After meeting Mark and Brent at the bus station in Suceava, we got some food and then got on a dilapidated bus heading over the border into the Ukraine to the city of Chernivtsi, known as Cernauti in Romanian. I thought that the bus would take a while, it looked like it could barely move and had problems getting up even small hills, but little did I know how long the bus would take. We stopped briefly right before the border at the Romanian town of Siret.
When we got to the border we got stuck...for 4 hours! The computers on the Romanian side of the border had gotten a virus and crashed so it was taking FOREVER to get across. An old Ukrainian lady was laying her feet on my backpack in the back of the bus, other Ukrainian ladies were getting drunk on some sort of alcohol they were passing around, and it was HOT! Pretty much one of the most miserable experiences of my life.
After a 7 hour trip total, we got to Chernivtsi, we got pointed in the right direction towards the city center and walked. The old Ukrainian lady who had her feet on my stuff tried to help us get there, but she knew almost no Romanian and couldn't understand that we didn't have money to pay for a bus ticket and got really mad at us when we didn't get on!
As we began to hump our packs down the street I began to see the true extent of the beauty of the city. The architecture was colorful and intact. It reminded me of little i have seen before, although it used to be called 'Little Vienna' (like Ruse).
We finally got downtown and I had some directions for our hostel, but they were so vague that we couldn't find the place and we were having a hard time finding signposts, although many were in Cyrillic and Latin alphabets which helped a bit. We tried asking for directions, luckily a Romanian Ukrainian lady helped us translate and we ended up following behind a father and his son down the street.
Unfortunately, the place the guy led us to was NOT our hostel, so we wondered around some more. We got back to the main central square and saw some young women and asked them for help in English. They gave us directions which were good and we arrived at the hostel and dumped off our stuff to go explore the city as much as we could.
We only had a bit of time in Chernivtsi. We had to leave the next morning to catch the one bus in the morning at 7 in the morning the next day so we could get back to Romania and the rest of our plans. The hostel owner tried to get us to stay longer, but I wanted to get to Budapest and Mark and Brent had to get back to Bucuresti to fly home.
The city was even more beautiful at night. The famous town hall here was illuminated by changing lights from purple to green to yellow and everything in between. We ate at a cheap cafeteria that the hostel owner took us too. I tired using pigeon Romanian there to order with some success and had one of the serving girls call me a 'frumos baiet' or 'handsome boy'! :D
We found the city theater downtown. Chernivtsi was a Hapsburg cultural center in the 1700s and 1800s. It had large Romanian and Ukrainian/Ruthene minorities, but was under Austrian administration. The city also had a massive Jewish population and was often called 'Little Jerusalem'. The city and surrounding area was seized by Romania after the First World War, but was lost to the Soviet Union temporarily from 1940-1941 and permanently after 1944. In 1990 it became part of Ukraine. Even today, after long years of Russofication, the city still has 6 per cent Romanian speakers (down from nearly 25 per cent 100 years ago).
I was going slightly nuts after the long day on the bus and thought that this circle thing which was illuminated underneath and changing colors was just like something from a Mario type video game.
During the Second World War, Cernauti became the location of a major ghetto under Romanian administration containing nearly 50,000 people. The local mayor, Traian Popovici did his best to delay and prevent deportations of Jews from Cernauti to Transnistrian camps and ghettos, and their high rates of mortality. Popovici managed to save 20,000 Jews through his efforts in arguing with the Antonescu regime that the original number of only 200 Jews to be allowed to be saved from deportation was too low. He is ranked by Israel as one of the Righteous Among the Nations. Most of the Jews who survived the war emigrated from Chernivtsi, now under Soviet control, to Israel and very few remain.
We walked around some more and continued to be impressed by the sights of the great city. I wished I could come back someday to better experience the city and its surrounding environs.
This is the entrance to the hostel that we stayed at that was right off the main square of the city. We all had a terrible night's sleep. Not just because we went to sleep at 2 to wake up at 6, but also the beds felt like rocks and one of the other guests was snoring in a way that should have awaken the dead! This guy's snoring was SO loud that I have difficulty that I could make the same sounds even when awake! We got up rather bleary eyed and headed back to the bus station.
The city was very quiet that early in the morning. We got to the bus on time and it was full of some of the same people on it the day before. We realized that many of them were intent on smuggling cigarettes across the border to sell, without customs taxes, for a profit. We also met a girl, Sarah, who was an American working as a Peacecorps aid-worker in Chernistvi.
One the way to the bus station I saw this truck pulling tanks of Kvass. It is a drink I tried in Odessa, Ukraine last year which is very slightly alcoholic, of which I was unaware, but to such a degree it is not considered alcoholic by locals, hence the reason I drank it. It is a wheat drink that is very popular in Ukraine and Russia.
We said goodbye to Chernivtsi and crossed back into Romania. At the border, a 'serious' customs officer, nicknamed 'the Boxer' by the Romanian Ukrainians let us Americans by without looking through our stuff, but many of the rest of the bus got in trouble for their cigarettes. We think that two cakes brought across by some people secretly contain cartons of cigarettes. Once we got to Suceava I convinced Sarah and her friend to go to Cluj with me so they could see that city and then head to Sibiu and Sighisoara (she had NO idea how to get there) and then back. So, while Mark and Brent took off back to Iasi, I and Sarah and her friend jumped on a train to Cluj.
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