DAY TWO
“Look, sheep!”
Robin and I gaze out the window at the Romanian countryside. We’re not sure whether we’re technically in Transylvania yet, but it’s not long after leaving Bucharest that we’re able to see the blue ghosts of mountains on the horizon. There are acres upon acres of grassy fields knotted with trees, and as our train crosses a river, we see a gentleman guiding his flock of sheep across a rocky ford downstream.
The image is immediately striking to me. I’m aware that rural life occupies an important place in the history of Romanian storytelling. The sight of these sheep, this crystal-clear stream untouched by litter, and the total absence of buildings between us and the mountains on the horizon, feels like snapshot of the country as a whole. It reminds me of when I went to the USA for the first time and saw big, white-painted suburban houses with massive lawns, American flags, and basketball hoops hanging above garage doors. The image felt representative of middle-class, suburban life in the USA. Similarly, the image of a farmer herding his sheep through a green, tranquil landscape feels like it captures Romania’s rural side.
I wonder what images visitors to the UK would find representative of wider truths? All I can think of is a 50-year-old man with a shaved head being sick in a Wetherspoons car park. During my student exchange to the USA in 2012, there was a recurring TV commercial that aired during the ad breaks for NFL games in which a trendy, modern woman is standing on a train platform and holding a fancy new laptop-tablet hybrid. All of a sudden, she’s transported to Victorian London, where a policeman with mutton chops asks, “What’s all this, then?”. Before she can answer, a chimneysweep with a face covered in soot inexplicably appears at the woman’s shoulder and asks, “Is it powered by coal and steam?”. Whenever the chimneysweep said this line, my American friend Aaron would say, “This is exactly what I picture when I imagine the UK”. Even as I write this, I’m genuinely cracking up at the memory of the chimneysweep’s soot-covered cheeks and cheerful, toothless smile.
The commercial was for an Intel Ultrabook Convertible, and when he asks the woman if her fancy device is powered by coal and steam, she replies, “No, it’s powered by Intel”. Anyway, the point is, I was getting an insight into Aaron’s impression of the UK, and while I found his reaction to the commercial absolutely hilarious, it also felt like a mirror to the way I’d absorbed certain images of the USA prior to arriving.
This is something that happens when you travel; you instinctively connect what you see to the images you’ve absorbed from popular media. With Romania, I’ve probably formed most of my impressions from the history documentaries I’ve watched on YouTube. As I gaze out the train windows at the passing countryside, I think about Vlad Țepeș employing a scorched earth strategy against the invading Ottoman host, luring them deeper and deeper into the Romanian wilderness via a trail of heads mounted on spikes and picking them off with daring guerrilla tactics. And today is a particularly special day for following in the footsteps of medieval warlords.
Today is all about mine and Robin’s love of history.
It’s about the intersection of real history, of imagined images, and horror stories. Our trip to Romania was conceived and planned around two pillars. The first pillar, Therme Bucharești, was our priority for day one. Today, our priority is Castelul Bran—which is marketed to tourists as “Dracula’s Castle”. While you can feasibly get from Bucharest to the castle and back within one day, it’s not ideal. You’ll be spending at least six hours of your day sat in transit—even more if you don’t go via train—and you’ll no doubt feel rushed. Robin and I decide to stay in the town of Brașov for the night so that we split the travel time across two days and have the opportunity to immerse ourselves in the area. And so, what started as a simple trip to Bran Castle gets built out into a vibrant Transylvanian excursion.
The tone of our second day is very different to our first. It goes back to what I said in Part One about the satisfaction I get from combining wildly different things. The theme of our first day was relaxation. We indulged ourselves, we let loose, we got a little whimsical. Today, the theme is history. The tone is more active and precise; we’re absorbing historical information, we’re walking up steep inclines in the heat, we have to manage our time and arrange various transport links. It contrasts with yesterday in a way that I really like.
The atmosphere is also very different. And I don’t mean in the obvious urban-vs-rural sense. In Bucharest, I didn’t get a particularly touristy feeling outside our visits to the spa and the Old Town. And even then, the spa and the Old Town represented a fast-paced, urban kind of tourism. We encountered people just going about their lives, some of whom didn’t seem to like us very much—the same way tourists in London will no doubt encounter irritable commuters that aren’t in the mood to be cultural representatives.
