I never have been able to sleep much in moving vehicles, but when you are sleeping on your luggage, for fear it will be stolen out from under you, it puts a whole new perspective on the traveling experience. Boarding the last train, some nice men offered to help us get our overweight luggage on. Then they demanded to be paid for their hospitality. We didn’t have any money, so that was fun trying to convince them to leave us alone.

We did stop over one night in Budapest. It was a relief to get off the train, but you must realise everything was a struggle. Our bags were HEAVY. Our lives were in them. Getting from one place to another required finding someone who could speak English, figuring out a Hungarian map, trying to discern if we were being cheated by the cab driver, youth hostel recruiter and hostel clerk, not mention loading and unloading bags in 2 trips, while trying not to let any bag out of our sight.

Arriving at the Strawberry Youth Hostel, we found 2 beds, open showers and genitalia graffiti on our room walls. How much do you think I cared about the shower at that point? The place made Motel 6 look like the Hilton. But I scrubbed myself new and that night we spent almost the last of our money on a good dinner of roast duck. It was, by far, the best duck I have ever tasted.

During the next day’s train ride, Nick kept pointing out the window “Oh, look at the mountains! It’s beautiful!” But all I could see, all I could think of, is that I had just left paradise and taken a cattle car to hell. I questioned my sanity. Culture shock wasted no time and spared none of my 5 senses. I felt like an idiot. Nick, because of his experience as the son of missionaries, had an amazing ability to see the beauty in chaos. He saw the bigger picture, how this was an opportunity to grow, to see the world.

I looked out that window as we pulled into Bucharest and saw, what appeared to be a war zone. Dilapidated buildings, smog, peasants, if you have seen pictures of war torn Bosnia..... well, this wasn’t as bad, but it seemed that way through my eyes. I was scared.

After waiting in the Bucharest train station for a bit, Andrea Scott, a friend of Nick’s picked us up. Andrea is the daughter of missionaries as well and it took me all of ten minutes to discover she did not relate to my traveling complaints. This was her life and she loved it. Such as it was with all the missionary kids or ‘MK’s’ I encountered along my journey. I was beginning to think the title “missionary” meant “superhuman”.

We also discovered that first week that the radio station that we thought would welcome us with open arms, wanted nothing to do with us. A misunderstanding that is still unclear today, I was told that Christianity in Romania is extremely conservative and that our Christian music was considered blasphemy. Our task would be to start a radio programme from the scratch.