Writer's Bloc

Phew!

2011-02-09T18:01:00.003+02:00

I have a bathroom that farts by itself without anyone in it.

Ah the joy of communist plumbing.

Iarna in Bucuresti Centru - Winter in the Center

2011-01-05T17:26:00.013+02:00

Tuesday in the Parc with Gloves

Usually from a decidedly X or XX thousand mile distance, while much of the US, probably with the frequent exception of Buffalo, New York, deals with its usual, normal, average winter conditions, we long-suffering ex-pats can get away with serious whining and complaining - oooh aaah - about the bitterly cold conditions soooo close to the Ukraine. Have you heard of Russian Winter? Brrrrr.

So, well, ok, maybe occasionally we eggagerflating expats perhaps do make our sojourns into foreign territory seem just a touch more...oh... adventurous .. a bit more...um... different- a smidge more frigid. And winter is a really good time to keep you thinking that we are, naturally, several tens of degrees more way cool than we think you already think we are.

Cuz, hey, what do you know? You don't live here. You don't even come to visit.

But if you really want to get geographical, actually, the Ukraine? Ha! Siberia? Not even close! The truth lies somewhere else. Bucharest locates more South even than that Hungarian Budapest you keep mistaking us for. And way more West than icy Novosibirsk.

We're just heels and toes above sunny Istanbul, and in fact, in a much more temperate climate than, oh, say, Oslo or Copenhagen, or a lot of Wisconsin for that matter. And in this year of "Told ya so" Al-Gore inconvenient cold spells, even with the white out, we may, this year and next actually be warmer than Cleveland or Pocatello or, who knows, Palm Springs or Pizmo Beach.

Which isn't to say that Bucharest can't get a chill on. As you can see from my walk in the parc.

It is often said of this city that there are only two seasons here: Dust and Mud. Ba nu. (that means, "Not so fast, Buddy" in Romaneste.) In fact there are three seasons. Dust. Mud. And Frozen White Mud. Which is what we have now, and what I see right now from my aerie in Bucharest Center (Bucuresti centru) because when it gets like this, my instinct is to stock up on DVD's and park the car till thaw.

But for you, I laced up my Austrian snow boots, put on my politically incorrect but necessary fur hat, and thought you might like to see what a winter walk in the parc does actually look like right now here in an exotic Eastern Post Socialist Republic you always promise yourself you'll visit someday, but won't.

It ain't Vladivostock. But it also ain't exactly Miami Beach either.

Stay cool, y'all. And keep warm.

Tuesday in The Parc with Gloves

(Cismigiu [Chis-mi-jew] Park, Central Bucharest, January, 2011)

Street Walking - Autumn - Bucharest, 2010

2010-10-30T15:40:00.005+03:00

The wind gently undresses Cismiu park till soon you can see the tree bones.

The air has edges. And whispers of coming chills, moving populace to heavy, dark coats and the nose-ear rescue of hand-knit scarves.

Tooth-gapped vendors street-offer hats of fur or curly lamb for a few hundred leu. Welcome now. Necessary soon.

It is Autumn in Bucharest City Centru. By this time next month, it will be a mere, warm memory.

Now it is a pleasant Saturday afternoon walkaround with jacket and camera.

Street Walking - Bucharest, Autumn 2010

17 Weddings & A Pay Toilet

2010-08-22T09:27:00.050+03:00

Cismigiu Park is just around the corner from my apartment in Central Bucharest. It is a peaceful, sunny summer day for a walk in the park. Summer has crested and this is the first day you can feel the slightest beginnings of the slide into autumn.

Today there are nineteen Wedding parties which have come to the park to shoot a memory album. Seventeen are shown here.

Oh, and by the way, in the upper corner of the park, by the black swans and white peacocks and the legendary Enescu Spring, there's a brand new toilet. If you want to see inside it, you will have to pay for the privilege.

Celebrating both, as my grandma used to say:

"Mazeltov"

Urban In Nature

2010-05-21T14:15:00.003+03:00

One of the most beautiful urban parks in Europe is in my Bucharest back yard.

Now that it isn't snowbound, I walk Cismigiu (Chis - ma - jew) Park in the mornings to exercise my soul.

Urban In Nature

The passing of a friend

2010-01-02T11:02:00.013+02:00

Those of you who connect with me on facebook may already know that in the first hour of 2010 Central European Time, and the last few hours of 2009 US, I lost my beloved pet, Hope, the Amazing Schnauzer. She went peacefully in my arms, among friends after a short, tough battle with pancreatic cancer and diabetes.

Now I know that many of you will say, "oh, just a dog, loved and all that, but what's the big deal. Get another one and get on with your life." Not inappropriate nor inaccurate advice. But.

I wanted to take a few moments to acknowledge all of you who have lost dear ones this year, animals, humans, and take another to honor the glorious spirit I was able to share for ten years and as many addresses with this magnificent canine whom I named Hope during a period when, for me, there seemed to be little enough of it, and I could use an extra sum.

She was a rescue. From the Atlanta humane society. She had been found running wild with a Vietnamese potbellied pig, a story I may already have told you. But it so impressed me, it was usually the first thing I told curious inquirers. Perhaps whether they wanted to know it or not. To the day she died she never stepped over a wire on the floor or ground because I knew that she had learned that ground wires were dangerous. I have always suspected that it was the pig who taught her about live wires, and who probably saved her life many times over. They're awfully smart those VPB pigs. Not that Hope wasn't, but she was a quick learner.

I never understood who could have abandoned her. She was a perfect purebred, and an extraordinary example of her breed. Outstanding conformation, even temperament. I always suspected it was a tall African American male because that's who she always ran toward whenever she saw one. I would have liked to meet him, not to ask why, or criticise or chastise, but to say thank you for giving me such a bright and gracious companion through the endless cycle of "what's next?"'s and "Where to now?"'s.

Hope lived with me in Atlanta, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Oregon, twice in Virginia and twice in Romania. She crossed the Atlantic ocean with me three times by plane, and the US with me twice and a half by Grand Cherokee ltd., never complaining. Usually on the land treks, she'd lift her head above the window line, peeking at a tree or a mountain, she'd decide that she'd already seen one of those, and return to sleeping most of the way. She discovered snow for the first time in the Rockies going west to Oregon, and she must have liked it because she kept it blizzarding for nearly a week as we prayed our way from one slippery Holiday Inn Express that would take wet pets to the next trying to find our way to Oregon. In Romania, because there was no greenspace near where we lived in Central Bucharest, I had to teach her to take care of her business on the sidewalk or on the street. It was common practice. Then I took her back home to the US and had to teach her not to. Then, to both our surprise, I brought her back to Romania where, well, you know. I know it confused her at first. I don't know if she ever forgave me.

She was a quiet girl, not a snuggly one, but still, she never quite left my feet. She curled most often under the desk when I was where I lived most, which was at the keyboard of this clackety, cantankerous machine. And if I'd move away for more than a few minutes, I always had to look down to make sure I didn't stumble into her as she determined where I was going to light next.

This is the way I will remember her best. My god did she love the ball. The sound of it's twunk on pavement or asphalt would bring her to heal the way obedience class never could. My son, when he was with us for a time after recovering from, ironically, the same two illnesses, would always walk her with her favorite plaything. He called it "ball control" and he was exactly accurate. I was curious once, in a rare idle moment during the first trip to Bucharest, just how long she would chase the ball non-stop. We were staying in the owners' penthouse across from the ad agency where I was Exec CD and the bedroom had a long hallway through to and through the living room. I was on the bed reading when she brought me the ball and I decided to experiment. At the end of an hour and 7 minutes I gave up and said the words she hated most. "Ball gone." I never actually found out her retrieval limit.

And she trained me well with that ball. It was really the only time she would multi-bark in the house. She had a penchant for nosing the ball under somewhere that was irretrievable for her short nose and furry paws. So she would bark for it. I know that she thought that if she barked long enough, the ball would magically appear from it's hiding place. I tried to train her out of it, but, instead, after endless, piercing yapping to make the rubber orb appear, the magic would occur. I'd get up, filled with the noise, and give in to the inevitable retrieval. So, she was right. If she barked long enough, the ball did actually appear.

I won't bore you any more with the thousands of seemingly meaningless anecdotes of pet-human interaction, meaningless except to me and perhaps the hundreds of you who had the privilege of knowing this special fur person. I'm sure you have stories of your own. (If you'd like to take the time to write them to me, any memories, I would be most grateful.)

And, yes, yes, she is over the pain and suffering of the last few weeks and month of agony that the mercifully swift angel wrought on her. and, no, she isn't suffering any longer. But that for me doesn't lessen the loss. She was a magnificent soul who graciously shared her spirit with me, kept me going when I didn't think I had anywhere left to go to. Who added to the celebration when times were stratospheric in the cycle. I still hear her in the creak of the nearby elevator shaft, and the quunch and crackle of every apartment noise, rise automatically to grab the leash and my winter coat, only to rebreathe and wish her well.

Today we will take her broken body to its resting place, and next week I will collect her ashes to take back home with me when I return to America. I will continue to mourn and celebrate her existence and the enormous satisfaction and sanctuary she brought to me. I will keep her close till then, and scatter her ashes in her home country. I know she knows I know she was an American dog.

Good bye, Sweet Girl. I will carry your heart and spirit with me. And miss you to the soles of my shoes and the edges of my winter glove tips every day for a long while. And wait for Spring. And celebrate your spirit, and the peace with which you left us. Bon chance, dear boon companion. Adieu. Addio. La revedere. Dear Hope, ball gone.

_ _ _ _ _

Thanks, for reading this far, if you did. And my life, it will go on. And be magnificent in its own amazing way. And I will be much better in it, dear reader for your company. Thank you for being.

Shelly.

Sometimes on the road, home is the best souvenir

2009-10-09T10:39:00.020+03:00

Just as I am priviledged to be traveled in the world, I am also profoundly privileged to also be traveled in my own beautiful and immensely magical  country. Though I am watching my country heal from a far distance, I know that I am watching an extraordinary concept reinvent itself in its own best image. Come join me on my personal life's long journey from see to shining see.

America My Beautiful

How to Lose 2 Friends In 3 Nights & 4 Days.

2009-05-31T11:29:00.012+03:00

Bucharest

Go to Milan with 6 friends.

Come home with 4.

Or 3.

Depending.

Take nice photos.

Don't go on group trips with friends you may want to keep.

Never go on group trips with people you should never have had in your living room in the first place.

You meet a lot of interesting people as an ex-pat. And some who aren't.

Buon viaggio.

Milano May, 2009

Spaga Is Not An L.A. Eatery

2009-04-25T09:27:00.006+03:00

Bucharest

I’ve been in Romania for an aggregate two and a half, nearly three years now, and besides the impossible-for-an-American-tongue language, there is another thing I never expect to master. Spaga.

Spaga (Spa – gah) is the subtle art of, er, ah, making an offering to the bureaucracy gods here to get papers processed if you need permits or permissions, and to get them, shall we say, NOT processed if you’re about to be cited for exceeding obscure or even occasionally non-existent regulations in a moving vehicle.

Now in my own olden days, I had been known to double tape a $10 or $20 to the back of my drivers’ license when I lived for a time in Chicago. This ploy came complete with rehearsed shocked look, and the plausible utterance of “Oh, Officer, that’s my emergency gas money.” should the encounter encounter an honest Boy-In-Blue. Fortunately for me, the speed limit gods smiled on me the entire time I aboded in the Windy City, and eventually I moved to a less breezy geography, and never found out whether it would work in an emergency.

But here I’m so American, it just never occurs to me.

So let me share with you a wonderful double example of just how things really work in the land the Romans left behind.

My apartment comes with a state assigned parking place. Cool, huh? No awkward, oddly-angled, illegal sidewalk parking for this kidlet. Oh, no. I have my own, thank you. It’s been in the family of the owners for over twenty years. And suddenly, it was time to renew. But, alas, the owner no longer had an actual auto registered at this address. What to do?

Well I, or rather my company, does actually have an auto registered here. And unless we could get the carpark place listed with the proper authorities (of which there are about a gazillion), abracadabra, whoosh, disappearing parking place. Fortunately, my LandLady, who is also a good friend, knows the Romanian ropes. And her mother, who had been the registered owner of the apartment before passing it along to her daughter, was concerned that the chain of ownership be kept intact.

“We must go with your papers to birolul (the bureau) to get the space permit renewed. Can you meet me on Friday?” Yes, of course. So off we walked to the nearby appropriate institution.

It was a short, straight walk, so I was a bit surprised when she veered left into the adjoining piata (pee-ah-t-za) (open market), took a sharp right into a magazine (store) and bought a relatively expensive box of chocolates.

Well, I didn’t exactly just fall off the cabbage truck, so I knew we wouldn’t be enjoying any of the tempting, tasty truffles ourselves. I was about to see the Spaga system for myself. Little did I know I would get to view a double.

My LL set the box on the high counter, proceeded to ignore it, and asked specifically for a certain clerk. Ok, I can see how this is going to go. Hmm. So far pretty smoothly. I pulled out my car papers, my residence permit, my company registration, my rental contract, my insurance, the constitutional acts obligation documentation, and smiled dumbly, understanding about half of what was going on. But it didn’t look good. The clerk checked registration and I wasn’t there. Oh oh. And my residence permit was, it seemed, temporary. Yes, a mere five years. So, sorry. No dice. It was looking a lot like street parking was going to have to be my fate. Maybe it should have been a better box of bomboane (bomb–bwah-nay) (candy).

The LL didn’t budge or give an inch. She seemed merely to continue smiling and inquiring. Finally the clerk called her supervisor, and the conversation speeded up beyond my comprehension. The supervisor also agreed that we had no viably registered vehicle. Tut-tut. Too bad. I tried to help out by starting to tell the LL, in English, some seemingly significant factoid I thought would help. “Shhhh,” she replied. “This is bureaucracy. They’ll work it out.” she smiled at me conspiratorily.

Lots more high speed confabs. A few trips back and forth to the books full of docs. A short wait and voilla! The LL was passed a handwritten piece of paper with an official number and a sum that amounted to about seven and a half bucks, to be paid to the downstairs cashier, and we had a stamped, approved, official permis de parcare. (Do I have to translate that?) Yee haw!

“What just happened?” I asked the LL when we were again on the street walking back to the apartment.

“The clerk told the supervisor that my mother was her doctor, and she’d really like to help us out.”

10 minutes later, mission was accomplished.

I realized that the LL had somehow “forgotten” to take the box of chocolates off the high counter when we left. Hmmm. But no surprise.

Spaga. Plus Who You Know. My Eastern European education in old school methods enlarges.

And only people who don’t live here say that the party system is dead.

Thoughts on the 18th of January, 2009 From Outside the Country.

2009-01-18T13:37:00.017+02:00

Bucharest
2 days before inauguaration of Barak Obama, the first really elected President of the United States in nearly a decade. (Thank God for term limits and American Can-do, not to mention "Can-don't.")

With fond apologies to Bob Hope*, our most American of English men, we say a heartfelt, “Buh-bye, George.

Thanks for the Memory

Thanks for the memory

Of Cheney and Enron, our house and savings gone
A voting fraud we couldn’t laud, a war that won’t get won.

We owe you so much!

Thanks for the memory

Religious zealots on the rise, the end of political compromise.

And church and state un-separate, with congress in collaborate
Without, of course, any real debate. And friends who now despise.
We owe you so much!

Many's the time your friends feasted
You let us all be Middle-Easted

You failed to see the harm you'd done.
Tell Dad don’t push the other son.
You cost us so much!