In Brașov, on the other hand, I get the distinct impression that we’re in a resort town. The Romanians we encounter are a lot more interested in having a chat and making us feel welcome. I wonder if it’s because Brașov has built an identity around tourism, whereas Bucharest is a major city where people live and work, which happens to have touristy places within it. The people in Brașov seem to reflect the charm of the scenery. And the scenery is more than a little charming. You exit this retrofuturist train station that looks like it was transported right out of the 1960s during the height of the Space Age. Designed by Teonic Săvulescu, Brașov Railway Station epitomizes the utopian ideal of Mid-Century Communist Modernism, with this sweeping concrete shell roof and a glass façade that floods its cavernous main hall with natural light. I love it. We step out of the shadow of its monumental geometric lines into the gorgeous, all-encompassing sunshine, and are faced with a kind of cinematic runway.
Everything is perfectly symmetrical. In front of the station is a roundabout, anchored in the center with a tall structure known only as “The Obelisk”. And stretching beyond it is a long, wide boulevard (Bulevardi Gării, aka Station Boulevard). You can think of it as an exclamation point, with the boulevard being the vertical line and the Obelisk serving as the dot below. I realize in this moment that I’ve got a raging hard-on for totalitarian urban planning. During the Communist era, architecture didn’t stop at a building’s front doors. The station, the roundabout, and the road all exist in harmony together. What Robin and I are looking at as we exit the station is a deliberate masterpiece. It’s designed as a two-way visual runway. Visitors arriving by train step into a calculated, grandiose symmetry that frames their first view of the city. Conversely, those driving or walking down the boulevard see this futuristic terminus at the end, like this visual prize that’s waiting for them, connecting them to something bigger.
Roads like Bulevardi Gării aren’t built just for traffic. They’re part of a bigger aesthetic project. And I love the idea that decision-makers are thinking about creating a visual experience rather than just commissioning whatever makes the most practical sense. I’d like to see it more often. Would anyone really complain if we completely bulldozed Swindon and replaced it with an eco-friendly, atompunk hypercity? Heritage is overrated. I say it’s time we start tearing it all down and giving Modernists free reign to build planned cities. I like environments—both urban and natural—that make me feel small, that create a sense of awe.
Anyway, enough about all that. Robin and I walk down Bulevardi Gării and stop off at a tiny grocery store. I’m fascinated by all the Romanian products. I love looking at the fonts, illustrations, and brand logos on canned goods. I grab an orange soda called Mirinda and wonder whether it’s Romanian.
“I’ve had that before,” Robin says. “I think it’s Spanish.”
We get a bus to the old town and the scenery changes. We go back in time from the Space Age to the Middle Ages. There are medieval defensive walls and watchtowers. Pastel-hued baroque facades and narrow, cobblestone alleyways. Gothic churches and bustling terraces. There are beautiful city parks marked with flowerbeds, ponds, and statues. Women sit on blankets, slicing cake and laughing together, completely untroubled by men. Little old couples trot along shaded paths, stopping here and there to admire the vibrancy of the flowers. It really does feel like an old-fashioned, 19th century resort town in the mountains.
“Oh my God,” Robin says.
“Wow.”
Past the old, multistory neoclassical hotels that make me think of Victorian aristocrats recovering from consumption or severe melancholia in high-altitude sanatoriums and luxury hotels in the Alps, we see the famous Brașov sign. Modeled after the Hollywood sign, it sits atop the forested peak of Mount Tâmpa and overlooks the city. You immediately feel like you’re somewhere special. The whole town of Brașov is tucked away by the Carpathian mountains, tightly cushioned by them, so that its dense forests become the canvas for whatever you’re looking at, rising high above the buildings toward the clouds.
Robin and I check into the historic Casa Wagner Hotel in the town’s cobbled Council Square and grab lunch before heading straight to Bran. Our Uber driver is really friendly and we have a nice chat. He tells us that the mountains surrounding Brașov and Bran are home to hundreds and hundreds of bears.
“That’s so cool,” I say.
“No, not very cool,” the driver says, shaking his head. We share a laugh, and I’m reminded of how, when I visited Louisiana, alligators were an exotic novelty to me as a tourist, but an everyday annoyance for the people that actually lived there.
Our driver seems interested in our impressions of Romania. We tell him how much we love the beautiful scenery and he tells us more about the area. He’s a local, but spent many years living in Italy at one point. He tells us about the different castles here, how one of them recently held a concert, and how another was the filming location for the TV show Wednesday.
Then he tells us how to say hello.
“In Romania, we say Salut, like in Roman Empire.”
