So I went to Romania, to attend a conference. I didn’t see one single vampire or the House of the People. I didn’t go to the centre of Bucharest either, to hide from reality in a modern hotel room. Instead, I was whisked away over the bleak Wallachian plains up to the Transylvanian mountains. What I met was a mercilessly split population striving to regain a culture they no longer possess as a united nation. This peripheral part of Europe, once proud, now battles with poverty, so alien to us affluent western cousins that no amount of imagination can balance the impact of reality.

Transylvania is fairytale stuff to the modern citizen: Dracula, Vlad the Impaler, Bram Stoker and foggy mountains topped by gothic castles. However, to Romanians, it’s beautiful landscapes, holidays on snow-clad mountains and a stronghold of ancient Romanian traditions. They’re not wrong. Whereas the plains leading out of the capital Bucharest are grey, depressive, endless pot-holed motorways, where the only scenery is the odd, hopefully derelict, power station, the mountainous part rises suddenly, to give the country not only a completely different make-up but also a much more positive atmosphere. The change is gradual to start with, but ends up abruptly, switching your senses from an imaginary Soviet-style hopelessness to a sort of medieval touch of southern Germany, with turrets and wooden houses. And yet, the impression is one of dilapidating beauty – exquisitely carved verandas of fading colour beside shacks selling anything and everything that can be flogged for western currency.

All along our journey, the roads, even the motorways, have been dotted with locals selling their own produce: onions, apples, honey. Not once did I see anyone stop to buy. Men and women walk along by the roadside carrying enormous sacks of dubious contents. Signs are up displaying company names and carrying a year-mark – my guess is frequently ‘1953’ but instead the year staring at me is ‘2003’. It’s rather surreal. Dead Alsatians lay abandoned in the middle of the road, hit by speeding cars of western engine-sizes – the type only the richest can afford – but nobody cares.

We reach Sinaia – a traditional skiing and tourist village proudly propagating its popularity with the old Romanian aristocracy and indeed housing the Peles Castle, famous for being a spot favoured by the last Romanian King, Mihail, before his abdication in the late 1940s, after the Communists took power. If the monetary funds of the great economic modernisation era of the corrupted 1930s were now present Sinaia would have a shot at becoming a popular modern ski-resort. As it is, it’s a quaint and infinitely better looking village than what we’ve encountered so far along our way but that dirty-brown sense of unhappiness and want still hangs in the air. Time and time again I find that the Romanians I meet and talk to are staunchly proud of, and committed to, their country and yet not one of them wouldn’t jump at the chance to leave. Everyone has a story to tell about a relative who left – there are more stories about those relatives’ lives to tell than of their own. I find it difficult to determine whether this is because they’re embarrassed about their own circumstances or that they are proud of a family member who succeeded in a different way. To my mind, those who are still there and fighting to regain the Romania of old times are the ones who are succeeding. A lot has changed since 1989 – this is the only fact that I’m told time and time again and which I have no intention of disbelieving.

Calin, a man I later meet during my conference, tells me proudly of his cousins who managed to move to Sweden. They lived in Gothenburg for years during the early 1990s and he tells me they owned his favourite car – a Volvo. He speaks of the Volvo like as if he’s owned several but when I ask him which model he has he retorts: ‘I don’t have one, but it would be my dream, you see?’ He is from Timisoara but tells me proudly that, although suffering a rebellious reputation, he and his people are now very happily settled and there is no longer any trouble. His relatives in Sweden went on to California, but they didn’t like it there. He tries to tell me that they feel it isn’t ‘real’. I understand what he means and can’t help but ask him whether ‘real’ as it is in Romania is preferable? ‘No’, he says, ‘but Sweden is’. His family are now back in Gothenburg. I understand that their search for ‘real’ life does no longer extend to Timisoara.