And thanks for the memory

Of bubbles burst, you did your worst.

America's no longer first.
You made Nixon seem less cursed.
You damaged so much.

Thanks for the memory

Making us a laughingstock, and causing cash gridlock.

And “bailouts" that put us in hock.
China owns us barrel, stock and lock.

How selfish it was.

And thanks for the memory

See George we took our country back
You caused us to elect Barak.
The system now is back on track.
We thank you… not much.

*For those 6 or seven of you out there not old enough to remember, "Thanks for the Memories" was the theme song of one of the finest Americans ever to have been born in Britain with a girl's name. (Leslie, forgedaboudid. Remember, John Wayne's real first name was Marian.)

My Best Christmas Present Ever

2008-12-29T18:33:00.003+02:00

My Best Christmas Present 12/25/08

Luciana, Augustina & Horia, my dear Romanian friends, came to B-dul Timisoara to serenade me with unexpected carols in both English and Romanian. Enjoy them as my shared gift to you.

Sarbatori Fericite!
Happy Holidays

love,
Shelly

It's Not The Same Old Romania

2008-10-26T08:38:00.025+02:00

Bucharest

Bucharest is a lady and a whore. An unpaved slum and expensive polished hi-rise malls. Peasant fresh-markets, and one of the last remaining rising stock markets. She's drenched in crumbling Deco, dressed in the rubbed raw damaged velvet of a beautiful bygone era, trying on Armani.

She's cobblestones and dust and a thousand new cars a month with streets and alees built for one-horse shays.

She's thirty five and learning fast. And 65 and still trying to make the indoctrinated past work in new clothes that don't quite fit. She's new money and no way to know what to do with it.

She's a sudden teen-age civilization ranting to be treated like a grown-up with the acne pocks and attitude visible everywhere except in the mirror. And an attractive, wrinkled crone applying expensive new makeup.

Bucharest is dust and mud and such unaccountably beautiful parks. City thoroughfares that swell with proud urbanity bordering unseen crumbles and blocks of blocs. Teeming with un-owned dogs the citizens still feel guilty about, love, and feed their leftovers.

Bucarest is a city that is losing its long held American Dream, seeing what a hash America has recently made of itself. But she does love her Kelloggs and CocaCola, and god knows designer labels, the shinier the better. If you could make a foot-wide Rolex, someone here would wear it.

Here Ugly's only ugly if it isn't expensive.

She's been half a century without. And now she's drunk on Multi-national money and too much to choose from. There are no Communist souvenirs, just a dead statue of Lenin still toppled in Mogoasaia Castle Park. She's busy cleaning out her closet, trading her stained red uniforms for new designer jeans.

She's one of the last few remaining markets standing, so she'll stay a little longer at the dance than some of her smaller brethren or her former over-sized over-seers.

And "Hello. And how is your mother?" Sounds like an argument to an untrained ear, so much Slav in the Romance lingo. But at least it's a friendly argument.

She's technologically chic with next year's cell phones, and still wires her walls without sheathing or insulation. Under Construction and Deconstruction at the same time.

She's trying her best and showing her worst. Trying to figure out what to keep and what to tear down. Aching with growing pains and aching to be somebody again. She's 16th Century and 22nd in the same glance.

Bucharest is suspiciously optimistic. And optimistically suspicious. Growing. Changing fast and sticking fast. Clinging to the past. Running headlong into the Day-After-Tomorrow.

She's throbbing and and exciting and pulsing to discover who she's going to be next.

She'll return your lost wallet, and steal your heart.

And She's goddamn interesting as hell. See for yourself:

Bucharest Now 2007-08

View From A Distance

2008-10-15T06:15:00.017+03:00

Bucharest

Am I the only one who has wondered how we suddenly had the entire US congress racing up and down the marble hallways desperately trying to find an insta-answer to the fact that the whole US economy - omigod- TODAY! - RIGHT NOW!!! - was gonna come to an awful end, tumbling like the Jherico walls?

Seems pretty damned convenient, if you ask me. Convenient? To whom?

Or perhaps it has already occured to you that this unaffordable Seven Hundred BILLION Dollar "rescue" happened with barely a month or two left to take any more profit at the taxpayer's trough. That this was just the last clear chance for the Cheney-Bushes raiding party, one more time, to crack open the American piggy bank again before exit. To give more government money to their already rich friends!

If you'll recall, George's original bailout plan called for no repayment, no reprisals, no constraints, in fact, NO governing of any kind for this handout to the poor (sic(k)) so-called financial genius CEO bastards who had driven their own companies, and the housing market, into the ground chasing the Gordon Ghekko Credo.

None.

Just give 'em the money.

So Mr., Ms, and Mom 'n' Pop America wouldn't have to, in their wretched little non-country club lives, suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune for merely mortgaging themselves into the American Dream.

And nobody in this over-priviledged money club seemed to see it coming. Nobody jailed. Nobody blamed. No parking priveledges at the spa and driving range cancelled.

Gosh, don't you want a job like that?

Didn't it strike you as just a little bit out-of-the-blue odd?

"Wooooolf! Wooooolf!" From the same guy who in 1999 started another pre-election recession by merely proclaiming then that there was one. There wasn't. But after a landslide of press panic - voilla - gee, guess what...a recession.

Makes ya kinda wanna go hmmmmm.

Thank you, Nancy Pelossi, for at minimum collapsing the golden parachutes, and making the financial Stupidity Kings at least promise to pay it back.

Maybe Gordon was right.

If you know the right people in the right places, move in the right circles and you make over 1.2 million annual with options, perks AND bennies:

GREED IS GOOD.

Could someone there please get this over with soon and bring back America so I can come home.

People Watching in Lipscani

2008-09-21T23:40:00.007+03:00

It's Bucharest days (Zilele Bucurestiului) so I ventured out with the full intent of filling up on faces. I thought you might like to see some of the beautiful sights I get to see every day.

-Shelly.

Faces of Bucharest 2008

Att: American Express Card holders. Congratulations. Your votes helpped move this fabulous charity into the top five finalists of the members' project, which guarantees them at least $100,000. Now they'd like your vote to boost them into the arena that will let them really get to work. To find out more and be linked to your ballot, follow this link to learn more about the project, then follow their link to cast your vote in the members' project finals and put them over the top.
http://internationalmedicalcorps.smnr.us/

Thanks, Shelly.

Car Talk - Another Story About Stamps

2008-09-09T19:20:00.023+03:00

Bucharest

Recently a new ex-pat posted a question on the Meetup Expat Web Board about buying a used car in Romania. Someone else gave her websites and advice about how to buy, casually mentioning that she should take a native speaker with her to help with the process, to which I added the following: (I just thought you'd like to have one more picture about the everyday life I am now trying to lead, living in Bucharest):

_____________________________

About registering a car in Romania:

I recently (two weeks ago) bought a used car from a friend, and by the way, everybody is right about that. Next time I won't. Fortunately, she did a lot of the running around with me. We started at 9am and at 5pm still had not finished.

First we went to the home sector of the car owner to the official place to get the car unregistered to her and start the process with me, and buy me some manditory insurance.

Then we had to go next to the official place in a different sector to where the address of the company is listed to get some more papers to start the re-registration process. (Yup. Did I mention that it was in a different sector? Across town? In Bucharest traffic?) So we did that. Well, first, of course we went to the obvious location, but alas, that was the place where a "physical person" not a company registers a car. We were across from my favorite cafe, so we recessed for some caffeine fortification for what was yet to come. We drove to another extremely obscure location where a company located nearby officially could register an old automobile.

Then we drove off to the Post Office to pay a tax. (Lines, of course, silly. Lots and lots of lines.) Don't ask me what tax. I just nodded and ponied up. Cash. Then we went to another place to pay another tax, and, of course, get lots of stamps. Romanians seem to love making that ca-cha-chunk sound loudly with their stampers. It must feel really good in the old party memory sense. Makes them feel more important.

Then we went to a place for another tax payment/stamp which had somehow turned from a government place into a bank making it really difficult to find. It was, of course, in another sector. There they informed us that we had to go back to the post office to pay a different tax, which they could have told us about in the first place. You know, when we were actually AT the post office.

So we did. Go back to the post office. Then we went back to the place in the neighborhood of my company's official address to get more stamps. We stood in line more than half an hour only to get to the front and be told we were in the wrong line and had to start over in a slightly longer line. (And I had a Romanian speaker with me!)

Then we went to what people here keep referring to as "the police station" which seems to be the equivalent of the DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles) to get more information on what else was needed to complete the registration. And then it was five o'clock on a Friday.

On Monday the car wouldn't start but that's another story about towing with a flex cable dragging the car to the dealership with the key turned on so the brakes and steering wheel would work (and drain the battery) and several thousand more RON.

Now that the car actually is drivable, I still have to have a Romanian speaker call a phone number to get an appointment so that someone can look at the papers and compare the number of the car with the number on the papers by appointment only. Sometimes you have to leave the car there for up to three days, I'm told. No they don't inspect for an engine. Or brakes. Or tires with actual tread. Just the numbers please. For the stamp.

THEN back to the "police station" on Strada (B-dul?) Pipera above Barbu Vacarescu (several sectors away, I'm sure, from where ever I happen to be at the time) to do god knows what to get god knows which stamp. Then the car will officially be mine.

Are you sure you want to do this to yourself. James is right. Definitely bring a native speaker with you, preferably one with a long history of putting up with the Romanian need to have three thousand pounds of paper with the proper stamps. Bring a lunch and some red bull or high test coffee and/or Valium. (There was no drug testing and she drove. But, alas I figured this part out too late.)

In two years or so, I'll sell the Renault to you for half of what I paid, and go home and buy something new and let the dealership sort out all the paperwork. I'll deserve it by then. Hell, I deserve it now, but I thought it was just better to buy something that I wouldn't mind having to repair when someone turning left from the extreme right lane at the last minute across my front quarter panel, decides that those pesky laws of physics about two objects occupying the same space at the same time only apply to foreigners. Or expats.

Naroc.

Oh, yeah. If you get the car and want to drive it out of Bucharest, you should know that you have to stop at a gas station and get, no, not a stamp, a permit that let's you drive outside of bucharest. You can buy it for a day or a week or a month or till your next birthday probably. Your choice. And I'm pretty sure that when you pay them, they will be delighted to ca-cha-chunk a stamp importantly onto your recipt.

What a country!

-Shelly.

Life is Good.

2008-08-30T09:24:00.008+03:00

Bucharest

There are blueberries now in the piata markets, a sure sign that September is the day after tomorrow. Tiny le seur pea sized purple-blacks, they are sold by the spatula. Scooped from the newspaper cloth’d concrete counter piles, a new addition to the proaspat (fresh) produce panoply into small, fragile synthetic bags the thinness of a plastic whisper.

“La fel,” the same, I say to the peasant merchant, seeing the size of the previous customer’s order and thinking I've found a linguistic shortcut. Slipping into the easy catch phrase that let’s me avoid my stuttering insecure language skills, and grateful for the simplification, I hand her half the Kilo price and she looks askance, shakes her head in a clearly negative direction and holds out a demanding palm.

Nope. Didn’t get by with the easy. “Jumatate” I sigh, slipping out of my good Romanian accent and into American. “Imi pare rau” I’m sorry, I say with exaggerated flattened A's, and she sighs, and gives me leeway for being a simply slightly stupid ex-pat and halves my order. I stash the fragile treasure in my bag and head next for the stands full of gladioli and freesia for the weekend household decor. Company is coming tonight.

This morning I reach into the back of the pantry where I keep the red-white-blue secret stash. Cheerios and Kellog’s Cornflakes, and sigh with the small but perfect satisfaction of my polka dot breakfast.

The leaves are falling, though Bucharest is still flirting with 38 and 40 degrees C. Work is going very well. My circle of local and international friends grows and sits around my welcome table drinking wine and eating cheeses and chocolates, experimenting, in IKEA reality, with the shocking rumor of a banana-caviar taste combo sweeping some adventurous market and unilaterally deliver our unanimous ugh's with lemon expressions.

End of the summer, September-serious is the day after tomorrow.

In Bucharest, for an Ami ex-pat, today, life is good.

_________

I watch the US political convention frenzy via CNN and Euronews and BBC and one thing becomes increasingly clear.

If you wish to prepare for war: John McCain.

If you wish to prepare for peace: Barak Obama.

__________

Romania In Pieces

2008-05-30T05:48:00.026+03:00

Bucharest

UH-HUH

No one in Romania ever says "Yes." just once.

They say "Da. Da." Sometimes they say "Da. Da. Da.

Very often they say "Da-da. Da-da-da."

Often it really means "No."

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

STAMPEDE

I am now official.

It isn't just that I have a company. Everyone in Romania, it seems, has a company.

It is that now I have a STAMP!

Now a stamp in Romania is the zenith and apex, acme, apogee, cap, capstone, climax, crest, crown, culmination, cusp, grand finale, head, max, meridian, peak, perihelion, pinnacle, point, quintessence, sublimity, summit, tip, top, tops, turning point, vertex.

'Cuz when you have a stamp here, you have moved up from merely being a physical person to being OFFICIAL! You get a stamp when the notary has taken between two to three hours to sign, and of course stamp, a pile of very official papers that move you into this lofty society wherein you become a "firma." Well, you don't exactly GET a stamp then. You have to walk to the nearest Stamp Magazine (store) which are everywhere, (and now you know why) to BUY a stamp.

Then you can walk into a bank with your head held high. You can buy things and register for things and invoice for things, full well knowing that at the culmination of the transaction, you will not merely affix pen to paper, but you will as well have the full body satisfaction of not only hearing the krinng-kachunk of stampile crashing down marking paper, YOU WILL HAVE CAUSED IT. (And they say the influence of the party is dead here.)

But that's ok. Now I have my own stamp! And that's official.

By the way, according to my accountant, there is absolutely no written law that contracts, invoices, mergers, receipts or anything official actually requires a stamp. But, God, please don't tell that to the Romanians!

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

BEARING FRUIT

Hardly anyone who owns a car here, which would be every single person tall enough to reach the pedals and cut in front of me, drinks alcohol . I once had fantasies of having a top floor apartment and entertaining hordes of charming, impressive, expressive people on my sweeping terrace where we would enjoy scintillating conversations while sipping the best local vintages from elegant crystal flutes and goblets. Last time I was here, it nearly came true. It was paper cups, the terrace was pretty cool, but hardly sweeping, and no one brought the wine. Rude? Nope. Cautious.

The local laws against driving while under even the slightest influence are harsh and punitive and rarely succumb to the for-nearly-everything-else, palm-out, tradition of I-really-didn't-mean-it-officer-here's-a-few-million-lei ($)-for-your-trouble-SIR!?-Spaga (bribes). You simply lose your license. Blow a high number lose your driving privilege forever. Harsh. but effective.

So instead, people arrive at your door, not with a jeroboam of bubbly, vintage anything. They come bearing gift tetrapaks of Suc (juice). When I was absent for the three years between Romanian visits, this is one of the things I missed most. Fruit juices.

Here's what kind of juices I can get, neatly, sanitarily packaged from my local hypermarket on any given thirsty day: Orange, of course. Regular, but with or without pulp, Spanish, Sicillian, Local, Blood or mixed with tangerine, pineapple, grape or multiples.

And, of course, tangerine. And grapefruit, red or regular. Apple and grape would make the list as no big deal. Now it gets interesting: Pear. Peach. Pineapple (ok, it's imported, but it starts with a P and you can get it here.) Pomegranate. Plum. Persimmon

.And my personal favorite, Visine. (No, not the red eye remedy, Cherry.)

