Archive for the 'Eastern Europe' Category

A Study of Backtracking

On August 22, 2009 from Eastern Europe. 0 Comments.

Well I broke down in East St. Louis
On the Kansas City line,
And I drunk up all my money
That I borrowed every time,
And I fell down at the derby,
And now the night’s black as a crow;
It was a train that took me away from here,
But a train can’t bring me home.
—Tom Waits, “Train Song”

CHAPTER I: LEAVING UKRAINE

This bus from Simferopol to Odesa was long and I slept uneasily, but after returning to the Front Page Hostel and spending a day wandering about the port, trying to find out about a Monday ferry to Istanbul, and on the Internet, trying to discover a quick land-route when the ferry was booked, I felt ready to go out again.

I drank with some Brits and Germans in the hostel and in the City Park, where Russians lined up to take pictures in front of bronze statues on pedestals and benches. We secured a bench somehow, and sat there as it grew dark, until a very drunk Russian came up to us. The white-haired man slurred very amicably for a while in his native language, but when he found out some of our party were from Germany, he stopped and became very still and somber, his face a parody of soldierly discipline and bravado, and raised slowly his right arm until it was fully extended, the hand out. “Dude,” I said. He continued to Heil Hitler until we left.

I met two Poles at the hostel and joined them on an expedition out to Arcadia Beach, the Ukrainian Ibizu, to one of the many super-clubs there. Itaka was Mediterranean-themed and open-air, with bad music and expensive drinks. Cover was $10, but you got a stamp, and common practice was to leave the club to buy beers at one of the snack-stands out on the cobbled street and drink them around the club lanes or on the beach before returning to the floor.

The next day the hostel filled up, and after sleeping off that uneasy malaise that follows a night in Arcadia I went to the bus station with a girl from Phoenix named Honore, also trying to get to Chişinău. My plan was to stay there for a night, spend the next night on a train to Bucharest, and the night following that on another train all the way to Istanbul. However, we missed all the buses out of Odesa, and so stayed in a small hotel near the station.

For about $10 a night the Tokyo Star offered small rooms — a twin bed wedged between a wall and a partition that separated it from a shower, toilet, and sink crammed into a three by five foot niche — monastic only in accoutrement. The hotel was a rent-by-the-hour place, and the reason was obvious by the hallway traffic and the noise that came from adjacent rooms. We played cards, surely the most innocent use to ever employ that bed.

The next morning came the challenge of buying a ticket without speaking Russian. It must be noted that the Ukrainians approach commerce differently than most people. Their attitude towards service is: Fuck you for bothering me with this, I’m just trying to pass the day and collect a check, and any possible complication in our transaction is malicious. So pretty soon I was saying, “What do you mean No? Just give me a ticket! Two o’clock, I don’t care!”

I kind of like being in other countries because you can talk about people right in front of them or say whatever you want to them and they won’t have any idea, depending on your tone, what you’re saying. However, in this case, I heard someone start laughing behind me. There were two Americans also struggling to work their way around Ukraine’s horrible transit system, and one of them spoke Russian enough to help us buy tickets. “What made you think you could travel Ukraine without knowing Russian?” he asked. We both shrugged.

Anyway, we had some time and so walked down to the Army Museum. It was closed, but I took pictures of the T-34 and Katyusha rocket truck outside. Two Ukrainians who had heard us speaking English shouted, “American spy! American spy!” In the park square beside the train station, we found parked in a line an old BMP and a BRDM, some of the Soviets’ amphibious vehicles, alone and unattended, so I climbed all over them. Then a smoking T-72 with a corked gun lumbered out onto the field, and we saw some artillery guns and a SCUD launcher. I was very pleased.

At 2 we boarded the minibus and rode back through great fields of wheat and sunflowers, south around Transdniestr to an official Moldovan border. It was August and everything looked drained by the heat and activity of summer. Two American girls and their chaperon were in front of us, through with a visit to Ukraine after their service trip to Moldova, and on their way to a plane back home. We talked about how difficult the country is to travel, and the language barrier for non-Russian speakers.

To play the chauvinist: Women often come away with a lower opinion of Ukraine than men, as they generally miss one of its most distinctive attractions. Ukrainian women, as I mentioned before, are very fine looking, and they advertise this by a cold, enticing nature and with their wardrobe. To sample this libidinous attire, take footwear: stilettos worn with equal skill across uneven cobblestone streets and energetic dance floors.

CHAPTER II: TRANSNISTRIA, PART 2

In Chişinău, I found the hostel as I had left it. Niles and the Welshman were still there. The girl who wrote Russian instructions for me to give to a barber was there and finally saw the product of her missive. I had missed the overnight train to Bucharest, and the next did not leave until Thursday. I had a night to kill and intended to spend it in Transdniestr.

At the hostel that night I met a Canadian named Neil who wanted the same. On our way out the next morning — I with rucksack and knapsack for a night in that Neverwas, Neil with only his camera bag — a Londoner named Paul joined us, and we caught a bus across that confusing, Russian-defended border into the secessionist state already described.

This occasion, having arrived early and with more cash to exchange, I explored more thoroughly the rogue nation. We got lunch in a cafeteria — meat and potatoes wrapped in pancakes, potato pirogi, and latkes — and followed 25 Oktobri through the center of town to the main square between a park and a war memorial. Ahead a platoon of young men, all civilians, marched up from around some corner in an ordered line three abreast, whistling at girls in spite of discipline. They were members of the MGB (Transnistria’s own KGB) Youth Brigade. We jogged across the street to follow them but were stopped by a militiaman for jaywalking, who checked our documents and let us go without further hassle, which was disappointing, as we enjoyed the excitement.

At the far corner of the square stood the Palace of the Republic, Igor Smirnov’s pale imitation of Ceauşescu’s most terrible monument. We took pictures out front and left when someone in a tie came out and walked straight at us, but he went back up the steps and inside when we were half a block away.

Next came the war memorial to those killed in the fight for independence from Moldova in 1992, with a T-34 and an eternal flame. Across the Dniester, the Trandsdnistrians had piled sand on the levy to make a beach, and they dove into the river from handmade platforms. We crossed the footbridge and sat on the strand, and finally around 4 went to register.

To stay in that fake country for longer than twelve hours, and Neil and Paul had decided to stay, you must get a special visa from the state. This amounted to a typically communist experience. We first found the OVIR office that Lonely Planet recommended, and there confused the staff until they told us that it was after 5 and we would have to go to the Militia Headquarters. This was a long and lofty white building across town with three entrances. Tortured screams from a high window let us know we had found the place and made us very anxious about registration.

We couldn’t find our entrance, so I asked some girl who was standing languidly out front, dressed for an Eastern European night club, who told us to take the middle door. This metal door was sealed shut. The girl came over while we were waiting for something and said that she was an interpreter, and asked, “Why do you want to stay in Tiraspol?”

“We want to learn more about Transnistria,” I lied. “It’s interesting.”

She said, “You are strange people!”

I asked her where the good bars were (she recommended a place called Sherri, a strip club where another Transnistrian told us to go if we wanted to “make acquaintances,” and which we did not investigate further, or we may have seen the interpreter again), and only after she left did we realize that her translating might have eased our deal with the Militia. This says much of our priorities and concern.

Luckily, the two secretaries who welcomed us from a barred window next to the door were incongruously fat and pleasant women, and they took our documents away to register without any problem greater than a lengthy wait.

We stayed in a hotel called Ayscha, in an economy room with three beds and no hot water, which was the cheapest option. The building looked run down, like it had been abandoned for a decade between the original and current owners. When we left for dinner, a wedding party had cruised into the lobby. Their decorated cars lined the street out front, and the guests lingered outside a great ball room set up for the occasion.

We went back to the cafeteria for more good food, and then to the VIP Club, which in its red-lit, zebra-striped interior had every aspect of a strip club but the strippers. From there we bought some beers and sat in the long park between 25 Oktobri and the river. The benches were full of young Transnistrians too cheap for the bars, or too much enjoying the cool weather.

Near the street a sort of shouting match started, or at least a face off between two men, one in a wife-beater and the other shirtless, which steadily escalated under the imprecations of the girl who flailed and screamed between them. She was dressed provocatively and not particularly attractive. A milita van from the river side of the park drove up with its lights flashing, and just as it reached the group, at the worst time possible: the clouds burst, punches were thrown, and a trashy Russian street brawl began in earnest!

The van advanced further towards this scene, as if wearily warning the participants to stop; but the fighters just moved back and kept at it, until finally the militia got out to deal with it personally. Everyone watched in amusement and laughter as the milita pushed the belligerents into the back of the van, and only hesitantly escorted the struggling, shouting girl into the passenger seat. It was so like Cops, I forgot this was a communist state.

