PART X – The Railway Thermal Deficiency
Due to events that started with the armored panties Cristina incident and compounded with my wife’s extreme devotion to the Romanian corrupted authorities’ ways, her insistence that I conform with the filthiness of this system and other minor and major circumstances, by 2005 I was single again.
My residence visa was based on me being married to a Romanian citizen and that was not the case anymore. Therefore, I had to request a change of visa status to a work permit based residence. And guess what? I had to go out of the country to request this visa in a Romanian consulate abroad.
As my company has offices in Bulgaria they also have lots of pull-able strings within the Romanian Embassy so the company arranged for me to obtain my visa there.
I was in the middle of my winter vacation when I got a phone call from my company at 16:30, telling me that the string inside the Romanian consulate in Bulgaria became available for pulling and the window of opportunity for the string pulling was very limited, therefore I had to be in Sofia by the next morning, which meant I had to board the train in a couple of hours.
It was very fortunate that as I don’t like to travel alone, I was spending my vacation at home. On the other hand, I had to travel alone to Sofia.
Anyway, I scrambled to get all my documents together and rushed to the train station and there I was again chasing after a visa in the middle of the Eastern European winter.
After all the rush to get to the train station in time, as I arrived at the station there was an announcement that the train to Sofia, which was coming from Moscow, is going to be delayed for 1:30 hours due to the snow.
While I waited for the train I noticed a group of four or five girls nearby talking in a language that I couldn’t identify.
A few minutes later and I noticed that one of the girls was staring at me and my experienced instinct prepared me for the possible mockery that could follow.
To my surprise, the girl detached from the group, approached me and asked me if I was Japanese, in Japanese!
We talked for a while and she told me that they were from Macedonia and studying at Bucharest University. She loves languages, especially Japanese and her dream is to go to Japan one day.
The delay stretched to 2 hours and we finally boarded the train. As the train was coming from Moscow, half of the cars were Russian and half Romanian and as the train crosses the border with Bulgaria it would be joined by a couple of Bulgarian cars as well.
As I board my car I noticed that the Macedonian girls boarded a different one, so well, I guess I’ll be travelling alone.
I finally settled in my compartment and I notice that the car is cold but I, optimistically (or stupidly) assumed that they would start the heating as the train leaves the station.
Well, so much for the half full glass bullshit. The train leaves and there’s no heating coming. I had to keep my heavy winter jacket on.
A few minutes after ticket check I hear a commotion down the corridor of the car. Apparently the Macedonian girls boarded the wrong car and the conductor was relocating them to the same car as I was on.
As they were settling down in their compartment the girl who speaks Japanese noticed me in the corridor and invited me to come over to talk. I went over there and we talked for a while, mainly about Japan and the cold in the train. After a while I went back to my own compartment.
Sometime later the door to my compartment opens and the girl who speaks Japanese says: “She wants to talk to you.” She then swiftly pushes one of her friends inside, steps out and closes the door after her.
As I related in Part VII, I had already lost an opportunity to meet a nice girl due to my shy geekness. I learned the lesson so this time I put on a friendly face and invited her to take a seat.
Apparently the girl, though very pretty, was even shier and geekier than me.
She timidly says: “Hi, I’m sorry, I don’t speak Japanese…” I tell her that English or Romanian would do just fine. She smiles and relaxes a little and tells me her name is Vanya and that she’s studying medicine at the University of Bucharest. I was curious as to why do they come from Macedonia to Romania to study and she tells me that the conditions in Macedonia are very bad so they can’t afford to study in a Western European country but it is so bad that even Romania is much better than Macedonia so they come here. And I had difficulties imagining that any other European country could be worse than Romania…
Then while we were talking we crossed the border into Bulgaria and the board officers came on the train for passport check. The girl excused herself and went to her compartment to get her passport but as she was coming back the officers tell her to remain in her own compartment.
As they finished checking my passport, I tried to go over to the girls’ compartment but the officers were checking their passports and asked me to remain where I was. While I waited at my compartment’s door the Japanese speaking girl peeked out of their compartment and I signaled her that I still wanted to talk to Vanya and she whispered: Don’t worry, she will come back.
So I went back into the compartment and waited. As the train started moving I went over there and the compartment was empty. I looked through the window and the girls had disembarked and the Japanese speaking girl was trying to say something to me. I opened the window and she said: “Sorry! It was too cold in that train. We decided to get off here and take a bus to Skopje!”
Vanya was a few meters behind her, with the other girls, waving goodbye rather reluctantly.
So I went back to my solitary and cold compartment.
As the night progressed the car became even colder and I started to shiver and the condensation on the windows started turning to ice.
As I was pacing up and down the corridor I met a guy in the next compartment. He was from Portugal so I had the opportunity to polish my rather rusty Portuguese with him.
Apparently he was even less tolerant to the cold than me and he couldn’t stay still and continued pacing the corridor and I went back to my compartment to sit down. A few minutes later he came back and called me to accompany him to the next car.
It was the Russian half of the train. The door at the entrance of the corridor was closed but the heater was right in that area that separates the corridor to the end of the car so we just stayed there, leaning against the heater.
A few minutes later the conductor of the Russian car saw us standing there and came over to check.
It was a woman. Well, sort of. She was huge. The incarnation of Mother Russia itself.
She mumbled something in Russian and pointed the direction back to our car. I tried to tell her that there was no heating in our car and we were cold, showing to her that we were shivering. She says, rather vehemently and in an almost masculine voice: “Nyet! Go bieck!” while pointing out firmly with her big finger.
We reluctantly left and she locked the passage behind us.
We went back to my compartment and continued the trip in silence as our shivering and teeth clattering prevented us from talking.
A few hours later, a lady dressed in railway uniform passed in the corridor and saw us shivering there. Apparently she took pity on us, said something in Bulgarian (that’s when we realized she was the conductor of the Bulgarian part of the train) and motioned us to follow her.
She took us to the Bulgarian car. The HEATED Bulgarian car. She pointed to some empty seats and let us stay there.
Slowly I felt all my muscles relax, like my blood was slowly thawing and starting to flow again. It was like life itself was infiltrating my body again.
So that’s how it feels to be cryogenically frozen and waking up in the future… Wait a second! I grabbed my mobile phone and checked the calendar: 2005. Ok. So that’s how it feels to be cryogenically frozen and then thawed after several hours…
I was exhausted after a long cold night shivering and pacing around to keep myself warm. I fell asleep instantly.
I woke up with the sun on my face. The warm, life giving sun on my face.
After all the delays and the sleep, I had no idea where we were. I tried to look at the name of the stations as we passed them but they were all written in Cyrillic, with no subtitles. Then I realized I had no way of knowing when we arrive at Sofia because I simply have no idea how Sofia is written in Cyrillic!
I tried to ask the conductor but she didn’t understand English nor Romanian. So I took my notebook and drew a clock face showing the time now and wrote below it: Sofia? She then took the paper and pen and drew a clock face showing 9:30 and wrote below it: София.
Ok, so I had to keep an eye for a station named COONR.
