My trips to Florida are not of general interest. I go to see my college friend, who lives alone in Avon Park, which is an hour and a bit south of Orlando. I had got an airbnb room in Fort Lauderdale because I’m old, and it wouldn’t be safe for me to drive three hours to Avon Park after a flight I wouldn’t have slept on. The airbnb was actually an off-season beach area motel. It had been fitted with keying technology that would obviate the necessity of having anyone on site. Why is “necessity” the only thing that gets “obviated”? Anyway, I went in, slept, and left. I bought food for the drive to Avon Park. Some time after noon, I arrived at the Jacaranda Hotel, another of the Grande Dames of the central Florida vacation circuit of one hundred years ago. It opened in 1926, ten years after the Kenilworth Lodge in Sebring, which was closed after a fire in 2016, and has not reopened because it can’t be brought up to code economically. I always used to stay at the Kenilworth.
Another example of generation-skipping: The Hotel Jacaranda plays Swing music. You’d have to be a centenarian for that to be your music. Maybe there are some centenarians; but most of the guests seem only a little older than me, maybe from the Elvis and Beatles eras. Perhaps they have made peace with their parents’ music. It seems to be an ongoing thing among supercentenarians, to have merged your identity with that of your forbears, and nobody around and Retronaut not having been invented yet, to call you on it. Maybe subcentenarians do it, too.
(I do hope that Jeanne Louise Calment is the real deal. 122 years is not that horrible an outlier when there are nearly a dozen around 117 and even one 119. The recently reported unlikelihood of the 1913 record of 134 degrees Fahrenheit, 56.7° C, at Furnace Creek was a studious bit of computer modeling. I guess you could call it “research”. Remember always to call it please…)
It rained off and on, in a tropical way.
I went to Mike’s house. We went shopping. Sebring has an Aldi’s now. It is good to have an alternative to Walmart. Mike shops as he always has, a true Floridian. Lots of canned goods for those moments of civilized breakdown. He has also got a new generator. Hurricane season goes until November 30.
Thursday, October 10
There is a wing in the Jacaranda hotel called “dorm wing” with some rules I can’t make out through the locked glass door across from the laundry room. I thought based on the community that it would be a bunch of old guys who couldn’t even pony up for Single Room Occupancy hotels, but I have seen three people going into that glass door, and they have all been fit twenty-year-olds. The first one I saw, yesterday, was in a baseball uniform. My thought then was he was the grandson of a geezer, or a hired Gerasim, but that isn’t true. Now I figure it’s a Christian fellowship that houses its acolytes in pairs on the theory they can talk each other out of masturbating unless the scoutaster’s around…hmm…I meant to type “scoutmaster” but “scoutaster” sounds like a fail of interest, the lost Sherpa….By “fit” I mean they aren’t obvious meth addicts. Not fit like gym bunnies.
(that is a nearly unedited note from my vade mecum for the date mentioned.)
Mike told me later, that the dorm belongs to a school sharing the Jacaranda, and it is a culinary school. Being a fit school athlete in a culinary school must be transitory and an exercise in willpower. Bright College Days. I hope they’re still friends in five decades.
We began at a nominally Greek restaurant in Avon Park for old people’s dinner, scheduled for people who go to bed at sundown and wake up at 3 AM to tweet. The Olympic was having its 40th anniversary party. There was a raffle of sorts; they handed out tickets. It seems as though everyone won something. Mike got a coupon for a dessert and I won a steak. The waiter told me they accidentally served the steak to customers, so he gave me a coupon for one. I gave that coupon to Mike.
There are not a lot of places to eat in that conurbation. The most authentic, probably, is Homer’s Smorgasbord. Homer is nearly centenarian himself, and walks around and greets the customers.
Olympic is the other place to go. There is a Cuban diner south of Sebring, but the Indian restaurant moved to Broward County.
Afterwards we spent another couple of hours at Walmart, where Mike finished restocking after a month of empty refrigerator because his car is broken. He says that people don’t deliver here, except Pizza Hut. There was a tower of pizza boxes, to the ceiling, in his living room, but Boo (the cat) knocked it over.