Kiwi. Melon. (Various and seasonal, naturally.)

Banana. Yes, you can get banana juice in Romania.

The berries. Black, blue, razz and unpronounceably local.

Only so-so on the vegetable front. Tomato, natch. Occasional carrot. I've yet to see onion or avocado. But here, it wouldn't surprise me.

There is absolutely no sociological ramifications attached to this observation. It's just early morning and I'm thirsty.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * ** * * *

DUST AND MUD

The fragile lilacs are gone now. Replaced with the robust roses that the State fills every median with. And every garden, public or private mimics. And jasmin and honeysuckle.

Bucharest in Spring is lush and fragrant and dusty.

In Summer, Bucharest is hot. And dusty.

In Autumn, Bucharest is colorful. And dusty.

And in Winter, Bucharest is cold. And muddy. Which is what you get when you mix snow...and dust.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

La revedere.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

To Be Continued...

Yash

2008-05-12T06:51:00.015+03:00
So now I'm in Iasi. No, not Eye-aah-see, Yash.

Yash (Iasi-with an S with a tail that makes it pronounced like a shhhhh.)

Romanian doesn't have the W or the Y in its scrabble set. Really.

It has dipthongs instead. For those who left English 101 somewhere back in the 19th century, these thongy things are combos of vowels. Mostly dip-thongs, or more accurately, like you care, di- or two -pthongs. Got it? There are also tripthongs and quadrathongs which if you can count to four you can figure out for yourselves how many old MacDonalds there are in the word. EIEIO. Oa, for example sounds like Wa. Ioa sounds like eeyowah.

And if you want a cup of coffee it ends with an ea that you'd think would sound like eee-yah, but no. ea is a bite-down, spit out sound even western europeans don't do right. Sort of Cah-f'ya (quickly squishing the fya). Took me a while, and they still served up their special, delicious caffeine solutions even with my Western pronounciation, but I'm getting better at it, and hey, it took me almost three years to learn how to correctly pronounce the word for bread. Don't ask.

And that i at the end of iasi (yash) like almost any Romanian word with an i at the end of it, well, don't really pronouce it. You just kind of keep your mouth hanging open as though you might be going to pronounce it, were maybe going to consider pronouncing it, could pronounce it if you wanted to, but, well, not right now. Bucharest? Nah. Bucuresti. Pronounced Bue-cuh-resht (half whisper out breathe mouth open) eh.

Except, of course if there are two i's, which often means that there are more than one of whatever the thing is that, when you spell it, it ends with an i, but adding another makes it plural. Clear? So with two ii's, pronounce one of them. I usually chose the first one, but you don't have to. Still with me so far? And don't even get me started on words with three i's.

But I digress. (Like that's somethingh new, right?) Back to Yash. Ok, Ok, for the purists: Iasi.

I'm going to skip the history lesson. Well, as much as possible. Iasi, like a lot of Romania seemed to be on the road to everywhere. So all the 13th, 14th and 15th+++ centurians, passing through looked around, said, "Hmmm, nice place to raise us some sheeps (sic) I think I'll take it over." and came, saw and concurred. Not just in Iasi, all over Romania. Turks, Saxons, Austro-Hungarians, Aryans, Capitalists, later and most recently the Russians, Multi-nationals, and of course, originally, the Romans from whence Roman-ia, the country with an italianate language that they claim is easy to understand if you speak Italian (NOT!) A language that could use 3 i's just to call the bunch of kids copiii. (ko-pee-ee) the i of which you pronounce two out of three times, your choice. Cool, huh!

I've only been in Iasi for an hour or so, checked into the best 4 star hotel I've found in Eastern Europe so far, and decided to let you know where I was today. So far. (The Select Hotel - just in case you're coming soon to Iasi) having debarked from the overnight train from Bucuresti. There is suppossed to be a building here built in 1300 something. Maybe I'll go look it up on the net later. Or you can. Maybe we will even go find it and take a nice tourist picture for you so that you can say in your own virtual way that you've seen it too. But that's not the point.

The point is that a) Iasi is seriously old, (600 years and counting) and b) it isn't the first thing you see when you get off the train (Just before you notice the magnificent Byzantine designed spectacular train station facade.) The first thing you notice is, I won't keep you in suspense here, the McDonald's.

I'm here to find out why the people of Yash don't drink all that much milk. So I can go back to Bucharest and figrue out how to make them to change their minds.

We have two focus groups here this evening, and all morning till 16:00 (That's four o'clock to us Ami's) to figure out what else to tell you about Iasi besides how to pronounce it.

La Revedere pentru acum. Arrividerci for now.

s.

Blood Red Easter eggs

2008-04-26T18:26:00.006+03:00
Bucharest

Romanian folklore offers several legends to explain why the Easter eggs here are painted red instead of the mint greens, baby blues, pink pale pastels , and rarely reds, of my home country.In the USA (SUA) Easter is much less a purposeful act of resurection as it is an act of fun, camplike activities. I have seen no easter egg rolls, or lawn hunts yet. Chocolate eggs and bunnies are making inroads here. But then, why not. It is, after all, chocolate! And western.

The legend says the Virgin Mary, who came to mourn her crucified son, laid a basket with eggs near the cross. They turned red from the blood that flowed down from Jesus' wounds. The Lord, seeing that the eggs reddened, said to those who were there: "From now on, you too shall paint the eggs in red to remember my crucifixion, as I did today."

Easter is the most important event in the Orthodox Christian calendar.

Traditionally, celebrations in Romania begin on the Saturday evening.

Ppeople gather round the churches bringing candles. At the Resurrection Mass just before midnight, the priest comes out to distribute holy bread, give a blessing and provide the flame from which everyone will light their candles which they are suppossed to keep aflame until they arrive home.

At home the the brothers and cousins and parents and children and grands all come together for a special Easter meal usually of Roast lamb and home-made cozonac (sponge cake with nuts and poppy seeds).

This morning, walking the dog through one of the nicer neighborhoods in Bucharest, the streets were wafted full of the smells of some wonderful restaurant I wish I could have made reservations for.

I will try to stay awake tonight, find a nearby church and bring a camera and a candle.

Whether you are Romanian or something else, Paste fericit (pash-tay fairy-cheat), Happy Easter.

palm sunday peasant fair

2008-04-21T16:27:00.010+03:00

Bucuresti

Here the religion is Eastern Orthodox, and Petre Cottontail comes hoppin' down the bunny trail later than in the West. Yesterday was Palm Sunday, and next Sunday, April 27th will be the day Easter is celebrated. (Julian calendar vs. Gregorian - Julian won here) So I braved the Bucharest traffic, invoked my Parking Karma, and took myself and camera to the yearly peasant craft fair at the Peasant Museuum (where else?) of Bucuresti.

Come along. You'll have a very peasant time.

Peasant Fair Bucharest
FROM TWO DIFFERENT SOURCES ON THE BEAUTIFUL, TRADITIONAL PAINTED EGGS OF ROMANIA:
Painted Eggs
The famed painted eggs, especially prominent around Easter time, are the most readily recognizable examples of Romanian folk art. Intricate patterns were actually secret languages known only to residents of the regions where they were painted. Painting of real hollowed-out eggs was an integral part of preparations for this festival of renewal. Women and children gathered in someone's home and spent a day painting and gossiping.

One of the most beautiful Romanian Easter traditions is painted eggs. Egg shells are dyed in colorful patterns and decorated with folk motifs. Designs are made with an implement called a condei or chisita - a small cartridge filled with paint with a sharp point on the end. There are a myriad of motifs used on painted eggs. The most popular ones are the cross, the star, the sun, the wave, the zigzags, and stylized flowers. Sometimes motifs are applied using natural leaves. Traditionally, it's the women who paint Easter eggs, and they have to do it on the Thursday before Easter. Women are not supposed to do any work on the Friday before Easter. Sunday Easter morning the painted eggs are tapped together with the words "Hristos a Inviat - Adevarat a Inviat" - "Christ is Risen - He is Risen indeed." This beautiful ritual precedes the Easter breakfast. For forty days people, especially in the countryside, greet each other with these words.

Romania For Rookies Pt 2:

2008-04-13T19:39:00.019+03:00
Bucharest

Chapters 2 & 3, Double Subsets 1 & 2

Chapter 2: Romanian Reality Time

(as opposed to that standard time on your ordinary ol’ average 12 or 24 hour timex or swatch) runs at about a ratio of 1 to 5 (or 6). That is, when a Romanian says to you “I’ll just be five more minutes.” Pull out your ipod and open up another chapter of Ludlum’s latest, or Madonna’s newest incarnation and be prepared to hear the whole chapter or spin through every cut. You will most likely be hunkered down in wait mode for at least 25 minutes. Maybe (jumatate ore) half an hour. (zhew-ma–tah-tay or-eh). Multiply out on your own for number of days it takes to clear anything though a Romanian Government Registry, no matter what they promise you. (See Romanian Paralytic Politeness – coming in curand (soon)!)
Unless we are talking traffic time here. With traffic time, in Bucharest at least, always plan your meeting to start a minimum of one ora after your announced start time if the meeting is to take place from multiple departure points to anywhere else across the city, or across more than 6 city blocks occupied by actual autos.
Bucharest is beginning to make downtown Tokyo traffic look like a lazy, breezy afternoon drive in the country.
Chapter 3: Baker Beware!
If you are buying shelled walnuts here, they will have shells in them. Teensy little bits of that drywall separator between brain-shaped halves or crunchy little tooth crumbles of actual shells themselves. Don’t fret though. Romanian dentistry is both cheap and good.

Things that look like raisins, currents or yellow saltanas, if they aren’t from Sun Maid or Dole, will have seeds in them. This is a crunchy kind of place.
Quality control here is not yet what it will be.

It’s Spring. And Bucharest smells of lilacs and cat piss.
No, not the effect that you get when your mother sprays glade in the room with the litterbox. Actual lilacs. The town, or at least my Florasca neighborhood, is crowned with whole trees full of them.
I have theories about this. The lilacs I understand. And love. And have always loved. And mourn that they aren’t now a year round enjoyable like tomatoes from Chile. But only grace us briefly in the springtime.

But as to the feline streaming aromatic contribution I can only postulate that it has been frozen on solid ground from winter till thaw, and only now has pungently, er, blossomed.
Choose carefully where you choose to inhale here.

Romania For Rookies - Part 1

2008-03-23T12:42:00.010+02:00
Bucharest

Kiss. Kiss. Hi. Hi.
Romania is a kiss-kiss country.

There are some countries that are only a kiss. And some that are a kiss-kiss-kiss. But Romania is definitely a kiss-kiss. Get it wrong and they will know immediately that you are either a total social misfit, or a new expat. You should know this for when you come here.
It’s the everyday greeting form that may be startling if you’re a Brit or exotic if you’re an Ami. You’re forgiven if you’re a foreigner. But com'on, you can only ride that excuse for so long before you're expected to get it right. And there is a very specific protocol.
Start with a regulation handshake and then, feet firmly planted, move your upper body in. The handshake should already have brought you into accurate bussing range. Later, often, after you get the hang of it, you can skip the shake and move directly to the smackeroo.

To avoid the embarrassment of headturn-headturn, bang-bang, oopsie-nose-wrestle, always start your first kiss to the right as you face the kissee. (That would make it their left, but that’s too confusing for a Rookie. Think right. Be right.) Then immediately and simultaneously with your target, move your face to your left for puckerup number two.

Hollywood air kisses are acceptable. Deep, noisy smoochie kisses are not. Pecking is perfect. Casual lip to cheek contact for old friends. Nancy Reagan at a Gala for brand new acquaintances.

Simple.

Do it again when you leave.

Saving expats everywhere from social pariahdom. If I don’t tell you these things, who will?

Little March

2008-03-01T13:39:00.027+02:00
Bucharest

Sometimes it is a pure pleasure to share with you some of the more charming old traditions of Romania. Martisor (Marts-ee-shore) is one such sweet, small joy. It is a first rite of Spring:

"Every spring on March 1 ... where Romanians live, (they) celebrate Martisor. They celebrate the rebirth of life after the hard winter. On this day men offer to their beloved women flowers and martisors (the symbol of serenity and happiness).

"The tradition's origins go back to Dacian times (Romanians’ ancestors). It was previously called "dachia dragobete" - the end of winter. The pin-charm could only be made during the winter months and worn after March 1st. In earlier times, the Dacians would hang little coins from a thin, twisted black and white wool rope. The coin type - gold, silver, or metal - dictated the individuals social status or wealth. The coin charms were originally used to provide both luck for the future and protection from the environment to the wearer. The ropes stood for the advent of summer, warmth, and regeneration (white), while intertwined with the constant presence of winter, cold, and death (black). The amulets were also believed to enhance fertility, provide beauty and prevent sunburn in women! Young girls even threw the amulets toward the sun to prevent freckles! They were worn on the wrist or pinned over the heart. Many wore the pins until trees began to bloom, hanging the amulets in the tree branches after that point.

"In modern times, the pins lost their talisman properties and became symbols of love. The black ropes were replaced with red, possibly influenced by the Valentine practice of the western world. The delicate wool ropes are still a "cottage industry" among the country people today. They still comb out the wool, dye the floss, and twist it into thousands of tassels. In certain areas the amulets are still made with black and white ropes - for warding off evil!

"There are a few legends that explain this beautiful tradition. Here are two we selected for you.

"One of the old Romanian legend says that once in a fight with the winter witch, that didn't want to give up its place, the beautiful lady Spring cut her finger and few drops of her blood fall on the snow, which melted. Soon on this place grew a snowdrop and in such a way the spring won the winter.

"Another legend tells that there was a time when the Sun used to take the shape of a young man and descend on Earth to dance among folk people. Now a dragon found out about this and followed the Sun on Earth, captured him and confined him in a dungeon in his castle. Suddenly the birds stopped singing and the children could not laugh anymore but no one dared to confront the dragon. One day a brave young man set out to find the dungeon and free the Sun. Many people joined in and gave him strength and courage to challenge the mighty dragon. The journey lasted three seasons: summer, autumn and winter. At the end of the third season the brave young man could finally reach the castle of the dragon where the Sun was imprisoned. The fight lasted several days until the dragon was defeated. Weakened by his wounds the brave young man however managed to set the Sun free to the joy of those who believed in him. Nature was alive again, people got back their smile but the brave young man could not make it through spring. His warm blood was draining from his wounds in the snow. With the snow melting, white flowers, called snowdrops, harbingers of spring, sprouted from the thawing soil. When the last drop of the brave young man's blood fell on the pure white snow he died with pride that his life served a noble purpose.

Since then people braid two tassels: one white and one red. Every March 1 men offer this amulet called Martisor to the women they love. The red color symbolizes love for all that is beautiful and also the blood of the brave young man, while white represents purity, good health and the snowdrop, the first flower of spring.

"Literally Martisor means little March: a small trinket pinned on the lapel by which winter is parted and spring is welcomed."

I got a Martisor from a friend. Another from the company that brought me here. And the pizza place gave me one with my takeout tonight. Even Hope, the mellow schnauzer got one that's now tied to her collar. Come March 31st we'll make a rite of tying them all to the blossoming trees.

In now-capitalist Romania this is a new buying occassion. You can find Martisor in every little shop along Magheru Blvd (near the McDonalds) with little gold or plastic amulet birds or bugs or beatles, shamrocks or lions or tigers or bears. Oh my, there's even a big, plush Mickey Maritsor. A buying event with a sweet, peasant past.

