The Road from Brasov to Budapest

Rolling country side in Romania
Hungarian style homes

More Hungarian style homes

Walled church

Romania is not known for its infrastructure. The roads are ghastly and the trains ancient. The train trip from Braşov to Budapest, Hungary was 12 hours long. While in Romania only once were we going faster than the cars on the road beside us. But we did get to see more countryside and several walled churches. Why, you might ask, would a church have a defensive wall? When the Turks were coming through this part of the world the people would hide out behind a wall to escape them. It was much easier to build a wall around a church than around a whole town and so – walled churches! The closer we got to Hungary the more the villages started to spread out. In Romania the Saxon villages were built with each house abutting the ones on either side of it. The Hungarian style villages had stand-alone single family dwellings.

We also got to see a lot more of the trail of communism. During communism many people were forced out of their farm villages and into cities and towns to work in factories. That the factories made nothing of real value was irrelevant. The point was to become industrialized. When communism fell the factories stopped producing and fell into disrepair. They were scavenged for anything of value (fittings, metal, whatever)and now sit as skeletons on the landscape. The people were moved from their homes into hastily thrown up apartment buildings. Most of these apartments are still occupied although, looking at them, you can’t imagine why or how. Now, even 20 years later, the ownership of much of the land is in dispute. Does it belong to who it was taken from? Or who worked it for those years? And so much of the country lies fallow and the people are suffering. This last economic downturn hasn’t done them any good either. The political leaders were trained under the communists and their way of operating is me and mine first and the devil take the hindmost. So they pull whatever they can out of the system for as long as they can and leave the people to fend for themselves – after paying their taxes, of course.

It has been raining a lot here, more than usual and, I would guess, more than even Seattle. The rivers are all very high and as we got to the plains in Hungary much of the land is under water. That did mean that we got to see cranes and storks however. The further west we got the more wild flowers were along the tracks. Many of the flowers here are the same as at home: the wild roses, red poppies (think Veteran’s Day poppies), the wild strawberries. But many of them are almost the same: the buttercups have the same flower but slightly different leaves, the nettles have white as well as lavender flowers and are shorter, the wild geraniums have a smaller dark purple flower. There are also a lot of wild flowers that I didn’t recognize at all.