This immediately strikes me as a very interesting—and potentially loaded—remark. During my research of “Do’s and Don’ts” for visiting Romania, I’d read that tourists should never ask about race or ethnicity. I already knew about Romanian’s linguistic connection to Italian, French, Portuguese, and Spanish as one of the five successor languages to Latin, but I wasn’t aware of any ethnic tension. The tension comes from the fact that Romanians are deeply proud of their Latin heritage and see themselves as a “Latin island in a Slavic sea”. In 106 AD, the Romans conquered the Dacian tribes living in the area, which led to a rapid process of Romanization and an interesting fusion of Roman and Balkan cultures. This “Daco-Roman” origin forms the foundation of Romania’s national identity, and the “Daco-Roman Continuity” is something every Romanian child learns about in school. It ties the country to the cradle of Western civilization and helps to validate its place in the EU. However, starting in the Middle Ages, the Roma people migrated out of the Indian subcontinent and settled across Eastern Europe. The Roma are a completely different ethnic group, whose language belongs to an entirely different language family. It’s simply an unfortunate coincidence that “Romania” and “Roma” sound similar. And the way Western Europeans conflate Romanians with the Roma has led to a lot of national anxiety, because it makes Romanians feel like their unique heritage is being erased.
It doesn’t help that there are many nasty and unpleasant stereotypes associated with the Roma people. When the Roma started popping up in Western Europe, they were named after the Eastern European countries they passed through, sometimes called “Hungarians” or “Easterners”. This cemented an early mental link between the Roma and the countries of Eastern Europe in the Western imagination. Western Europeans lumped the peoples of the east together and characterized them as impoverished criminals. It’s sad and a shame. And it’s only intensified the anxiety in Romania. It’s why Romanians (such as our Uber driver) sometimes feel the need to emphasize their connection to the Roman Empire as a kind of defensive, pre-emptive correction, because they know that Western Europeans have historically confused them with the persecuted Romani people (and thereby undermined Romania’s essential “European-ness”).
Our encounter with the Uber driver is fascinating and we feel very grateful to him for being so informative. As I mentioned earlier, the people we encounter in Brașov seem a little more eager to be friends than the ones in Bucharest. While I’ve done plenty of research into Romanian history, I don’t actually know much about the Romanian national character. I know not to mention anything to do with local ethnicities, but I don’t know what makes Romanian people tick. I don’t know how to charm them, what their temperament is like, what they typically like to talk about compared to other countries. I’m someone that likes to be friends with everyone I meet. And I like to leave a good impression if I go to another country. It’s why I looked up the Do’s and Don’ts in the first place. I can’t stand the idea of enjoying myself in a foreign place and coming across as disrespectful, ignorant, arrogant, or ill-tempered.
I do actually have a Romanian friend—Marta—who I met during my Publishing MA at Kingston University five years ago. She’s the kind of person that talks to anyone and everyone without fear, but I wouldn’t say she’s loud. She’s happy to let someone else take the spotlight and then she’ll come in with a witty or sarcastic comment at the right time. She was one of those students that got involved in everything, and since graduating she’s established a successful career in the publishing industry. But all of these things could simply be traits particular to Marta. Should I conclude that Romanians have a culture of being outgoing and hardworking? I don’t know whether she’s a typical Romanian or not. Am I typical Brit? I definitely have certain habits, attitudes, or ways of thinking that are 100% the product of my British upbringing. But I’m also atypical in other ways—I don’t drink tea for example. Part of me wishes I had asked Marta about the Romanian national character before coming here.
One thing I feel fairly confident in from our brief time here is that Romanian people are quite concise and straightforward in how they talk. This could be purely anecdotal. But the Romanians we meet don’t seem to waffle, nor do they seem desperate to impress or flatter. The ones that like us are kind without being over the top. The ones that don’t like us are direct in conveying their irritation. During customs at Otopeni, I stood too close to this line I was meant to keep behind, and the Romanian customs officer said, “This is not UK. In Romania you have to respect the rules”. It made me wonder whether British people have a reputation here for being disrespectful. I wouldn’t be surprised to be honest.
The Uber driver likes me though. He drops us off in Bran and helpfully points us in the right direction to the castle. You can tell that vampires are still popular, because the place is absolutely heaving with tourists. Robin spots a black-and-white cat sunbathing on a terrace and starts petting him through the bars of the metal railing. The cat flops onto his side and stretches his paws out to meet Robin’s hands. I get the feeling she was disappointed last night that we didn’t encounter any cats in Bucharest. After playing with the little tuna thief for a moment, we cross the road and decide to get some ice cream.
While ascending the steep hill toward the castle, however, I accidentally spill some ice cream down my front. I wipe it off but now there’s a little dark spot on the beautiful merino wool. It’s one of my favorite T-shirts. Like everything else I’ve brought with me on this trip, it’s from UNIQLO.