That was exciting, and we followed it by going to a sort of bar we had seen earlier called Pharaoh. A drunk man met us at the door and asked for cigarettes. Inside, we stood at the bar, and saw that there was a table full of Russian girls with one guy seated there, and a few other guys dancing. While we watched, the Russian girls would get up and go in front of the mirror and, facing their reflections, dance alone.

We watched for a long time the lonely movements of those feminine Narcissi, and eventually started dancing behind them and pointing enticingly at our reflections and taking pictures. Later we talked about it analytically. We decided that Westerners are too self-conscious for that bunk, and would likely die of embarrassment if we saw our own clumsy, drunken gyrations. In any case, it was very weird.

Then a new song came on, something old-fashioned and Russian that everyone but us (and the drunk cigarette guy, who had passed out on his table) recognized. They all formed a circle by holding hands and began to spin.

Here’s a story from Albania that I neglected to tell: Stuart and I were eating in a kebab store in Serande, with a filthy and punctured soccer ball on the floor between us that we intended to go return to the gypsy we bought it from and demand a new one, and from across the street we heard the joyous sounds of music and laughter and talking girls. We went into the small bar on the ground floor of a hotel expecting a vibrant party, or maybe a college group on a road trip, and saw instead a strange scene:

A group of Albanians about our age had formed a hand-holding circle and were wheeling around and laughing to some song. Sometimes one would release himself and dance about in the middle, and then rejoin it. We went to the bar and got two beers and tried not to stare, but the presence of we Westerners halted much of the fun. So we drank on the porch. Silly as it was, in some way we resented those Albanians and wished they invited us to dance.

Ah, but chance will extend her hand to those who seek. There at Pharaoh those Russians formed another circle, and Neil and Paul and I joined it.

CHAPTER III: TRAINSPOTTING

Backtracking is the part I hate most in video games, like Super Metroid and Halo, where you have to reverse-navigate levels already covered. I want forward momentum! To backtrack was something I wanted to avoid in traveling, despite the serpentine nature of my route, and so I was disappointed when the ferry did not work out. Yet I minded this backtracking much less than the virtual kind as I could sleep through it.

We bussed back into Chişinău on the 10 am bus, having gone to bed at 4 but slept well. I sent emails and wrote too much about Ukraine, then went into town to buy my ticket and finish reading Dracula, which I’d picked up in Odesa.

On the night bus to Bucharest, which was cheaper and faster than the train since the rail gauges differed between Moldova and Romania, I sat next to two Irish girls and their missionary chaperon, on their way back from two weeks in poor towns of Northern Moldavia, with naught for a shower but a bucket of water, heated by the sun, over a curtained square. Driven to Kill, one of Steven Seagal’s later movies, played on the television. The Irish Catholics did not appreciate the endless unnecessary violence or the strip club scene, but I watched the whole thing, and understood it’s course despite the Russian dubbing.

(When Russians dub movies, they leave in the original soundtrack, so you can hear the characters say things under the Russian overlap. They have only two actors for all the parts, one male and one female, and they largely read the script without any trace of emotion.)

I arrived in Bucharest at around 7, walked to the train station, and at noon boarded the Trans-Balkan Express to Istanbul, a twenty hour train ride for which I was prepared with two sandwiches and a two-liter bottle of water. The two sleeper cars attached to the larger train to Sofia, where we would latch onto the Bosphorus-bound Orient Express, were unsurprisingly full of travelers; for who but we would be stupid enough to sit in a train for twenty hours?

In my compartment were three Germans and a young and generous Iranian, who spoke of his country’s theocratic regime, his involvement in June’s uprising, and his fond nostalgia for the rule of the Shah, until leaving for a more empty room. A Turk came around and threw down pillows and packaged sheets, which we stored up on the uppermost bunk beds. The second tier was folded up, and the bottom one made our seats.

For a water closet the train had a hole in the floor which looked out on the tracks and the gravel. To urinate standing required a bit of target practice, and to do anything squatting, while that train rocked and braked and careened about, would have been a messy gymnastic feat. Someone waited until we had stopped for a while at a station, and I watched the result dribble down with the Iranian. “If someone did this in Iran,” he told me, “they would be taken off the train and arrested.”

We sped through parceled farms and fields of wilted sunflowers and into the Thracian forests. I read and napped and stuck my head out the hallway window, passed in my passport at the Bulgarian border, stepped outside when we changed trains near Sofia, ate my sandwiches, talked to some Aussies, and did whatever else you do on trains, until the sky turned red and then black, and we folded down the bunks and made our beds and slept. Out the window, the horizon flattened into solid black under whisked stars.

At around 3 we woke up under duress and fell out onto the platform in a mob before two low buildings with dim windows. One of these was for passport stamps, the other for visas, which only a handful of countries must buy. Turkey requires visas as a punitive measure: Aussies must pay $20 since one of their nation’s companies dumped waste into an Anatolian river. Yanks pay the same, though I’m not sure of the crime.

In line for my punishment, I met a noisy American couple from Phoenix — a skateboarder and an insurance investigator — traveling with a more somber and worldly friend who had lived on both Coasts and in Africa, and now resided in Sofia. “She told us, ‘They’ll wake you up at 2 to check passports, and then wake you up again to go outside at the border,’ and we said, ‘Well screw that! we’re not sleeping!” They had spent the night drinking in their compartment, and trying to lure in a poor Korean named Bong, but were now out of the two liter beer bottles that they found a novelty and their guide called a nuisance for college kids to drain in the park.

Morning found us in hilly fields of Turkish green and gold, still in Europe but only just. And then we disembarked, and I emerged onto the Bosphorus with mosque domes and minarets at my back, again rendered a stranger in a strange land.

ADDENDUM

The New York Times agrees with me on several counts: including hasty museum-goers and that women are treated like shit in a lot of places. I try to pick up the International Herald Tribune on the weekends.

Someone showed me this article, relevant to our experience, titled “Americans Warned to Stay Away From Bulgarian Strip Clubs”:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The State Department is warning that more than your money and marriage are at stake if you visit strip clubs in the Bulgarian capital.

The U.S. Embassy in Sofia issued a security alert Tuesday saying the city’s “gentlemen’s clubs” should be avoided after two bombings and a shooting seriously injured several people at strip parlors there in August and September. The bombings have been blamed on turf wars between rival criminal gangs.

The blandly worded message avoids comment on the wisdom of visiting such clubs apart from the question of personal safety. It notes that security is generally better for tourists and business travelers in Bulgaria since the country joined the European Union.

It’s not the first time the embassy has urged U.S. business travelers and tourists to stay away from Bulgarian strippers. Earlier this year, an embassy crime report noted several incidents of club patrons being roughed up after refusing to pay outrageous fees for drinks and private dances.

Luckily we went to the gentlemen’s club in Varna, and had Uncle Pete to pay for Lilly’s Cocktail of Love.

Tales of Exile and Brute Wandering

On August 17, 2009 from Ukraine. 0 Comments.

The road, they said, was a place apart, a country of its own ruled by no government but natural law, and its one characteristic was freedom.
—Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

Waiting at another border, I got to thinking how weird all this was, these six months rambling Europe, and now this Ukraine, my last country on that continent. I have seen Norman castles, Parisian catacombs, Belgian breweries and Dutch coffee shops, the corporate plazas of Berlin and the beer halls of Munich; Austrian Alps, Hungarian bath houses, the palace of Roman Emperors in Croatia, Bosnian rubble in Sarajevo, Montenegrin fjords, and Albanian roads; I have seen Venetian fortrezzas and Turkish bastions, Greek oracles, Cretan katiki, Macedonian monasteries and Bulgarian strip clubs, Romanian squalor, Carpathian vistas, Moldovian weddings, and now the border stations of Eastern Europe.

A rap at the bus window awakened me from my reverie. The portly officer led me into another office, this Ukrainian one much nicer than the Transnistrian cell, where a young lieutenant sat by a wood desk. He asked me my name and about the specifics of my trip to Ukraine, and then about my work. I told him, hoping to make things easier and knowing he had no way to validate it, that I was still a student, and he asked me about where I went to school and what I studied. In that weary tone of judicial pity he told me I had no exit stamp for Moldovia and that every other passport on the bus would show one if he looked. He said, “This is your passport, and you must take care of it.”

Then he started asking me all sorts of questions about school: about entrance exams, standardized tests, SATs and ACTs, applying to university, and lettered grading scales. Everything I mentioned led his queries in new directions, and left largely unsatisfied his unknowlegable interest in education.

Finally I wondered about my passport stamp, but he said he just wanted to talk to me and that the bus was still there. “I ask you about school because I am curious. I am not much older than you.” I asked if he wanted to go to school in America. He said, “I would like to but I cannot because of my army job.” He spoke with wistful envy of the EU and its free borders, as if Ukrainian membership would liberate him from the tedium of the army. He told me he was going to Bedford College as part of an army exchange program, to take a class titled Peace and Conflict.

