Bucharest Life » CFR

A word or two on Brasov, and Brasov In Your Pocket

Craig Turp — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 15:14:06 +0000

Every couple of months we take a hike up to Brasov, very much ground zero of Romanian tourism and simply one of the nicest places in the country.

Besides the obvious fact that it is always a nice place in which to spend time, we visit Brasov for one main reason: to research the next issue of our mini-guide, Brasov In Your Pocket. (The next issue, Spring 2010, should be out sometime next week. It goes to print tomorrow).

We’ve been publishing the Brasov In Your Pocket mini-guide for a year now, and we hope one day to be able to turn the mini-guide into a full In Your Pocket (IYP) guide. Much will depend on how the city develops. An airport would help.

For those with long memories, you may remember that we actually began our Romanian publishing adventure in Brasov: we published Southern Transylvania In Your Pocket in May 1999, a month before the first Bucharest In Your Pocket hit the streets. Indeed, the first IYP office in Romania was in Brasov, not Bucharest.

Alas, though it was a wonderfully useful publication (and copies of it sell for a small fortune on eBay) Brasov (and indeed the whole area) was simply not ready for an IYP all those years ago, and commercially it simply didn’t work out.

But as anyone who has visited Brasov over the past year or so will testify, the city is moving on up. When we published that first Southern Transylvania In Your Pocket there were three good restaurants in the city (Blue Corner, Roata Norocului and Taverna). Now there are at least ten times that number, and more open all the time, as we discovered this past weekend.

(Stand by for another post about our latest Brasov discoveries).

First though, a moan about one old, old issue we still have a grievance with…

Getting there.

It takes longer now to get to Brasov by train than it did back when we started, in 1999. Much of the railway line from Bucharest – Brasov is currently out of action: long sections consist of a single-line, a line that has to be shared by passenger and goods trains going in both directions. No wonder the 167km trip takes more than three hours.

And the roads are no better.

The pothole count (especially the portion from Predeal – Campina) is into the many thousands. Speeds have to be reduced to a crawl in some parts so that drivers can slalom their way through all the potholes. Anyone who can do the Bucharest – Brasov trip (or the return) in less than two and a half hours is either mad or simply irresponsible.

Bucharest Life 2009

Craig Turp — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 08:13:16 +0000

A week or so late, here is Bucharest Life’s Review of the Year that was 2009.

January

A new government, led by Traian Basescu and Little Emil Boc, installed following parliamentary elections at the end of 2008, introduces, amongst other moves of sheer political genius, a compulsory profit tax for small companies (even those that lose money) which leads to the immediate bankruptcy of thousands of small businesses. By the end of June more than 81,000 companies had closed their doors forever.

February

Romania’s blonda mondena of a Tourism Minister, Elena Udrea, launches a new international marketing campaign designed to persuade foreigners to travel to Romania on holiday.

Complete with a cheesy slogan (Land of Choice) and an even cheesier anthem, the campaign ran throughout much of the summer at great cost on Eurosport and CNN.

March

Bucharest City Council tried to go green with a half-hearted attempt to get the city’s inhabitants to begin selectively disposing of their rubbish. We suggested that a campaign to first encourage the good people of Bucharest to start using one bin might be more likely to succeed.

The council also – to the horror of many – approved the construction of the Dambovita Centre. We have our doubts as to whether the project will ever be finalised.

Skint, the Romanian government was forced to put its cap in its hand and head off to the International Monetary Fund to ask for a few pennies to see it through until pay day. The IMF agreed to a loan, though at great social cost: it demanded massive redundancies in the public sector, and a freeze in pensions and salaries. It was the first of many U-turns.

April

In a visit to a Hungarian-dominated area of Romania (part of the Szekelyfold, where Hungarians are in the majority), president Traian Basescu said that the Szekelyfold would never enjoy any kind of autonomy.

Later in the year the main Hungarian political party, the UDMR, would join Basescu in forming a government.

