Planes, Trains, and Automobiles

My first  week in Romania, my group decided that it would be fun to take a trip to another part of the country.  We were not familiar with the culture, the language, or the people, but we thought all those things would make for a fun and interesting trip.  We decided to take night trains to get to where we wanted so we did not waste day time on the train.  So we got on our first train around 10 PM, and rode until 2 AM, when we had to change trains.  We got to the train station (which was the scariest place I have ever been), and were expecting to be on our next train by 4 AM.  WRONG.  Our train did not arrive until 6 AM, just a mere 2 hours behind schedule.

The public transportation in Romania generally falls under two extremes:  Very efficient and on-time, or very late.  Generally, the systems within a city are very efficient and useful.  Many people use public transportation because they do not have cars of their own, helping to make the systems more reliable.  Most bigger cities have trams, buses, and taxis.  Bucharest, the capital city, has a meto line.  All of these systems are very useful, taking you where you need to go, and getting you there within a fairly timely manner. 

The trains that travel around the country, however, are a very different story.  These trains run on their own time, regardless of what your ticket says.  That is simply how they operate.  Every train ride that I went on arrived much later (we're talking hours later) than expected.  In most cases, it is faster to ride a bus around the country than to take the train. 

But if you take the bus, you don't get the experience of waiting in train stations for hours on end, meeting drunk Ukrainians, getting harrassed by teenage boys, or playing Uno to pass the time...