested peaks, is suitably magical.
All in all, it’s the kind of place the Goblin King might give his daughter for her thirteenth birthday - or that she might magick into existence for herself.
And the weather was glorious, too.

I’ve been shamed more times than I can count by old people going up and down these steep cobbled and potholed streets like mountain goats, overtaking me at a clip, while I mince around worrying about breaking my ankle.

Something I forgot yesterday - Tritonic organised an interview for me with Romanian Playboy magazine, and photos. When I was a little girl I always wanted to be in Playboy, and now I am - with clothes on, though!

On the 9th, Lorena took me walking around the historic quarter of Bucharest. I had already walked a bit with Mireille the previous day, when I was taken with a yellow glass porch over an open door leading to a high-ceilinged lobby with a charming fresco of an Arcadian scene inside. I thought it must be a public building, but Mireille said no, it was someone’s house - which was confirmed by the owner returning with shopping bags while we were standing in the porch. Mireille said that one of the things she loves about Bucharest is that its full of such surprises. I agreed with this very much as I walked with Lenora. Yes, the city has plenty of butt-ugly concrete housing blocks - but still rather less of them than many cities, and much more in the way of beautiful architecture than many cities. It wasn’t only Ceaucescu, but bombing and earthquakes that damaged Bucharest - but much more of the old city survives here than in, say, Tokyo. And it isn’t just the big important buildings that are something to look at. There are ornate little treasures seemingly down every street, though often in a sad state of neglect - which gives them, in a way, a Venetian sort of charm, but doesn’t bode well for their ultimate future. And if they don’t crumble by themselves, the next earthquake may do it. But for now, old Bucharest is a wonderful place to wander in, just rubbernecking, poking around in antique shops, and having coffees. My favourite place was a horseshoe-shaped arcade with a yellow glass roof, so that when you looked into it from the street it seemed to be glowing with a light from another place. Inside it was white, and like everything in the old style here, richly decorated with stucco mouldings.

In an art gallery I was tempted by an etching by Marcel Chirnoaga (http://www.stdb.ro/~vasile/emuzeuc.htm)

I hadn’t heard of him, but Lorena told me he is very well known in Romania. At 475 lei - 175USD - pre-dickering, it seemed like a bargain, but after looking at his work online I can see a lot of pieces that I like better and would rather have, so I’m going to see if I can find them at the gallery where they’re supposed to be.

Later, we met up again with Bogdan and Mireille, who drove us to the Palace of Parliament (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palace_of_the_Parliament) which in the communist era was called, with horrid irony, the House of the People. The second largest building in the world after the Pentagon, perhaps the kindest thing one can say about it is that it looks better than the Pentagon. Like Versailles on steroids, a sort of Death Star of civic architecture, it impresses with its sheer scale at the same time as it inspires disgust at the memories of what it stood for. Poor thing, it’s just a building - it doesn’t know who built it, or why, or that one fifth of historic Bucharest was demolished to make room for it. It certainly has a presence, which is why I can’t help anthropomorphising it. Death by earthquake will probably be its fate.

My hosts talked to me about how Romania got shafted in WWII - Churchill did a deal with Stalin, Romania in exchange for Greece - and about life under Ceaucescu. Severe rationing, shortages of everything from cheese to toilet paper, hunger, cold - it can drop to thirty degrees Celsius below zero in a Bucharest winter - constant fear, and constant worry about you and your loved ones simply surviving. As in Russia, families had their property, money and possessions taken from them, and some were relocated and forced to labour on state farms. (I hope I’ve said all this correctly - if any of my Romanian hosts are reading this and would like to correct or add something, please do).

The process of reclaiming property is complicated, as you need to have the paperwork proving your family owned it. When the papers aren’t there, the building often goes to ruin.

As a visitor, after hearing this, I felt impressed by the recovery Romania has obviously made - in less than twenty years, and deeply admiring of the people here. I talked to a few people about the future and what they see happening. I heard both pessimistic and optimistic points of view. I’d put my money on the optimists being right.

Leaving Brasov - the taxi driver who was taking me to the station tried to convince me that it would be better to pay him 100 Euro to drive me to Bucharest. And to think I thought he was kidding. Anyway, he was tall dark and handsome, so I gave him one of my baby cigars as a reward for being decorative and an incentive to just pipe down and drive me to the train, which he did.

