I'm not going to lie: when I first got outside the airport in Cluj-Napoca, I was a little apprehensive. Really apprehensive. The airport in Cluj, like many around the world, is not located in the area of the city that we'd call the "happenin', cosmopolitan downtown." Totally fine. There's not that much space in the city center. However, the difference is that those other inconveniently located airports are not situated in places that could be readily described with the adjectives "frighteningly-dilapidated", "Dracula-esque", "gyspsy-shantytownish", or "stray-dog bedecked".
You can't really bedeck with stray dogs. Can they be festooned?
OK, it wasn't THAT bad. It wasn't what I'd call, for example, "post-Communist, crumbling housing-block-strewn", or "rife with shifty, grizzled, faded-Cosby-sweater-wearing drifters." No, it was none of those things. But there were a lot of people milling about. They were looking at me. Staring at me with my big, "I-am-a-gullible-tourist-from-somewhere-that-is-not-here" backpack. Luckily, I found some dudes from Madrid who also had cumbersome rucksacks and we scrounged our way onto a bus.
As we drove along, things did not quickly improve. The crumbling, Vlachian cabins made way for huge apartment blocks, bedecked with cracks and festooned with litter. More Cosby-sweater-wearing bedecked drifters-
OK, wait wait wait. Wait a minute. I'm getting a little carried away with the descriptions. I've said bedecked twice, maybe even three times now. Fuck it. I'll cut to the chase: the airport was in kind of a shitty part of town. The bus went through an equally shitty part of town. But in about 20 minutes we got into the historic downtown center of Cluj and it was actually really, really nice.
Check it out:
I met some awesome cats at the hostel. They were actually human beings, not cats. It's just a manner of speaking. We went to a bar where everything was made out of cardboard. And everyone was smoking. I'm no fire marshal, but I don't think tenuously holding burning embers and drinking Romanian whiskey in a room made out of cardboard doesn't really say "safety" to me.
Ray don't mind though.
You can't really bedeck with stray dogs. Can they be festooned?
OK, it wasn't THAT bad. It wasn't what I'd call, for example, "post-Communist, crumbling housing-block-strewn", or "rife with shifty, grizzled, faded-Cosby-sweater-wearing drifters." No, it was none of those things. But there were a lot of people milling about. They were looking at me. Staring at me with my big, "I-am-a-gullible-tourist-from-somewhere-that-is-not-here" backpack. Luckily, I found some dudes from Madrid who also had cumbersome rucksacks and we scrounged our way onto a bus.
As we drove along, things did not quickly improve. The crumbling, Vlachian cabins made way for huge apartment blocks, bedecked with cracks and festooned with litter. More Cosby-sweater-wearing bedecked drifters-
OK, wait wait wait. Wait a minute. I'm getting a little carried away with the descriptions. I've said bedecked twice, maybe even three times now. Fuck it. I'll cut to the chase: the airport was in kind of a shitty part of town. The bus went through an equally shitty part of town. But in about 20 minutes we got into the historic downtown center of Cluj and it was actually really, really nice.
Check it out:
I met some awesome cats at the hostel. They were actually human beings, not cats. It's just a manner of speaking. We went to a bar where everything was made out of cardboard. And everyone was smoking. I'm no fire marshal, but I don't think tenuously holding burning embers and drinking Romanian whiskey in a room made out of cardboard doesn't really say "safety" to me.
Ray don't mind though.
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