When the other passports had been processed, the lieutenant dismissed me from his office. The other passengers watched me with annoyance or good humor as I got back on the bus from my second interrogation. For the second time I alone had been called away. We rumbled off down the straight-edged highway past fields of drooping sunflowers and weat, the country so flat you could see the turn of the world.

I came into Odesa at 8. None of the ATMs worked at the bus station. Penniless, I started walking southeast towards the Black Sea, guessing that was where the city center would be. My plan was to find money, then Internet, then a hostel, then food, but soon I was lost in the dark. I would ask people, “Hi, excuse me, where is the city center?” and they would shrug and walk away, so I would have to call, “Center, center!” in an over-enunciated voice that they understood. Finally some dad told me to take bus 201.

The buses in Ukraine are large taxi-vans called marshrutkas. I took the prescribed marshrutka and stood near the front but didn’t know what to do when people started passing up hrivna scrip from the back seats. I gave them to the woman in the passenger seat, but she was only a passenger! The driver had this carpeted platform by the gear shift, and when you get on or want to get off, you throw money there and he gives you change while he is driving like a maniac and smoking. When a lot of people got out I followed, and then wandered around some better-lit streets looking for an Internet café. I ate dinner, kept walking, and — what’s this? There leaning against the wall stood someone from Varna.

I said Hi, and Rob asked me if I was there to stay at the hostel. “There’s a hostel here?” I said. This was a true miracle of salvation: In a city of one million and but three hostels, all secreted in cheap apartment suites, I had stumbled on a friend and a place to stay. So even though I lost my bag there, the fate of the Flag Hostel is unfortunate, for the connections I made in that busy place proved life-saving.

Rob showed me how to get into the unmarked hostel but did not follow me up, as he had left in a huff for being charged too much and was going to Kiev. Yet my good luck held. The Ukrainian hostel owner had lived in Oregon for a full year, in Portland and Eugene. He talked about Lake Oswego and West Linn and Milwaukie, and that road that goes down to Oregon City — what was it? Oh yes, 99 West!

For $10 I got an air mattress in a room crowded with old hospital beds, couches, and box-spring mattresses. My bed deflated steadily until it was nearly flat in the morning, when I rose, packed, and left without a word. The city looked more welcoming in the daylight, its cobblestone boulevards lined with old imperial buildings and mottled oaks, from whose boughs hung lights and streamers.

I walked to the train station, got some pastries and coffee, and took a bus, first to the beach somehow, but then to the Sobor Church in the Main Square, where I knew there was a hostel. Luckily, I saw someone else I knew, Cristian the Swede whom I met in Moldova. We got lunch at one of the Top Sandwich restaurants, which offers pizza and beer for $4, and walked around the Opera House and the Potemkin Steps, then he showed me the Front Page Hostel.

An Englander, on his way to Kazantip, which annually holds a massive music festival on the Crimean beach, was struggling to learn a little Russian so he could talk to girls, and in the kitchen recorded a language lesson onto his MP3 player. There was an older Dutch man there who had lived in Russia for several years and knew the language well. He told us it was not as difficult as English, simpler and with fewer cases, and gave us insights into the Russian custom.

The way this Hollander saw things, there are four spheres of human interaction: the public forum of the street and the market, the social sphere of workplace and pub, the private domain of the home, and the intimate one of the bed. In the West, the barrier of trust between acquaintance and friend exists between the social and private spheres. You can know someone and never be invited to their home, but if you are, and that person is otherwise compatible, you can sleep with them. In Asia, where it is easy to be invited home for dinner but not for sex, the barrier stands between the private and the intimate. In Russia, the barrier is between the public and the social. It is impossible to meet someone in the street, but once you become social, the relationship progresses very quickly.

Holland gave the following example: When he moved to Moscow, he would go regularly to a mini-market down the street from his apartment. At first the woman behind the counter there met his business with a terse manor and unsmiling face; in the second week, a hint of a smile graced her countenance; in the third, this bore its full fruits, and they started exchanging pleasantries; in the fourth, they conversed truly; and in the fifth week he asked her to dinner. With a wry smile and a libidinous memory, Holland said, ”It went fast from there. You can imagine what happened.”

I heard this same sentiment from others, and found that most Russians have the mentality of a small Southern town within the mixed clan of their family and friends that exists within a large and alien community, besieged directly by mistrusted urbanity. Strangers are not worth shit, unless you can get money out of them. They find those they can trust and make them kin.

In public and abroad, Russians behave like Americans. They imagine that they run things, that everyone should speak Russian and want to be Russian, and, being of a superior culture, that they may act on every impulse, disregarding what would be polite or in their own best interest. Appearance matters more than happiness, which they forsake for the trappings. They dub every movie into their own language and mostly listen to bad Moscow pop.

Such familiar faults! We Yanks and Ruskies are committed by pride to the same shallow grave, and we bicker over thrown dirt even as we together dig the pit.

Down by the port of Odesa, at the feet of the Potemkin Stair and alongside an autocenter, is a long hallway of marriage agencies. Each has a catalog of prospective wives of that handsome Slavic cast: high cheek-bones and flat cheeks, long legs, and hair low over the brow, darkly-hued or colored that blonde that is dark at the roots.

A middle-aged Western bachelor, balding and pallid and twice her age, having no propositions at home, comes to buy a marriage, and in one of the musty agencies by the port chooses his bride from a magazine. “She likes to clean and cook,” he says. Her English is not good, so he helps her memorize the necessary statements on the way to the terminal: “I want to go to America with my husband. Nothing to declare.” Across oceans she receives a BMW or a Porsche from her lovelessly doting groom, and she becomes herself little more than a posession, yet living through the torment. She forgets what it is to be home.

What fitting place for this business of exile, there beneath the steps named for that scene of massacre in The Battleship Potemkin where innocent mothers and their children fall dying under the tsarist troops. An infant’s stroller rolls helplessly and dispossessed to the bottom. Now the tsars are gone, and girls continue to roll down those stairs, dispensed by no definable enemy but unhappy circumstance.

Women in Russia, Ukraine, and Moldova marry young, to the richest man they can find at clubs or parties or to one who can find them through one of those agencies. After 24 years of age they are considered old maids, though some have a child anyway and few means to support it. She hopes for a modeling job which does not work out. To this unfortunate single woman a trader comes with promises of lucrative employment at a Cypriot cabaret, and soon she finds herself legally trapped in the Mediterranean world, on a boat to a brothel in Beirut or Antalya: a public woman, no longer her own.

Fate is cruel to those free women, manumitted but powerless and penniless, born under wicked boreal signs to short-lived guardianships. All say, “Marry now or die a spinster.” The bed is the only sanctuary, and a loathsome one. They ice their hearts in springtime and succumb too early to endless polar nights without gladness or joy, married and alone, empty but alive. May luck find thee, O beautiful woman of the steppe, and crush the sad condition of thy sex.

The Front Page has for owners a Polish couple, who get university credit to start the venture, and an American from San Jose. From one of the Ukrainian staffers I got directions to an open market, and there bought a pair of shoes from a gypsy — white tennis shoes that say Puma on them for $20, with a pair of 20 cent black socks. Now I was ready to go out.

Cristian the professional had left for Kiev, but Yuri, the Rough Guides writer I met in Chişinău, was still there and keen. He had lived the past eight years abroad, living in Beirut and Slovenia and visiting crazy places like Iraq just after the US invasion, and had been home only once in the last three. Slovenia, where he teaches English, is a small country in the Alpine foothills, an EU member and very wealthy, having escaped most of the Yugoslav fighting with only a Ten Day War and 18 deaths.

“We are hard working, of Saxon blood,” says the Slovene. “You stole all our savings in the Bosnian War!” cry the Serb, the Croat, the Bosnian, Montenegrin, and Macedonian. The Croat adds a spiteful spit and says, “Give me back that mile of coastline,” but the Slovene replies politely as he wipes his face with a silk handkerchief that the Croat better stop all that if he ever wants into the EU. Meanwhile the Serb eyes the Bosnian, who just might be a Muslim; the Bosnian shouts for a UN tribunal, which sends the Serb scurrying for sanctuary at the nearest military base. The Macedonian turns his ire south, and the Montenegrin goes to the beach.

Yuri and I drank in the hostel kitchen and went to a recommended place, an underground bar for university students. Our directions were to find a brown door, go down some stairs, past the guard, who might ask for money but we shouldn’t give him any, and into the bar, which looked like a garage project and very hipster.