Beyond lovers and spice (my particular plural for spouse), friends also offer Martisor to each other as a symbol of friendship and joint celebration for the bumpy thickening of the trees, the sudden startling shards of chartreuse, and the crocus spears braving their way through the dirt up to the sunlight.

So I offer this one to you. Happy Little March, my friend.

The source for this wonderful explanation is:
http://www.moldova.org/pagini/eng/59/

Gone to the Dogs

2008-02-21T07:10:00.014+02:00

Phewcarest

It's 0 degrees outside, which always sounds colder to an American because I freeze in Fahrenheit, not Celsius, which is considerably warmer.

The ground-covering snow from three days ago has already melted into the asphalt and dark brown mud. But the disappearance has left me with a very clear understanding of why Romanians leave their boots at the front door during winter. It’s the dark brown doggy detritus.

You just never know what traces will end up at the bottom of your soles.

Right now Bucharest smells like a puppy poopy park.

All of those canine biodegradable souvenirs, while highly biological, have, in no discernable way, degraded.

It gives whole new meaning to the term "Watch your step."

Now I have a sniffer that barely even noticed the human counterpart of this kind of olfactory assault for most of my entire decade in NYC. I could walk oblivious through Times Square or into the underground train transfer points in the nether regions of Penn Station with rarely a wince or a crinkle. So imagine, if this snout could survive that urban decay, how bad it must be for me to notice that this city smells like one of those abandoned kennels usually mercifully raided regularly on Animal Planet.

Bucharest is a city known for its street dogs. Most of them were abandoned when the dictator dictated that everyone move out of the way of his ego so he could build the world’s second largest building on top of their old houses. The folks went into the apartment blocs. And the dogs went into the streets. The dogs aren’t dangerous, for the most part. Everyone feeds these outside critters. And nature has given them a way to remind you that, while you are inside, cozily snuggling up to your central heating, they’re still shivering outside looking in.

“P. U.!!” as we used to say in the third grade.

Hope, the mellow schnauzer, who can bark in Romanian and learned to souvenir in the street like all her new furry chums the last time we were here, is happy to make her own contributions. She says "Hello." <"Woof.">

(Bringing a dog to Bucharest is truly like carrying coals to New Castle, which you would have to presume already has a lot of coals. But we wouldn't have done it any other way.)

La revedere.

Whadda ya say?

2008-02-17T09:31:00.018+02:00
Bucharest

If you are traveling for two weeks or less to any country other than one which habla’s, parla’s, or vorbeste’s your own native language, I have found that there really are only a few phrases that you need to get around:

“Please” and “Thank you” like your mama taught you.
Kudasi and Domo arrigato, or Bitte and Danke, or Va rog and Multumesc.

“Where is the …?” You can usually just substitute the English which at least 37% of the time will be close enough. (Pharmacy, train, hotel, police station.)
Waar is die…? or On és…? or Unde este…? (Faracia, tren, hotel, politia)

“How much does this cost?”
Ka'ma zeh ole' or Cât costa?

“Do you have a room for the night?”
Hast due ein zimmer, bitte fer ein nacht? or Are o camera, va rog pentru o noapte?

And “Excuse me.”
Pardon or scuzati-ma

I’m pretty sure that I’ve done 11 or 12 countries successfully on just these.

Couple that with my “getting directions” philosophy you can get around just about anywhere. What? Oh. Sorry. Sure. You go up to anyone friendly-looking and apparently unarmed on the street and say in your best Tagalong or Hindi, “Excuse me, where is the…train station?” And who cares what they say. Almost without exception, they point. Aha. So walk a few blocks in the direction they pointed, and stop the next friendly native and ask the question again. If they point in the same direction, keep going. If they point in a different direction, turn that way. Keep repeating this procedure till you catch sight of the big, dark building with the clock, empty taxi's and dudes in red or blue uniforms without holsters, pushing trolleys! It may take some time, but what the hey, you’re a tourist, right? Time to look around the city is exactly what you have.

If, however, you are planning to spend more time than that abroad, I strongly suggest that you look up a few other handy phrases, none of which I’ve looked up for you: (Hey, did your other teachers do all your homework for you?)

What’re you, NUTS?!

For that much, I could buy three camels and your mother-in-law!

I ‘m lost. Could you please give me directions that won’t take me through a band of children begging for my money?

Hey, exactly what’s in this? And why does it taste so funny?

How much is that in real money? Gallons? Time? Weight? Temperature? Length? (This one is primarily American)

Can you tell me how to get to the Embassy without having to go through all those irate, uzi equipped citizens?

Pour me another one and make it a double!

Could you stop laughing at my clothes long enough to help me change this tire?

Don’t confuse the word “tourist” with “can’t count to ten” in your money.

HAAAAAALP! (Am ne voi de ajutor! – that one I know in Romanian.)

That should keep your safe on your journey till the next lesson. You’re welcome.

Buon viaggio!

Writer's Bloc by
Shelly Roberts is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Nothing Happened.

2008-01-28T13:19:00.000+02:00
Bucharest

Absolutely nothing extraordinary happened to me this week in Romania.

I got the oven lighted without blowing up the bloc.
So now I can bake bread and roast chickens and prime ribs of beef. I won’t. But I could if I wanted to.

I bought a quad band superslim mobile phone from a store in a shopping mall. After only four or five months of endless and useless self-debate. Thanks to a necessary kick in the tail from a friend who suggested that I stop being such a whiney, helpless ex-pat and take my life back. (Well, he didn't say "whiney." I did. and he was right.)

I signed a new contract with a client I recruited myself and visited the client’s company and put a team together and negotiated the fees.

I bought a new LCD tv that didn’t blow up when I plugged it in.
See previous blog.

I renegotiated a renewal contract that puts my name on the rental agreement so I can get the business papers I need.

I emailed an attorney to get started on those papers.
I spent an evening at a friend's dining table drinking wine and talking about life, the universe and everything.
I ate in a restaurant, went to a meeting, got a new password for an online account, did the laundry, washed the dishes, cleaned the house and drove the car to several places I’d never been before by reading a map just like everybody else does. Unless you're an ex-pat in a very foreign country.

Like I said, absolutely nothing out of the ordinary happened to me this week in Romania. And when you consider that when I first arrived here the only three words I knew in Romanian were “Thank you.” (Multumesc.) And “Please.” (Va rog.), that is absolutely extraordinary.

Ain’t life amazing?!

Expensive No Charge

2008-01-15T05:29:00.000+02:00
Bucharest

These are the things I have blown up so far trying to use international transformers on Romanian current:

1 Desktop Tower Computer
Nobody told me there was a 110-220 switch on the back plate till too late.
Fortunately, I learned about the switch before I plugged in the other tower.
Bye-bye power supply.

1 Epson Photo Stylus 320 Color Printer.
Plugged into the outlet daisy chain when I turned on the computer. Ouch.

1 Five CD/Radio/Tape/MP3 Player System. Now humming to myself.

1 Flat Screen TV beyond the transformer's capacity. {deep sigh} {really deep sigh} {really, really deep sigh}

1 Senseo Coffee Maker . Fortunately in this country the coffee is pretty good and the coffee house is down the block and across the street.

Things I have not plugged in yet because I'd like to keep them, if only as attractive sculptures, at least until I figure out the current-cy exchange rate or exchange them for something with two round plug poles:

One Cuisinart Blender
Two Mission Style Brass and Parchment Tall Floor Lamps.
One electric blanket
Various None-Of-Your-Business Personal Appliances. (footbaths and nailpolish dryers, oh, ye of the filthy mind. I mean really!)
Two ceramic heaters - fortunately the bloc apartment's central radiator overheats everything. But, wow, October was chilly. Can't wait for Spring!

Oh, well. Business is picking up. Soon I'll be able to replace everything with shiny new versions that will certainly blow up when I go back to the states. Ain't life amazing?!

Anybody want to buy an artistic American collection of electronic boat anchors?

It’s Snowing like Dracul. Or Detroit.

2008-01-10T08:28:00.000+02:00
Bucharest under snow.

I’ve been told that there are really only two seasons in Bucharest: Dust. And Mud.

They’re wrong. There are three seasons. Dust. Mud. And really ugly, dirty brown, muddy snow. Guess which one we're in now?

I haven’t been blogging since before Christmas because I took a break and a Winter vacation in Austria.

Now you have to understand that I am a Southern California baby. Oh, sure, I started with more weather resistent Chicago genes, but my thoughtful parents decided on LA way before I could grow an extra layer of clothing or adopt igloo survival techniques. Yup. LA. So when a friend invited me to join a group of hard-drinking Romanians for a jaunt and journey to a not-so-nearby Alp, I didn’t exactly jump at the chance. I waffled. And weighed.

I realized that my option, since everyone I knew was going somewhere else, was that Hope, the dog, and I would end up in our tiny apartment splitting a bottle of bubbly (water) and spending New Years watching CNN drop the ball at midnight. Phoeey. Die of frostbite? Or die of boredom. Frostbite won. So I said “what the heck.” And tried to figure out what I owned that was equal to an Austrian mountain top. (Actually, nothing, if you must know, but some old Boston long johns which have come in handy almost everywhere I lived but Florida.)

Now I’m not here to gloat. Well, ok, a little. I got to spend the tail end of Christmas and all of Revelion (New Years) in an Austrian Christmas card. Ok, so it wasn’t perfect. But I got to know a bunch of really good people whom I understood at least 12 percent of the time. That would be the time they were NOT speaking Romanian. Not a problem. When I’d had enough Romanian, I found other things to do. And when I’d found enough alcohol, I’d find other things to do. But good people struggling to let go of their problems for a few days of freezing and anti-freezing. (See the end of this column for the Romanian Rules of Drinking. They apparently work really well. I couldn’t tell because I mostly drank Coke Zero, but none of our group fell down any stairs or slopes, so there must be something to it.)

But that’s not the end of the story.

The real story is back here in Bucharest, where a meter and a half, that’s about four and a half feet, of snow blizzarded into town while we were gone. Ick. We were lucky enough to find pretty good roads getting back. But what we didn’t get back to was pretty good roads. We got back to Romanian road tending, which, I'm sorry to report isn't exactly up to EU standards. Or the standards of any civilized country that doesn't always seem so surprised that "... it's winter, and omigod, look at that. Who would have expected SNOW?!"

Now in Bad Ischl (Baad EEshhh-ul), (Austria, of course) at 3am you could hear the first plows and salters scraping the asphalt and soothing the roads that skirted the ski lift. Well, sure, it’s their living. Of course they’d pay attention. But then again at 5am, there they were dozing off another icy layer. And on and on, all day. And in fact, it IS their livelihood. Tourists who want to strap on barrel staves to their feet and slide down a thousand foot mountain, well it's an avocation that’s always escaped me. But it's money in the bank to all the Bad Ischanians, not to mention all the rest of that country. And god it’s breathtaking to watch. And unless you’ve never seen an alp in a heavy snowstorm, well, do it before you die. But when your money comes from people who want their ice outside their drink glasses, I guess Austria has learned to pay attention to keeping them alive on roads coming and going. So the winter roads are clear, safe and easy.

Welcome to Bucharest. It's a whole 'nother country. Guess there aren’t enough Winter tourists here yet. And it’s too far south of the Carpathian Mountains for the usual winter sports. Oh, sure, NOW , today, there's the shoveling-in-front-of-your-bloc marathon, but that doesn't count. The speed-sliding-down-to-the-corner-magazin (store) for frozen bread and milk every day. And the teach-the-old-dog-the-new-trick-of-going-in-the-snow competition. But those degrees of difficulty are just another ordinary winter day in far Europe when the temperature drops.

We pulled, or should I say, nearly slid into town at about three in the morning. I didn’t recognize streets I practically lived on. The next day, with the help of really good friends, I dug the car out of the place I’d parked to (Ha!) keep it safe while I was gone, then controlled skidded my way back home.

Well, not exactly. I skidded my way up in front of a parking space I was going to back into when the car behind me slid right into instead. Turns out that it was a neighbor, and it was ok, because they were the ones who had spent three hours in the morning shoveling the space. After I scraped off an inch or two of old New York attitude, I managed a skimpy space across the street. It took nearly an hour of boot kicking and glove shoveling snow from under the front and rear bumpers, then moving forward-back-forward a thousand times forward-reversing till I could get the car safely out of the roadway.
It's days later and Bucharest is now drowning in seriously ugly, seriously old snow. There aren’t enough plows. There must not be enough salt. The side roads are four inch brown, crunchy ruts.
And I’m not moving the car till daffodils!
For all of you who think my life here is exciting and exotic, well, right now I'm knee deep in Romanian exotic!

Next year I’m going someplace with palm trees!

ROMANIAN RULES FOR SURVIVING DRINKING - A LOT OF DRINKING:

1. Do not drink beer after wine. The yeast in the beer acts on the wine and increases the alcohol effect.

2. When you start to feel the least bit dizzy, stop drinking and take in as much water as you can. Wait 15 minutes to ½ hour before resuming alcohol.

3. The tongue is the most absorbent part of the alimentary canal. So do not keep hard alcohol in the mouth. Swig it back. On the other hand, if you really want to get someone drunk, serve them something sweet and thick made with whiskey or vodka or gin, and tell them to savor it for a few minutes before swallowing. But keep a bucket handy.

And these two you know already:
4. Eat food to absorb some of the alcohol.
5. Don’t mix sweet drinks with hard drinks.
(I'm sure there were more, but one of us probably had too much to drink to write the rest down.If I ever remember the rest, I'll let you know.)

In any case, may your coming year be twice as good as your last, and half as good as your next.

I'll write again before the snow is cleared. Enjoy my Alp.

(If you're having trouble seeing the entire photo, please click hereand choose slideshow.)

Revelion (New Years) in Bad Ischl Austria

It's Snowing Like Christmas Cards

2007-12-17T14:38:00.000+02:00
Bucharest

VREMEA (Weather) IN BUCURESTI

It's less than two more shopping weeks till Craciun.

Little children are on their best behavior. An unwashed gypsy boy no more than ten stands in the middle of Strada Glinka at rush hour cradling a tiny lamb in his arms for city dwellers and small children in cars to stop and pet for a few RON (bani) (money) donation, of course.
The nearly biggest Christmas tree in all of Europe - well they missed it by a few meters according to one of the "investigative" newspapers - is aglow right in the middle of the biggest shopping center.
Everyone in all the offices is biding time and imitating working as they secretly scheme to leave at three to get to any mall in Bucharest traffic and home on the same day.
I know that this year I will be without family and hearth. No chestnuts roasting by any familial open fire. Yes, friends, of course, but here, like there, this is the holiday for family trees. Still, with all the red and green, all the cushy-warm Christmas commercials to rub your hands together in front of, even the family umpah band playing Oh Come All Ye Faithful and Away In A Manger yesterday outside the eventide bloc, it's hard to ignore the ho-ho-holiday spirit.
Almost perfect.
But there's just been one thing missing. Until now.
I looked up from my screen out of the window that faces the parc between the back of the blocs, and it was snowing like Christmas cards.
The big fluffy flakes that 1st graders draw in their coloring books, no two alike, like fingerprints, if you could only get them to hold still long enough to get the ink rollered on without melting their identity all over the Ident cards.
From this post-socialist country that never tore down all the churches, may the old guy in the red suit (Mosul Craciun) find your balcon and fill it with your heart's desires.
Fericit Craciun, to all and one. And to all o noapte buna. (a good night.)

