Cluj

After a short ride I arrived in Cluj Napoca. Soon I found out that there was the Transylvania Film Festival that will start the next day. It lasts for 12 days and features low budget movies from throughout the world. There were playing maybe 20 different movies in one day in the many cinemas/ rooms with projector in the university city. I decided to take a holiday from the holiday and do something else than the usual stuff. In the 12 days I watched about 40 different movies and documentaries.

There were many students out in the streets and good concerts and parties in the evenings. Cinema culture during the day and concerts in the evening. I got to know many people who were travelling, but also very polite Romanians. The attitude of the locals is different from the capitol, most evident in the amount of smiles you get.

I got to know a delightful lady which is studying psychology in Cluj and we met every evening to go out. Sadly she was in the middle of exams, but I still very much enjoyed her company. She made me feel like a teenager again. We went to several concerts together which were very different from what mainstream culture in Switzerland has to offer. Once we went to a gig of the Turkish band called "Babazula". The energy of the singer sweating, singing and playing some odd looking guitar was overwhelming.

Some other time we went to the "Hungarian Theater" where a friend of her was performing in art mix between video, live classical music with a DJ mixing in the beats. Probably should be best observed with some kind of influence. Truly great stuff.

Apart from others I met one other guy that sticks out. He was claiming to be from Jordan and now being a fashion designer in London. He was gay and unorthodoxly dressed so it made sense. He slept in our hostel without checking in, he had a tab at my favoured bar that he never paid, so the poor student behind the bar had to work a day without salary, he burrowed 800 USD from a South Korean (apparently the SK was not aware of how much he actually gave to this guy) and many more free cigarettes and beers while going out. Eventually the South Korean got suspicious and confronted him outside a club, where the "fashion designer" was arguing with some locals about a separate money issue. Afterwards he claimed that he doesn't have any money left and the South Korean snapped and hit him several times and found 400 USD in his pocket. The police later on explained that he is a famous Roma, who goes from city to city and scamming people. Not even the Romanians noticed that he was Romanian. I am sightly impressed by his performance that lasted several days involving about a dozen people.

Finally my camera broke again (this time the lens) and I bought my 6th camera of my trip. Then I was on to Hungary.