“Oh dear,” Robin says when I show her. I’ll have to cover it with my camera bag. Meanwhile Robin’s wearing a white cotton sundress and looks strikingly like Marilyn Monroe, so I feel I’m letting the team down a little bit.
Inside the castle I bang my head twice. It’s quite snug. It’s not like the Harrenhal-esque behemoth you see in Nosferatu. But I like it—it’s got character. And as we walk through its narrow corridors and up its tight spiral staircases, I start to think that this would be a great setting for a novel. I think its size would be perfect for a household full of tension and secrets. In terms of its shape, it’s not wide or sprawling. Instead, it’s tall and narrow, perched on top of this steep hill like a natural extension of its rocky bluffs. I imagine a small noble family living there hiding a secret from the townsfolk in the village below. I imagine a small garrison of soldiers on the verge of mutiny. There’s a courtyard in the center, and Robin poses in one of the interior balconies, affecting a haughty demeanor and pretending to be the lady of the castle inspecting her servants.
Our imagination seems to run wild in this place. We duck into a small armory and now it’s my turn to role play.
“Look, it’s you!” Robin says.
She’s spotted a movie costume hung in a display case for the outfit of Mihai (Michael) the Brave, my all-time favorite Romanian. I watched a documentary on him a couple years back and his story has always stuck with me, so I’m delighted to see some reference to him on our trip. There’s a heavy, regal caftan with a thick fur-and-velvet cloak, some ornate gauntlets, and they even have his famous “căciulă” hat. I should have checked the castle gift shop to see whether they had any replicas of this on sale. It’s a tall fur hat with a white feather agrafe.
There’s a lot of information inside the castle and we learn that it was actually built in 1377 by the Saxons.
“Hey that’s us!”
The king of Hungary allowed the Saxons to build the castle at their own expense, enabling them to look after German settlers in the area. Some time later, it became a customs post for merchants traveling through the mountains. As far as I can tell, the association Bran Castle has with Vlad the Impaler and Dracula is a marketing initiative driven by the local tourism industry. And a bloody successful one at that, because we’re crammed into the castle like sardines. But it doesn’t really matter what’s true and what’s not. Robin and I are interested in storytelling just as much as real history. We’re interested in all of it—what the castle was and what it’s become. Today’s about tracing the thread that connects the Saxon warriors and Transylvanian nobles to Gothic Literature and modern copywriting. It’s enjoyable to imagine that Robin and I are weary travelers from some rapidly industrializing German city, and we’ve come to spend the night in the castle at the invitation of some mysterious count, despite the cryptic warnings from the Bran villagers. Funnily enough, Robin has been taking some acting classes in real life, and had we had more time in Romania, I would have liked to film some skits with her.
But the reality is that we’ve got a bunch of things to see and not a lot of time. After exiting the castle, we spend some time in the small, open-air museum below, admiring the crafts and watching live actors in medieval dress fighting each other with replica swords. There are also loads of stalls selling all kinds of gifts. Perusing these stalls ends up being one of my fondest memories of the whole trip. Robin and I have this thing where we get a fridge magnet wherever we go, and the magnet has to have an illustration that somehow sums up what made the place particularly special to us. In Edinburgh, Robin became obsessed with Highland cattle, so we got a magnet with a cow rather than one depicting the city’s castle, the Scottish flag, or whatever. When we went to an immersive horror experience this summer, we got a magnet depicting a plague doctor, and when we went to a museum of anatomical curiosities, we got one of a frog preserved in formaldehyde. It’s something we take very seriously and we’ll usually have a long discussion about it before making our decision.
“It has to have bats!” Robin says. She likes the haunted aesthetic. We decide we also want the castle to be in it, and after a lot of searching we find the perfect design: a magnet with an illustration with Vlad the Impaler on the left and Bran Castle on the right, with bats and a blood-red moon in the background. We also get a couple T-shirts. I go for one depicting Vlad the Impaler and Robin chooses a spooky one with bats. I also pick up a scary chalice with a dragon on it. How it will fit into my RyanAir carry-on is a problem for tomorrow.