Then back to his house to watch the last part of The Black Cat, followed by Night of the Demon. The director has said in interviews that the studio insisted on showing the demon. I am on the side of the director — the demon should have been left to the imagination. Like all horror movies of the time, it was heavy with the symbolism of anti-Communism. The liberals defy the reality of the Communist threat, and so the demon must be shown as unequivocally real. Socialist Realism demands it.
Friday, October 11
The breakfast at the Jacaranda is not from the culinary school. I ate a pop tart and some instant grits. The pop tart is as bad as I had imagined.
I drove back to Fort Lauderdale and got on a plane to Texas, the next stop on my American voyage. Amarillo is where I visit my friend from the 1970’s, who is in prison there fairly indefinitely. The Southwest flight attendants are still comedians:
“They haven’t taught us how to deflate the vests: if you want to learn how to deflate, talk to Tom Brady.”
I saw a big meteor descend into the Gulf of Mexico, near Houston.
Again, a hotel near the airport in Dallas, to drive out in the morning. The trio checking in before me were large and Fear Of A Black Planet but when they spoke they were like, Oh, Mary! so that brought up the next prejudice in the filmstrip. It doesn’t matter who you are, snap racial judgment enters into it. I was all ready to deal with Bull Connor when I got pulled over at a speed trap in Florida a few years back, forgetting that I wasn’t a hippie any more, but Duck Dynasty! The officer was all “have a nice day, sir”. You cannot seriously argue that that would have been the outcome if I were young and brown, and the only people making that argument are mendacious slitherers who approve of institutional racism.
Saturday, October 12
I drove to Amarillo and had a four-hour visit through glass. Then I went to Motel 6 where my reservation had been lost. I wrote a review on TripAdvisor:
“There was nothing wrong with the property, but Expedia did not successfullytransmit the reservation. Anyway, the staff figured it out, my presence in the office wasn’t even required.”
I tried to place the above sentences on the Expedia website. Expedia wrote back to me just now:
“Your review has not been approved.”
Hahahahaha. Which of their terms and conditions do you suppose triggered this warning? Profanity? Personal Information? Inappropriate photos?
“This is a perfectly decent Motel 6. There’s a nice Mexican restaurant across the street. When I was staying there, some major construction was happening on the street, making access difficult sometimes, but the room was not noisy. The highway department must be done by now.”
The Mexican restaurant is El Charro and it’s decent, too. Pork and nopales, up from pork nipples. A young man came in selling beef jerky table to table.
Sunday, October 13
Another prison visit, and the five-hour drive back to Dallas Love Field for the flight home. For some reason, they wanted to see everything in my carry-on. If it made any sense, it could be gamed. The man who was stacking the trays at the inspection place thought he had inconvenienced me somehow. Where most people would say “excuse me,” he introduced himself and shook my hand. Some psychological trick, I assume. My friend in Clements Unit says he’s afraid of airplanes. He lives in a prison with the highest percent of life without paroles in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice system.
The safety announcement was played straight on this Southwest flight. The last one, the flight attendant said, “if you haven’t been in a car since the 1940’s, your seat belt…” It is interesting the level of experience in flying that the airlines can assume. I wonder how many flights carry anyone who hasn’t been on a plane before? Maybe the flights to Orlando have more: first trip to Disney World.
Today is the day I flew to Barcelona. I had allowed a great deal of time to be lost trying to return the SiXT car, but I found their little driveway on the first pass. I got to the airport before Ryanair was even checking in. The Bucharest airport Otopeni, now named Coanda, had the second best hot chocolate in Europe, in my experience, after Dalmas in Venice, but Dalmas no longer serves it. I got hot chocolate, fresh and a croissant for 60 lei; maybe it isn’t the best in Europe but it is right up there. It’s still better than the chocolate in Stockholm in 2010 that called itself the best in Europe.
Ryanair is getting mellow in its old age. The guy didn’t charge me to print a boarding pass. My flight was to BGY and then on to BCN. All very quick. We touched down in Barcelona at 1546 and by 1712 I was in my Airbnb near Mercat de Sant Antoni. It is a lovely part of town. There are real people everywhere, kids playing on the walking streets, workers doing stuff, people talking who aren’t trying to sell you things. I don’t know how the neighborhood has survived its proximity to Barri Gotic. I will surely stay there the next time I come.