Snowing Like Christmas Cards

ACCIDENT UPDATE:

The Politie (police) delivered my driver's license to the US Embassy. And it is in my hot little hands, er, wallet even as I type.

My plot to call American Citizens Services at the embassy every two days or so, asking if the license had arrived yet, obviously paid off. First, they found it. Secondly, they didn't send it to Arkansas where I won't be for a long, long, long, did I mention loooong, time. Or probably ever again.

And, third, when I stepped up to the window at the embassy to say I was there to retrieve my license, the sweet man there, who obviously recognized my voice, (which was my evil plan all along) said, "Oh, did it finally come in?" It did. Yay!

Am I driving differently now that I know how long it takes to get your license back? Yup!

Am I now carrying a photo copy of my license instead of the real thing? You betcha!

SES provided by distance learning technology group.

I Love A Parade

2007-12-07T11:51:00.000+02:00

Bucharest 1 Decembrie 2007

Ok, I admit it. I’m a parade junkie. I’ve stood sidewalk New York vigil under the dirty patched inflatable gigantathon rubber and helium cartoon characters and floating super heroes du jour on the all-American over-eating day, at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Believe me, the balloons look better on tv!

I’ve shivered in near 51 degree (Farenheit) January’s Southern California frost in Pasadena, awe-ing and ah-ing at the most amazing things they can do with flora and fauna at the Rose Parade.

I’ve seen the ball drop on New Year’s Eve (Revelion) in Times Square, and been terrified when the crowd decided to move, and you moved with it, or risked a trample.

Once of each was enough outdoor exposure to give me bragging rights for attendance at the USA’s biggies.

But I’ve also spent many a spring, summer and autumn criss-crossing the states, and when I’m on the road at any random holiday, the draw of small town America celebrating pulls me in like a 5 pound bass on 25 pound test line.

I love an American parade. I’ve paused in Iowa and Massachusetts, Oklahoma and Kansas, Virginia and Nebraska, among others, to take in the line of tractor, hay wagon, dignitaries wearing convertibles and imitating the Queen of England’s wave. I’ve seen Founders’ Days and Independence Days, little shapeless five-year-old adora-belles in pink leotards and net tutus tapping or twirling their way to hometown recognition from the local jazz-tap-ballet studios, and cub scouts, boy scouts, eagle scouts with badges and sashes on parade to celebrate ground hogs, and Halloweens, state fairs and new mayors, veterans in proud, rusty medals, and local high school drama clubs/girl scout troops, YW&MCA’s adorned and bedecked in occasion-matching outfits. Pilgrims and witches, though not necessarily in the same parade. And the fire truck, if it’s a really small town. Or the fire trucks if the county is involved. And wonderful and awful high school bands oompahing marches something near Sousa, or definitely Sousa-like. And dogs in big collars, and sometimes, in the western states, horses draped with more silver than a Tiffany display case.

It’s always a treat. It’s always a proud occasion.

So when I was invited along to spend a Saturday morning on the 1st of December seeing the Romanian National Day Celebration Parade march down Bul. Kisseleff to the exact duplicate of the Arc de Triomphe (Arcul – The Arch) that Bucharestians revere, you betcha I accepted. Yet another chance to compare country attitudes, actions and traditions, spend a sunny, winter day in the brisk air, cheer some passing populations, go to the after-carnival and eat delicious things that taste better the worse they are for you. Sure, who wouldn’t have accepted eagerly?

Nooooot exactly.

First of all, it’s a military parade.

Any decent Ex-communist country would surely know how to throw a line of cannon in to a row. And I had already seen this self-same martial art practicing on the street I traverse daily to biroul (the office) two days before. I just didn’t know that this would be the only contingent.

As we approached, my companion began to comment on the crowds. Startled by so many. This was not a mandatory meet. It was not a communist compulsion. This was a voluntary event and the streets were lined 3-5 deep with on-lookers. Obedient children were everywhere. Waving their curiosity like the small blue (albastru) yellow (galban) and red (si rosu) government giveaway flags that sprouted everywhere.

A previous parade under the dictator was a very different spectacle. “People had to be here then?” I innocently asked, trying to penetrate the atmosphere and match it to anything I knew from life as an oblivious American. “More than that.” I was told. “There were sign-in sheets for everyone. They would take attendance. And they would check, sometimes as much as six times during the event, just to make sure you didn’t leave. What’s a spectacle without adoring crowds?”

But today was different. It was a quiet orderly assembly of people finally experiencing that the honor was theirs. Not imposed. Not required. This was the first year that Romania was a member of the European Union. And the back of the free flags sported the blue field with the now-familiar golden ring of stars. And Romanians belonged. Now they brought their children. Because it was a nice day. Because it was a good activity. But something bigger. The pride was palpable.

After September 11th in the US, parades like this would have brought on cheers. Loud applause would ring over the streets, raining down appreciation on the heads of all the uniformed participants for their service to town and country. On this initial December National Day, there was no applause. It felt to me like it felt to them that it would be rude. And this was not a day to dishonor.

“Why is it” I posited “that when the boys plan the parades, they always bring out their war toys?” The response was a logical surprise. “Oh, no, you really don’t understand. It was the military that stood with us and supported the Revolution. Without them, we would not have been successful.”

The President spoke, of course, though we were far too far down, finding a tiny slice of view to hear him. And the tanks, and rocket launchers, some dressed for forests, some for deserts, the jeeps and vans and cycle patrols rolled past to a crowd that drank in the representation and protection that this tiny 21 million strong, ever-conquered country now counted on to keep history from repeating itself.

But at the end, there was no carnival. No hot dogs, or locally made popcorn balls in colored cellophane. No rides or ping pong ball tosses for prizes of goldfish you would name “Richard” or “Amanda” and who, three days later would be floating belly-up in their bowls. No recruiting booths for the local volunteer fire-fighters, or the armed services. Just an orderly egress. People still waving their paper emblems, a little, or wearing like shawls the full size flags they’d brought from home.

I wish words were better at catching the intensity of the feeling of that crowd. There was a rock solid comraderie, a human union, a silent, appreciative coming together to celebrate that now there was an independent Romania. And that it was at last advanced enough to join the club of independents that is becoming the European adhesive.

I guess you have to have lived through being a captive to really know what it is like to be free. That’s a long way back for an American. A part of our essential essence, but more like a sense memory than a reality.

At this parade, I was very proud to have been a witness. And maybe I understood one more tiny bite of this ripe Romanian apple I have chosen to dine on.

Romanian National Day

Acum Pot

2007-11-12T16:12:00.001+02:00

Bucureşti

If you’ve read much of me at all, then you’ve probably observed that what I’ve mostly written has been for my American friends, about what is so different about Romania from our US experience, a kind of tourist cum expat sightseer journal of impressions from this stranger in a less-and-less strange land.

For his blog I want to reverse the polarities, and write for my Romanian friends. The ones who ask me repeatedly, “What the hell are you doing back? In Romania? What were you thinking?"

Well, here’s what I’m doing back in a country so many so fervently want to get out of because they believe that the land of opportunity is anywhere else but here.

Let’s enter the Way-Back machine. The year is 2003. I’m a lost puppy sent as an advertising guru to a country whose language is supposed to make sense to me because I parla Italiana, but doesn’t. I’m stuck with a driver who charges me double for everything I need because he knows I can’t fend for myself. He won’t show up to take me home past 1900 hours (7pm) when I work daily till 2100 (9pm) fiecare zi (every day) unless I bribe him adequately, which I don’t think to do, because, well, because I am an American, and we don’t think to do such things.

He works three jobs. His mother, who used to be employed by the state in a factory that doesn’t exist any more, and hasn’t yet been sold to foreign investors, would work if anyone would make her an offer, but they don’t. She’s almost fifty, and there aren’t many opportunities. His brother drives a taxi, works construction, and sells cigarettes on the side to foreigners who will pay outrageous prices for Winstons that tongue-burn on ignition from being so far beyond their expiration date. He never speaks of his father, and I don’t inquire.

They all tend vegetables in window boxes in every window of their bloc apartment (to eat themselves or sell) which houses three generations in the space solitary American grad students complain about. And they make do. Waiting for better. He would like me, when I go back home, to send him boxes of American sneakers which he could black market for a profit. I decline. His best hope is to one day own a Volkswagen Passat. It is, for him, a very big dream. They are a too typical urban Romanian family caught in transition. And the crossfire. I don’t know this at first. But I learn. Optimism is a very expensive and painful luxury in this land of promising disenchantment.

And the energy of the country is like quicksand.

It is a strange, stalled, static charge, rank with the bouquet of disappointment and frustration. Romania has one foot on the gas pedal and one foot on the brake, restlessly waiting for the light to turn green. Romania is a finally-liberated country desperately waiting for someone to tell it what to do. While I am here, no one does.

Fast Forward:

“You won’t recognize this place when you get here.” Andreea e-informs me as I pack for my short-project trip, the one that will ultimately culminate in signing on for long-term plans to ride the Romanian tidal wave.

“Everything’s changed.”

Was she ever right.

Now the energy is organized. There is an in-spite-of-everything optimism as the undertone. There is a flourishing and energetic world-class force that is emerging. Romania is rising. While America is still sinking under government stupidity and an aberrant, non-leadership, sock-puppet president, Romania has one of the few economies that is growing.

Multi-nationals have found a new exploitation target, which is really good for its victims. Personal income taxes have been lowered from 50% to 16% uniformly. Several corrupt politicians have gone to jail for being corrupt politicians. Banks issue debit cards now, and credit cards aren’t far behind. With real, professional jobs comes money. With money comes credit. With credit comes houses, and cars, and consumer economies, and every weekend can be Crăciun (Christmas) with an embossed plastic rectangle in your pocket, and malls opening everywhere you’d want to plunk them down. Yee haw, it’s capitalism. At last!

Right now Romania is drunk on money and choices.

Streams of Nissans, and Fords, Peugeots and BMWs, HumVees, and Mercedes necklace the better blocs and neighborhoods and flood every road. Versace wafts through Dorobanti and St. John’s and Armani walk hand in hand down the better boulevards. This is the show-off phase that comes after such a long and empty drought. Because they can.

The multi-nationals bring jobs, and with them the possibility of careers again. Lives again. Anything is possible. In Romania now, everything, after waiting through two thousand years of occupation, is finally possible.

FlashBack #2: Same time. Same station:
(Being prescient is not always an evil gift.)

I may not have known it at the time, but maybe I did when I wrote some lyric prose to Romanians for my then client, Connex, the country’s biggest telecom company at the time. It never got out of the agency, because the Romanians making the decision about what would go to client and what would go waste bin, didn’t have quite the confidence that what I saw was possible. It is called Acum Pot. (Now I can.)

I Am Romanian
I have survived two thousand years of others who believed that they knew what was best for me. And again and again, I told them that I know what was best for me.
I have survived hardships to work hard for myself. And for my freedom.
Now I can build businesses from mere ideas. Build my family’s life the way we wish it to be.
I am no longer a shepherd who is willing any more simply to lie down and accept my fate. I see fate as clay. I will mold myself new fate.
I look around and see my history in every street, but I also find there new possibilities and opportunities for change.
I am descended from brave-hearted Dacian kings and Roman emperors. I am Romanian. And I can do anything.
I invite tomorrow and I swallow opportunity in one bite.
Where others doubt, I believe. And what I believe, I can do.
I believe that doubt is defeat, and inaction is every opportunity missed.
And I don’t want to miss anything now. Because I believe that next thing I do is the first thing that brings me closer to whatever I can dream.
I move and change and dream in my own best interest now.
And now. I can do anything. Acum pot.
Sunt roman.

Present Time:
It is now nearly 2008. Four years nearly to the zi.

Bucureşti is exciting in the way that the Wild West frontier was. The way 1960’s New York was. The way Amelia Erhart and Henry ford were. It’s the discovery excitement of Columbus, and Thomas Edison and Carl Sagen, to go American on you for a moment. It’s the innocent optimism America has lost, temporarily, I hope. It’s why I came back to Romania. Though the natives cannot always see it for themselves. Sometimes it takes someone who hasn’t seen it every day (fiecare zi) to see what’s going on.

And everywhere I turn, here, now, I see Acum Pot. It’s why I came back.

And why I think I'm going to stick around for a while.

Writer's Bloc by
Shelly Roberts is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Here's Lookin' At YOU, Kid!

2007-11-11T13:53:00.000+02:00

Bucharest

If you should happen to find yourself drinking at a dinner party full of Internationals and Romanians who have already shouted "Noroc!" (Nor-oak) and "Success!" (Sook-chess) with every progressing decanter, not to mention "Skol!," "Salud y amor y pasetas" and "l' chaim" do not, I repeat, Do Not hoist your own chalice and loudly proclaim "Prost!" to the assembly.

In Romanian, it means idiot.
(Not to mention "stupid," "fool", "simpleton" and "ninny.")

Oops.

Now THAT is how you really learn to speak Romanian. And <blush> also how not to.

Cheers!

Writer's Bloc by
Shelly Roberts is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Huh?

2007-11-04T10:13:00.000+02:00
Bucuresti (Bu-cah-resh-t-(ee) (slightly breathe the last i so no one but other Romanians can actually hear it.))

Just in case you thought that learning to speak Romanian was a lark, merely a matter of turning the French poisson, the Italian pesce, the Spanish pescado into the Romanian peşte (pesh-tay) (fish), or "crayon" (meaning pencil, not the burnt sienna of your yellow and green crayola pre-schooling days) into the Romanian creion, THINK AGAIN! In Romanian, the plural of crayon is creioane, a neuter noun. (Nothing personal. I like creioanes.)

A creion and the crayons, well, we have a bit of a hermaphroditic concern here because neuter nouns take the masculine definite article in the singular and the feminine in the plural: (Make up your damn minds!)

I'm really good at English, and I certainly don't remember having to learn nomnitave, and accusitive cases, much less indicative, imperative, subjunctive, optative-conditional, and presumptive modes, and if I did, I've mercifully forgotten them. Haven't you? Anyway, back to the bi-genderal pencils.

Creionul in the singular. Creionele in the plural. I think. and if the creion happens to own something, then you could get to something like creionului. Or creionaeulelui. Or Creion-uh-loo-loo-looie-lor. Or maybe not. This is one tough lingo!

Once I've mastered THAT, I get to go on to conjugations, reflexives, subjunctives and those damnative cases:

So far I can, on my limited but well pronounced Romanian, get from my house to the office without getting arrested. Well, provided that I am in a taxi with a driver who got a C- or lower in English, or heaven forefend, took French in school. Taxi Romanian. Not bad for four months. Great if you're a Romanian four year old.

But this I must share. This is a page in, well, it looks like English, on conjugating Romanian verbs. It does not include exceptions. But be prepared. The following contains contamnative (I just made that up) phrases such as homonymous morphemes. (I didn't make that one up.) Continue at your own risk. Quit when your eyes get tired (I know I did.), Or, what the heck, just skim. (I know I did that too.):

4.1. Introduction to the verb
4.1.1. Basic information about verb and conjugation

Romanian verbs have different forms that show mood, tense, person, number, gender and voice:
- mood: five personal moods (indicative, imperative, subjunctive, optative-conditional, and presumptive) and four non-personal moods (infinitive, participle, gerund, supine). Most of these moods have two tenses (present and past); some have only one tense; one of them, the indicative, has eight tenses (one present tense, four past tenses and three future tenses) tense: present, past and future tenses. The tenses are of two basic kinds. There are simple tenses consisting of one word – the main verb stem plus different suffixes and endings. These include present indicative, imperfect indicative, simple perfect indicative, and pluperfect indicative. There are also compound tenses (consisting of different combinations of auxiliary elements and the infinitive or the past participle of the main verb) – compound perfect indicative, the futures of the indicative, past subjunctive, present and past optative-conditional, present and past presumptive, past infinitive

- person: 1st, 2nd and 3rd in the personal moods. There is also the possibility of combining the infinitive and the gerund (non-personal moods) with reflexive pronouns in different persons, which gives these non-personal moods a person-oriented usage

- number: singular and plural

- gender: masculine, feminine and neuter for the past participle in the passive voice, as well as for the gerund, when used as supplemental predicative element or attribute

- voice: active, passive and reflexive.

