Bulgaria &c: Timisoara

March 15, 2017

Early morning train (3:35) to Craiova. There was thick fog on arrival, with many arriving trains blasting their horns to warn of their impending arrival. Not to be outdone, the train drivers in the station began replying with their own horn blasts in an ad-hoc competition. The connecting train passed by the Danube on the way to Timisoara.

        Morning fog at Craiova Train Station

 Passing the Danube. Serbia is to the left,  Romania to the right

Upon arrival at Timisoara Gara De Nord, I had a very pleasant walk to the hotel. The city center is quite compact, and has a number of parks, gardens, and pedestrian promenades. The tallest structure in town is the spire of the Orthodox Cathedral.

            The Orthodox Cathedral, Timisoara

The National Opera Theatre was performing Scripcarul pe Acoperiş. I was not familiar with this work and it had no obvious translation. I looked at the cast and there were characters such as Tevya, Tzeitel and Yentl; so, it was "Fiddler on the Roof"  While the character names and pronunciation may sound very foreign to us, they sound familiar in Eastern Europe (1), much closer to where the events depicted in the musical play actually ocurred.

I got a ticket for a loge seat. The usher was quite nice and told me the view was not very good, but that I could move. I went up to the second balcony, where I would prefer to be anyway. The National Opera Theatre building was quite nice inside, with many interior details typical of the late 1800s.

        Corridor at the National Opera Theatre

         Stairway detail, National Opera Theatre

The show was very well done. Even though it was performed in Romanian, I was able to follow the story reasonably well. From somewhere deep within the cob-webbed recesses of my brain, I was even able to find the English words to the choruses of many of the songs.

(1) Romanian is a romance language, derived from Latin (like French, Italian, Spanish etc.). However, the pronuniciation has been influenced by the Slavic languages (e.g., Russian, Bulgarian, Serbia) common in neighboring countries. In the 1800s, Romanian was commonly written in the Cyrillic alphabet (used for the Slavic languages), which included a letter for the "ts" or "tz" sound: ц.