I saw someone drink a strange concoction and ordered one. Over a glass of flaming absinthe the bartender melted a spoonful of sugar and drizzled it in, then put the fire out with his breath and handed me a straw. While I drank quickly the hot liquor, he poured in some cranberry juice, which followed the green absinthe down my gullet. Yuri drank one, too, and it set us back to a primitive state of mind and instinct.

We sat down and talked with three Russian girls from Murmansk, that cold and distant port north of Finland on a fjord of the Barents Sea, and then met some other Russians. Some girl led four of us down to an empty bar by the beach. One of the Russians got very angry at me for talking to her and let it be known that he wanted to fight. He kicked chairs and threw beer bottles and shouted a lot, but was too impotent to do anything else, so Yuri and the Russian girl and I left them there.

The next day Yuri and I were discomposed, but Yuri moreso than I. I went back to the Top Sandwich restaurant with someone from England who told me stories of the Siberian Russians, who spend all day drinking vodka at a shack of a bar, and then spill out into the snow and call their shaggy horse so that they might fall across its back and be carried home — what a primitive means against drunk driving.

I enjoyed my schwarma wrap and omelette, but then took a long nap. I woke up and was reading and feeling very good when one of the hostel staffers came in and asked me when I would check out. “Tomorrow,” I told her. “When will you check out today?” “Are you kicking me out?” “Your booking was only for one night.” The hostel was full, and I was napping in someone’s bed. I gave it up and told newly-risen Yuri I would take the night train to the Crimea, which I had planned to do the following day.

We went out to dinner anyway, to a Ukrainian restaurant where they wore traditional outfits, the colorful fashions and wide-brimmed hats apparently adopted by the Mexicans. We got soup and a plate of Cossack snacks, which the menu said were for deciding whether to drink or not, and were mostly made of pork fat. I got a cup of Cossack kvass, which is fermented rye bread. It tasted like woodsmoke and leather, like wisky without the fire, being only mildly alcoholic. At markets they often serve the cloudy brown potion in plastic cups from big tanks loaded onto carts with KBACC stenciled on the side.

After dinner I grabbed my stuff, went to the train station, and got a cheap second class ticket in the sleeper train to Simferopol in the Crimea. A mournful Russian waltz played as I crossed the long platform to my car, the third of fifteen blue steel boxes carried by the tired old engine. It was hot as a sauna inside. Second class is open, with no compartments. A green carpet ran down between partitions of four bunks around a table and two bunks lined against the window. These were up at the moment, and I sat next to a dour party of Ukrainians and sweated with nothing to do about it, which is the worst feeling.

The train started, and we clapped down the upper bunks and unrolled mattresses with down pillows, then made beds from packaged sheets. The beds were not designed for people as tall as me. Mine was an upper one, parallel to the window, and not designed for people tall as me. I slept on my back with my knees up, or on my stomach with a hand on a vertical bar to keep me from rolling out, which seemed made for that purpose.

In the morning people filtered down slowly and beds became benches. Outside sped a flat and sunburned world of yellowed fields, copses of poplar and brush, run-down houses and Soviet factories, and telephone poles strung together. The metal car became hot and there was nothing to do but to sit still and allow as much air circulation as possible, and then to sweat without recourse, which is about the worst feeling to endure.

Men played cards over the aisle. The stewardess served tea in glasses with tin handles from a great silvered samovar, and a man walked up and down the aisles of the train with a cart full of packaged pastries and bottled water, juice, and vodka. I just read. The people I sat with soundlessly made me a plate of biscuits, bread, and cheese on a paper towel, and I felt bad for having nothing to exchange.

When we got to Simferopol, the speakers played a sort of Slavonic dance and everyone got off the train and hugged waiting relatives. The whole scene felt very antiquated and anachronistic. Outside I went to a cafeteria for lunch, then found the Internet and looked up a few Crimean hostels. I took a trolleybus with a sign for Yalta, not realizing that it was the longest trolleybus in the world at 54 miles. Twice on the highway the struts got knocked off the cable and we had to wait for the driver to realign them. Who decided this was a good idea?

The Yalta hostel and beach both proved unaccommodating, so I approached one of the babushkas at the bus station and let her take me home. Eugenia Kalinina, grandmother and event coordinator for the Jewish Culture Society, lived right off the central boardwalk in an apartment. She already had four Russian girls living there, and I took the last bed.

Eugenia explained to me in her limited English how the front door worked and had me demonstrate my understanding of locks and keys. She made tea and showed me a photo album of her family, her father and brother in Red Army uniforms, and her younger self reciting a Russian poem in front of 200 people in New York City. Two of the Russian girls were straightening their hair for a night out, and the other two sat there and laughed while Eugenia tried to tell me some sort of story about herself, which I could not grok. None of them spoke enough English to translate.

Ukraine was very difficult to travel for this reason. Everyone speaks Russian, and few but Eugenia and my new flatmates made any attempt to communicate around that barrier. Most Ukrainians just stared at me and responded to my question or order in deadpan Russian that could have meant anything. I often tried to use universal words like Internet, Center, and Super, but these were usually dismissed unless pronounced in a nearly-perfect local dialect. My improvised sign language was often ignored — although it is presumptuously American of me to require Charades. Without the bilingual advisers at hostels, I would have been lost.

It should be noted that sign language is not universal and can be dangerous. The Peace Sign, for instance, means the same as the middle finger in England, where the King would cut off those two fingers to stop a bow-pull. The Rock On horns mean the same insult in Spain. The A-Ok circle signifies anus or cuckholdery in Germany, Brazil, and the Mediterranean. Even the smiling Thumbs Up means the middle finger in Latin America, West Africa, Greece, Russia, Southern Italy, and the Middle East. Why must every affirmation become synonymous with Fuck You?

Anyway, I had found lodgings and so went for a wander around the busy neighborhood around the port, an arcade of bars and cafés and stores and lights, with street performers and huge carnival rides set up for the occasion of high summer.

A towering bronze of Lenin surveys the waterfront square — and between him and his port, the Golden Arches! The hero of communism and the icon of capitalism, pitted across a hundred feet of marble and tourists! What can you be thinking, Lenin, to see this embassy of your Western victors there on ground that once belonged to the People of the Rus. In one hand you carry a rolled document, and with the other you peel back the edge of your greatcoat. Do you reach for your wallet — that dollar menu is awful appealing to the common man — or for a gun? That severe look that ever seems to drag your Mephistophelean countenance forward in a bull rush presently suggests a deep revulsion and a raging torrent of thought.

McDonalds! She exploits workers as if chattel, bullies farmers as corporate serfs for cheaper produce and more of it, and fattens the lower classes on food instinct says they need, once rare cholesterol and sugar now base and common. Here her floor is crowded by those who prove their status with a Western meal, no cheaper and far fouler than local fare, and by young men who take girls there for first dates. Yet by her obtuse profit that corporation is an agent of peace, for as any political theorist will tell you no two nations which flew the Golden Arched flag ever declared war on the other.

Speak Lenin! Does your mummified corpse turn in its glass coffin? Will you break this unsteady Free Market peace on principle?

In the morning I had tea and biscuits with Eugenia and her friend Dzuba, who spoke meticulous English. Dzuba wanted my help with a tourist proposition, and wanted her beautiful daughter to guide me around town, but when Dzuba called, the young woman was still sleeping and anyway had plans, and I was no businessman.

I did take Dzuba’s recommendation to see some old tsarist palaces along the Crimean cliffs. The marshrutka to Alupka and the end of the line careened around the hills like it was South America or Asia. I got off safely at Vorontsov’s Palace: Monstrous and conglomerate in its English design, with squared Scottish walls of beige diabase basalt, Gothic chimneystacks at the corners like minarets, and Moorish onion domes at the peaks. Under the seaward side and a great half-domed balcony were the gardens, crowdd with Russians.

The Russians take as many pictures as the Japanese, but instead of throwing up peace signs and clumsy-cute smiles they pose severely, as if for a fashion catalog or even a daguerreotype, although for young women the look becomes pornographic. Their propensity for photography made navigating the palace through all those projected lines of snapping cameras as difficult as stealing a diamond from a laser trap.

I didn’t know the name of the next castle, and there was much confusion on the marshrutka back towards Yalta until a Russian helped me tell the driver it’s name: Lastivchyne Hnizdo, or Swallow’s Nest. The Russian had lived in India for two years, Texas for seven, and my own Portland for six months, and now resided in Kiev. He said Yalta had a unique climate, created by the Black Sea and the cemicircle of Crimean Mountains, which attracted so many tourists. His friends bring their sick son there for three weeks every year to clear his lungs, and if they miss a trip, the boy is sick for the rest of the year. CCCP party leaders all had resorts there, and Livadia Palace was used for the Yalta Conference in World War Two.