Wasting no time, Robin and I get a cab back to Brașov and take the cable car up Mount Tâmpa. Like the railway station, the Tâmpa Cable Car building is a textbook example of Socialist Modernism—which moved away from the dull, blocky aesthetics of the Stalinist era and adopted an optimistic, forward-looking political narrative driven by Space Age futurism. Concrete was now treated as something much more malleable, with architects beginning to embrace its innate fluidity—sculpting it into dynamic angles, sweeping curves, and dramatic cantilevers. The Tâmpa Cable Car building reflects this fascinating architectural U-turn and the shift toward more expressive design, with sharp geometric angles and heavy overhangs that seem to defy gravity. Just looking at it makes me feel some kind of way.
Robin, meanwhile, has been developing her own obsession. She’s become utterly infatuated with Romania’s brown bears and seems intent on seeing one in the flesh. This reaches a fever pitch when she sees a warning sign in the woods the mountain’s summit. She makes a little squeal and takes a photo of the sign.
“I wasn’t gonna tell you this…” she says. “But I read that a tourist in Brașov got mauled by a bear last week.”
Holy shit.
I start to imagine what would realistically happen if a bear wandered out of the woods. It’s almost 8pm and the sun is going down, but there are plenty of people around. We’re probably safe in numbers, but we don’t take our chances walking down the mountain in the dark. We take some photos of the sunset beside the famous Brașov sign, talk about that one scene from The Revenant, and head back to the cable car. Robin keeps her eyes peeled as we descend the mountain, looking for the slightest disturbance in the bushes.
It’s been a long day and we’re tired. We head back to Council Square, which looks very atmospheric in the dark, and get some nice pizza. We also try an iconic Romanian wine called Fetească Neagră—a rich, dark red that we enjoy, despite both of us usually preferring white. It’s been a good day, and my only regret is that we don’t have more time here in the mountains.
DAY THREE
I wake up on August 25th feeling pretty good about life. I’m in a beautiful, historic hotel. I’ve got leftover pizza that somehow tastes even better than the night before. They have this really nice peach juice at the hotel breakfast buffet. And I’m still riding on high on the fact I’ve just had two incredible days in Romania with my best friend.
I feel like nothing can take me down at this moment.
But then something strange happens. Robin and I get the morning train back to Bucharest and I start shivering. It comes on gradually. For the first hour or so, everything’s normal. If anything, I’m a little hyper. Robin and I are taking photos of the mountainous Transylvanian landscape and having a lively conversation about the horror series FROM. At first, I tell myself it’s the AC. I try to ignore the shivering and will it away. But it stays. Not only does it stay, but it gets worse. I don’t want to tell Robin about it because talking about it feels like it would make it more real.
In my head, I’m still in denial. But I’m getting a bad feeling. My instinct is that this has nothing to do with the AC. It takes me a while to accept this though. I’ve always felt that when you say aloud that you’re unwell, then everything changes. You can’t go back. I don’t want me becoming ill to impact our trip and the day of exploring in Bucharest we have planned. I’m hoping that I can somehow keep a lid on this thing and suppress any sign of it until we arrive back in London. At the forefront of my mind is the fact that this whole trip to Romania is in honor of Robin’s birthday. It’s a big, three-day celebration. I hate the idea of her having to temper her excitement because I can’t match her energy. The idea of my body failing me makes me angry. But by the time we’re halfway from Brașov to Bucharest, the shivering becomes too much to ignore. My teeth are chattering. I’m really uncomfortable.
So I take a deep breath and tell Robin about my shivers. It pains me to have to do it, because I don’t want it on her mind. I don’t want to change the tone or mood of our trip. The best part of going anywhere with Robin is the atmosphere she creates—it’s like everything, even the smallest moments, becomes more fun. Everything becomes an adventure, and it’s quite entertaining seeing her reactions to things. If something is unfamiliar or unusual, she’ll want to know everything there is to know about it. If she sees anything that’s small and furry, she’ll become obsessed with it. I hate the idea of diminishing all that.
So far, it’s just the shivers that are bothering me. I put my chinos on over my shorts and I put on three layers of T-shirts. I ask the conductor to crank the AC up from 16°C to 20°C and that helps a little. But I still have this gnawing dread that something is wrong. I almost never get ill. The last time I was ill was over three years ago, when I got COVID-19 during a work trip to Brighton (an outbreak that took out half the entire company, in fact). Sometimes I get the shivers if I drink too much, but it’s been a while since I was genuinely wasted. It occurs to me that I haven’t eaten much the past couple days. This hadn’t really alarmed me though. After all, I’ve been out of my routine, I’ve been trying new foods, I’ve been on-the-go. And sometimes, when I’m really excited, I forget to eat and rely on pure adrenaline alone. I’ve never been good at fitting in meals when I need to—for example, in situations where I’m busy and I have to adapt my eating habits.