At Bucharest, Michael Haulica, my editor at Tritonic (http://www.tritonic.ro/), met me at the station, with two other Tritonic people, Valentina and Marius, and we drove to their office to meet Bogdan Hrib, the publisher, and fabulously stylish Mireille Radoi, who’s in charge of non-fiction. They publish a lot of academic books, and have been working enormously hard to publish a large amount of fiction in the last year, mostly science fiction and fantasy, though they plan to diversify into mainstream fiction. M. John Harrison, Neil Gaiman, China Mieville, Mary Gentle, Jeff VanderMeer and Justina Robson are among the writers they’ve published or will publish - and I think you too soon, Jeff F.? They also want to translate and publish authors from France, Germany and other Continental countries. Their books look great, with some really superb covers.

For the last three days, these people have been treating me like family (the kind of family you like, that is), and basically spoiling me rotten. That night they took me to dinner at the Hanul Lui Manuc, an old inn in the historic part of Bucharest, where I adventured beyond soup and discovered that food in Romania is widely varied and really good, both the native Romanian cuisine and others. We sat in the arcaded courtyard of the inn, which is very big and atmospheric. You could imagine the merchants returning from Turkey and further abroad, with their horses and donkeys, glad to be home, drinking the local wine, perhaps eyeing the ladies who I imagined to be cruising around the balconies above. Me being me, I also imagined the tinkling of camel bells, until my hosts informed me that there were no camels in medieval Romania, and not even camels in Turkey, except, possibly, in the very far east of that country - so my imagination had to be content with horses and donkeys, and men decked out in a few items of eastern garb, perhaps, bought as souvenirs - which reminds me, the ‘Black Church’ in Brasov, so called because its walls were blackened in a fire, is decked out inside with numerous carpets, mostly Anatolians, that merchants brought back from their travels, including prayer rugs, so that mihrabs float gorgeously in the air above the pews of the Lutheran church - but Luther would probably have been a happier Muslim than Christian, anyway.

The next day, Tritonic launched the Romanian edition of Etched City, called Orasul Gravad, in a beautiful bookshop housed inside a cozy former palace (the owner of the shop is a descendent of the prince who originally owned it). It has lovely ornate ceiling and wall mouldings, and baroque-style grotesques and foliage designs painted in the architraves. It was one of the many buildings in Bucharest that I rather fancied having for myself.
Unfortunately for people who don’t read Romanian, there isn’t a lot of Romanian fiction translated into English, and there was none in the shop, but I’m still looking out for some.

The launch was perfectly organised and went really well, I think. Tritonic hired an actress, Lorena Lupu, to read in Romanian the section of the book that I read in English, which I thought was an excellent idea. My heartfelt thanks to all involved. And then there was more dinner… and more wine…

Next time: Bucharest, city of surprising beauty or beautiful surprises, history lessons, and Campina and Siniaia, locations of two very different magic castles. And I do mean magic.

I had it all planned out this morning - I dampened my hair, put shampoo on the roots and conditioner on the ends, and hopped under the shower expecting to have just enough time to rinse it all off - but the hot water stayed on without interruption, so I set off feeling clean and very happy. My destination was Sighisoara, birthplace of Vlad Tepes. The minibus driver put me in the front seat next to him, so I had an unobstructed view of the gleeful games of chicken the traffic was playing all the way. The road looked like it had been quite recently surfaced, and everyone seemed to be luxuriating in the smooth tarmac. Midway we stopped for water at a charming fountain in a stone surround decorated with a relief sculpture of deer and ferns.

Sighisoara had less in the way of factories and concrete blocks around it than Brasov or Sibiu. It’s a very nice place indeed - not at all the kind of town you’d think to associate with Vlad the Impaler. The old town is inside a straight-from-a-fairytale little citadel with nine towers. The weather was glorious, and I felt lucky to be there before Romania becomes the next super-trendy tourist destination - though there were still quite a few tourists there.

