Sometimes, well you just know a date with the toilet is in your near future.
I mean, you could prevent it, sure. But then that would just be rude. The train from Iaşi, in northeast Romania, along the Moldovan border, to Bucharest, the national capital down south, demands about six hours of travel time.
I’d spent several days in Iaşi, for a book I was writing on the emerging middle class, and I’d decided the train back to Bucharest for my flight home would be the more scenic way to see eastern Romania. I booked a first-class seat because in Eastern Europe at that time—a good 12 years ago now—the cost was peanuts.
(Cheap was the story in Romania back then. And IL readers knew it before most folks. In the March 2007 issue, our real estate expert Lief Simon wrote: “Two years ago, I made an 80% profit in about a year and a half, flipping an apartment in Bucharest.”)
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More importantly, non-first class seats in Eastern Europe at that time were little better than Soviet-style bench seating that’s about as comfortable as a stone slab.
Who wants that for six hours? I had just put my backpack on the rack above the seats in a four-seat compartment when the door slid open with a shoosh.
A Wedding Party, a War Hero… and Me
I looked to see a local family that had booked the other three seats: a mom in her early 50s, her 17-year-old son, and her dad, a World War II veteran, a former fighter pilot in his late-80s and who was wearing the medals he’d won. They settled in and the son, the only one who spoke English, told me they were heading to Bucharest for a family wedding.
We spent hours talking about all kinds of randomness, the son acting as our compartment’s UN interpreter. When lunch hour arrived, the family started unpacking a plastic grocery bag of sandwiches, a simple salad, and a block of white, crumbly farmer’s cheese.
I was sans meal, having overlooked the food options back at the historic, late-19th century train station. But moms are moms the world over, and this mom noticed me without food.
And in the mom-est of non-spoken demands, she looked at me a certain way that insisted I take a sandwich—or be grounded for the rest of the train ride. I thanked her and took her offering.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. Back in 2005, IL told readers about Romanian farmers who “attach benches and boxes to their gates to hold bread and water for passing strangers.” Feeding strangers isn’t a gesture here, it’s tradition.
Then Came the Rusty Pocketknife
And then… out came the knife. The grandfather pulled out a small pocket-knife and popped it open. Decades of rust and dirt and grime from rural Romania buried the glisten I assumed was hiding on the steel blade underneath. He grabbed the block of cheese and sliced off a hunk that he then offered to me.
In nanoseconds, I saw my future. The gurgling. The cramping. The toilet. The missed flight. The entire party awaited me in Bucharest, this I knew.
But there are moments as a traveler—traveler, not tourist—when you have difficult choices to make. This was one of those moments.
The One Travel Rule I Never Break
When offered food by a local family—food they’ve grown, food they’ve prepared, food they’ve bought on salaries that undershoot yours by a magnitude or three—you never say no.
I’ll get hate for this, but I don’t care if you’re a vegetarian being offered braised duck tongue as I once was in southern China, You Do Not Say No.
You suck it up and you eat what you’re offered. With a smile. And a show of gratitude.
Otherwise, best to stick to the comfortable bus tours of Rome and London, where you’re guaranteed palate-neutral and culturally bereft tourist food. To say no to an offering of food when traveling locally isn’t just rejecting the food itself, it’s rejecting the person making the offer. You’re saying no to any hope of building a relationship, even if the relationship only lasts the length of a train ride.
You’ll go on with your life, but the person you rejected will always remember that American who said no to their offer of hospitality. I’ll say this, that cheese was quite good—a salty, creamy tang that paired well with the Moldovan beer the grandfather shared with me. But my premonition was, unfortunately, correct.
By the time we reached Bucharest a couple hours later, my innards were demanding we convene at the nearest facilities. I was scheduled for an evening flight back to London.
Alas, my body unilaterally vetoed that itinerary. Instead, I found a room at a Radisson Blu hotel about a mile and half away, which is where I spent a night acquainting myself with Eastern European porcelain. Over and over. And over again.
Why I’d Eat That Cheese Again Tomorrow
But you know what?
Here I am, years later, sharing a story about toilets and farmers cheese sliced with a befouled pocketknife on a train ride through eastern Romania with a World War II Romanian fighter pilot who wanted to befriend an American. I built a memory of my life traveling the world that I will never forget. All because I didn’t say no to a kind offer of food in a foreign land.
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