Outside, the temperature is 35°C (95°F), so I make sure to remove all my extra layers before we exit the train. The shivers do actually go away at this point. But the heat begins to take its toll on me. Robin and I drop our bags off at this random halal fast food joint that’s operating a side hustle as a luggage storage business and get a cab to the Arcul de Triumph. It’s an impressive monument that commemorates Romanian victory in WW1 and the coronation of King Ferdinand I. However, it also sits in the center of a roundabout that takes about 3-4 business days to drive through. After taking some photos of each other posing in front of the arch, I tell Robin that I’ve got a surprise for her. She thinks it’s something to do with cats, which would be the obvious thing where Robin is concerned.
What I actually have in store is much more kooky. I’d discovered during my research that the nearby park has a random Michael Jackson memorial. Why, I haven’t the faintest idea. But I knew that the sheer randomness would make Robin laugh. She’s developed a strange fascination with Michael Jackson recently, which I attribute to her interest in horror and the uncanny. I’m not a fan personally, but I do enjoy a couple of his songs. I also really like watching people do his dance moves.
We get to the memorial and Robin bursts out laughing. This is what I mean when I say she always has the best reactions to things. I take a few photos of her posing next to the memorial and then I start to feel funny. It comes on quite suddenly. The strength seems to disappear from my muscles. It’s like my legs can’t support my weight. I start to feel incredibly weak and worry that I’m going to pass out. There’s something sinister about the dark Michael Jackson silhouette facing me, the way his body is contorting like one of those fake skeleton dummies you see in a doctor’s office. This other Michael. My nemesis.
I head toward a nearby bench. The feeling of being unwell is so overwhelming at this point that there’s no way I can possibly hide it. I tell Robin I need to lay down. I make no attempt now to downplay what’s happening or put on a brave face for fear of ruining the trip. Before I even reach the bench, I feel myself retch. Nothing actually comes out, but I involuntarily double over and feel vomit coming up my throat. A cold ripple passes over me and I feel light-headed.
I don’t faint though. I’ve fainted before (July 4th 2022, in Texas) and it’s a different feeling. In Texas, I felt my whole vision blur, to the point I could hardly see, and it was like I was on the verge of losing consciousness. The feeling was in my temple more than anywhere else. With this, however, the feeling isn’t in my head. It’s in my muscles. My whole body just feels dog-tired. But I don’t feel like I’m in danger of losing consciousness or anything like that. It’s just an overwhelming need to rest, like I’m a broken-down car that needs to be taken into the garage for a while.
It must be the heat, I think. I must be dehydrated.
“Here, drink this,” Robin says. She hands me the can of soda she’s drinking. Mirinda. I start drinking it and it’s crazy how much it wakes me up. It’s like someone’s just jabbed me in the base of the spine with some kind of military-grade stimulant. I’m still weak, but the drowsiness disappears. The Mirinda saves me from the curse of the haunted Michael Jackson memorial and keeps me artificially awake long enough for us to reach the Dimitrie Gusti National Village Museum.
I’m able to walk through the park with Robin in the heat, but it’s like I’m a phone on 3% battery. What bothers me most is that I don’t have the energy to talk. We ought to be walking through this park having a lively conversation and joking around, but I feel utterly spent. Robin is very understanding though—she tells me not to feel bad about the fact I’m quiet for long periods of time. She appears completely calm; concerned with my wellbeing but not alarmed. I guess it’s not too surprising—Robin is a nurse after all. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen her panic about anything.
We gradually find our way around to the entrance to Dimitrie Gusti National Village Museum—which, like Therme Bucharești, Caru’ cu Bere, and Bran Castle, is another of Robin’s finds. It’s a big open-air ethnographic museum that showcases traditional rural life in Romania. The buildings—which include peasant homes, barns, windmills, and wooden churches—are all real structures dating back to the 17th century, each of them having been physically dismantled and reassembled in the museum. It reminds me a lot of this open-air museum outside Cardiff called St Fagan’s, which similarly rebuilt historical structures from rural Wales that had been carefully disassembled. I went there a couple of times as a child, including for a school field trip, before returning there with one of my American friends as an adult in 2015.
Robin and I pay for our tickets in the admin building. However, once we exit the other side, I feel the tiredness intensifying. The Mirinda seems to be wearing off. I end up sitting down on a patch of grass while Robin has the time of her life playing with a gang of cats nearby. I feel a kind of relief seeing her so happy; if there are cats to be played with it means that whatever’s happening to me hasn’t completely ruined the day.
