All of Romania has been receiving drenching rain for the past several days. While the only real visible effect in Bucureşti was a week's worth of lovely thunderstorms and mostly-tolerable temperatures, many northern towns and counties have been inundated and, in some cases, flooded. Maramureş included.

I departed for my site yesterday evening (once again a second-class warrior, but benefitting from beginning my travel on Saturday, instead of Friday, afternoon), and was enduring a chilly, music-less, but rather quiet ride back, counting the minutes until I could be off the train, and profoundly grateful that I would never again have to do the Bucureşti-Sighet CFR run. I deflated the rest of the way, though, when the conductor woke me at about half past three. He was moving through the cars and informing everyone that, because of flooding in the area, the train wasn't going back to Sighet--only as far as Vişeu de Jos.

Vişeu is about 60km or so from Sighet; not walking distance, in other words (though I might have considered it if not for the flooding and the amount of stuff I was carrying). There was a microbus that went from Săcel, a few stops earlier, but I had no idea when it left, or if it even ran on Sunday, as the vast majority of microbus business comes from people commuting for work or selling their wares in the piaţa. After some pondering, I decided that instead of getting off at Săcel and waiting who knows how long to catch another form of transport (or just saying the hell with it and hitching--a sketchy prospect on an inclement Sunday), I'd just go one more stop and drop into a nearby village where another volunteer lives. I couldn't call him to verify that he was there, so I crossed my fingers and hoped that it would work out, and that if I couldn't catch a microbus today, I could get the crack-of-dawn one tomorrow.

However, due to the large number of people who were all trying to get back to the same place I was, there was a bus waiting for us at Săcel. I was pretty surprised--and grateful--for this, as it's not the kind of service one expects to receive in the backwater provinces of Transilvania. It was packed and uncomfortable, but it moved, and was vastly preferable to sitting in the depot waiting for six hours for another form of conveyance to arrive. We all packed ourselves into this ancient bus--watching bemusedly as tourists snapped photos of each other standing outside in the rain and in the aisles of the bus, imagining the stories they'd tell to their friends in the suburbs back home about the experience--and took off.
The ride took forever; between the suspension system bottoming out due to the bus being filled far beyond capacity, the slow going because of same as well as partial flooding of the roads, and the roundabout route taken to get everyone into a general proximity of their final destination. It felt like about three hours, though probably wasn't that long. We finally hit Sighet, I grabbed my stuff and popped like a cork out the door, and tramped the rest of the way back to the apartment; exhausted, dirty and stiff, wanting nothing more than a shower, a gallon of water and a nap.

Only to find that the water in the building had been shut off when I returned. No drinking water, no bathing water, not even enough to boil an egg. Apparently this is the case all over town; the flooding broke a pump, or something, and everywhere is without water, and nobody has any idea of when it will be back on (though everyone is advised to stay close to their taps because there are rumours that it might come back on for an hour or two, sometime today). So no shower, no tea, and after I drink the couple of glasses' worth I have left I'll be going out to buy mineral water for consumption.

Welcome home, indeed. If nothing else, this is making me quite happy that I'll be saying goodbye to this town next week.