Sofia and Belgrade!

Just got back this morning from my trip to Sofia, Bulgaria and Belgrade, Serbia. Overall, it was a great trip, but I am glad to be back in Bucharest.

Sofia

I started out the trip with an overnight train from Bucharest to Sofia. Despite the fact that I was technically in "first class", the experience left something to be desired. The train was from the USSR in 1988, complete with sickle and hammer on the outside. The inside didn't have any air conditioning and the windows were stuck and wouldn't open. Needless to say, it was extremely uncomfortable, bordering on dangerously hot.

I arrived in Sofia bright and early, dropped my stuff off at the hostel, and went on a 3 mile run. Nothing wakes you up better! I then went on my own little walking tour of Sofia. Now, despite the fact that Sofia is technically poorer and lower on the development list than Bucharest, I actually found it to be more put together than Bucharest. Better quality roads, no stray dogs, no downed power lines. Sofia also had some cool places to check out; my particular favorite was the Alexander Nevski cathedral. Like most Eastern European capitals, there was enough cool stuff to keep me occupied for a day, but not much else. I spent the second day mostly relaxing in a park, reading a book. Then I was off to Belgrade!

Belgrade

The overnight train to Belgrade was much more pleasant than my previous one. Even though I was in second class this time, the windows at least opened. And there was a nice Portuguese engineer who was chatty enough to keep me entertained until I could sleep.

Belgrade was a very cool city. Unlike Bucharest and Sofia, Belgrade's architecture seemed to have survived communism much more intact. It was also fun off these really great streets lined with great little restaurants and shops. They also had a lot of really cool Orthodox churches. I think my favorite moment in Belgrade was eating a great meal of homemade sausage, potatoes, and beer on one of those cute streets.

Finally, there was my last overnight train last night. A highly unpleasant experience, for several reasons. First, a train employee threw a massive fit that I had my feet on the seat across from me, even though I was the only one in the cabin. Didn't make a lot of sense, since they lower into beds, so people's feet on the head rests every night. Europeans are strangely assholes when it comes to shoes on seats. After a few hours, a Romanian man joined me the cabin and committed two sins that are SO Romanian it made me want to scream. First, he shut the window, despite the 95 degree heat and lack of air conditioning. God forbid there's a breeze in the cabin! Second, he spent like 4 hours on his cell phone in the middle of the night, with no regard whatsoever that I was trying to sleep. I was so close to smacking him when he finally lost reception and went to sleep.

Other than that, good trip! I leave Bucharest tomorrow morning, have a few hour layover at Heathrow, and then I'll be in Baltimore for a couple of days. I'll be back in KC on the 15th.

Who needs sleep?

Yesterday was my last day at my internship. My coworkers through me a surprise going away party, which was cute. It was a potluck, so I got to try all sorts of tasty homemade Romanian food.

This is my last day living in the house in the suburbs. I'm completely packed up, cleaned up, etc. Like so many other times, my life is once again packed into two 50 pound suitcases.

In a couple of hours, I'll be boarding an overnight train to Sofia, Bulgaria. I'll arrive bright and early tomorrow morning, do some sightseeing, and stay that night in a hostel. The next night (Monday night), I'll be on an overnight train to Belgrade, where I'll also be staying two days and one night. Then I will conclude my journey with an overnight train back to Bucharest. Despite the misery that is bound to accompany so many overnight train trips, I'm pretty excited. I've wanted to visit Sofia for a long time, and Belgrade will be my first excursion into the Balkans. I managed to fit everything I'll need (including pillow/blanket) into my big purse, which my backpacker self is quite please with. Hopefully, I can avoid getting robbed / harassed on these trains. I'll be in 1st class, so hopefully there won't be too many problems. I'm also hoping that I understand the visa laws correctly; hopefully I don't have problems with any Bulgarian/Serbian border police.

I'll be back in Bucharest for one day, then my plane ride back to Baltimore! I'll put up a post about my trip during that day in Bucharest.

Thoughts on Running in Romania

For non-runners, this may be a pretty boring post. But, since a lot of my time here in Bucharest is spent training for the marathon, I figured it would be appropriate to comment on some of the challenges of running here.

- Bucharest is a smelly, smelly place. On a daily basis, it's annoying, but ignorable. When running, however, it's much less easy to ignore. Now, I'm a person with a pretty strong gag reflex; smells don't usually bother me. But these smells have caused me to almost puke, which is not a good feeling while trying to run long distances. Usually, I think the smells are either rotting animal corpses, rotting trash, or human excrement. Really unpleasant.

- The animals are no less annoying when they're still alive. Many runners in Bucharest carry sticks or pepper spray to keep the stray dogs away. I haven't had to resort to that yet, but most strays really don't like people running near them and get pretty antsy.

- Romanians stare at anything they perceive as different (even my culture guide notes this). Unfortunately for me, they perceive a female American runner is definitely different to them. During any given run, there are dozens of people staring at me, yelling at me, saying things to me in Romanian, honking at me, etc. At first, I though it was pretty funny. After a few hundred instances of this, it just really pisses me off now. The runner in me is annoyed because it's very distracting, the feminist in me is pissed because I should be able to run without being harassed.

- Bucharest is not easily traversable. There are big holes in the roads/sidewalks, places where no sidewalks exist, random mounds of dirt/trash in odd places, and cars parked on the sidewalks. It gets tiring on long runs.

- My final annoyance is the lack of supplied. I need new shoes, new socks, some Powerbars, new Fuelbelt bottles (Delilah chewed mine), etc. But since no Romanians run, there aren't any running stores.

Despite all these things, there have been some nice moments. There are some truly beautiful areas of Bucharest that I've gotten to see, that I would never see if I didn't run. You don't truly know a city, til you've run through it.