There is a large number of suffixes and endings, which form tenses and moods, persons and numbers, as well as a series of infixes (-ez-/-eaz-; -esc-/-eşt-; -ăsc-/-ăşt-) that appear in the 1st and 4th conjugations. There are homonymous morphemes in the system of the Romanian verb, which leads to the presence of relatively numerous grammatical homonyms and homographs within the verbal paradigm.

Some independent parts of speech become structural elements within certain verbal forms. The preposition a
functions as a particle that indicates the infinitive mood. The conjunction să is used as a morpheme to form the subjunctive, as well as the futures based on the subjunctive.

One of the distinctive features of the verbal conjugation is the presence of numerous auxiliary elements used to form compound tenses and moods: a avea to have (am cântat, am să cânt, aveam să cânt), a fi to be (a fi cântat, să fi cântat), a voi to want (voi cânta), other auxiliary elements (aş cânta, o să cânt, oi cânta). Some of the auxiliaries are used to build several verbal forms.

Within the conjugation numerous phonetic mutations (both vowel and consonant changes) occur. They are brought about by the new phonetic context created by inflective suffixes and endings in conjunction with the changing position of the stress.

Thank you, God, for letting me be born in the country most of the rest of the world had to do the above to learn how to speak their own language and I didn't. And, more importantly, than had to learn to speak MY language. Just so I could buy a pound of cheese or a cafea or grab a taxi here by myself.

And God bless, Alexandru, my teacher, who honestly believes, poor beleagured, and optimistic guy, that someday I'll actually be able to speak this Latinate, Dacian, Slavic, Hungarian, Turkish, Greek stew of a language. If I'm his best student, God, please especially bless all of his other students. And please grant us all the auto-insertion of a not-yet-invented Romanian microchip directly implanted into our confused, er, am confuselui brains. Or is that brainului confusi?

And by the way, all the people who tell you that if you know Italian, limba Romana (Row-muh-nuh) should be a piece of prajatura (cake) ARE WRONG! Italians pronounce all their vowels.

Words with three i's are entirely possible in Romaneste.

But why?

Or is that whiii?

And, by the way2, la in Romanian, like it sanely does in Spanish (la, le, il, etc in French and Italian) doesn't mean "the," It means to or at.

Noroc. (Good luck.)

Many wonderful people who live here speak this language like natives.

Oh, and just in case you want to learn this stuff for yourself, that reference is from here:
http://www.seelrc.org:8080/grammar/mainframe.jsp?nLanguageID=5

Writer's Bloc by
Shelly Roberts is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Romanian Word of the Week

2007-10-25T09:21:00.000+03:00

Misto (Mish-toe)
Derivation: Roma or Gypsy
Meaning: Cool

Update: The embassy has promised that it will hold my drivers license when it is sent to them by the police, so I don't have to move to Arkansas again just to drive. I do have to find my courage though. My invisible plastic I-can-drive-anything shield was cracked in the accident along with the Skoda.
Stay tuned.

They Ain't From Around Here.

Last week I tried to call my US bank on the 800 number. They wouldn't accept calls from Romania.

And when I typed the word "Romania" along with another search word parameter into one of the internal search engines of a site I visit frequently, an odd thing happened. The first half dozen responses all said approximately the same thing. "What to do if my account has been stolen." Hmmm. Shouldn't have surprised me though. When I was on eBay, and my account WAS stolen, it was stolen by, yup, you guessed it, Romanians. Well, not exactly Romanians. By Gypsies.

As any Romanian will tell you, Gypsies are NOT Romanian.

Now the Romanians I am lucky enough to live among and work with, along with your usual assortment of jerks, and geeks, social in-epts and classy-smoothies, dumb-bunnies and smart alecks that you'll find in any random population drift, are, for the most part bright, well-groomed, ambitious, optimistic, hard-working, family oriented, supportive of friends, smart as Rhodes scholars, and all-around swell folks to have added into your buddy lists. (Not to mention how gorgeous most of the women are. I'm sure that there are homely Romanian women here, but they must keep them chained in the attics or the basements, because, honestly, so far I have never seen any on the streets of Bucharest.)

And then there are the gypsies.

Here is a group that writes its own stereotype.

Except for some enterprises involving fresh markets (piata) (pee-aht-saas), fruits, vegetables and flowers, gypsies occupations often include liberating your passport, your traveler's cheques, and your hotel keys, putting your bank account on a forced reduction diet, keeping to themselves in a way that would make David Koresh and the Branch Davidians seem like blabbermouths, and training five-year-olds to look like sex-kittens or Dickensian urchins enough for handouts, depending on the best advantage. (Not to mention crumbling, rusty Dacia truck driver gypsies aiming at poor, unsuspecting Ami ex-pat Skoda drivers for their probable insurance. Opps. Sorry. Didn't mean to get started on that again.)

Unfortunately, for most of the world, think Romanian, and think email fraud, think Ponzi scheme, think paying ten thousand Euros to win a fictitious million, think hi-jacked eBay account. Too bad. Because, more accurately, it should be think real estate fraud, think "Just click here to reconfirm your account password," think paying ten bucks for a genuine non-existent Sony Erikson or Patek Phillipe anything, think gypsy. And leave the poor Romanians in peace.

Well, I’m a spoiled American, who, deluded or not, loves to believe that I have no prejudices (except for the Dacia …. Sorry…never mind) at all. So I decided to do a bit of gypsy research to learn more than just the myth that gypsies won’t cross into churches because it’s hallowed ground, and something about lightening striking them dead, but the outside edges at the egress are perfect Sunday assault pickings for “orphans” costumed in shabby and rehearsed in impoverished to run after you with “alms?” outstretched.

And guess what? The Romanians are right. The gypsies are not Romanians. They’re not even Balkans. They really ain’t from around here. Blame the Pakistani. (see below). It’s just that no one seems to have been able to convince them in the last seven hundred years to go home.

But to be honest, no gypsy has ever invited me over for dinner to talk, so maybe I am being influenced by my non-gypsy friends, and, ok, I'll say it, just the teeeeeensiest bit, ulp, prejudiced.

Begin Gypsy History Lesson:
source: http://www.eliznik.org.uk/RomaniaHistory/minority-gypsies.htm

The Gypsy peoples originate from Sind region now in Pakistan. Their Rom language is close to the older forms of Indian languages. The three tribes of Rom, Sinti, and Kale probably left India after a succession of campaigns in Sind through the C11, initially spending time in Armenia and Persia, then moving into the Byzantine Empire after the Seljuk Turk attacks on Armenia.
Within the Byzantine Empire they dispersed into the Balkans reaching Wallachia (1385) and Moldavia (1370) ahead of this area falling to the Ottoman Turks. Other groups also moved through India to Gujarat and south of Delhi. Gypsy populations can still be found along all these migration routes.
When entering west Europe they initially had letters of protection from the King of Hungary. This privileged situation did not last long as amazement at their way of life commonly led to hostilities. The Gypsy way of life still leads to hostilities from the people of their host nations. Europeans regard "private property" as sacrosanct, whereas gypsies do not have a word for "possess", which gives rise to two incompatible ways of life and a continual problem of gypsies being regarded as "thieves" from the European's view.
In each host nation gypsies appear to take on the religion, names and language of their hosts, but within the Rom they maintain their Rom language, names, music, customs and Indian looks. This tight community has meant that after some six hundred years there is still a large population of gypsies not integrated or assimilated with Romanians.
From the time of their arrival in Romania Gypsies were the slaves of the landowners, only to be emancipated in 1851. While in Romania some of the Gypsies took to speaking a version of Romanian called Bayesh which can be heard in some of the songs of Gypsy groups recorded in Hungary. Nowadays about 40% of the Gypsies still speak Romany and many can still be seen travelling in lines of carts along the roads of Romania.

I Love The Smell Of Ciorba In The Morning.

2007-10-17T19:50:00.001+03:00

Bucharest

First of all, Ciorba (chore-bah). What it means I’ll get to in a few paragraphs.

Before that, I’d like to introduce you to my long-gone grandmother. A perfect grandmother, who loved me unconditionally. Not the “unconditionally” that your parents promised which conveniently faded at the first spilled nail polish remover on the new parquet floors. Real unconditionally. Like from your grandmother. Or at least like from mine.

As to the rest, well, you now know the most important part, unconditional love. Also a lap to crawl into, and a strange language which she shared with my grandfather that was mysterious and fun to listen to but unknowable.

Here’s what little else I know: My grandmother arrived in the United States at the age of 18 from Georgia. No, y’all, not THAT Georgia in the US South, the other one that’s part of northwest Russia. I don’t know how she got to the US. By boat, I suspect. How else? I don’t know where the money came from for the passage. Or the inspiration. Alas, no one in the family ever talked about her journey, being so busy assimilating. And her English wasn’t all that good, nor would it occur to her to tell an eight year old whether she arrived at Ellis Island from steerage, or skipped, as the better people got to do, that part, and debarked directly in New York City. Those are only the first few things I don’t know about my perfect grandmother.

How she got to Chicago from New York? Unknown. How she met my grandfather, who’d come over when he was barely twelve? Clueless. How they hooked up or whatever it was called in numbers marking centuries and not just decades? A complete mystery. Why she never found the time to learn to read English in a country she would spend the better part of 60+ years in? There’s no one left to tell it.

But Grandma could cook. Dishes my friends found strange, that were everyday occurrences at family meetups. Ground whitefish balls with carrots and clear yellow jelly. Omigood. And as familiar to me as her traditional lutefisk was to my old Norwegian friend. And as odd to each of us as the other. Roasted chicken with herbs and spices I still can’t find in my hypermarket. Delishes that still flood my memory’s nostrils.

Then there was her soup. Which is now my soup.

Grandma and Grandpa never made it rich, though they did live their part of the American dream. What little family legend there is tells us Granddad started out with a pushcart on the streets of Chicago. He sold spools of sewing thread, and needles and notions for pennies a card I’m told. Hard work and true belief and more hard work and after enough pennies, they owned a dry goods store. This was long before I was ever ingesting oxygen. And they must have done okay because by the time I knew them, though the dry goods store was long shuttered, I never knew them, in their later years, to be in lack of life’s necessities. Maybe not luxuries, but we never had to take up a collection.

But back to the soup.

Even now, though an apartment or cash would have been nice too, I consider the recipe my only true ancestral inheritance. Not that I’m complaining. After all, I did get the soup.

It’s a sweet and sour cabbage soup that apparently Grandmother only knew how to make in quantities large enough to feed a large family, or maybe half a small village. I only know the recipe in that extravagant battalion size. So I make it in the winter when I have a hungry gang arriving. Or I’m wanting to eat the same soup for days on end. And, no matter what part of the world I set up house keeping into, I always somehow manage to transport my huge, heavy stockpot. For the soup.

It’s an easy recipe, made with patience and cabbages. Canned tomatoes, salt, pepper, sugar, crystallized citric acid, beef short ribs and time. It cooks best for at least three days. For the first two it tests the tolerance of the neighbors. Because for those critical first 24 -48 hours the house, the hallway, probably the neighborhood reeks like an Irish tenement. Cabbage is not subtle.

The soup never leaves the stove. The first day it boils for hours as the chopped cabbage shrinks, and the beef drinks the liquid. Then it simmers till you remember that it is still on the stove and you turn it off. Then it rests like a living thing. It is boiled hard before bedtime, and again at first light. If you’re staying at home that day, it simmers on and on for hours. If you’re not, then you’d best not be cooking the soup in the wrong month. Cold Octobers through Februarys are the best ways to avoid ptomaine. When the beef falls from the bone, the meat is pulled and shredded with two forks in a secret family method dating who knows how far back, returned to the pot, and kept at a constant under-simmer till, well, you’ll know.

If you’re lucky and the stars are all aligned the magic happens. It’s a phenomenon known most intimately to French cooks and confirmed foodies. The breathtaking instant when water and everything else merge, become something far beyond the sum of its ordinary parts. The moment when ingredients morph into manna. Into a slightly thicker mélange of beefiness and sharp savor leavened by the tiniest sampling of sugar. Grandmother’s soup is a one bowl feast that an on-hand dollop of sour cream adorns well. Rarely, if the magic fusion occurs earlier, will it ever get to the third day unsampled. Some nearby hungry, impatient someone almost always just has to dip a little ladle.

It has been one of my top three comfort foods since slightly after I attained consciousness. Grandma’s Sweet And Sour Soup. It always makes me feel dear. Unconditionally.

Then I came to Romania with a hunger to learn the language. I read on every restaurant menu a special offering called “Ciorba” and I confess I left it off my order. I just didn’t know what it was, and even I just wasn’t adventurous enough to try any, in case it contained shuddery foreign things like tripe. Or eyeballs. Or brains.

Finally, my curiosity overcame my fearful palate and I asked. “Okay, Okay, what’s the ciorba?”

“Oh, it’s a delicious sweet and sour soup. Kind of an acquired taste though. Most foreigners don’t like it. Mostly, it comes from the villages.”, I was told.

“Comes from the villages" is a convenient Romanian euphemism for peasant. Ciorba is a mulligatawny peasant creation colored by whatever’s left in the pantry or the root cellar and what’s in the piata (pee-ah-tsah) (fresh markets). There are chicken ciorbas, and beef ciorbas and fish and sausage and ham ciorbas, depending on what season it is. Curious about how familiar it sounded, I gave in and ordered a bowl. Funny how sense memory works. Grandma’s connection reached out to me with a spoon over all those miles, and years.

In Bucharest, in the early morning, before the sunrise, when the dog is insistent that outside is a better choice for her than leaving me unwanted presents on the tile floor in the hallway by the front door, we walk the blocs to let her sniff out any recent messages from canine passersby. While she’s reading her pee-mail, what I smell is the start of the morning’s cookpots wafting through open windows. Here cabbage isn’t so much a mainstay - at least not now in mid-October - as tomatoes and local vegetables. But the smell of the ciorba is identifiable. And unmistakable.

Whether it is the first day or the third, my olfactories say it makes no difference. In that faint blue first light, the ghost of my grandmother taps me lightly on the shoulder in an Eastern European city I’m pretty sure she never set a single size 5 slipper in. Apparently there is a shared common peasant cooking heritage throughout the Balkans, the Ukraine, and the old pieces of Mother Russia. We called it “Grandma’s Sweet and Sour Soup.” Here, the Romanians call it “ciorba.”

As the sun rises in the foreign country I never expected to feel so quite at home in, I find myself feel inexplicably loved unconditionally, happy and comforted.

Is it any wonder that I love the smell of ciorba in the morning?

-30-

Yesterday, When I Was In Istanbul

2007-10-07T06:19:00.000+03:00

Bucharest

Not so long ago, when I was wondering where my life had gone, when money wasn't tight, it was evaporated, and the US was closed for business, at least as far as anyone over 32 without 40 years of Internet experience was concerned, I gave it all up and went to live with my kids.