The Swallow’s Nest was a toy-sized Neo-Gothic palace on the lip of a cliff. The path up to it was crowded with dozens of Russians holding either a hawk or a suited monkey. I had to duck to get under the poor animals, who hung their mouths open against the heat. I found it just as unbearable, and so after seeing the disappointing castle, now a restaurant, took a marshrutka back to Yalta and went to the crowded beach.

While eating dinner at a restaurant on the arcade, I unexpectedly saw a trireme elevated on struts out near the eastern end of the docks. I made my way there and saw strange things: a musical puppet show, a hummer with its floodlights on and rims spinning, and Jack Sparrow driving a covered moped painted like a Zebra. I told the waitress I was meeting a friend and so explored the boat, which had tables about the rails and a turntable at the quarterdeck. The sun set while I walked back. Their virtues known, I got a bag full of Crimean tomatoes from a street stand, and some salt and fries from McDonalds, and ate the lot for a snack out near the dock. Strange that once I would remove a slice of tomato from a sandwich and now I would prefer a whole one to an apple.

Saturday I took an early bus to Sevastopol. The road followed a forested slope under a beetled ridge of basalt, looking down on the seashore resorts and the Black Sea. I sat next to a Russian who cracked a beer, though it was only 9:30, and slurped it noisily, with many sighs and smacking of the lips between each sip. When he was done, he tried to crush the can and spilled beer all over himself, which I found very satisfying. Finally we arrived at that great Russian port, site of two terrible sieges: one by the British, French, and Turkish allies of the Crimean War, and the second by the Germans in the Great Patriotic War.

From the bus station I walked in a chosen direction across a cramped railroad depot and up a hill — it’s always better to chose the higher path if given an option. Soon a park opened up on the right, overlooking the wedged bay of the port and its ships and arsenals, and old buildings rose on the left. The park was full of monuments and busts, and I took a long stairway up to the top of the hill, to a church and a great bronze Lenin, with soldiers and smiths and the salt of the earth around his feet. Following his outstretched finger, I walked back down into the marina, among more monuments to the defense of the city and its patriotic commanders, and more whitewashed buildings. Here, knowing all the listed battles of the Eastern Front, I deciphered the last unknown Cyrillic character: the Ч (Che) of Керч (Kerch).

My bus got into the outskirts of Simferopol a few hours before the train left. I rode on a marshrutka up the main street, through a series of round-a-bouts surrounded by the same Soviet buildings, with long stretches of nothing between, and I had no idea where the train station was or what to look or ask for. Finally I got in a cab at one of the round-a-bouts and asked for Center. As we drove, I told the uncomprehending driver, Train, Rail, and Railroad, but none of these had an impression. I looked for tracks to point to, and finally, swallowing pride, I made a few train motions. I started saying Odesa, and he asked me a few things, but I said, “No autobus, no aeroport — Odesa!”

The driver said, “Boksal!” which I had seen but not recognized on some of the signs, and then he started doing full-on train impressions, much better than mine. I said, “Da, Boksa!” but he kept asking if I was sure, and kept doing the delightful impressions, so I had to turn it into a sort of mantra or cadence to get him to drive there. I paid him and went to the crowded ticket counter, but the train was sold out! all except first class, which was over $50. I went to a cafeteria for a big cathartic dinner of steak and soup and salad, and then found at an Internet café that there was an overnight bus. So back to the Autoboksal!

More News From Nowhere

On August 10, 2009 from Moldovia. 0 Comments.

And it’s getting strange in here,
Yeah, it gets stranger every year.
—Nick Cave

The minibus crossed the border and entered Codri Forest, the patches of oaks and willows broken by small farmsteads. The economy of landlocked Moldova, Europe’s poorest country and one of its most densely populated, is almost entirely agricultural, especially after all their industry seceded with Transnistria twenty years ago. They grow grapes for Moldovan wine, famous for its freshness and fruity flavor according to the expertise of the Frenchman on the bus.

Everyone else was Romanian, but I sat in the back with Pierre-Henri of France, Lidy of Moldova, and a Romanian. Lidy had taught English before marrying, and although she had not spoken in four years remembered it quickly. She pointed out the forest and Lake Ghidighici when we passed, and recommended some Moldovan cuisine: goulash, rolls in grape leaf and cabbage, and mamaliga, a sort of cornmeal mush. Her brother lives in Boston and she has to correct his English. She wants to visit but not to stay. She would miss the air, sky, people, and faith of Moldova too much.

When we came into Chişinău’s central depot, Lidy and her husband showed me where the tram station was, and I took one out to the Malldova mall at the edge of town, behind which was my hostel. The Welshman who opened the Chişinău Hostel also owns one in Varna and much property in Eastern Europe, and is surely the most successful and least alcoholic of that club of Welsh ex-patriots who frequent the world’s strange places. He was very proud of his region, and informed us that Richard Burton and Catherine Zeta-Jone also hailed from there.

The hostel was nearly full on Friday night, including another four travelers I had met in Varna: two Aussies and two of the staffers from the Flag Hostel. They came from Varna Veche on Romania’s Black Sea coast, just near the Bulgarian border, and told stories of drinking till dawn around the dance floors that stretched from the houses to the surf, and then sleeping uneasily until the sun grew too hot, at which point they would wander around until the drinking began anew at 5.

The original idea of the Varna Veche festival, which starts every year on May 1 and usually peters out by late August, was to save that small resort town with rock and roll. Now up to 20,000 Romanians will show up on the warm weekends during the festival to enjoy their youth. The houses of the overrun town, saved from eviction at least, turn into nightclubs, bars, guesthouses, and brothels.

(From the Welshman who ran the Chişinău Hostel I heard some sorry news out of Varna. It seemed that Dave had not paid any taxes on his Flag Hostel and was being shut down, not accepting any reservations past the middle of this month.)

Saturday I didn’t do much, and at night went to get cheap Chinese food from a stall in the Malldova food court. I also checked the times for Harry Potter, but all movies there and east are dubbed in Russian. I went with a Swede named Cristian, a social worker who spent a few weeks a year partying in Eastern Europe, where the clubs are bloated by mafia money into magnificent spectacles all their own. He wanted to go out that night, and I felt the first constraints of my light packing, having no shoes or long pants for the glamorous places in which he intended to be seen drinking.

Well fine then! I drank with the expeditionary party, composed of Cristian, a Rough Guides writer named Yuri, and a Nipponese named Miyamoto, and then when they left finished the vodka with the Welshman and Niles, an older American. The only other lodger at that rare place, a Dutchman, had already gone to bed. One of the Moldovan girls who ran the hostel named Helena was watching Wall-E on her laptop, and the sounds coming from the kitchen made me very nostalgic. She came out looking like she had fallen in love. O Wall-E, may you be everyone’s favorite movie!

I wandered around the old town on Sunday. I saw more mullets than I had ever seen before, and also noted that along the Black Sea coast, it is okay for guys to roll up the hems of their shirts and walk around like that with their stomachs hanging out.

I went in a church, a great Orthodox gallery crowded with wedding guests. From what I could tell, there were three weddings going on concurrently, at different stages of the ritual and in different corners of the church. One couple stood before the Templon and the speaking priest in a familiar display of oath-taking. In the corner, a priest waved a censer over a pile of pastries with candles stuck in them, and as he chanted a choir of women sang a hymnal.

Outside, three newlywed couples and their parties were dispersed around the square. Two posed for photographs, and one groom had his smiling bride bent over the lip of a fountain while he planted himself behind her hips in a pose sure to please his father-in-law and inspire his children. Caravans of cars bedecked in flowers, streamers, and balloons awaited the customary slow drive through town, accompanied by much fanfare of car horns.

On my way back I saw Cristian and the Dutchman, whose name I forgot, on the way back, and we got coffee and dinner and looked through the closing market. Only Cristian went out that night, and he did it yawning all the way across the threshhold, for he had not left last night’s club until 8 that morning and was at the end of a week spent traveling and clubbing. The other four of us drank in the common room and jawed about manly subjects like music and girls and parasites while Helena played Act I of Diablo II in the kitchen, though she needed help with potions and Scrolls of Town Portal, which my sad experience provided.

The seperatist region of Transnistria, which occupies a skinny strip of steppe between the east bank of the Dniestr and the incredulous Ukrainian border, has become easier and easier to enter. When I first heard of it, you needed American cigarettes and Russian vodka to gift to the guards; later this became a bribe of $15 to $60; soon the price was reduced to a standard fee of 17 lei, which is just over one Euro; and finally the mandatory bribe was entirely eradicated, in all situations but a few unlucky (but exciting) outliers.

Monday I took a bus into Tiraspol, the capital. I intended to stay the night, though foreigners have to register themselves with the police to stay longer than twelve hours, but learned too late that I could not withdraw money, only exchange real currencies for worthless Transnistrian scrip, recognized nowhere but there. I changed my €10 of Moldovan lei into Transnistrian rubles, which was enough to buy a hearty lunch and a ticket to Odessa after a brief wander.

