Bucharest

                                                                                             I instantly fell asleep upon sitting down on the plane and woke up when we were descending over Bucharest. 

After a long-hauled journey on the bus to the city center I checked into a cheap hostel and ate something. Maybe it was the rain, but I couldn't help but see a miserable side to this city, full of aggressive and sad looking huge grey cement castles decorated with tacky commercials, beggars on every corner. 

I spent most of the day nurturing my hangover, there were not many other guests in the hostel and the weather wasn't exactly inviting. So at night I went on the very easy to use and modern metro in order to find out at the train station what options I have to get to Belgrade from there. A really nice student on his way to his home town in Transylvania assisted me with my inquiry and I ended up waiting with him for his train, having very interesting conversation about various topics. Unforunately his explanations only confirm the trist impression that I had gotten from Bucharest, he said most young educated people try to leave, because it's so hard to find work and the country is buffeted by corruption on all levels of public organization.

The next day, in spite of the weather, I mercilessly walked up and down the whole center to visit at least some of the points of interest, for example the state palace which is the second largest building in the world, or the square of the revolution etc. before embarking on my first eastern european train ride and night. In the seater compartment of the train coming from Moscow headed to Sofia, I spend the whole night being paranoid about my luggage and talking to a pakistani-french girl who studies medicine in English in Pleven in northern Bulgaria! It was really interesting to hear from someone who is in a similar situation as me and she gave me some good tips for my day in Sofia.

She told me interesting things about Romania, for example that the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu tried to outplay Paris, creating majestic Boulevards over the entire city, tearing down countless residential houses to make room for the monstrous palace, most of which rooms are nowadays empty, of course.

I think this arbitrariness with which the despot ruled the country left deep scars in this nation. Maybe that's why I got the impression that everyone who lived there would like to leave if they only got the chance.

Gypsies selling stolen mobile phones at the train station, prostitutes roaming the streets at day time, large packs of stray dogs...it could pass as a post-apocalyptic Paris, but to be fair I'm intrigued to visit it again in the summer, when I'm sure the long boulevards as well as the parks and lakes of the city will make it seem a lot more beautiful than on my short stay.

As the unfriendly romanian officers were checking our passports at the border with a view over the dark Danube it occured to me that I was crossing from the country where my grandfather grew up into the country where my grandmother grew up. Apart from countless linguistic relics, I didn't notice a lot of Ottoman influence in Bucharest and it started to really bother me that I know almost nothing about my grandparents' lives in these countries, not even which town/city they lived in, let alone how they lived there.

Well, only more reasons to explore the Balkans more thoroughly!