Around 7 P.M., Philipp showed up. He is a friend of Justin’s, who had a job in Los Angeles for a while. We have stayed in touch because he is cooler than we are and everyone should date above his level. We began walking and continued for 10 kilometers, sometimes stopping to eat but mostly just walking and deciding. We walked all the way to Barceloneta and back through the Gothic Quarter. Then it was time to go to sleep.
Saturday, October 5
Philipp’s and my activities on this Saturday (before meeting Dave) were: going to the market, eating, taking a bus to the beach, sitting, looking for a place to eat, eating, taking the bus back. Philipp wrote on the post card to Oliver, at breakfast.
Dave: Getting There from Kiev
I got picked up and taken to the airport. I was flying on Air France, and had a very tight connection in Paris on my way to Barcelona.
When I arrived in Paris, I was quick off the plane (row 5), immediately went through security (an agent helped me jump the line). Then I walked from terminal 2E to terminal 2F, and found a long line of people waiting to enter the Schengen zone. I started panicking that I wouldn’t get to the flight on time, and all the agents seemed unwilling to help. At one point, the number of officials looking at passports went from two to one, but after awhile a second one returned. Finally I got stamped in, walked to my gate, where the flight was well into the boarding process. So I guess a 55-minute connection is possible, though it seemed like it was cutting it close.
I arrived in Barcelona, took the airport bus into town, and Ray and Philipp met me at the bus stop.
Together Again
We deposited the luggage, and then went off in the Sant Antoni district where we were staying to find some tapas. The restaurants operated by the Adriá brothers (of El Bulli fame) were predictably full, and we ended up at a somewhat touristy but still delicious place.
One aspect of “touristy” is that people are back to walking up to us and wanting our photos and general beardedness. The trio that approached us on this night were striking. We look like J.R. “Bob” Dobbs compared to their colors and weaves and inserted jewelry and permanent fashion statements and the guy had an awesome light brown beard. Some people say “ginger” when describing this color, but I think ginger should be reserved for people with red in their hair, which totally doesn’t make sense because ginger isn’t red, it’s light brown, just like the beard. The grammarians at South Park need to get their act together.
Sunday, October 6
It was nice to see Philipp though I saw him only very briefly: it was time for him to return to Berlin. We got up early, found some pastry, walked around the Sant Antoni market, then put him on the bus back to the airport. Ray and I were staying at an airbnb inside a couple’s apartment, they rent out two rooms. It was a great neighborhood, lots of great places to eat but comfortably distant from the most crowded areas.
Continuing the theme of little brothers of Germans, I stopped at the book fair at Mercado Sant Antoni and bought a 50 cent nudie calendar wallet card for Thomas Schaaf. Where do people get into these odd loops, of sending particular things to each other? He sends the same to me. The gender preference match about 75% of the time but the important thing is the generic Barbie/Ken sexless touristicity. I made his card into a post card and felt very rewarded when I dropped it off at the post office and the man at the counter took it back to show his workmates. Strategic Heterosexuality Mention is as traditional for workers as it is for pedophiles. It has far outlasted any utility it could possibly have had, but I’m always happy to have made someone’s work environment just a little more hostile.
We set off with a list of places to see from TimeOut. We ended up walking up the Ramblas to get to the first one. There cannot ever be a reason to do so, and it gets worse every year. There were any number of kiosks this time around, selling pepper seeds with packet photos showing them growing into penises, but later on when I inspected the Internet for them, I found nothing but complaints that they look like liberty bells or other objects. This is disappointing in any penis, especially one intended for consumption.
After fighting our way through the Ramblas, we found La Musclera, a place which serves mussels in many different sauces, and had a snack. Banners hanging pointed us towards the Gaudi house La Pedrera, which had an exhibition by video artist Bill Viola, who had connections to Barcelona. The first work we saw on entering had video special effects which I have no idea how they might have been done in 1979. It was an interesting survey of several of his works.
Then we went to les Punxes, another interesting-looking Art Nouveau house, and decided to take the tour. Big mistake forgetting to check it out on Trip Advisor first.Do not go in here. The house has been gutted. Inside is nothing but the conference rooms out of an Ibis hotel. Gray wall to wall carpets. An embarrassing narration of the legend of St. George on video screens in rooms to which you are carefully admitted sequentially, which presentation was meant to compete against Game Boy Color for the attention of children.