Romania got some international press, including an awful ‘isn’t poverty wonderful‘ piece that appeared in the Austrialian daily WA Today, and two woefully inaccurate stories about Bucharest in the Independent.

May

The city partied all month to celebrate Bucharest In Your Pocket’s 10th birthday.

June

Bucharest Life got its five minutes in the spotlight when an editorial published in Bucharest In Your Pocket (in which we had lovingly nicknamed Tourism Minister Elena Udrea as Romania’s Pitzipoanca-in-chief), was discussed on a political chatshow on Realitatea TV by a hysterical Andreea Cretulescu and her guests.

Cretulescu’s show was ditched by Realitatea later in the year (the two events were not connected).

We also in June officially backed the wrong horse in the Romanian presidential election.

July

Romanian footballer Adrian Mutu is ordered by sport’s highest international court, TAS, to pay €16 million to former club Chelsea for breaching his contract by taking cocaine in 2005.

Bucharest Life took a holiday, but not before finding a real gem of a Bucharest travel guide (and accompanying map of the city before the bulldozers) in the attic.

Metrorex renamed a Bucharest metro station that does not actually exist.

August

The Basescu/Boc government decides that in order to save money, all civil servants (including teachers and medical sector workers) would have to take ten days compulsory unpaid leave before the year’s end.

Madonna came to Bucharest.

September

RATB, the company that operates Bucharest’s surface-level public transport services (trams, buses and trolleybuses) celebrated its 100th anniversary with a parade of vintage trams. Though a success, the event could have been even better had RATB told anyone about it in advance.

October

After a creditable 0-0 draw in Paris against France, Romania’s football team lost a crucial qualifying match against Serbia, in Belgrade, 5-0, thereby missing out on qualification for next year’s World Cup in South Africa. Coach Razvan Lucescu pledged to build a new team, without rapidly fading star Adrian Mutu.

November

The Bucharest metro celebrated its 30th anniversary just a few days after its workforce – amongst the highest paid non-skilled workers in the country – had staged a three day strike for higher pay that caused chaos and brought much of the city centre to a standstill.

December

In the presidential election Traian Basescu narrowly defeated challenger Mircea Geoana in a run-off. So narrow, in fact, was the margin of victory, that Geoana had initially declared himself the winner, after three exit polls had shown him to hold a two point lead over Basescu.

Indeed, Basescu won fewer votes in Romania than Geoana. The difference was made by the Romanian diaspora, which voted in huge numbers for Basescu. More than 100,000 people voted for the president abroad (and less than 30,000 for Geoana). Basescu’s final winning margin was less than 70,000 votes.

Basescu immediately disappointed many of his voters by appointing Little Emil Boc to once again be his muppet of a prime minister.

Elena Udrea (whose Land of Choice campaign was such a disaster that the number of foreign visitors to Romania actuall decreased by more than 25 per cent in 2009) was given an enlarged ministry, now including the regional development portfolio, which will oversee the distribution of more than €4 billion in EU funds.

Ker-ching!

While its trains continue to go backwards, Romanian railways (CFR) takes a giant leap forwards

Craig Turp — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:35:43 +0000

The sleeper from Bucharest to Satu Mare, expected to arrive a mere 17 hours after departure

A while ago we reported how we had thought we must be stupid, for we could not find the ‘buy tickets online now’ button on the website of Romanian railways, CFR. As it turned out, there wasn’t one.

Now, however, news reaches us that you can indeed buy Romanian train tickets online.

Oh yes. Right here, in fact.

And do you now what, it is relatively easy to reserve yourself a ticket.

You need to sign up, creating an account, but you of course only need to do that once. From then on you can buy your tickets online in three steps. Easy.

The main problem (we knew there would be one) appears to be the unavailability of a ‘choose your seat’ option. Basically, you appear to get whatever seat the computer throws at you. If anyone has found out how to actually choose their own seat, do let us know.

Other that that, we think this is a major step forward.