We get lunch at the café, but I find it difficult to eat. I know I should, but I can’t seem to get anything down. I just chug water. The open-air museum is really beautiful, but I’m struggling to even sit up straight. I tell Robin to enjoy the buildings and take some pictures while I rest, and I end up laying down in a nearby garden using my camera bag as a pillow. One of the cats comes over, sees me resting, and decides to join me. By the time Robin returns, there are several cats curled up near my head, which seems to delight her. It’s a scorching hot day, and we decide to head back toward the area around Bucharest North train station and find a nice café.
We end up at a little place called Manila Coffee. It’s cool and quiet in there, and the barista seems like quite a jolly fella. I get an iced tea and start to feel better. I’m no longer struggling with sitting upright and I feel more present. Just being out of the sun has an immediate effect. I’m also knocking back fizzing Rehydrol water like a Bactrian camel at an open bar. The café has a selection of board games and Robin grabs one from the shelf.
“Let’s play UNO!” she says.
This is my favorite part of the day. When I fell ill at the park, I didn’t think I’d be able to enjoy myself before flying home. I was angry at the idea that I was about to be robbed of six hours of holiday time. But here in the café, I’m actually able to take my mind off of being ill for the first time since shivering in the train carriage this morning. And I credit this entirely to my friend Robin. As I mentioned in the previous post, she has this unique ability to make anything fun. I feel like most people in her position would either be scrolling through their phone or studying me anxiously, not knowing what to do. Since the train journey, I haven’t exactly been meeting her halfway in terms of energy. But she doesn’t accept that we have to sit in silence or that the holiday has to end prematurely—instead, she calmly finds a new way for us to have fun. And it works. I feel myself perking up and I forget that I’m ill for a moment. For a beautiful half hour or so, all I’m focusing on is trying to destroy her at UNO.
Naturally, Robin wins, and we decide to head to the airport an hour early. On the drive there, I do feel the tiredness start to come back. I still don’t know what’s wrong with me at this point, and I begin to wonder whether altitude will have an effect on my condition. It comes to my attention that Otopeni has a 24/7 medical service, and I tell Robin that I think it’s a good idea that they check me out before I get on the plane. I am nervous, however, that the medical team will find something serious enough to bar me from flying home. I’m not sure how the whole thing works. It would be a nightmare if they whisk me off to some hospital in the city and I have to stay in Romania for several days before organizing a new flight. I’d rather just wing it, if that’s on the cards. But Robin is calmly supportive of my decision to get checked out, and I feel reassured it’s the right thing to do.
The problem, at first, is that there are no signs for the medical service. We walk all the way from departures to arrivals and back, asking every member of staff we can find where the medical service is. No one seems to speak English. We go to the pharmacy and they tell us irritably to go back to departures.
This is an international airport—I can’t be the first person coming through here in need of medical attention, I think to myself.
I’m on the verge of giving up on the whole thing, but we try one last time. We ask a security guard and she takes us to a man in a currency exchange booth, and the two of them work together to try to figure out what the hell we’re saying. Neither of them speak much English, but they eventually figure out what we want, and the security guard directs me to an ambulance outside the airport. We find an old fella in a pink high-vis medical jacket, smoking a cigarette. At first, he doesn’t seem to know what we’re on about either. But eventually he says, “You want a doctor, yes?”
I say yes and he nods calmly. He stubs out his cigarette and to my immense relief he guides us away from the ambulance and through a nearby door. We’re in a part of the airport that’s underneath departures. It’s completely silent inside and there’s no one there except for a woman in a booth.
The old fella tells her what we need, which I appreciate. Robin and I have to show our passports and fill out some forms. Within minutes, the old fella takes us to an examination room. No waiting around, no faff, just straight to business. I feel very happy all of a sudden. The old fella turns out to be the doctor, not just a paramedic as I’d initially assumed. He sits at his desk and I take a seat on the bed. A nice woman comes in, who I assume is a medical assistant of some kind.
They do that thing where they attach what feels like an armband around my bicep, and then it kinda deflates and squeezes my arm. They also clip what looks like a giant clothing peg onto my finger. After that, they ask me to take my Vlad the Impaler T-shirt off and lay back on the bed. They attach these stickers to my chest and clip wires to the stickers. I get this strange idea that I’m about to be electrocuted.
I look at Robin and she seems to know exactly what I’m thinking.
“They’re giving you an ECG,” she says, smiling at me.
The doctor has a little machine on his desk, and a pink strip of paper rolls out with a wave graph on it. This is it, I think. I’m about to find out if I’m allowed to fly home tonight.