I think when you get well into middle age, there is a tendency to forget just how many generations there are. There’s more to it than just remembering that you are no longer young: the Kids are no longer young, either. Consider the pundits who speak even yet as though Millennials are the Spoiled Brats. No, wrong, some of the older millennials are taxiing their children around to check out colleges. The people who vandalized the Punxes house thought they’d be entertaining the children of tourists, but the children who once related to that level of graphic and narrative sophistication are thirty years old now, and definitely not traveling with their parents, and the ones who are nine and restless will be rolling their eyes unless they are truly precocious Pixelvision artists who throw up installations of cabbage patch fan art on their post-post-post-retro whatever-is-nine-year-old-for-deviantArt sites.
It would be interesting to learn what happened to the inside of the house. Fire? Termites? It must have been irretrievably destroyed in order for anyone to be allowed to build this dumb experience inside. The house is almost not mentioned by the audio guide and the video presentations. Puig’s other works get much more coverage. As well they might.
Eventually, we pushed our way through and went to the roof, where it was more like a museum, and we could actually see traces of the original construction.
That was enough tourism. We went to the highlight of our Barcelona visit, the restaurant Dos Pebrots. Many of the dishes we ordered (a la carte) were awesome surprises. The alcohol-infused fruit to start, not so much. The dried/cured fish plate was fine, especially the smoked mackerel, but the bottarga had a bitter taste. The biggest hit was the sow nipples, little discs of amazingly flavorful fat served on an upside-down ceramic pig. There was some smoked ice cream, which also had a surprising flavor.
Monday, October 7
We found Cafe Cometa, a wonderful place to have breakfast, a few blocks from the apartment.
Then we headed to MACBA, Barcelona’s museum of contemporary art. The main exhibit there was a timeline of art and world events covering the 90 years since the museum was founded. Each decade was in its own room. I looked for a long time at the Civil War era posters, as that is the part of history, and hence art, we are currently approaching.
Afterwards, we had dinner at Hisop, a fancier tasting-menu restaurant, where everything was beautiful and tasty. But the most memorable part was talking to our waiter outside after the meal. He’s from Mali / Niger / Burkina Faso (“which?” “all of them, we’re nomadic”). It was his last night of working there, and his shift was over. He’d already found some other place to work. We were in the area in 2006, and I can imagine him having gone from the area in a large truck to Libya, and then crossing to Italy or Spain. He didn’t say the name of his tribe. I would not have recognized it.
Tuesday, October 8
We had breakfast at Düal Cafe around the corner, and then walked around the Sant Antoni market to get some food for the flight. We checked out, and took the bus to the airport. We were flying back separately to the United States, me to San Francisco, and Ray to Miami.
Dave: Off to San Francisco
My flight had been a mess the previous several days. It was booked as an Iberia reservation, but was operated by their new budget airline LEVEL. Having two companies be involved was an opportunity to avoid responsibility. I wanted to find out if I had a baggage allowance. We never had gotten an email confirmation of the booking, so there was no booking reference. There was a ticket number on the credit card statement (yay for that!). I called Iberia in the UK (right time zone, right language), and they looked up the booking reference. Then I tried to find out about the baggage on the Iberia website using the booking reference, it said that information wasn’t available. Trying on the LEVEL website didn’t find the booking. So I called Iberia in the UK again, and they told me I didn’t have baggage, but I could buy it, so I did. (I also paid to get a window seat, I’d been assigned to an aisle. A fee here, a fee there, pretty soon you’ve got an expensive fare!) I never got any confirmation, so I had to call them a third time to get one, and this time the agent was able to email me. The record he emailed said that there was no meal service.
At the airport, the agent told me that I’d get a meal since I’d bought a baggage reservation. That’s nice. I got on the plane, the meals came around, and I wasn’t on the list. After having had my expectations built up, it was a bit demeaning to be turned down. As I left the plane, I said “delightful flight! stupid airline!”
Getting into the US was amazingly swift. I’d downloaded Mobile Passport, and submitted my information. I was whisked into a very short line, said I had no food with me. When I got to the carousel, my bag arrived in front of me. There was nothing else, I was sent directly to the exit.
Justin picked me up and took me home. After recovering from some jet lag, I was back to work.
