Traveling on Bulgarian and Romanian trains, especially when you have to cross a border station, requires patience.

The other train-in-waiting at the border

The Romanian border police started off by taking our passports, so complaining too loudly was out of the question. But when Vasile Nistor, a chubby 22-year-old Romanian college student, helped himself to the compartment I had occupied by myself, I was ready to scream. I was wrong about him, though. Vasile took some time to get used to, but in the end he made the three-hour wait more tolerable. He was an in-person talk radio program.

I learned his whole story. In search of opportunity, he had moved to Bucharest from a small Romanian village. Now, he said, he was ready to leave Romania as well. He worked as an office assistant for the American Peace Corps, and all of his international connections reinforced his desire to "make it big," bigger than would be possible in Romania.

Approaching Bucharest

"I just applied to this air traffic controller training in Amsterdam," he said in one of the few noncompound sentences he uttered. "I may end up doing that, although I'm an English major, but you know, anything that will get me out of here is good enough. I also have some friends in Brussels, and they told me I could stay with them for a while, but until I do that, I travel. You know, traveling is my life. I'm just coming from Sofia; I went there while I'm on my summer break -- I took off a few days from work and went there, and you won't believe who I met there."

I readied myself for a Matt Damon sighting, but instead he told me of an 80-year-old Australian man who had been traveling the world for 20 years straight, writing about beer. Not so very surprising for an Aussie, I said, but Vasile didn't hear me.

"That's kind of what I wanna do too," he sped on. "You know? Travel the world and do something cool. There's very little opportunity to do cool things in Romania."

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