Day 39
Ok. It may not be day 39. It may be day 42 or something like that, but it's not that important to fix it ;)
As I am writing, we're still in Romania heading towards Hungary, and there are a few things I want to say about Romania.
Driving:
- The huge majority of the drivers are civilised. They are much better than the average Greek driver. They don't speed as much, they don't overtake blindly so often before a bend. This is quite rationale driving here, like in Bulgaria. And most Romanian cars we saw on the roads are normal size cars, not fast, not furious, not oversized.
- That means that the uncivilised behaviours of the drivers at the wheel of RO-plated cars that we saw in Greece and Bulgaria are NOT representative of the behaviour of the people who live a proper life in Romania. Once again: money can't buy manners.
- There's an awful lot of trucks on the roads, even the narrow and windy 1/1 roads. It's not rare to find 6 trucks following one another. They are like a freight train. We (us) see them stacking up in our mirrors, and we let them pass when we have an opportunity to make a stop. Rest areas are not a thing on such small roads, or highways by the way. We don't overtake trucks: we can't drive as fast as they do on these roads.
Villages, towns, cities
- From South to North the villages and the towns are organised along the main road, and bear the nuisance of heavy truck traffic all day long, and may be during the night too. The roads are carved by the trailers.
- South there's not 2 meters between the barrelling trucks and the facades of the inhabited houses, whose owners often keep the windows and exterior blinds closed. It's not rare to see wrinkled people, clothed in the kind of heavy fabric that my rural grand-parents were wearing, looking at the traffic, hunched on a stool their back on the wall of their house. There's nostalgia in their eyes, sometimes briefly broken by the realisation that our van's plate is nothing local, despite its exterior appearance.
- In the South one sees cultivated fields and gardens, with haystacks built on a long pole like giant gyros. Think Les dizeaux au soleil (Monet? Van Gogh? Google doesn't know about it. History is flattened and washed by the collective ignorance.)
- As one progresses North, starting 100 km away from Timisoara, the villages become towns, the distance between the kerb and the houses widens, one finds kindergartens, and ... large parking areas for trucks and people attending to the various needs of the truckers. And then the towns become sprawling cities.
Ramblings
- Then came Timisoara. Now I know why I want to explore East: it's because I memorised some of the city names and events that occurred there while I was eating dinner in a religious silence in front of the 8 pm TV news. Timisoara 1989. My travel companion tells me that she can't remember these events because she had her hands full with what was happening with the fall of the wall. And she was living in West Germany...
- The government(s) that built the wall called it anti-fascist protection rampart while the other camp was calling them fascists. That's the current rhetoric used by politicians throughout Europe. I wonder whether people living in true happiness would let people with such discourses raise to power. I wonder.
- And we've seen so many abandoned villages and so much previously cultivated land! So much! These could provide a place to live honourably to anyone in need. In our little random travels, we've seen refugee camps in the middle of nowhere rounded by fences too high to jump. I would like to ask publicly these host countries' governments and people where and how they have lost their sense of dignity. I would like to ask them why they prefer to park people who couldn't bear to keep living where they were born (and remember this place is an accident for all of us) instead of giving them abandoned villages to rebuild and abandoned land to cultivate for their own needs. Really, with a little bit of practical down-to-Earth thinking, it is hard to not see that it would be beneficial for everybody, now and in the future.
- Land, sun, water, rain, clean air: these are not resources to draw profit from or devices to enslave or coerce people. A century or two ago, there was in a place in Greece this rich guy who gave away money to fishermen when they would terrace a sqm of land above them. Soon enough food came out of these terraced gardens where not much could grow beforehand, and drinking water was in supply too. He had a vision and the means. Why do people keep electing people without a vision?