Trust me, none of us loved that arrangement.

You see, they both had had parents like me. Not an easy thing to live with if you're them, or so they led me to believe. And I do. Believe them, I mean. They had had enough of spontaneous adventure and wanted life on still waters. Me, I just wanted to know where my life had gone.

They wanted me to give up on dreaming. Come down to earth, quit waiting for the next adventure and get a job at Home Depot, where they seemed to specialize in hiring the elderly and the misbegotten.

I tried to make them understand that I was neither. But that must be hard to imagine on the early side of the parent-children bridge. I was waiting for my life to start again. They were waiting for me to grow up.

"But, Mom, what's the matter with being ordinary?" Sean inquired, as though it were really a question with an answer. I knew what he meant, of course. For him. And I asked every friend I owned if they understood the question. Strangely, of course, none of us did.

Last night I went to a live, outdoor MUSE concert in the middle of Bucharest and let the fusion flurry and the boom-tumble of the 24 foot woofers wash through me, wash me clean of old despairs, clear every channel that stood in the way of laughing out loud, and finally understood my answer. I don't know how.

Three weeks ago I had to do a solo performance for a member of The Board, embedded in a meeting whose content wasn't mine. Nonetheless. The show must went on in a stunning solo study of competence, confidence and quiet don't-screw-with-me bravado that looked like granite expertise.

Two weeks ago the mother of my closest Romanian friend departed early, though there was a diagnosis that said there were several more months to fill up and say farewell before my friend had to join the universal adult orphanage that awaits us all. I learned customs I so much prefer to acquire as a distant tourist catching the sad parade from a bus window, and not as a sharer of the nutcakes and wine served beside the bier. Some time I'll share with you the exotic, well to me, of course, customs like only bringing an even number of flowers, and other things that will go in the guidebook to here. But now it's too personal and close, and tinting everything, so that's not for now, and the fortnight goes on.

A week ago the traffic I laugh about with you came startlingly too close. With mere inches to spare in the new emerging-country norm, at 4 feet away, crawling at too few kilometers/hour, my foot slipped off the brake pedal and hit the gas. One and a half seconds, I've since calculated, was the time I needed to recover from such a simple slip. Instead, well, this is Bucuresti. There is no second to spare. My wonderful Skoda, like my Schnauzer meeting a street dog for the first time, sniffed the tailpipe of the courier van innocently attempting to speed to a destination at about 5 mph. My first accident (ak-chi-dent) since 1974. A little soul shaking and a light tap on the bumper to remind me that in Bucharest you do not even dare to remove a loose thread from your sweater while operating heavy machinery.

Five days ago, off to my Romanian lesson in the middle of the day, in the miraculously as-yet undamaged Skoda, I took the turn I take every day of the week. A thrill-skill ride onto the highway from a near-dirt intersection at the end of the street on which the company lives. I do it daily. It's treacherous and tricky and requires skill and daring and keeps an Adrenalin junky fully supplied. I thought about turning right instead. Hie-ing the half mile to the ring road to get myself pointed where I was going. But look-left look-right look-left look-right look-left look-right told me I had the clearance.

The old guy in the old, old, old, crumbling piece-of-shit Dacia truck didn't see it that way. He saw an opportunity. A nice car with probable insurance. So he pushed his foot down hard, braced and raced, and slammed me to a standstill tearing the Skoda's front and side quarter-panel, and abruptly calling me to a hard, shaky halt. Where I come from, he had "the last clear chance to avoid an accident." Where he comes from, he had a new front end, a rebuilt engine and a new set of front tires. All for the mere price of about four hours in a, to me, foreign police station. Which by the way, was built by an insurance company, replete with ads and posters to the most prime targets, and came complete with an adjoining Internet cafe.

No, I'm fine. Shaken up a bit, of course, at first, thank you for asking. But now, of course, I'm mad as hell. And guilty of innocence. I'll also spend some time at the American Embassy, where the politia will send my confiscated drivers license, trying to convince them not to send it back to Arkansas where I don't live any more, and can't go to retrieve it. Hoping they'll have seen it all before, and know that this punishment doesn't fit this crime. Oh well. I've shaken off the early tremors, know that I'll have to get back on this horse and drive again soon, somehow, or be forever banished to learning the correct taxi Romanian expressions for "No, you idiot, don't take me to my house via Bulgaria! Do I look like I just fell off the cabbage truck, you moldy mutton of a hack!" which I can do because I lived for a decade in New York, and learned that lingo.

And yesterday when I was in Istanbul.

Two days ago, really, if you require this to be literal literature.

It was a perfect flight, and a perfect meeting, with rooms full of accomplished and accomplishing women who knew their stuff and brought it to the table. An evening wandering through the bizarre, which, now that Romania is getting, to me, to be a nearly commonplace, is not a sic misspelling. Buying turquoise and silver at the bargaining price because I carried the camera and was mistaken for a crazy American journalist. Hearing my sad friend/client explain that the millions of Euro at stake in the deal we were crafting certainly paid the tab for taking a few hours to watch the end of Ramadan break its fast by the old mosque's lawns at sunset, and worth the price. And hearing her laugh for the first time again in weeks. Crossing the bridge that took us in one short span to set a set of tires for five minutes into Asia because Istanbul uniquely stands with one foot there and the other in Europe. Talking with new friend-colleagues over a perfect Turkish lunch on a deck on the Bosporus. Sharing stories about places you only read about that we'd all been to. A story of Irish Catholic weddings in Italy conducted by an accented Indian priest. And another, after a lovely lamb chop dinner in Istanbul the previous night, how confusing it had been, if you don't speak the language, when you just want a receipt from the cab driver and he offers you instead a "fish" (fis with a cedilla so you say "sh") which is the word in Turk for "the company will reimburse me if you just give me a damn slip of paper with numbers on it." And, oh, yes, eating octopus. Lip-smacking just after the shuddering subsides.

We flew back to Bucha into the perfect sunset as though it were somehow our birthright. And somehow it was.

Last night, letting the fusion music fuse-drive-pound-rock into me with the fireworks lightshow I could see even with my eyes closed, I finally knew the answer to Sean's question.

"What's the matter with being ordinary?"

Nothing. If you know how.

But you never get to say, "Yesterday, when I was in Istanbul."

Yesterday in Istanbul

Never Wear An Underwire Bra To A Lightning Storm

2007-09-17T14:35:00.000+03:00

Bucuresti

This blog title has absolutely nothing to do with this blog entry. It’s just something I learned from watching the Discovery Channel this weekend, and the headline just seemed to grow as the hours passed.

It’s probably a great idea. Especially if you are a woman.

Asa. (asha) (so)

What I wanted to share with you are my four favorite words in Romanian.

This also has nothing to do with either the headline of this entry, or the approximate or precise meaning of any of the words. So you don’t have to take any notes.

I’m both a word jockey and a word junkie. (Like you didn’t already know that.) I like to think of myself as wildly superior to mere average mortal American-English speakers with their paltry vocabularies in the tiny multiple thousands. I know more English words for snow, for example, than most Eskimo (no, the plural is "Eskimo" not "Eskimos," which would be pronounced “eski-moss” spelled that way. “Eskimo” is kind of like “moose.” Would you say “mooses”? I think not!) (Well, I hope not.) (These asides are beginning to sound like I’m channeling Ellen de Generis)

Now I have the perfect luxury, as I learn a new language that requires Olympic tongue calisthenics, of, at first, caring not a whit or tittle what the meaning may be. Later, I’ll add them to my flash cards. For here I’ll just add them to your “who gives a spit” collection of relatively useless information.

But they just feel fabulous to roll around your mouth, dandle on your tongue, and bounce into the oxy-nitrogeousphere. (See?)

Here they are:

Niciodata.

(Knee-cho-dah-ta). Say it for yourself a million and a half times or eight. There. Isn’t that fun? Don’t forget to put the slightest hiccup of a pause between the kneecho and the data. And to lose your American accent that would pronounce it like the name of the StarTrek Next Generation android. It’s da, not day. Tuh. Kind of fizzes in your mouth before you get it past your lips. It’s the first Romanian word I found to luv (iubesc) (now there’s an awkward sounding word to work into a sonnet).

It means “never.”

No. 2 is fericit.

(Ferry-cheat) (no breath beat between the ferry and the cheat.)

It sounds like pixies just before they burst from Gerber daisies. (Well it does to me if I start channeling Anne Geddes.) It’s just such a sing-song. What a delight. What a child’s-rhyme.

No waiting. It means “happy.”

My friend's Peugeot 407, when you’ve forgotten to buckle up for safety, plays a high-bells warning I swear is singing “Ferry-cheat. Ferry-cheat. Ferry-cheat.” “Happy. Happy. Happy." I can’t tell if the damn car wants me to be happy, or is just so French that it requires that by snapping on my safety harness it will get from me exactly what it wants. To be made foarte (very) fericit.

(You do remember that I told you that ci and ce are pronounced like the ch in “lunch,” ("chinos" and "cherries" )don’t you? Or did I remember to tell you? Well, so be it. And when the i is at the end, well we will get to that behind door Number Four.)

Next one you should guess for the obvious reasons if you do the math and remember that I came of age in the sixties while going to the University of California at Berkeley and then lived in San Francisco to wear some flowers in my hair.

Macaroane.

(Mah-car-wannay).

Brings up visions of toking on a prime strand of vermicelli. Oooh. Wow. Like groovy.

And last but definitely not least:

Atunci

(Ah- toonch) (Like "loonch.") (Sorry. Couldn’t resist.) Who cares what it means! (It means “then.”) It just makes you want to find a reason to say it.

"It would make me very fericit, atunci, niciodata to have to do bad macaroane." she said, working all this frivolity into a single, relatively meaningless sentence. Sonnets will come later. Or never.

Fericit Romanian to you atunci. And don't forget to check the weather report before dressing for the day.

-End of lesson 7-

Ride 'em, Cowboy!

2007-09-09T15:59:00.000+03:00
Bucharest

So here’s the joke about Skodas: Why is the rear windshield of a Skoda heated? To keep your hands from freezing when you push it.

The Skoda used to be a Czech joke. Not as funny as the Romanian Dacia. But definitely in the POS (see previous post) category. Then VW bought into the company and finally, probably doubled over in laughter, took over the plant and introduced classes in quality control and assembly.

Now Romania is full of them. Romanians think of them as cheap Volkswagens, which may be redundant.

My company has a contract for Skodas. It’s a perk of employment in a society where, before, there were hardly any decent jobs. But with the onset of the tsunami of multi-national, and expanding national companies, the perks are the price of entry for luring workers with IQ’s above a ripe cantaloupe (pepene galban) (melon – yellow) (hmmm. Should have been pepene portocalo – melon orange) (You guessed it, watermelons are pepene rossu – melon-red) (or sometimes pepene verde (green))), phew, sorry, long aside and a new record for ending )'s, where was I? Oh, yes, perks are requirements to draw and keep decent workers. So the parking lot at work is full of Skodas.

In the US, I still have my Jeep Grand Cherokee Ltd with heated leather seats. Sitting somewhere in Virginia wondering where I’ve gone to. I’ll sell it when I return in 5 more months on my quick trip home. But for now I have a Skoda alb (white) to drive.

All I can say about driving in Bucuresti is that it is a very good thing that I grew up in Los Angeles where they don’t issue you real feet when you are born. They give you training feet. You use them to get to the car. (“Hey, mom, can I have the keys to the car? I need it to go to the bathroom”) And that I kept a car in New York City.

Living in the LA car culture, you learn everything you need to know about machinae (cars). Living in New York, you learn everything you need to know about getting out of the way of all the other machinae aimed at your machina. Not to mention several words used commonly by sailors. And, of course, living in San Francisco for some later formative years, you learn how to keep one foot on the clutch, one on the gas, one hand on the parking break, and, looking up at the sky on a 30 degree grade, how to keep from rolling backwards into the Bay, and, most importantly for here, how to dodge errant cable cars and cars rolling backwards into the bay.

Perfect for driving here. The number of cars, when I got here, in mid summer, was five times the number back in 2003, when it was only medium scary to drive here. Then September. Everything got serious, and the other thirty percent of machinas came back to Buca from their holidays at the Seaside. Oy.

Here’s the Romanian concept of Right-of-Way: “Hey, you see that piece of pavement in front of me? IT’S MINE!” and “Hey, you see that piece of pavement in front of YOU. IT’S MINE!” and “Hey, you see that piece of pavement I’m thinking of that you can’t see, but it will appear at sometime in the road ahead? MINE! MINE! MINE!"

Every morning the 8km (a kilometer is 6/10ths of a mile) to work is an adventure in cowboy driving. Drivers everywhere occupying every inch of asphalt and cobble. Yee haw! Add to that the all the pot holes, cobblestones that regularly pop out of their neatly symmetrical but incredibly bumpy beds, and every day, it’s “Head ‘em and ride ‘em out!”

Oh, yeah, and the parking. “IT’S MINE!” Parking is anywhere on a piece of open pavement, which could mean dead center of the street leaving one tiny car width open for other cars to pass through. Or up on the entire sidewalk, which also means climbing 5" curbstones while parallel parking backwards. I’ll bring the camera to work with me tomorrow to show you. It means I’ll have to drive no-handed. But around here, that will not surprise anyone. Every corner and every empty space, every curb and every sidewalk is taken.

If I were a betting woman, I’d put my money into importing dent pullers, tires and replacement axles. Available credit for buying cars here is relatively new here. Only a few years. So are the cars. The surprise is that so few are dented or side scraped.

They’ve banned the wonderful old wooden wagons from the city because they slowed the traffic down too much – (Hah! My ten minute ride to the Bucharest Arch of Triumph, which normally takes 10 minutes, took an hour because of traffic, and not a horse-drawn in sight.) But I think that the Romanians can thank the horses that more cars aren’t banged and dented. Horses work hard at not running into each other. And I think that must have taught the drivers here some necessary, instinctive horse-sense.

Of Pui and Peste

2007-09-02T19:32:00.000+03:00
Bucharest

Here’s a funny thing. I was determined to take you to the grocery store this week. I thought we’d get a good chuckle over all the foreign foods, the cans of exotic unknowns with names and legends in Polish, or Russian or Turkish, or, of course, Romanian.

What a nice alien adventure to bring you along on, I thought. I even brought the camera.

Well, guess what. It wasn’t so foreign after all. Maybe because I’ve been in this particular market a few times before. Or maybe my Romanian has picked up enough. Or maybe I just am becoming accustomed to my new surroundings and adapting.

It no longer seems strange to me that milk comes in a box.

Or that people lug eight-to-a-dozen 2 liter bottles of water up three flights of stairs once or twice a week.

Or that the produce is weighed in Kg’s instead of Lb’s.

People in funny hats don’t look strange to me any more. They just look like their ears were cold.

I took the pictures anyway.

Now don’t get me wrong. I LOOOVE foreign grocery stores. I see it as a way to see how the people in any given country really live. And what they call their chicken. And how they offer their daily bread. Here the chicken is called “Carne de Passere” Which means Meat of Bird, or “Pui” which means, well, “tastes just like chicken” I suppose.

And just to explain the title, “Peste” (Pesh-tay) is fish.

But the thing is, now I live here too. So going to the grocery store is also about buying a small frying pan to cook my morning eggs with until my ton of household goods arrives from its landing in Belgium and is trucked cross Europe. And figuring out which dog food is made with carne de passere and which is made from, well carne de caine (dog) or cal (horse). And not being shocked at what they sent over from Norway in the fish section. It’s about picking up toothpaste, and fruit juice and paper towels and toilet paper and salt. It’s not a junket any more, just another ordinary day at the grocery store now.