So it is all the more galling that the trains themselves become less and less agreeable. It is rumoured that when the new timetable appears next month, huge, scheduled delays would have been added in. Satu Mare- Bucharest will become a 17 hour journey (as opposed to 14 now). The distance covered is 782 kilometres, so that’s an average speed of a ‘hold on to your hats’ 46 kilometres per hour.

Other problems on the railways include the news that the line from Brasov-Sibiu via Fagaras (currently closed due to the collapse of a bridge last Spring) will go unrepaired until at least next summer.

And that a line which is usually one of the most useful for visitors to Romania.

Still, at least we will be able to buy our tickets for our cancelled and delayed trains online. That’s progress of a sort.

Romania goes off the rails

Craig Turp — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 13:06:55 +0000

The derailed Romanian passenger train. Photo from Mediafax

Monday’s railway accident in south-western Romania, in which an acelerat train derailed while travelling at 100km, injuring 15 people but miraculoulsy causing no fatalities, has quickly become the country’s most discussed story, with many people – political commentators and ordinary citizens alike – seeing it as the embodiment of all that has gone wrong in post-revolutionary Romania.

(Apropos, the fact the train was travelling at 100/kph is probably the most remarkable part of the story; see below).

Incredibly, later the same day, another train – this time carrying fuel – also derailed, this time near Cluj-Napoca.

Though the passenger train appears to have been derailed deliberately – by the removal of the bolts that hold pieces of track together – the precarious, deplorable state of Romania’s railways has once again been thrust into the limelight.

We have written a number of times on the subject of Romania’s railways, rarely – if, indeed, ever – have we had a good word to say about them.

And rightly so. They are slow and useless. How slow? Well, half as slow as they were 20 years ago.

As the newspaper Gandul reported earlier this year, the average speed of trains on Romanian tracks has halved since 1989. That’s right, halved.

In 1989, the average speed of all Romanian train journeys – including stops – was 120/kph. In 2008, the average speed was 60/kph (and those figures come from the Secretary of State for railways). So far this year the average speed is thought to be even slower, around 55/kph.

(For more on slow trains, here’s a brilliant piece – in Romanian only, alas – by Adevarul editor Grigore Cartianu on the almost three hours it takes a train to travel from Constanta to the seaside resort of Neptun. A journey of 35 kilometres and an average speed of 13/kph).

At this rate – if our admittedly un-scientific, back-of-an-envelope calculations are correct – Romanian trains will start travelling backwards some time around 2020.

We blame Ceausescu.

Number crunching with Romanian railways

Craig Turp — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 18:22:51 +0000

The Bucharest Life kids are off to the countryside this week for their annual peasant experience. We went to get their train tickets this morning, one each for them and one for Bucharest Life’s mother-in-law.

Not for the first time this month, we turned up at the CFR agency on Strada Brezoianu and were left gobsmacked. This time, it wasn’t inefficiency that left us speechless, it was the price.

A return ticket for one adult and two children, from Bucharest to Satu Mare, including reservations in a sleeping compartment, on the overnight Rapid, costs 830 lei. (380 lei for the adult, 320 lei for the first child and 130 lei for the second child). That’s almost exactly €200. That’s a lot. Especially as the sleeping coaches are nothing special (we will tell you later this week exactly what kind of accommodation that money gets you), and the journey takes a soul-destroying 12 hours. (Distance covered? 746 kilometres).

Driving, apropos, with a complete lack of motorways the whole distance, and with two kids in the back of the motor, takes about three weeks.

When we got back to the office we priced up a flight. We hadn’t considered it as we just didn’t think the train would cost that much. (And we do not actually have to spend 12 hours on the train ourselves).

Price for one adult and two children for a Bucharest to Satu Mare return with Tarom? €196, all taxes etc. included. Almost exactly the same price. And Tarom has a monopoly on that route (as it does on most internal routes in Romania).

So, lesson learned. Next time we (or our offspring) travel somewhere in Romania will not even consider the train. We suggest anyone reading this does the same. Try Tarom before booking any train tickets.