03-08-2007, 12:10 AM
A town in Romania, fascinating place..I shall quote a website and see what you people think. (all my shinra fan-mates will like it =p)
Twenty minutes later the Transylvanian idyll I had been observing began to erode. The forest disappeared; the slopes beyond the tracks were now cankered with bald, grassless patches, their upper reaches increasingly lost in brown haze. A graveyard of charred steel hulks (actually a derelict carbon-black plant) resembling a burnt-out amusement park loomed into view amid a landscape that was steadily waning into washes of grays and blacks. The train, slowing, rolled into a gaseous twilight, lurching on unsteady rails. Above towered smokestacks that belched orange clouds of waste; they were the generators of this chemical gloaming, the defoliators of the valley.
A long, ailing screech of brakes on axles cut through the clackety-clack of the rails as the train decelerated for the station.
"Copsa Mica!" the conductor shouted.
I debarked alone. On the platform, a hobo rifled with gusto through a heap of refuse. The station, once forest green, was black with soot, and many of its rooms looked abandoned, their doors knocked off the hinges, their windows shattered or glassless. A man in a gray uniform emerged from the waiting room; I thought to ask him for directions to the churches but he brandished a club and shouted at the hobo, who skittered off into the plant graveyard and climbed over a mess of piping. From behind it he snorted wildly at his pursuer before bounding away.
I followed the access road from the station toward the center, passing grit-encrusted women trailed by broods of runty children, wearing sooty, tattered clothes. On the main drag people huffed and wheezed by on creaking, oversize tricycles; there were few cars. Hoping to find a vantage point from which I might see the churches, I clambered up an ashen path wending through fields of ash-covered ricks, passing bug-eyed cattle that stood like sacks of hide propped up on spindly frames. I reached the top of the rise and walked along above the town, kicking up puffs of soot. My eyes burnt; an ache began behind my sinuses. I halted when two mongrels, all bone and carious fang, started barking at me from the yard of a tarpaper hovel.
Retreating from the dogs, I sat down on a stump and surveyed the scene below: a conglomeration of smelting plants, girt by rows of blackened houses, spread along the valley under a pall of acrid smog. The total effect was of a proletarian hell; its creator was, not surprisingly, the late dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. During decades of misrule, in his striving to bury agricultural Romania under the cement and steel of a socialist superstate, he erected in the once-bucolic Saxon settlement -- and in many other parts of the country -- noisome industrial behemoths that fouled the air and wrecked the health of millions of his countrymen. Though many of the plants were obsolete before completion, they outlived him and function still. Only bankruptcy would cool their smelters.
heh, what you guys think then? sometimes truth is much worse than any fiction :p
Ian
Twenty minutes later the Transylvanian idyll I had been observing began to erode. The forest disappeared; the slopes beyond the tracks were now cankered with bald, grassless patches, their upper reaches increasingly lost in brown haze. A graveyard of charred steel hulks (actually a derelict carbon-black plant) resembling a burnt-out amusement park loomed into view amid a landscape that was steadily waning into washes of grays and blacks. The train, slowing, rolled into a gaseous twilight, lurching on unsteady rails. Above towered smokestacks that belched orange clouds of waste; they were the generators of this chemical gloaming, the defoliators of the valley.
A long, ailing screech of brakes on axles cut through the clackety-clack of the rails as the train decelerated for the station.
"Copsa Mica!" the conductor shouted.
I debarked alone. On the platform, a hobo rifled with gusto through a heap of refuse. The station, once forest green, was black with soot, and many of its rooms looked abandoned, their doors knocked off the hinges, their windows shattered or glassless. A man in a gray uniform emerged from the waiting room; I thought to ask him for directions to the churches but he brandished a club and shouted at the hobo, who skittered off into the plant graveyard and climbed over a mess of piping. From behind it he snorted wildly at his pursuer before bounding away.
I followed the access road from the station toward the center, passing grit-encrusted women trailed by broods of runty children, wearing sooty, tattered clothes. On the main drag people huffed and wheezed by on creaking, oversize tricycles; there were few cars. Hoping to find a vantage point from which I might see the churches, I clambered up an ashen path wending through fields of ash-covered ricks, passing bug-eyed cattle that stood like sacks of hide propped up on spindly frames. I reached the top of the rise and walked along above the town, kicking up puffs of soot. My eyes burnt; an ache began behind my sinuses. I halted when two mongrels, all bone and carious fang, started barking at me from the yard of a tarpaper hovel.
Retreating from the dogs, I sat down on a stump and surveyed the scene below: a conglomeration of smelting plants, girt by rows of blackened houses, spread along the valley under a pall of acrid smog. The total effect was of a proletarian hell; its creator was, not surprisingly, the late dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. During decades of misrule, in his striving to bury agricultural Romania under the cement and steel of a socialist superstate, he erected in the once-bucolic Saxon settlement -- and in many other parts of the country -- noisome industrial behemoths that fouled the air and wrecked the health of millions of his countrymen. Though many of the plants were obsolete before completion, they outlived him and function still. Only bankruptcy would cool their smelters.
heh, what you guys think then? sometimes truth is much worse than any fiction :p
Ian