Ray: Off to Miami
My flight to Miami was uneventful. My telephone started speaking Romanian to me again, at the airport, but this time I was able to pull out its SIM. Daisy, Daisy…
As mentioned, the flights to and from the Caucasus are at ridiculous hours, the ones not going to Russia, anyway.
At 2:15 we were ready to go downstairs.
At 2:25 we left.
At 2:39, we got to the airport.
By 3:20, we were at the departure gate. I read on my computer that Robert Hunter died. His lyrics were appalling macho crap leavened only by incoherence. The Guardian’s first “Related Story” was of Don Buchla’s death. Distant relation.
At 4 AM, my computer failed to boot. The white line got about a quarter of the way across left to right and then it shut down. Battery? No time to try that. What I get for speaking ill of the Dead.
At4:09, a completely incomprehensible announcement in any language.
At 4:27, in seat 6A.
We flew to Bucharest, a short flight along the southern coast of the Black Sea. It got cloudy as we approached Romania. I thought I saw a piece of Sinope, but nobody honest. Upon arriving in Bucharest, my computer still wouldn’t turn on, and my phone keyboard became Romanian. It improved gradually. The Return key read Return, but the space bar still said “Spațiu”. The real problem with iPhone xenoglossy is autocorrect. I had to turn off spell check for the duration.
Next, we flew on a little jet to Iași. The man in seat 2B with a diplomatic passport told the girl next to him he is from Minnesota. The clouds broke and we saw the fields.
Our friend Radu picked us up in Iași. We met Radu and his brother Andrei in 2001 when they were in high school in California. We’ve stayed in touch with their whole crew, including Tibi (whom we saw in Medellin) and Dennis (whom we saw in Munich). Radu and Andrei both moved back to Iași, a college town in Romania near the Moldova border.
Radu has had a successful career managing shopping centers, married Nicoleta who has a successful chain of patisseries, and they’ve had three kids. They’re staying with their folks while the house they just bought gets renovated to their specifications. We walked around it and the work is cut out for them.
Andrei has become a dentist with his own practice. He lives in a condo in the same complex as his office. He and Oana have a 1-year-old, Ingrid. He also owns the condo next door, which is where we stayed.
Armen, the Armenian guide, sent to Dave a link to a facebook photo of us that had appeared somehow in Yerevan.
We met Radu’s dad’s handyman. He told Radu he shut off the gas; but he did that at the new house and the problem is at the old house. “Always drunk,” said Radu. “I wish my dad would stop using him.” “Yes, we know,” said Dave.The gas pipes run outside, by law, so there is no great danger.
Our visits in Iași seem to revolve around coffee shops. This has been true for 15 years. It is a sign of true civilization. The man at the first coffee shop of the day laughed at something. Can’t remember what aspect of our existence.
Later, we walked to a park and met Stef and Roxana’s baby, Radu. Radu was named after Radu, I am pretty sure. It has to be a social situation when a whole pod of people is that close, deciding which friend to name your baby after.
We went to Stefan’s house where Roxana had made a delicious homemade vegetable curry. They also have a new baby named Vlad. I guess he decided not to go through the baby-naming situation again, or maybe I just don’t know Vlad. Stef explained later, “We wanted a Romanian name that wasn’t a saint.” Isn’t Vlad the impaler a saint? “Not the regular church.”
There was some good news from Avid: the situation where ProTools seemed to be making computers not bootable is apparently due to a Chrome update that interacted badly with a /var directory. Raise the Somebody Else’s Problem Field.
Thursday, September 26
Today we walked to “eMag”, the local version of Fry’s, and bought a terabyte SSD to back up my computer onto before reinstalling the system. The drive is the size of a stack of maybe seven credit cards. I am not entirely inured to Moore’s Law, even after a lifetime of it. And if I do get used to the idea of a terabyte in my wallet, it will soon enough be time to get used to ten terabytes in my tooth, and faster than light entanglement communication to fetch instructions before I have even written the program.
There was an ad for a Black Friday sale at eMag. On September 26, there was. In Romania. In English. Cultural imperialism.
On the way back, we were introduced to Butza’s son David at the park across from a little coffee kiosk. He had a toddler’s rational fear of strangers.
