Romania, Together and Separately

Wednesday, September 25

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.
  • At 4:09, 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.