The Pregnant Yellow Dog

She was begging for food and obviously pregnant. I leaned over the open window of my private cabin and looked down at the pitiful site. I could clearly see the extended womb of the yellow mutt who had been careless whilst running with the local pack. She came within a meter of the train tracks and set herself roughly down, and looked up at me while whining.

My journey from Giurgiu, Romania to Thessaloniki, Greece was scheduled to be almost two days on the same train without a significant layover, and so I was not going to have time to shop for additional food at major cities along the way, such as Sophia, Bulgaria. I had packed my linen bag full of bread, cheese and fruit (only fruit that could be peeled) at my journey's start in Bucharest. My food supply would last me for the entire journey plus a day for the unexpected, I calculated. The food service on the train was not to be trusted.

Even with my limited food supply, I almost relented to the pleas of the forlorn dog. Then, I heard another voice. I raised my head and from a distance of 20 meters, I saw a woman had approached my first class cabin car and was calling on me in Romanian. She was asking the same favor as the dog. I closed my window, shut my blind and sat down, staring at the wall.

The train slowly left the station at the border town of Giurgiu, and I reopened the blinds and window. I stuck my head through the opening and looked at the train engine which was beginning to cross the mighty Danube. Dark smoke billowed from the stack of the engine, and I realized that at Giurgiu the train had switched from electric to diesel power.

We meandered slowly through the countryside, and it was quite pretty, actually. Whilst in Giurgiu the previous day, the owner of the town's pizzeria told me to be wary of the Bulgarians. She said it was much worse economically and otherwise than in Romania. I was beginning to suspect a national rivalry motive, as the towns in Bulgaria that we passed did not look worse than the ones I had seen in Romania.