To summarize, Transnistria is a country that does not exist, recognized by no nation of importance but Russia, who it seeks to rejoin despite Ukraine’s intervening bulk, and the Russians are as happy to play along as they are in Abkhazia and South Ossetia and Azerbaijan. Tiraspol serves Moscow in gestures of Lenin statues and Putin posters, of billboards proclaiming the benefices of socialism and the nobility of the worker, and by the squadrons of soldiers, many of them deployed by Russia, who patrol its streets. And yet none in Transnistria would shed tears were her impossible goal never realized, the nation being owned wholesale by Igor Smirnov and his family, who run the star-logoed Sherif Company and profit immensely from the country’s confused status.

How now Pridnestrovie? What dost thou intend, O fake nation, with thy fictitious name, sovereignless magistrates, and counterfeit currency, thy mock police in costumed livery? Why further burden the lists of nations with conflict, fetter your people with a meaningless citienship, and squander all wealth on folly, you East Bank of Moldova, last Republic of the USSR? Why weather the storm as a picket of nothing? Be thee Oblivious or just Uncaring?

Here I come to the make-believe border, and a sham soldier with a greased AKS-47 dangling from his neck checked the aisle of the bus. Another collected the passports. They were all returned but one, for the Bald Eagle in that stack might as well be a dollar sign, so clearly did he portrude to acute eyes. I was called outside the bus to an office in a guard station with an iron door.

I waited for the leather-bound detachment of Free Riders to be dealt with, and then went inside and took a seat before the metal desk of a young officer. Behind him a man with a moustache sat at a computer facing the room’s only window. In Russian, the officer told me I did not have an exit stamp for Moldova and that I would have to go back there and proceed around Transnistria to make my passport complete, if I wanted to get into Ukraine. He drew a word map on a piece of paper, an X through a line from Tiraspol to Odessa, and a new arrow drawn from Chişinău around to the Ukrainian port.

The Welshman and Niles had assured me that this would not be a problem, so I started arguing and calling Transnistria a fake country and said Odessa a few times. The man kept saying no, and finally said something about a present.

“Present?” I asked, knowing what he meant but wanting him to ask for it.

The officer scoffed at my naïveté and looked comically to the man at the desk behind him, and I had to fight back a grin as he turned back to say again, “Present!”

I learned later that this guard sometimes catches unwary travelers for €50 or even €100, but by some windfall I was happily broke. Even though he kept saying, “Too small,” I handed over €2 of Transnistrian rubles and said, “No euro, no dollar, no lei. Only rubles.” The fake officer clicked his tongue but took the bills and returned to me my passport.

Marking Time

On August 7, 2009 from Romania. 1 Comment.

I drink and smoke errday while you travel the world. FML.
—Sissy Katy

A great sign of white letters propped up on the hilltop like Hollywood told us we were in RASNOV, south of Brasov on the road to Bran. Although Vlad Tepes, or Dracula, never lived at the Bran castle and only maybe visited, it has become the penultimate site of his legend and absorbed Bram Stoker’s character and a tourist flair.

The castle would be better called a palace or a country manor, with its peaceful inner courtyard of white stucco and many quiet rooms. There were no spiked pits nor slag piles, no dungeons, no sulphurous smoke, not even a cemetery; just this little castle on a wooded hill over a pleasant village and its knick-knack market, peddling masks and Dracula shirts with images from every film adaptation and also Blade. It had a high tower, but this was closed off by a gate, which we slid under so we could get a few pictures.

Out in the market, Marty saw a stand of Romanian instruments that he compulsively wanted. The woman there had learned to play them from her father when she was 12, and she showed off her acumen on Romanian bagpipes and on the ocarina, both the ovoid Legend of Zelda kind and one shaped like a flute. To our pre-emptive annoyance, since he failed in practicing to get anything like a tune out of it, Marty bought the latter for 35 dib-dubs.

Marty followed another Aussie in calling all foreign currencies dib-dubs. This fit well the Romanian scrip, once called leu, then lei, and now officially the roni. Nearby nations have similar names: Bulgaria’s lev, Turkey’s lira, Albania’s lek. Croatia, Serbia, and Bosnia all use the name dinar for their entirely different currencies, while Macedonia has the denar, all inheriting the denarius of the Roman Empire, just as Spain did with the dinero. West of the Dniestr are the rubles, and east of the Atlantic come the dollars. So it really makes sense to just call the lot of them dib-dubs.

Romania’s dib-dubs are worth mentioning. Perhaps in response to their inherent corruption, the country prints a paper money which is made of plastic fibers, making it indestructible and impossible to counterfit. In Varna we had a full circle of guys try pulling 1 roni in half and succeed only in stretching it, although we did light it on fire eventually. Like the euro, ronis come in different colors and sizes depending on denominations. In all ways but value they are superior to the American dollar.

My flip-flops had fallen apart, so I spent a few dib-dubs on some new ones, made of action-figure blue plastic that made me feel like a Japanese robot, and we drove off toward Brasov. The city should not have been hard to find — like Rasnov and Hollywood it has a great white sign proclaiming its location from the hill above, this one supposedly constructed using some of the letters that once spelled STALIN — but it took us a while anyway.

We tried to kick each other’s feet out on the way to the gondola station, and then took a cable-car up to the top of the hill where the Brasov sign stands. The old town is wedged between two such hills, with the sign on the eastern and two towers, the White and the Black, halfway up the western. The town is of old Hapsburg architecture, all fine stonework and red rooftops. The two chief attractions are the Black Church, a great Protestant cathedral scorched without by a 17th century fire, and the narrow Rope Street, which is just an alley but famous as Europe’s skinniest street. We saw these and a cafeteria very quickly.

Jezz and Marty set off back to Bucharest, for a train to Sofia and a longer journey to Corfu’s Pink Palace, while Alan and I stayed to find our own lodgings. Alan had made a booking; I was stuck with scraps, and finding the Kismet Dao and Rolling Stone hostels equally full, I went to one of the guesthouses managed by a Romanian named Gabriel. The apartment was between the hillside and the cobblestone pedestrian street, the Strada Republicii, which ran up from the Black Church and the Plata Sfatului past a mall of cafés and boutiques. I had a small room with three beds, and a balcony that looked down on the little backyard, where the owner, a shrunken old woman, had once seen bear cubs.

I shared my room with a Frenchman named Chilly, and nextdoor was a Swiss couple, David and Rosanna. After I had taken a shower we went out to a restaurant called Sergiana for traditional Romanian food. David and I got glasses of palinca, which tastes like rakia but is yellowish in color instead of clear, and I ate a stew with beef and sausage and corn dumplings, and a salad of summer cucumbers, which I was sad to learn just meant sliced pickles.

Afterwards, while walking around the city, and to the consternation of his girlfriend, David and I started talking about computer games: Time Commander and Sim City, his favorites, and mine, Age of Empires and Heroes of Might & Magic and Civilization. He mentioned that eternal sound of the priest, which echoed across all continents in those days of the early ’90s, to the equal annoyance of parents of every nation. David told me, “My Dad would always shout, ‘Wah-noh-noh! Wah-noh-noh! What is that Wah-noh-noh? Can’t you turn that off?’”

In places with weak currency, prices suddenly seem much greater than they really are, and the $2 price tag on the White Tower museum seemed to me offensive. Alan and I refused it, on our Wednesday wander, and the same price at the Black Tower, although we accepted the student discount at the Black Church since they did not check for cards and got in for about a quarter each. We got pizza, and then I went to take a nap.

That afternoon, when out looking for a grocery store, I ran into a great group of people whom I had met at the Flag Hostel in Varna, for Black Sea backpacking is a small community with only a few routes. Assuming we head north, everyone goes from Sofia to Varna, from Varna to Bucharest or Istanbul, from Bucharest to Brasov or Budapest, and from Brasov to Budapest or, be they adventuresome, to Moldova or Odessa or Kiev, and because there are but few hostels you continually see the same faces. I went with this band to walk up the mountain and see the sunset.

The over-enthused manager of their Rolling Stone hostel, who sticks her head out the window and shouts “Reservation?” when anyone rings the bell, warned them severely of the brown bears that infest the woodlands, and who not one year ago killed a drunk who fell asleep on one of the trails. I received similar warnings from Chilly, the Frenchman, who said the bears in those hills killed one man every other year. Ceauşescu loved the dire bears and bred them around his woodland retreat, so that now they number 6000 and are commonly hunted to maintain that number. The hostel offered a bear-watching tour, wherein a driver took a group up to a pile of trash in the woods and waited for the hungry bears to emerge. “There is the bear,” he will say. “Take a photo, and then we go.”

