Biding my time...

Well, I'm back in Budapest. I caught the night train from Brasov and met three interesting (and chatty) Venezuelan travellers. Two had some kind of dual EU citizenship; one had only Venezuelan citizenship and had a bit of a hard time at border crossings. The border police (both Romanian and Hungarian) required a secondary form of identification and the Romanian side pressed him hard to find out whether he was transporting cocaine, heroin, or guns across the border. (I wondered to cheekily to myself whether anyone's ever been dumb enough to answer "yes" to those kinds of questions... Hmm...)

Anyway, I'm exhausted and will be spending the day here before making my way to the Deli-pu rail station and taking the night train to Sarajevo. The ticket was more expensive than I anticipated, but still not too bad by U.S. standards. The kicker is that there are apparently no couchettes on the train, so it's just a 2nd class seat from 17:40-05:40ish. Oooh, fun. At least there are no train changes, though... (However, the more I ride the train, the more I realize I'm not a big fan; there's a level of convenience, yes, but I'd still rather not take the train if I have my choice.)

In the "file under strange" category, last night in Piata Sfatului (the main tourist square in old Brasov), there was a guy with a synthesizer set up playing ambient music reminescient of Hearts of Space. Across the square, however, there was an English-speaking Bible thumper yelling at the Romanians about the souls and about "being ready"--when I guaratee that most of the old Romanians hanging out in the square couldn't be a word of English. It's strange the lengths some people will go to; I just don't understand proselytism on an intimate level.

Query to self: I wonder how many times I can nod off at the computer before I wind up face down in my keyboard... ;0