Took the slow train from Sibiu (more on that soon) to Brasov today (now two days ago). I assume it’s the same track as the fast train, only with more stops, but it’s still well worth the extra hour or two. It stops Everywhere. We stopped at a little metal shack with a rusted-to-almost-nothing sign, at which waited three generations of men/boys, with the littlest urinating in the bushes. Their horse-drawn two-wheeled cart was nearby. We stopped twice in a larger town, in both the well-maintained residential districts and the industrial area. In the former, a church, looking dilapidated even from a distance, stood on a small hill its clean red triangular spire bright against the distant mountain snow. A flight of pigeons departed as we passed. Even in this time of year, mostly brown and empty, Romania can produce sights of indescribable (yet here we are) beauty. The latter, the industrial area, was all blackened metal, the tracks lined by corrugated steel sheet shanties that I hope were for storing goods. We stopped for a rather long time on one side of a bridge, waiting for an oncoming train to pass. We stopped at Arpas, where a mysterious, new looking brick tower of three stories loomed over the train, the interior, visible due to a lack of door, filled with ash and graffiti. We stopped at a station that had been exactly half-consumed by fire, half of its roof tiles still red and beautiful, half completely absent, revealing blackened timber rafters and cheerful pigeons. We stopped suddenly for a herd of lazy goats, (though perhaps the shepherd deserves the blame) as they wandered off the embankment. And all the while, the Făgăraș mountains towering across the plain to the south, a bastion of winter among the melting snows and occasional patches of green.

Before we go back to Sibiu, and maybe further back yet, I want to try and describe what I see as the typical Transylvanian town. I passed dozens of them, with little variance on the theme. The houses are old, mostly. Always exceptions, but the majority look about one hundred, maybe one hundred-fifty. They are all, regardless of age, adorned with red shingles, curved on the bottom. They’re a uniform colour, something like an orange-ish rust, though that doesn’t capture it perfectly, but within that colour there is much variety. They darken with age, though new metal shingles are also often a deeper shade. Individual roofs are beautifully pattered with bright new replacement shingles. Underneath the shingles, houses in small towns are usually whitewashed, though in larger centres they’re e very colour of the pastel rainbow. Above the town, on a hill in the middle or up the valley on one side, is perched a church, with the lovely Transylvanian style spire, triangular and usually very tall, spear like, also adorned with the same reddish shingles, and topped with a silver cross. On the outskirts there are heavy wooden beam animal pens, and a few people burning garbage. And if the town is large enough (though I’m not sure how large this is) there is always some sort of massive abandoned industrial building somewhere near the train station, all missing windows and long-faded painted metal walls. Occasionally there’s the added interest of an abandoned complex outside of town, multi-story concrete skeletons and improbably tall smokestacks towering over brown fields, sheets of metal rusting and falling in heaps. I keep coming back to the word beautiful, but it feels wrong to describe these things as such… tragic, certainly, and it’s strange to feel so drawn to what is probably a symbol of failure and lost opportunity to the people that live here. There were jobs there once, afterall. But they have a special aesthetic that I still can’t place. More on this to come, I think.