Anyway, we couldn’t find the trail so we just sat on a bench near a park, looking out over the city wall at the sunset which struck the hills through the low dark clouds like a bomb, and when it started to rain we moved up to a concrete buffer under some trees on the slope. A car of the politia drove by, and the officer said, ignorant of his humor, “You don’t have to drink here! It is forbidden!”

A group of four old Romanians followed the car on foot, and one of them asked us, “What did they say to you? Don’t drink?! They drink all the time! They are just jealous of you.” The man’s name was Chicha, and he was Romanian-Mexican, his three companions being Romanian-American. Chicha complained about his European nation and told us some good places to eat; his wife, a high school teacher, complained about the dislocation of the spine which afflicted her black and female students with superfluous and impertinent nodding of the head.

We went out to a restaurant near the two hostels, then to the Rolling Stone to watch a group of 37 students straggle in with all their bags, while the owner threw mattresses down in every available spot, and we talked incessently about Dave who ran the hostel in Varna, and all his strange English ex-pat mannerisms, and how on the last day he was to be seen at five in the afternoon mopping the kitchen floor in nothing but a towel.

Thursday: Alan and I went to the train station, but the train to Sighisoara was too much. We followed road signs out of town and hitched a ride with one of the many Hungarians born and raised in Romania, in those Hapsburg territories given away after World War I. He drove us all the way to our destination, through open fields and Saxon towns, the flat lines of red rooftops broken only by white Lutheran towers.

Sighisoara is reputed to be beautiful, but actually looks like the apocalypse, or maybe a Victorian set for a rendition of the War of the Worlds novel. First we passed through the Lower Town, the old buildings filthy and collapsing, crowded around with gypsies and beggers. Young mothers cradled sleeping children in one hand and stretched out the other with some muttered request for alms. This scene persisted all along the switchbacks of stairs until we passed through the walls to the Upper Town. As part of Romania’s refurbishment, construction crews had torn up all the streets and left them piled in corners. This made it look as if a bomb had gone off, and made the distant tractors sound like tanks. We climbed the covered stairway, saw a church, drank coffee in Vlad Tepes’ birthplace, now a menacing medieval café.

When ready to leave, we started walking east on the highway along the river, but it went on forever without a good spot for hitchhiking. Finally we got on a city bus — but bad luck! for though we only took it a few stops, we were ticketed! Luckily our prosecutor spoke no English, so I played the confused tourist and kept demanding to buy a ticket, which in that country can only be bought from the ticket stands at major bus stops. Then he wrote down on a piece of paper 10 ronis, which was $3, and an outrageous sum for Romania. I said No and that I no longer wanted a ticket at all, and I tried to get off the bus. The back doors wouldn’t open! Finally I gave him 3 dib-dubs for both of us and brushed past his bulk.

This effort had taken Alan and me to the edge of town, where after a few minutes of hitching we boarded the sedan of an Italian mafioso. His illicit employment was obvious: slicked back hair, two mobile phones, gold chain, platinum watch, and snazzy clothes and car; he had taken trips to New York and Miami, but spoke no English, nor any Romanian. It was unclear what the aged Italian had done to earn such a distant deployment, but he did not appreciate it. He kept honking at random parties of locals at the side of the road and waving like he knew them, then laughing with us at their ape-like behavior. His opinion of the Romanians was obviously very low, but we could not tell whether he was calling them Animals or Allemanes, the latter being the French word for Germans, and that region of Romania being a Saxon colony.

I wanted to know where the Italian was from, so I listed a few cities: Roma, Florence, Venizo, Neapoli—. “Neapoli!?” he cried. “Milano! Milano! Neapoli no productivo. Neapoli, Albania, Yugoslavia, Romania: no productivo!” He went on to tell us, through miming, that Neapolitans just play mandolins all day and live off welfare, and that all real industry is in Northern Italy. He was very good with the pantomimes, which he used to tell us that Romanians with breasts are prima bella, and was otherwise as physically exuberant as any Italian, dancing around the driver’s seat and asking us to sing. Whether by olive oil or wine or proximity to the sea, that race is truly an ageless one.

It started to rain, and the Italian’s home in Rupeea was still 40 miles from Brasov. He told us that hitchhiking was not possible, and I asked him about a train station, or gare, to which he kindly drove us. From there, it was still two hours to Brasov on those slow trains, but quiet enough to sleep.

We tried to find some chicken place called Ando’s, where you can get two breasts, fries, and salad for $3, but ran into problems when a block away from the place I asked for directions. Romanians, like Greeks, will not say so if they don’t know how to get where you want to go. They’ll just chose a direction at random, and with a confident swagger tell you exactly the wrong way to go. A series of this led us away from our prize and then in circles until we settled for pizza. That night I got a weird kink in my neck, and the next morning my arm hurt so I woke up early and could only roll around on my creaking bunk. This made me so angry that I got up and in five minutes was packed to leave the country.

What a thing travel is! Anger, frustration, embarrasment — why endure it? Just leave, and none can call it an escape, for movement is necessary in this business, and sometimes all you need is a reason to slough off that mess. New worlds await!

A bus left at noon for Chişinău, capital of Moldova. It rumbled back up into the western Carpathians, through haunted vales as sinister as the stories, where headlights bob like wisps in the misty and daylit gloom. We emerged into a field that rolled like the ocean — forest here, marsh there, corn and grain, city and factory — all as impermanent and alien on those waves of grass as any ship at sea. Lines of telephone poles and railways faded into the haze of a shower, while turn your head the other way and see blue sky, so vast is the distance of the great Scythian steppe. The steppe! A dreamed of place: endless, savage, and free.

The Paris of the East

On August 3, 2009 from Romania. 1 Comment.

It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day, it’s a new life, for me… And I’m feeling good.
—Muse

Bucharest has a bad reputation, and the train station, roamed by ragged strays, both canine and human, under a dismal grey sky untouched by morning light, did little to allay doubts. I took a bus to the Butterfly Villa Hostel, ate some breakfast, and talked with some hostelers in the courtyard. There was one Birmy, and a far-eyed Canadian girl who had this poor South Korean by a leash since she spoke a little of his language, and then three people with whom I would later travel: an Aussie named Marty and two Brits, Alan and Jezz, from the same town, although they first met in Ukraine.

Marty lived in Sarajevo until he was twelve, all through that great siege of the Bosnian War. He could take apart and refit an AK-47 and disarm a hand grenade, and recalled this story: He and his friends were searching through an old ruined building to find steel tubes for blowguns when a cop found them out and chased them out into the street. It was one of the marked streets, visible from the occupied hills, but Marty and company ran across as the pavement erupted into dust and chips and the ricochets of sniper bullets whizzed past their heads. Such was a normal occurrence in that city at that time.

This group of three, plus the Birmy and a Colombian, had no less strange experiences in Bucharest. On their first night out, they played drunken limbo under the red-and-white striped security gate at a parking lot in the old town. Marty couldn’t make it, and so slammed up the bar, which crashed back down. Thirty seconds later, two security guards ran out of the building with pistols drawn and aimed, and shouted at the tourists to get on the ground. Two civilians, maybe managers, followed the vigilantes, and they asked the prostrate group what they were doing. “A game! A game! Ha,” said the man, and he demanded 5000 Lei for reparations, that much being about $1600, much higher than the standard Romanian bribe of €50 (bribes in Bulgaria are only €20, they say).

They kept arguing, the two standing, the five on their stomachs. The mute security guards examined the gate and found it functional, which defused the situation. Finally Marty, used to danger and an Aussie to boot, stood up and started asking to see badges, and finally said, “We’re leaving,” and started walking. When their confident pace carried them past the corner, they sprinted off down that street — and accidentally around another corner and back into the parking lot! though this setback was quickly remedied. The hardship was not over for Alan, who on his way home had to escape from two-dozen twelve-year-old boy prostitutes, who detached from their fat American like drones from a Protoss carrier to harry the poor Englander for several blocks.

Now the following night Jezz saw another scene while walking back at 5 am: six of the politia in riot helmets, brandishing nightsticks, chasing six civilians. One of the pursued tripped and fell and was beat savagely in front of the Brit, who struggled to walk fast and stay inconspicuous, and two others were captured — at least Jezz saw one get tackled, and heard the seal-like bleating of the other from around the corner. Marty was too drunk to remember anything, since the bartender had served him many of these flaming drinks where he dumped brown sugar into the flare and had the Aussie drink the hot liquor through a fast-melting straw, but he remembered yelling at a poor Kiwi who asked him to stop squirming in his creaking bunk, and demanding a fight since he wanted to punch someone.