“You have a fever,” the doctor says matter-of-factly. No surprise there. He then tells me that my blood pressure is normal and that I’m okay. The medical assistant gives me two tablets and I sit up.
“I’m…I’m alright?”
“You’re okay,” the doctor says. The medical assistant smiles warmly. I’m cleared to fly.
EPILOGUE
Romania was an incredible trip. Obviously, I’d rather I didn’t get ill on the last day, but there’s nothing I could have done to prevent it. It’s not like I took a chance on an expired seafood platter or French-kissed a girl in Wetherspoons that had been exhibiting flu-like symptoms all night. There’s no moment I can go back to and identify as the one where the pathogen entered my body. I didn’t accidentally spray myself in the face with bubonic plague or fall into a cowpat downstream from a chemical plant. I was just unlucky, which can happen whenever you catch a flight.
The good thing is, Robin and I front-loaded our trip with the things most important to us, so nothing was ruined. We created some amazing memories and proved that we can put together an action-packed trip on short notice with ease. After leaving the doctor’s office that day in Otopeni, I started to feel better quickly. Whatever the doctor had given me had an immediate effect and I felt more energetic than I had all day. I also felt quite emotional. Robin had been everything I needed her to be that day. What I valued even more than her support was the atmosphere she created. Her personality ensured that no moment felt depressing. Where others may have been panicked, distant, awkward, upset, or indecisive in the face of my illness, she was somehow able to inject the atmosphere with humor and positivity. In the doctor’s office, she even seemed a little giggly, like this was just another side quest we had taken.
All of this helped me immensely from a mental health perspective. If she hadn’t been the way she was, I would have started worrying that my illness was ruining her trip. I’d have been wracked with guilt and focusing on her disappointment. I’m someone that’s very sensitive to changes in other people’s moods or behavior. But Robin gave me nothing to scrutinize, nothing to fret over. I was free to simply rest and focus on myself. She even told me outright that I shouldn’t feel bad about my lack of energy.
We grabbed dinner at this burger joint and reflected on our favorite moments from the trip. It felt very reminiscent of our first night in Bucharest, where we had a great time just planning things and chatting in our apartment. This simple dinner at an airport burger restaurant similarly felt like a really memorable moment. It made me think about how sometimes an unfortunate moment or an altered plan can lead to a greater emotional connection. Don’t get me wrong, I really wish I hadn’t gotten ill—but as I chewed slowly on my fries, I came to believe that my illness had resulted in something positive for mine and Robin’s friendship. I call it the Doja Cat Phenomenon.
Let me explain: imagine you and your best friend are getting ready for a Doja Cat concert that the two of you have been looking forward to for ages. However, on the way to the concert, a rattlesnake bites you on the ankle. Your friend punts the rattlesnake into the tall grass and immediately starts sucking the venom out of your wound. There’s no cell reception, so you can’t call for help. Your friend carries you back to the road and because they sucked some of the venom out of your snakebite, you’re able to hang on long enough until emergency services arrive. Now, obviously you’d both rather that hadn’t happened. You’re sad to miss the concert. The snakebite is deeply uncomfortable and more than a little traumatizing. But I guarantee you’d feel closer to your friend than you would if everything had gone to plan that night and you’d had a nice time watching Doja Cat together. You’d feel more connected to them and I’d wager you’d remember that day forever.
That’s how it was with me and Robin in Bucharest. The illness was a pain in the ass, but it kinda felt like a good moment for our friendship.
You’re probably wondering what happened next. I can confirm that we made it back to London safe and sound with no issues whatsoever. I can also confirm that Robin didn’t catch whatever the fuck it was that took me out. It seems that either her immune system dealt with it easily, or that I wasn’t very infectious at that point in the illness. And what exactly was this illness? Well, the symptoms completely changed when we got back to London. I no longer felt dehydrated, but I woke up the next day with the worst sore throat I’ve ever had. For the next week I barely ate. Swallowing—even swallowing fluids—was deeply uncomfortable, so I hardly got anything down. I had no strength and could scarcely walk from my bed to the pisser. I got treated for tonsillitis, and it took me a week to get better. Even now, a month later, my fitness isn’t what it was. But my GP reassured me that I was healthy, and that I’d just been the victim of bad luck.
In conclusion, Robin and I had a great time in Romania. There’s nothing we didn’t do that we could have reasonably fitted in. I think if we had an extra day, we would have spent more time in Brașov and the surrounding countryside. If you’re thinking of going to Romania, I’d definitely recommend it because it has a nice variety of things on offer.
