[Romania]

I’ve crossed the Hungarian border and had entered the strangeness of Romania. I’m on a train in Transylvania, and there isn’t a person who speaks a word of English. I’m baffled, and can’t figure out where I am. Nothing makes any sense.

We enter a small city, and the train just stops in industrial yards of some sort. No station or platform. Everyone gets up, walks out. An old woman taps me on the knee and motions me to follow her. We climbed out in a freezing rain, and move quickly – hopping and picking our way across eight sets of muddy tracks to another train.

Every day people came up to me trying out languages they partially know in hopes of talking to me. A lot of failed attempts at Italian and German. A year earlier they had been completely prohibited from such exchanges. In fact, controls on expression and communication were such that it had been illegal to own a typewriter.

Sibiu is one of the old German Saxon towns of Transylvania, and it was truly unpolished, old Europe.