Archive for the 'Romania' Category

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.