I had lunch at the house where Vlad Tepes was born. After trying their ciorba de perisoare to see how it compared with the other one (average soup, ordinary bread, but very tasty meatballs), with the very nice house white, Dracula whispered in my ear that the only sin is restraint (okay, that was the Marquis de Sade, I think, but it’s the sort of thing Vlad might have agreed with), I ordered curd cakes with jam and cream, which turned out to be fresh doughnuts with beautiful plum jam in the middle, lavished with cream with a slight, pleasant hint of cheese in it. I ate one, cannibalising the other for its jam and cream. Stuffed and a little tipsy, I staggered out onto the brightly lit cobblestones to wander through the rambly, crumbly, leafy cemetery - which is on a hill, with steep paths, so that I imagined it becoming a sort of exercise park for goths.

There was no bus back to Brasov, and the taxi driver who took me to the station tried to tell me there was no microbus either. Of course, he wanted to drive me to Brasov… anyway, there was an intercity train, and I arrived back in Brasov in time to wander around some more. I went to a cafe bar called ‘Opium’ (well, of course I had to try it), which had dark red walls and comfy leather chairs, and a huge selection of coffee cocktails - hot and cold, alchoholic and non. I went for one with honey and chocolate, which was strong and sweet, as you’d expect.

Something I forgot to mention - on the train to Brasov, when we were stopped at Sinaia, I looked out the window to see a lovely vision in dark blue and cream pulled up at another platform - none other than the Orient Express, with fancy curtains and pretty lamps on the tables in the dining car. At moments like these, I wish I’d become an orthodontist or an actuary instead of a poor commercial artist and then a poorer writer. I join a couple of my fellow travellers in gazing dreamily at the magic train, before a big blue local train pulls up in front of it, like a faithful old carthorse blocking a view of a unicorn.Rural Romania is a place where you might just see a unicorn. Despite the grotty, unsightly industrial outskirts of some of the bigger towns, there’s a great amount of wild, pristine countryside here, and forests aplenty.

The pensiune I’m staying at in Brasov is basically very nice - a little house in the owners’ large backyard, with its own bathroom and a little sunroom overlooking fruit trees and wooded hills. The pleasantness of the sun room is only slightly marred by the chicken scraps that have been left on one of the chairs. I can live with that. What’s a bit harder to live with is the water situation. Hot water comes on at 7 a.m., in strange short sprints, so that I have to wait shivering with it turned off between shampoo, rinse, conditioner, rinse, and try to guess when it’ll be safe to turn it on again. I must remind myself that far worse things have happened in Romania. Sometimes I wonder whether, despite having perennially itchy feet, I’m really cut out to be a tourist. (I personally think I’m cut out to be a rich loafer on the Orient Express!)

The maxitaxi ride to Sibiu takes 3 hours on a road that isn’t so bad, but isn’t so good, either, and I arrive in Sibiu a bit frayed.

I think Sibiu and I met each other on mutually bad days. Lonely Planet waxes lyrical about this town (which, like Brasov, has a lot of unsightly concrete outside the old town centre), but the roads were under heavy renovation, and it was hot, dry and windy, so that yellow dust from the roadworks was blowing around everywhere - no doubt the reason for the large town square being a bit desolate.

I stopped at the first restaurant I saw in the square, ‘La Turn’ (The Tower), and had ciorba de perisoare - meatball soup. The soup was really delicious, made with a rich stock and full of herb flavours, and the bread was maybe the best I’ve had anywhere - crust crunchy but not too hard, inside soft but substantial, almost cakey, and very flavoursome. There are a lot of cornfields in this area, so maybe there was cornmeal in it.

I didn’t explore as much as I should have, and dragged myself rather than wandered around. On another day, I’d have seen more.

Down in the ‘Lower Town’ below the old town there were a lot of little higgledy-piggledy houses with tiled roofs, in which were eye-like windows - the tiles curving like eyelids over small narrow embrasures with their even smaller windows sitting in them like sleepy pupils - a style apparently unique to this town. They were very charming, but I couldn’t help wondering what they were like inside.

I had similar thoughts on the way back - by train, this time (I had to ask a young policeman where the ticket booth was; he was very nice, and spoke English). We went past numerous hamlets and villages of stone and wooden cottages, most of which were in that picturesque state of disrepair which must be a pain to live with day by day. You also see horses and carts - perhaps the last of a vanishing way of life, but you can see why it’s vanishing: it’s a lot of hard work.