Orient Express #3: Brasov

The original plan was to head to Bucharest from Budapest, but after hearing a lot of negative feedback about the Romanian capital, we decided to stop instead in the Transylvanian region of Romania, and the city of Brasov became our base for the region. 

It all started with that long train ride overnight, chugging away gently into the Carpathian Mountains. The landscape looked more and more agrarian. Peasants worked in the field with their hands and simple tools. Everything looked like a scene from a bygone decade where life was hard but simple. 

Old Town Brasov, like every other European city, centres around a square. The architecture was mildly Germanic, due to the strong Saxon influence in the area.

Venture out of the old town a little and it immediately starts to look industrial and post-communist. At times when I’ve walked past a particularly hideous set of apartment blocks, I could’ve sworn I had been there before - back in the China of the 1990s. Communism has a unique talent for producing the same grotesquely sombre architecture all over the world.

Rope Street, famous for being the “narrowest street in Eastern Europe”. Of what significance this is no one really knows. But it does have a nice ring to it. 

Our gorgeous apartment, right at the foot of Mt Tampa and the famous BRASOV sign. 

The Bran Castle behind me, remotely associated with Vlad the Impaler, also known as the real life Dracula. But in fact, the castle curated some more interesting stories about the former Romanian royal family than our old friend Vlad. 

On our third day in town, we decided to hike up Mount Tampa, the mountain just behind the Brasov Old Town. The mountains near Brasov are famous for being bear-infested, and it’s not a rare occurrence for tourists to come across bears, so I was a little alarmed as we were hiking.

But in the end, the only wild life we saw were some deers. The woods blocked out all the sounds of traffic from below. Bird twittered. The damp ground smelled like rain and moss. The sun eventually peeked through the dense forrest, and we were loving the dose of nature after a week of city hopping. 

Compared to Paris and Budapest, Brasov was somewhat off the beaten track. The tourist infrastructure was poor, even though Brasov was considered to be a tourist town. As obvious foreigners, we had to fend for ourselves a lot more, hire drivers, watch out for scams, and know when to trust our own instincts. 

But Brasov was also where we lived it up, dining out at the best restaurants in town, drinking copious amounts of vino blanco, hiking and cycling deep into the countryside where little old ladies with square scarfs around their heads stared as if they’ve never seen an Asian person before.  

The more savvy English speakers we met listened to our tales of gallivanting across the countryside and hiking in bear infested mountains like we were crazies. In Brasov, we felt bold and active and onto something special. 

And indeed we were. 

xx doots

Orient Express #2: Budapessshht.

“First things first: a pest is an epidemic disease, and my beautiful city is not that. So from now, you will call it Budapesht”. 

That got a giggle from the crowd. It was a cheery start to the “free walking tour” of Budapesht, the second stop on our journey from Paris to Istanbul. 

We had rented an apartment on AirBnB, and coming from the opulence of Paris, it was a shock to step into the apartment complex and see decay - decay everywhere. Peeling art nouveau walls, rotting elaborate door frames, rusty iron handles on creaky lifts. The apartment itself was newly refurbished, but it seemed out of place, stuck in a building that was literally falling apart, crushed and forgotten by age.

We would later learn that this is fairly common in Budapest, particularly in the some old neighbourhoods where many apartment buildings are still owned by the government. The rent is low, there is no body corporate and little incentive for individual renters to fix what they regard as common property, so many art nouveau buildings are simply left to rot and completely fall apart. Indeed, in some cases, the government would get more money out of redeveloping the land after a building has been demolished than to restore an old building to its former glory.

But what is the long term effect of this kind of defacing of a city? It seems to be a tension wherever I go in the world. And even when you do restore heritage, how do you keep it real at the same time? How do you do it without raising the rent, without excluding those on the margins who have been allowed to live in relatively peace in their rotting old town apartments?

I’m not sure if there is an easy solution, but I do remember feeling a sense of pity when I brushed away the dust on the staircase of my rental apartment to reveal white marble underneath.

Our apartment building. 

Museum of terror

But as the Mumford song goes, you must know life to see decay. Budapest has known a lot of life, and even in its apparent post-communist, decaying dormancy, we saw signs of a vibrant culture: the glittering opera house and some of the cheapest opera tickets you will ever be able to buy (we paid about $50 for front show box seats). The cafes and ruin bars tucked away in dilapidated yards in the Jewish district. The hipsters with a licence to wear their grandpa’s loafers. Cheap drinks, delicious (much underrated) wine, artery-cloggingly rich food. 

We ate, drank and lived like kings at night, and walked through streets filled with the smell of cinnamon during the day, learning about history, Hungary’s long history of resistance and adaptation - first as foreigners from Central Asia who settled at the foot of the Carpathian mountains, and later as a people dealing with a taut relationship with their successive invaders - the Mongolians, the Turks, the Habsburgs, the Communists … 

There are some cities that you bookmark for “One Day”. That One Day when you’ll have the time, the leave, the opportunity to visit again. I left Budapest with a bookmark, hoping that when I return on that One Day, there will be less decay and more dusting off of the brilliant city beneath the decades of dormancy. 

Orient Express #1: Towards the Orient.

The concept was a simple one: I needed to go to Paris to go see the French Open. I’ve always wanted to visit Turkey and never had the chance. It seemed only natural then to join the dots and turn it into my very own Orient Express. 

We decided to go via the original route of the Orient Express (red line). Because I only had three weeks of leave, I picked two stops en route to Istanbul to explore - Budapest and the Transylvania region of Romania. 

And so it began in Gay Paree, where I spent long days at the tennis, and long nights walking off the terrifically rich food up and down the hill in Montmartre.

In hindsight, Paris felt like a footnote to the whole trip. I don’t remember much other than the tennis. 

But I do remember our cosy citrus-coloured apartment, with the Sacre Coeur casually gleaming outside the window. 

I remember getting off 24 hours of flight time to meet a friend at an indie music festival on the outskirts of Paris. The music, booze, the crowd jumping on stage to strip off their clothes … I remember thinking I’m too old for this shit. 

I remember the late night, after-dinner walks up to Sacre Coeur, the gelati, the hawkers selling miniature Eiffel Towers made in China, the reggaeton buskers dancing on the steps next to the furnicular on chilly summer nights. 

I remember my only day away from the tennis, catching up with an old friend, dodging the rain inside the opulent Palais Garnier, hitting up the grands magasins packed full of Asian tourists bulk buying Louis Vuitton. 

What more can I say?

Paris is Paris. So defined. So assured of its own identity that it borders (and indeed is a form of) commodification. French enough to be foreign, but not foreign enough to be outside my comfort zone.

It was the perfect place to touch down, to “do stuff” and chill out at the same time, to get used to being a tourist, being an outsider. And at the end of our four day sojourn, we were ready to head off for REALZ. 

Towards the Orient!

xx doots