The WiFi in Andrei’s guest apartment is not as fast as at Butza’s workplace, “Fan studio”, so we went there to do all the over-the-web reinstalling. Dave also did work. Eventually, I had macOS 10.12 on my computer, and it was time to embark upon the six months of tweaking required to regain the functionality I had with my previous system. You never quite get back to where you were. It always takes a year, even if you’ve just changed the color of the briefcase you carry your laptop around in. Industrialists are trying to teach you unattachment. “They’re candy bars,” said Frank Zdybel. He was speaking of cars. I think most commercial candy bars have a shelf life longer than most operating system releases are supported. Modern cars would be intermediate.
Back to Andrei’s house for burritos takeout dinner. Babies have cut into their cafe time.
Friday, September 27
I made an appointment with Andrei to look at my own dental situation, and he was helpful in getting me set up with a 3D imaging place. They gave me a DVD which I’ve brought back to the endodontist here. I may even end up going back there for some dental tourism, we’ll see what happens.
We spent some of today wandering in downtown Iasi. There was an art gallery selling art at the customary prices for fine art, about €7000 per square meter. I feel snarky and dismissive saying this, when I say it, but if you do an internet search for anything concerned with pricing original art, telling art majors to multiply the height by the width appears in the top paragraph, or alternatively hours by a wage rate. I don’t remember any of the pictures we saw. I would have remembered penises.
There was a delicious barbecue at Andrei & Radu’s parent’s house. Radu grilled many types of vegetables, some beef, and various sausages. We drank the bottle of wine we’d been given in Georgia (one less thing to take back home) and some local wine. Their dad, Fanel, makes wine, but he didn’t have any on hand at the time. We also drank some of Georgian chicha, and left the rest for them to finish.
Saturday, September 28
Today was Vlad’s baptism, but the set we stay with wasn’t going to the ceremony itself, so we joined the whole society at “Little Texas” for the reception.
“Little Texas” is a destination restaurant, if you live in Iasi. It’s out toward the airport. It was apparently opened by a Seventh-Day Adventist who missed Texas. Romania does have oilfields so maybe visiting Texans…but if there were visiting Texans, they would have informed the staff that they had hung the Texas flag upside down. Anyway, the food is OK, generic international, it’s not like hamburgers are anything particularly American. The founder hired mostly his friends; then when it was sold lately, all the old staff were let go and the new staff is not as good. At this point in the evening (when he told the story) it was two hours and nobody had taken a dinner order.
After dinner, Dave and I sorted out the suitcases for who was going to take what to Kiev and to Craiova, our separate vacations.
Sunday, September 29
Radu and Nicoleta drove us to the airport for our flight back to Bucharest. Goodbyes all round. When we got to Bucharest, Dave got on a flight to Kiev, for a week of work with the Ukrainian team.
Ray continues in Romania
I went to the SixT counter and picked up my car. I am gradually settling in as a SixT customer, and not price shopping exclusively, because they usually have something at a nearly competitive price, and I have had the fewest number of horrible experiences with them, compared to all the other companies.
After they rented me the car, I drove to Brașov for a whirlwind tour of UNESCO World Heritage Fortified German Transylvanian Churches. The drive to Brașov was O.K. Romania is under-freewayed. Fortunately, on a Sunday afternoon, everybody was heading back toward the capital from their weekend in the mountains. I stayed in an ordinary little hotel called Hotel Brașov. They seemed to apologize for their maintenance of the hotel a lot. Like, if they were vacuuming the hallway, they would knock on your door or telephone you to apologize for the noise they were about to make. Of course, this was more disruptive than the noise, but I spent the minimum amount of time in the hotel, having planned two days worth of furious touring, and not nearly enough at that.
Monday, September 30
Google Maps does not have reasonable expectations of Romanian roads. In particular, they do not assume valid default speeds, in the absence of any cell phone data from other cars. This causes Google to choose routes for you that run along cow paths that have never seen cell phone coverage yet, on the assumption that since the Salvadoran lady in Silicon Valley who transcribed the satellite photo was able to see an opening between the trees, it must, in the absence of data to the contrary, carry cars at 80 kph. In particular: nobody in Mountain View has ever made a left turn in Romania. I think the entire map division should travel the entire world for a year, doing nothing but making left turns. J. Edgar Hoover would not allow cars he rode in to make left turns. He should write the routing algorithms for Romanian cities. But he’s dead. In particular, lane changes: in Brașov, Google plotted some lane changes that could not be done. Maybe a Romanian could do them.
