International Women's Day/Lost in Transition

It's International Women's Day, so women all over Timisoara are carrying flowers offered to them by the city's most chivalrous men. At the train ticket office today one older gentleman came down expressly to hand a flower to one of the young ticket salespeople. A college student bearing two roses for some lucky recipients at the Tequila Club just ran past the window of the cafe from which I am writing this. Ah, here come two more guys, one with five roses and the other with one rose.

Weather is sunny, with temperatures somewhere between cool and cold as spring jousts with winter for supremacy.

There are two types of travel stress. One is the "rush to the airport while worrying that you left your passport at the hotel" type. The other is the "I have been vegetating in the same smallish city for the past five days and I need to get outta here" variety.

Timisoara, and the country of Romania as a whole, have been wonderful, but after five days in this city--and over a month in this country--it's time to bid "La revedere" and head for new pastures. Tonight I go to Budapest. The trip by train will be a mere 5 hours; cost of a ticket was about $30. There's a time zone change, so I will be an hour closer to Cristina. :-)

Last activities here are to enjoy a small lunch, drink a final beer (or two) at my favorite little wi-fi enabled cafe, head to the Gara de Nord, mail a package (hopefully) from the post office there (said to be the only one in the city that handles international mailings), and then await my train.

Travel days are always strange; counting down the minutes I have left in the city I am about to leave while contemplating a city I have never seen before leaves me feeling lost between places. It will be a pleasure to wake up in a Budapest hostel tomorrow morning with my attention undivided.

I'm feeling sentimental, but I look forward to visiting some new (to me) countries in the coming weeks. These will likely include Croatia and certainly Serbia, where I am meeting up with a talented band I will be writing an article about, along the same vein as the Gorchitza piece that ran in the Kyiv Post.