Saturday, after hearing these tales, minus the ones which had yet to occur, I went for a wander, as the Brits say, down to the city center. Bucharest combines run-down works of reparation and brand new additions, all signaling a trickling of new wealth and affluence. The public transit is excellent, with clean buses equipped with GPS screens that upcoming stops. The main roads are clean and well organized; the parks happy European places of rowing ponds and ducks. The old town might be well in the future, but now the cobbled streets are torn up, replaced by construction pits and narrow wooden walkways. Impatient restaurants constructed platforms of wood for their outdoor tables and chairs, giving a sense of permanence to what should be a temporary measure.

Bucharest is easy to navigate partially because the Romanian language is a romance one, and therefore provides a break from Cyrillic and Slavic pronunciation out there in the east. It is supposed to be very close to Italian, and the closest living language to Roman Empire Latin, with the same old structure mixed with Slavic vocabulary. Dacia was an imperial province for less than two centuries, and that period ended over thirteen centuries ago. Why then have the Romanians not picked up the tongues of Slavic and Central Asian migrants, as Hungary, Bulgaria, Turkey, and the Western Balkans have so permanently? “The Romans made us learn Latin,” said the Dacians of to-day, “and we couldn’t be bothered to learn anything else.”

Everywhere the capital bears the marks of its communist dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu (Ko-chess-ku), who in the style of Brother Stalin spent lavishly on self-affirming public works while his people starved. There is the Arc de Triumf, slightly smaller than its Parisian counterpart but on a self-conscious street a full six meters longer than the Champs-Élysées; and then there is his House of the People, now the Palace of the Parliament. I crossed the Cismiga Park and the Dâmboviţa River and came before the Palace, the largest building in the world after that other tyrannical building, pentagonal shaped, in Washington D.C.

I took a tour through the echoing halls and galleries, made of wood and marble with red and green carpets and crystal chandeliers. 700 architects designed it, and 20,000 workers started its construction in 1984, using all Romanian materials to highlight the nation’s self-reliance. The silk curtains were embroidered by nuns with industrial gold. Much Romanian marble went to waste, as Ceauşescu ordered two grand staircases rebuilt five times, so as to allow him to maintain the perfect posture of a dictator on the ascent. Similarly, he refused any air conditioning for the building, as he feared both assassination of his person by gas and assassination of his voice by dry and sterile air.

When Ceauşescu died in 1989, only two rooms were finished; yet the Romanians continued work on his grandest project, though leaving empty the great recess designated for his portrait and the recess opposite designated either for a portrait of his wife or a mirror, and today are five percent from completion. In all the palace cost $4 billion to build, although Donald Trump offered $3 billion to buy it, with the intention of making it into the world’s largest casino. Romania said No, but continues to rent out rooms for private events in the world’s most expensive administrative building.

At the end of the tour we came out onto a presidential balcony. Below stretched a six-lane boulevard broken in the center by a line of thirty fountains, with a towering monstrosity of choreographed waterworks in the distance, the fulcrum of a roundabout in a great square ringed by white communist buildings. The tour guide pointed to a flag with a compass, next to the flags of Romania and the European Union, which someone identified as the NATO insignia.

“Some American was here a few weeks ago and thought it was the flag for Seattle baseball,” said the guide. I said they were probably big Mariner’s fans, but some German woman interrupted me: “Americans! They do not know where anything is in the world.” She complained more when the guide told us how Michael Jackson had called out to Budapest while in Bucharest, and how George W. Bush made the opposite mistake in the Hungarian capital. Well fuck you Frau Hitler, because I know you don’t know the difference between St. Louis and St. Paul.

That night I went out to a restaurant with a thick-bearded American named James, who was a Peace Corps volunteer in Bulgaria, and with the same Kiwi mentioned earlier in Marty’s story, an opera student and cocaine addict named Henry. James said his students all play Counter-Strike, and they come to class and say, “Mr. K——, Oh My Fucking God.”

Then the next morning, I asked James why he had so many Frisbees, and he said he was taking them back to Bulgaria, where they had none, to plant as seeds of the sport. He had bought a few in Romania, and his two friends, met while studying Russian in Siberian Irkutsk, had brought a few more with them, so he had half a dozen. The three of them were on their way to an Ultimate Frisbee tournament in Kiev, for the sport is popular in Ukraine and Russia, as well as in Sweden and at American colleges.

Marty, Alan, and Jezz proposed that we all rent a car and drive up over the mountain, on a winding series of switchbacks we had seen on the desktop wallpaper of the hostel computer, and then to Brasov. I agreed, and we rented a Romanian-made Dacia Logan for €40 a day, although we could not get it until that night, postponing our migration until the next morning. This was fine with me, since I wanted to visit the Village Museum, where the Romanians display nearly one hundred of their traditional homes, from thatched-roof cottages to old road-side inns, transported bodily to the capital.

At 8 we received our car and went for a drive, looking for food and the Arc de Triumf. There was some confusion, as Britain and Australia use the wrong side of the road. The others would claim shotgun and go for the driver’s seat. They also called the trunk the boot, which I did not understand. The Brits are aware of all our terms for things, but we know none of theirs.

That night I proved adept at navigation, and so earned the passenger seat and the map when we left the next morning. We went first to Maracineni, just north of Potesti, where the Khazakstani scenes for Borat were filmed, in a village called Glod, which means Mud. Though most people in that rural town spoke English, nobody knew where Glod was, or feigned ignorance before we stupid tourists. We did see the river where Borat liked to sunbathe, and many cows.

From there we went on a winding road to Curtea de Arges, and then north into the Carpathians. The road wound up around crags with castles at the top, and across the roof of a dam to loop around its lake. We joined long cavalcades of other Dacia Logans, Romania’s the most popular car, used for taxis and cop cars, and drove up into the craggy highlands, stopping regularly to take photos, although none of our limited frames could take in the magnitute of those mountains.

At the top, on the other side of a tunnel that crossed those upper reaches, we parked at an inn, under the terrible blades of the highest slate peaks, and ate at a tent that served grilled meat, roasted potatoes, and beer. A rainstorm hit while we sat, lightning followed. If that old method of one-second-to-one-mile still works, it was half a mile away, and close enough to blow out the speaker propped up in the frame of the tent with a spectacular flash. We waited out the storm, and then proceeded down more of those eternal switchbacks to the feet of the hills. Jezz liked the swerving roads, which resembled something in an Aston-Martin commercial, and said, “I want to come back here in a nice car without passengers.”

“So you die alone?” asked Marty.

We passed a populous camp site along a river there in the first miles of Transylvania, and after some debate, decided to join them. We got some beer from a nearby town, pitched Marty’s tent (and I exhibited the great Tautline Hitch, my favorite knot), and collected some wood. Lighting a fire proved easy, as Alan had worked in a pub with a hearth, and Marty was something of a piro. As any Aussie, he was savage yet easy-going, and infinitely fun to be around. He was touring Europe to see four different festivals, most of them for Dance and Trance music.

The proposition of a tent excited Jezz, who asked if I wouldn’t mind yielding my spot under the nylon for one cramped in the car. Now, I knew from experience that sleeping on the hard ground is no easy thing. It is not so much that raw earth is uncomfortable as that a lack of insular cushion puts nothing but thin clothing between warm flesh and a cold planet, a vacuum that sucks greedily at any heat. I’d rather have a foam pad than a blanket on any cold night, and here on the wrong side of the Carpathians would be a cold night for sure. I cruelly told Jezz none of this — to be fair, he wore two shirts, a hoodie, long pants, and socks, while I had only my shorts, a plaid shirt, and bare legs below the knees — but politely yielded the cold, cold ground for the Dacia’s back seat.

Anyway, we didn’t have much wood and went looking over the well-picked ground. A neighboring band of a half-dozen Romanians offered some of their stores and also a plastic bag of grilled and salted fish, which was delicious. So we sat around the fire feeling very fine. Fish consumed, beer half-gone, Radiohead inexhaustible so long as the batteries held up, we held a classical Symposium on Love, lacking only flute girls and Alcibiades. Jezz was idealistic Agathon; Marty, shouting from his tent, Socrates; and I was Aristophanes, obscenely correct. Alan slept in the car, in the passenger’s seat, and later I curled into a fetal position in the back.

Comfortable and drunk as I was, I slept poorly and dreamed wild things, and in the morning I woke first and kicked the others out of their own poor parodies of sleep. We collapsed the tent and threw its dewy bulk in the “boot.” In the cool Transylvanian light of sunrise, we took off down the highway toward Brasov.

Archive for the 'Eastern Europe' Category

A Study of Backtracking

Tales of Exile and Brute Wandering

More News From Nowhere

Marking Time

The Paris of the East

About

Calendar

Categories

Recent Posts

Blogroll

Flickr

July 2010
S	M	T	W	T	F	S
« Jun
				1	2	3
4	5	6	7	8	9	10
11	12	13	14	15	16	17
18	19	20	21	22	23	24
25	26	27	28	29	30	31