Most German trains are white with a red stripe.

As the train left at dawn from Bucharest North Station, I sank into a zombie-like state. I wouldn't fully wake up until Brasov, the easternmost city of Transylvania, where my solitude ended as an elderly couple settled in my compartment.

"Do you mind if I take my shoes off?" the woman asked in Romanian. I didn't understand, so she repeated the question in German. We tried a few languages we might share, until she gave up, letting out an exasperated sigh in Hungarian. "Hat, Istenkem." "My goodness." She found it extremely funny that I, too, was Hungarian and erupted into conversation. It would last all the way to Budapest.

"My name is Magdalena, and this is my husband, Sterian Bernea," she said. Sterian was a jovial Romanian mathematician and retired army colonel. They were going to visit their children, both of whom had fled to Hungary during the harshest days of Ceausescu's dictatorship.

This Romanian factory is one of the most polluted in Europe.

Those were hard times. "We had money, but we couldn't just buy food; there were monthly portions. One family could only get 10 eggs per month, for instance, and half of those were broken or had an embryo inside."

Now, she said, it was the exact opposite. There are enough eggs to buy a dozen a day, but they couldn't afford it. Together, they got a monthly pension of some 9 million lei (US $275), barely enough to scrape by on.

The Romanian-Hungarian border is an entrance to the European Union and relative prosperity. In Budapest, I changed trains, boarding the night train to Munich, Germany. An attendant took my breakfast order and handed me sheets, towels and bottled water. Finally, this was starting to resemble the legendary Orient Express.

From Munich, on yet another train, I headed to Nancy (pronounced nohn-SEE), which is not a woman but a French city not far from the German-French border.

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