We got a booth on the train with the drunk guys, the girl with the red hair and two other grunge rock people. “DRINK-ING BEER! SNIIFF-ING GLUE,” one of them chanted. Then, unexpectedly, he broke into the most perfect rendition of Kee Lee that had me laughing my ass off.
“METALLICA! METALLICA!” The other one was yelling.
“Err, so you liked the concert?”
“IT WAS AN EAR ORGASM!”

We learnt that one of them was from Moldova, his English wasn’t so great. The others had almost perfect English but they still yelled at each other in Romanian. Like in Timisoara, we decided to pretend Marcelo couldn’t speak Romanian so he could listen into their conversations without them knowing. The train guard came along and asked for tickets. Unsurprisingly, the drunk guys didn’t have any. One of them got up, followed the train guard outside and shut the door. 5minutes later he came back in and sat down like nothing had happened. “I bribed him”, he explained. He bribed him like, £6 for both him and his friend. We paid about £20 each for those tickets. Guttered.

“Where are you guys staying? What are you doing in Romania? Why are you here?!”
We didn’t know where we were staying. We were planning to figure that part out when we got to Brasov, just find a hostel or something.
“Don’t do that, it is too expensive. Find University Halls! They’re heaps cheaper and it’s summer holidays”
“My brother, he has a spare room! He’s not staying, you come stay with me. We’re in a band, I show you some good music” the Moldovan told us. We both said nothing. One by one, everyone started to quieten down and fall asleep, except Moldovan who tried his best to talk in English for us. We learnt that he only made £100 a month, he’d been saving up for the Metallica concert for a year. It was his first concert and he loved it so much. He couldn’t wait to get home and tell everyone about it.

“What was your favourite song?”
Oh, he only knew about 2 songs. He wasn’t a big fan of Metallica. He’d gone for the experience!

It sort of hit me around this point just how little some people live on. Sure, everyone knows there are people who are extremely poor in the world, but you never really think what that truly means. This guy had spent all of his savings to go this concert and he didn’t even really like the band. It was a huge deal to him, it was the greatest experience of his life. Meeting him was extremely humbling, it really made me so grateful for everything I have, the places I’ve seen and the things I’ve done.

“I got a present for my girlfriend from Hard Rock Cafe” he told me. “Want to see?”

He reached into his bag and pulled out…. a Heineken and Guinness cardboard beer coaster they serve drinks on at the bar. I just about burst into tears. He couldn’t afford to eat there; he’d just gone in to see it.

Finally, we got to Brasov. The Romanian skinhead had fallen asleep on my lap and despite all Moldovans yellings, he wouldn’t wake up. Moldovan resorted to punching him in the face and we walked into Brasov with two drunk guys, one of whom had a bleeding nose.

Ya know those guys you see when you go out, the ones who start fights and cause trouble? The ones you generally tsk at and stay away from? They were them.

Romanian Skinhead wanted to start a fight with some kids at the bus stop. He yelled a bit in Romanian then turned to me and winked, “Stay tuned!” Sometimes the sayings people pick up from English are hilarious in a certain situation. We dragged him away and got on a bus. “You come back to my place,” he said. “I live in the ghetto”.

Crap. We had no idea how to get out of this. “It’s very important they don’t know I can understand them,” Marcelo reminded me. “Have they said anything about us?” I hissed. “Err, yea but it was a joke. I promise it was a joke”.
“What did they say”
“Err, well they were joking about which one of them was going to look after us and one accused the other of wanting to, so he could rob us hur hur”
“WHAT. THIS IS CRAZY. WE ARE CRAZY”.
“No! You don’t understand! I promise it was a joke. You don’t understand Romanian culture. They feel obliged to help visitors, they really feel they have to take responsibility for new people lost in their city”.

To be continued in Part 6.