Low-cost midlife crisis

I’m not entirely sure where day 2 began. Midnight was one of the few times I was actually asleep. Somewhere in the beautiful (but invisible at that time) Transylvanian countryside on a painfully slow train. It was not that this specific train is painfully slow, but pretty much all trains in Romania are. Romania has preserved much of its network which is great, but every part of the railway system is in desperate need of upgrading. By 1am I was awake, though, and that was pretty much how things would stay until the morning.

Usually, the overnight train to Budapest, though slow, takes a fairly direct route – through Cluj and Oradea and then straight into Hungary and west to the capital. At the moment however, there is some kind of major engineering work going on (I wish in Romania, but I strongly suspect in Hungary) and after Oradea the train no longer goes straight over the border but turns north and trundles up to a place called Valea lui Mihai.

This is the Romanian side of the border (and because the EU consistently finds reasons not to let Romania be part of Schengen, it’s an actual border) – so, when we arrived the border police got on and headed through the carriages. One advantage of the diversion north is that rather than being woken at 5 by the border guards you are woken up at something like 6.30. Well, you are if you were managing to sleep in the first place.

The system here is that the policeperson asks for your passport, checks your face against the photo and then takes the pile of passports they have obtained out to the office. I remember once being told that you should never let your passport out of your sight. Good luck with that. About 10 minutes later they return with the passports, and in some cases questions. In our case that was to check that the adults with our 16 year old daughter were actually her parents. These are not questions you get asked everywhere in the world, but tragically people trafficking is very much a concern over this end of the continent. I did get a stamp from Valea lui Mihai though, which seems a bit of a collector’s item.

At this point I feel like I also should add that contrary to type the border police all were friendly and in a good mood. Normally uniformed Romanian officialdom do not have a good reputation for, let’s call it their bedside manner, and deservedly so. “This uniform is one proof of my power over you and to ram it home I’m going to be unfailingly miserable and unfriendly”. Maybe the small town of Valea lui Mihai is some kind of utopia. Even the police are nice.

It became apparent that there was some problem somewhere on the train though, and sure enough, after a while, two girls with backpacks were led off the train and taken over to the station. I watched as they started looking at the timetable on the wall, presumably for trains back into Romania, as they were clearly not being allowed over the border. I felt for them. I didn’t imagine there were many trains in and out of Valea lui Mihai. Again the border police surprised me with their obvious sympathy with the two. The guy who was obviously in charge was clearly trying to find a way out of whatever the problem was. I wondered where they were from – I’d guess they were European (I suspect, perhaps unfairly, that if their skin were darker they would be getting less help at this stage), clearly not EU citizens, as if they were this problem wouldn’t exist, possibly British, but probably not I felt, which left my first guess, Ukrainian. The chief border bloke made a long phone call, lots of discussion, and then went over to them and gestured for them to get back on the train. They fist pumped, picked up their packs, and came back on board. Whoever he talked to was either from the other side of the border or was themselves talking with someone there, as there would be no point getting back on only to be thrown off ten minutes later.

Finally then, we were ready to leave. Now about an hour behind schedule, something which would turn out to be a bit of an issue down the line. We trundled along the rarely used line crossing the border to the Hungarian side and went through the whole process again. This time, the Hungarian guard came to our carriage, and bearing a fancy passport scanning machine as if to demonstrate their technical superiority. My travelling companions all had EU passports and were approved in quick order. I on the other hand had a passport that looks like an EU one, but no longer is. So, my approval took a lot longer, and involved my Romanian residency card as supporting documentation and some questions.

At this point in the blog (not to the passport inspector) I was thinking of launching into a spittle-flecked, obscenity-rich rant about Brexit and its facilitators, but instead, quite calmly but with no less emotion, I will simply say this: you people who voted for Brexit and especially the politicians who used that vote to push through this vile xenophobic insular oppositional hate-driven “hard” brexit – I hate you. I hate you with the fire of a thousand suns. I will never ever ever forgive you. You disgust me. (Trust me, that really is the calm considered restrained version)

Anyway, we got through. An hour or so late, but we had entered the Schengen zone