Anyway, I got to the churches on time. The first stop was Biserica Fortificată Prejmer, in a quiet suburb of Brașov, or it will be a suburb when the road is wider. Imagine an ordinary old Lutheran church, surrounded by a small lawn surrounded by a wall that conceals everything but the steeple. You can climb up ramps into the wall, and walk around the whole church — not on the top of the wall, but in a hallway with minimal lighting and rooms on each side. The circumference is nearly a kilometer. The rooms facing the outside have arrowslits, for firing on people of differing religions. It’s part of the liturgy.
It’s peaceful being at an unpopular tourist spot. Just a few pedants wandering around.
Next stop, the village of Viscri, whose church dates from the 13th century, in Romanesque style. It is a Saxon village. Viscri is as close as Transylvanians can come, to saying Deutschweißkirch. There was a village museum, similar to any small town museum in the Midwest.
They always feel like they have to entertain you.Here you stand in a 13th century courtyard, it’s enough to look at the moss covered tiles and be amazed — but — farm tools — farming is more recent for Romanians than it is for Americans, I wonder if they feel cheated by unironic museums of the familiar.
There were bees living in the walls, too. You could hear them.
Viscri is set up for tour groups. There are restaurants, and places where people wear costumes, not so much on a Monday afternoon, but you could see the signs. The signs are all in English. Otherwise, you’d need to know Hungarian. This area was owned by Hungary for a long time. It was getting later in the afternoon. These churches are only open a few hours; really hard to see more than two per day. Afterwards, I went to a Slow Food restaurant. I was the only person in it, by that time, as the town attractions had closed and everyone was back in the tour bus on the way to Bucharest. The proprietress said that she had been living in America until her parents decided to move to Las Vegas and she chose at that point to move back to Romania. This is why there is a slow food restaurant in Viscri. Thank Las Vegas.
Slow Food is like buffet food, isn’t it? Only you don’t see the steam tables.
Tuesday, October 1
Today I took a pretty early-fall drive through the foothills in Transylvania. It is charming country, as if in Borat, or the Blair Witch Project. The leaves were just starting to turn yellow and red. I got to the first church, Darjiu, around noon, and was allowed inside. The churches are generally open only a few hours a week, or by appointment. I had email or text conversations before going, in all cases.
In their courtyard were photos of village life, with a big accent on conscripts going off to World War I. Humans caught in the grip of performed masculinity inspire many emotions: pity, pathos, shouts of “Darwin Award!”, laughter (not what they were thinking), holding their steins in their Sunday Best and hoping nobody would notice they were afraid of being gassed.
The church was complicit in their seduction. It had murals on both sides of the nave, depicting, in that traditional graphic novel form, religious bloodshed from the life of King Ladislaus I that spoke particularly to their imagination. I am sure that the conscripts dreamed of the day when they would snatch a girl off the back of a Turkish horse and castrate and kill her boyfriend (mistaken identity figures in here, too) and afterwards ascend to Heaven and act as intercessors to other daydreaming young studs. The mural is damaged, but the colors are good in the remaining parts. This church is affiliated with the Unitarian churches in America. Unitarianism does not present itself as the religion of murderous warlords here. They might be more respected if they did. The average person does not go to church looking for peace.
The Darjiuvian idea of old stuff was a late model typewriter. They also had beehives of a local pattern. Pedal Powered Sewing Machines are a gateway to the past in many small museums, and here as well. I must add that all the people you meet here, tourists or staff, are very nice.
I left in the early afternoon and drove to Craiova. We have friends there. It is a long drive. There is no freeway, and not a whole lot of four lane road. I arrived after dark, having stopped only for water and gas.
The Hotel Royal Craiova is a bargain. The room is as big as a floor of our house, and the shower looks like a transporter on Star Trek. My room also had an in-room spa, which is convenient because I can dry my laundry over it and not worry about dripping on the rug. All this for the usual $40.
My friends joined me for dinner. They all speak English well, although Dan doesn’t like to make mistakes, as he is a proud engineer, and therefore doesn’t say much. I think extroverted buffoons are the best with languages.
Dan’s son Andrei is making good progress in school. They are all young enough to have learned English instead of Russian; the next generation will be the Chinese speakers.
The restaurant at the hotel was out of most everything but that doesn’t matter. Food gets in the way of conversation.
