When I travel solo, I am fully prepared to spend a lot of time alone. However, this trip is proving to be more social than anticipated.

 

Somehow I managed to walk into a lot of interesting conversations, all of which started out as non-Americans talking about the 2008 Presidential election. At first I would weigh my answers carefully, but it got so repetitive that I started changing positions for kicks. It was with perverse satisfaction that I watched German travelers having to talk about Hitler and WWII with everybody.

I even got to brush up my German, when I ran into Gerold, a German biochemistry professor on the train from Brasov to Bucharest. After exchanging pleasantries, he started asking questions about my research topic. My brain cells were recovering from either the cold or the Cyrillec alphabets, in another word, not functional. I had to promise to send him pdf files of my papers to stem the tide of questions.

 

My favorite conversations involved art. On this trip I met Ina the German exhibition tour guide from Vienna, Marcus the ceremic artist from Santa Monica, California, Kathy the art theory student from Sydney, Australia, and Kim the conceptual artist on multiculturalism and globalization from Calgary. It was great fun hanging out with the art geeks!

 

To top it off, I even analyzed the mentality of backpacking with Christian and Andreas the German, on the train from Bucharest to Istanbul. They asked why people, despite their promises to stay in touch, rarely contact each other after they go home. I thought inertia and the daily routines push people away from such friendship.  Andreas wondered if people are just being dishonest when they could not kep such promises. Umm...