Wednesday, October 2
Craiova is a peaceful and businesslike medium-sized town. Cristi invited me, right out of the blue, to a press conference at which the mayor was going to announce the color of a bridge being restored in Romanescu Park. Ana-Maria and Cristi work for a newspaper; they do this sort of thing all the time.
Romanescu Park is a lovely place. We go there every time we visit. The conference began with mundane city affairs. The base of a statue of a horse needed repairs. The facing tiles were all coming off. The statue has names of all the mayors since 1864 directly underneath the horse’s ass. This has been noticed but not addressed.
I did not of course understand any of the words in the press conference. I think the answer was gray, because that is the color of the rock outcropping.
The bridge was built in 1900, along with the rest of the park. Édouard Redont, who designed the park, is a red Wikipedia entry, in the English version; one is always curious to know who the most famous person without a Wikipedia entry is. (But fr.wikipedia.org knows him!)
After that was a pretty inclusive buffet. I did not know if I should eat, but there was four times the food anyone could manage, so I did. Thee sausages and bean dip alone were glorious enough to undermine the independence of the press. After that, it was no longer necessary to eat.
There was an emergency where Cristi had to go yell at somebody for delivering the wrong size of gravel to the project of restoring his family home, that belonged to his late grandparents. Four comic characters from Shakespeare or Beckett (well, Ionesco) are preparing to pour a new foundation. It was sad wandering through the abandoned rooms that were once alive with cheese and tomatoes, salami and Wallachian pickles. I hope that the restoration is accomplished.
Then, back to Cristi and Ana-Maria’s work place, which is a rented space in a giant hall built with EU money. (Everything you ask about in this town, less than twenty years old, was built with EU money.) It is a big round building, suitable for a revival meeting, and all the upper floors of the colosseum are rented to local startups. Fair enough. Craiova lost its bid to be European Culture City of 2021 to Timisoara, and I think this may be a leftover. There are faded posters advertising the 2021 engagement.
Afterwards, Cristi handed me off to Edy. It was hot. We watched the rowers and the fountain and walked through a graveyard. We talked about art and architecture, mostly. Edy found a paper airplane, which he refolded into the design he favors, which flew much better. We got lost looking for the cafe to meet the rest. Andrei danced as little kids do. It is too early to tell whether he will become suave.
Thursday, October 3
The full extent of the Romanian conspiracy to be good hosts came into view this morning at a cafe on Calea București, where the cashier lied to me that their credit card machine was broken, just so that Dan could pay.
The gas cap on my rental car has instructions on the inside of the door. This should be a clue to the designers of the car that they haven’t done it right.
I drove on an indirect route to Bucharest. I stopped at a monastery that I had been to about ten years ago, and back then failed to purchase the most tasteless snow globe in the world. I told myself I would get it some other time. There are not many three dollar items that I regret not purchasing. I have too much already. Snow globes are not easy to travel with.
But Calvary Snow Globes are no longer sold at Curtea de Argeș. They are so tasteless that when you search for them on Google, you are autocorrected to Cavalry and shown horses charging through a snowstorm.
Just to make things worse, my phone ran out of battery in the Bucharest rush hour, and I missed the exit to the airport. I stayed in an airport motel for a flight the following morning.
Meanwhile, Dave’s Trip to Kiev
Sunday-Friday, September 29-October 4
As with my previous trips to Kiev, I stayed at the Greguar Hotel And Apartments. They have washers in the rooms, and breakfast is not included, so that you are free to try many things elsewhere. However, they have a delightful cafe next door with excellent pastries, where I went on three of the mornings.
I had breakfast two other days a few blocks away at a somewhat upscale place called The Life Of Wonderful People. One day I had avocado toast, the other I had porridge. All of it was delicious, with garnishments and great presentation.
I only had Ukrainian food once, and didn’t have Georgian food at all, since I’d just been in Georgia. I found a Turkish place that had Beyti kebab the way I remember it from Turkey, instead of the way it’s presented in the US. I had dinner with Yuriy, an ex-coworker, and his wife Sasha, twice: once at the nearby Indian restaurant, and once at their house across the river. And one night I had Indonesian food near the hotel.
It was a productive week. The days were all warm except for Friday, the first day of the whole trip I wished I’d brought a winter hat.