How disappointing. I suppose now I’ll have to go to Uzbekistan or Tasmania to get back the adrenalin rush. Or tackle something else as my weekly personal challenge. Like ordering a pizza.

Think I’ll just go make myself a CRAP sandwich, turn on the Hallmark Channel, and wonder what I ever thought was so foreign about living here. (Oh, yeah, CRAP is a spread of CARP (peste) roe, or caviar, made with white creamy cheese. Delish.)

Have a good Sunday. Mine’s nearly over, and the salt mines, er, interesting, well-paying, fabulously exciting, consulting job beckons in the morning.

La Revedere.

S.

Omidumnezeu!

2007-08-31T19:44:00.000+03:00
Bucharest

Every once in a while I come out of the bedroom in my very small apartment, where I've been enjoying a rerun of the West Wing where CJ just became Chief of Staff because Leo is in a coma, sit down at my computer to check my email, look out the window onto the back of a small block of pre-war flats, and realize:

Omigod, I'm in Romania! Bucharest! Eastern Europe! On purpose.

"Cool."

I used to do the same thing in Oklahoma City.

Only in OKC, I did not have subtitles in a mystifying language that everyone said was just like Italian, and everyone was lying.

In Oklahoma City, when this happened, I almost never added the word "cool."

Omigod. I'm in Bucharest! On purpose.

Ain't life amazing.

History Lesson Pt II

2007-08-31T15:05:00.001+03:00
...Continued (see, just like I promised)

Part II: Now

June, 2007.

My plane had just landed at Otopeni, Bucharest’s International airport. I was back.

It was a simple transatlantic call from Andreea, who had been one of my clients when I was here four years ago. We became easy friends, and, somehow, I think, she must have babysat ex-pats before, because she was a damn-site better at it than the people who’d actually brought me over to Bucharest the first time four years ago.

“What’re you doing right now?”

“Nothing much. Why?”

“Cuz, I have to go to a meeting this afternoon in Constanta and I thought you might like to go for a ride out of the city.” (Constanta is on the Black Sea along Romania’s mere 60 or so miles of coastline, about 140 miles east of Bucharest, an Eastern European summer resort destination.)

“Let-me-think-about-it-yes.”

Andreea is an excellent tour guide, and seemed to know the subjects I might be interested in learning about, how to teach without preach, and when to keep quiet, how to slow down when I wanted to take a photo, all the important things. She would drop me off in some photogenic place, and then we’d meet in some prearranged coffee shop or park when she was done with her meeting. I saw a lot of Romania with her. Plus she gave me the courage to venture out on my own with my camera on the weekends when I had the red Dacia.

She’s a globally traveled Romanian, and I bet her English is better than yours. When I left Romania, she still worked for the country’s biggest telecom company, so, employee perk, every now and again I’d pick up the phone and hear that wonderful, accented, perfect English, just checking in to see how I was doing.

“ANDREEEEEEA! Ce faci? (Chey fatch?) ( How ya doin'?) Give me a project so I can come see you.”

She moved on from the telecom company a couple of times. So when her last call came in, and she said, “Do you want to do a project in Romania for me? I have one that’s perfect for you.”

What could I answer but “Let-me-think-about-it-YES.”

“Great. You won’t believe how much it’s changed.”

So that’s how I got to Otopeni Airport. And got my first glimpse of how quickly things had gone from Nu (no.)(pronounced New) to Nou. (new.)(pronounced No.) (Oh, goodie, my first Bilingual Romanian word play!)

There were approximately eight million four hundred thousand six hundred and eleven cars in front of us in the parking lot trying to pay and get out. A lot more cars than I remembered, And we weren’t even out of the parking lot yet.

And not one of them was a Dacia. Andreea had a new Peugeot 407. We were drowning in a sea of other Peugeots, BMW’s, Mercedes, Toyota's, V Dubs, Renaults, Skoda’s (more about these later because I’m driving one) Fords, and all of them nou. Wow.

“What’s up with all the cars?” I asked. I don’t remember getting too clear an answer because Andreea was, I think busy communicating some loving gesture with her hands and arms at the idiots in front of us who hadn’t figured out that they were supposed to pay at a kiosk inside, then get their cars, and then drive up to the exit gate to turn their tickets in and leave. Instead they would drive up to the gate, realize their error, leave the car blocking everyone behind, run into the station and wait in line behind all the other illiterati who also didn’t read the directions. Learning new ways is hard.

“Once it took me an hour to get out of the airport.These guys can't read!” she groused while executing a perfect cowboy maneuver around and ahead of a car about to use the exit gate as a rest stop. “Brava, Andreea! You go, girl!” Yee haw!

“I want to show you around the city before I take you to your hotel. I don’t think you will recognize Bucharest from before.”

Quel understatement! Was she ever right.

Besides all those things I told you about from when I was here before (oops, sorry, that just slipped out.) I didn’t tell you that the city had been crumbling. And now it wasn’t. That simple.

After the revolution in 1989 the outside of the buildings were neglected. Once the state didn’t own the bloc, individuals were allowed to buy their apartments. But since Owners Associations seemed a lot like the old overseers, nobody owned, therefore took any responsibility for, the exteriors. So they crumbled. During my first residence, though, those with enough money were buying men on scaffoldings to fix the crumble. They were everywhere. And they seemed to me to be moving slowly. And my snapshot of them shows – oh wait – I actually have the digital snapshot – I’ll post it here – was of a disintegrating city slightly beyond the verge of total deterioration. Scaffolds were as common as pizza parlors. They were gone now.

I guess you can tuck point a lot of buildings in 4 years.

I didn’t have to be in the city for an hour to feel the difference. The frustration and anger seemed evaporated. People were actually bustling. In Bucharest. I spotted some actual residents smiling. Eastern Europeans. Smiling. For no visible reason. Not at anything. Just smiling. OK, not all of them. There will always be scowlers till a few generations pass into history. But still, this was different. My cognitive dissonance antennae were twitching like crazy.

“What’s the difference? Whatever it is, it’s HUGE!”

So here’s the deal, see: (I'll make this short because you've been reading too long, and even I'm getting bored with it.)

Remember that 50% income tax? It’s been cut to 16%.

More Money to take home in fatter envelopes, right?

Not necessarily.

Sure, more money. But no envelopes.

Because the banks finally decided to let people access their own money: First there were Debit Cards. No more dangerous-to-carry/would-take-an-ogre’s-mattress-to-store-it-all cash. You could put your money in the bank and take it out anytime you needed it. Or, hey, just wanted to see it. Bancomat. (ATM).

That’s not all. This cascade continues. The march of the multi-nationals finally figured out that the emerging countries were the only unexploited markets left. Romania was now an EU member. The European Union isn’t much of a big deal for you state-siders, but for previously disenfranchised Eastern and Central Europeans, being a member is like joining the same century as the rest of the world.

Incoming!

Multi-nationals bring jobs. EU brings start-your-own-business grants. Increasing real estate values bring - money- money-money-money.

Did I mention money?

Money to put (where else?), in the bank to get back out of a bancomat machine. Money in the bank to establish credit. Credit, by the way, was unheard of in 2003. Who would give credit to a Romanian with such a low paying (above the table) job?

So now there are debit cards, and credit cards. Now there is credit for people with high paying jobs from the multi-national companies, and the growing Romanian companies using the startup grants. And the two best things that credit buys best, precisely those things that Romanian’s have been most deprived of. (Now stop that! Not Air Jordans)

Those things you can’t ever save up enough cash for on low wages:

Houses.

And cars.

Cars.

And more cars.

It's a Romanian sign of the times. Cars. Cars. And more cars. If you'd been here before 2004, you wouldn't recognize the place. I wonder if my driver ever got the VW Passat he was lusting after? If so, that would be too bad. He should have dreamed bigger.

I hate history lessons. Next time I’m taking you to the bucanie (grocery store). Or we'll go for a cowboy drive on the crazy streets of Bucaresti (b-you-cuh-rest (breathe the i, don't actually pronounce it)).

To see Romania in 2003 through my eyes,
click here.

History Lesson - Pt I

2007-08-30T11:53:00.000+03:00

PART I: Then

So let me tell you a little about Bucharest.

I hate to keep harking back to “when I was here before” like your grandmother telling you how she had to walk ten miles to school every day in the snow. Uphill. Both ways. But the contrast and amount of, well, we’ll call it “progress” for now, stands in clear relief for me because I have some comparisons. And, lucky you, there’s no way you can stop me from sharing.

As I said a few Romanian lessons ago, Romania was an all-cash society. (I don’t have to tell you that it was Communist for 45 years, or sort of Communist, with a dictator who took the Russians for all he could get, not to mention the Romanians, and built the 2nd largest building in the world, (only the Pentagon’s bigger) with the proceeds, do I?)

Well, when I was here before (2003-2004), the locals had already caught, captured, and, shall we say, er, 45-caliber aerated the man who exported all the crops to pay for his silk suits, cement mixers and megalomania. The Romanians liberated themselves and waited for the Americans to show them the fruits of democracy. <America The Beautiful with cello, harp and low-toned flute, sighing softly in the background.>

Well, here’s which Americans arrived: Mr. Coca-cola. Mr. HBO. Col. Kentucky Fried Chicken. And (don’t bother to hold your breath for this one)…The whole McDonalds family.

There was a whole country holding its breath, trying to teach itself how to be capitalists. And, trust me, without help, they weren’t very good at it.

Not that they didn't have the model. They had American TV. In every village.

Lenin had insisted that every satellite country be electrified and have hookups. It was a technologically smart way to disseminate uniform propaganda for two hours a night. So during Nicolae Ceausescu (Chow-Chess-coo)’s reign, the people saw party programs. After his exit, they got real TV. American TV. So they knew what “real” American life looked like. And they wanted it. Boy, did they ever. Just one teeny-tiny problem. They hadn’t a clue how to go about getting it.

When I was here before (sorry) the whole country, now that it was free, seemed to be waiting, like good comrades, for someone else to tell them what to do. And getting frustrated and angry in the process. You could feel it in the air. And on the streets.

What they wanted was simple. They wanted to know how to make all that rich, Western money, have a nice pair of Air Jordans, and have nice cars that were NOT Dacia’s. (A Dacia (Dat-cha) is a Romanian piece-of-shit car brand. It is not, as I'm sure you probably previously believed, a small, luxurious villa in the mountains outside Moscow where only party elite slipped away to on weekends with their mistresses. Those are Dachas. These POS cars are Dacia’s)

If you had a car at all in Romania, not a wooden wagon drawn by a walking ribcage, a Dacia is what you had.

I had two. I got the green one after I fired my driver for charging me double for everything including getting the dog groomed, then also turning the receipts into the company for reimbursement. I drove it from my apartment to the office and back again. I learned Romanian swear words driving it. It lived up to it's POS reputation. Old by any standard, it had a choke I kept forgetting to use when I was stopped for traffic. (Hey, my Mustang back home never had no stinking choke! What did I know!) It would stall all the time, and some frustrated Bucharest driver behind me would have to exit his car, scream at me, recognize that I was a just poor, helpless Amerikanca who could maybe hire his son, and then, more kindly, remind me to pull out the choke when I tried to restart the POS. I could see the road through the hole where the clutch came up into the passenger cabin.

There were some newer Dacias around, and after a pretty big fight with management, I got one of those to drive on the weekends. It was the go-to-clients car, shiny red, new, had an automatic transmission, and you couldn’t see the gravel under your feet through the floorboard. No choke.

The company owned it. Real people couldn’t afford them unless, of course, they had been family members of former Securitate officers. Maybe.

Oh yeah, and for this history lesson, don’t let me forget to mention that most able-bodied Romanians who weren’t Gypsies (Rroma) had two or three jobs, if they could get them. So did their mother. And brother, sister, cousin, and crazy Uncle Alexandru and Aunt Bogdana. Everything went into the family survival pot during this transition time. Because, suddenly the state didn’t assign you a job any more. No job, no money. No money, no shoes, no doctor’s visit, no electricity, no dinner. Social Security for the over 60-Somethings was a comfortable seat on a concrete park bench with your upturned hand out.

But, back then, you could feel the momentum. You could feel the push and frustration. Like keeping your foot on the brake at a stoplight, and pushing your foot down hard on the gas pedal waiting for the green light. At this point in Romanian history, the light wasn't changing very fast.

Oh, yeah, and one more thing. The income tax on the over-the-table jobs was 50%!

It was a huge tax on anything your earned on the books. So while you may have collected your cash in a No. 10 envelope, the government, if they actually ever knew how much you really made, got an equal portion. (Communist ideological holdover? Possibly) (Also, possibly standard, worldwide, bureaucratic greed.)

Needless to say, a lot of jobs went, er, shall we say, unreported.

FLASH FORWARD: (Yawn. Thank God. Finally.)

To be continued…

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Second Childhood

2007-08-26T20:26:00.000+03:00

8/26/2007
Bucaresti
Sunday, 20:16:13 PM

It’s nearing the end of August and the first sweet, cool rain is lifting the wool blanket we’ve all been under for weeks and weeks. It got so bad that the pharmacy chain I am consulting for put notices on all the windows of their stores inviting people who need it, to come in for a cup of water and a blood pressure check.

I’m still translating Fahrenheit to Celsius, so I never quite know exactly how hot or cold it is. As with so much else, I just watch the faces on the natives who are complaining about the weather, to determine degrees of heat stroke or relief. “Ooooh 38!” (that must be bad. Wait, I’ll go look it up for us.)

I’ve added, in my list of web favorites, to the Romanian English Online Dictionary, and the Yahoo Currency Converter, the Insta-C2F charts.

Yup. It’s bad. 100.4 degrees in real temperature.

The city is filled with green spaces everywhere. Some because it is undeveloped. Some because it is beautiful. Some because it is where you take your walks. Some because it is where you take your dogs. The leaves are edging into browns and yellows. As sure a sign of summer’s wind down as the decreasing numbers of people in any given office who have taken off to the Mountains or the Seaside for their two week allotted gambol, just when you need to ask them a critical question, or finally learned how to pronounce their last names.

Thank heavens for the dog. Because I’ve been here before, I do know a few people, and that’s been an enormous help in acclimating having a few friends to go out to dinner with. But in the day to day accommodation, without the schnauzer, I think I’d sink into a completely reverted state with my knees under my chin and my thumb in my mouth. She keeps me in present time. With a cat you can go both Zen and catatonic, no pun intended, but I don’t think that word’s derivation is accidental. With a dog, when you walk in the door, there is clearly no other human as important on the face of the earth as you are. And when she decides it is time to go outside to visit that smells-familiar part of the nearby green space, she means now, and who gives a damn if you’re reading, in a funk, making gnocchi, planning the overthrow of a global competitor, or just curled up in your bed with your knees under your chin, and your thumb in your mouth.

You see, the thing about being an expat is that it makes you an infant again. EVERYTHING is a question. Probably not as embarrassing as the one my own child asked about in the feminine hygiene aisle in a crowded US supermarket when he was five. But close. In your field, you are a genius/expert/guru. But walking through the supermarket, you are an illiterate baby.

Here’s, for example, just a partial list of things I had to, have to, or will soon figure out how to ask about. I think it’s a pretty typical ex-pat list. And it doesn’t even include “How much is that in real money?”

In no particular order:

How do you flush this toilet?
Can you make a right turn on a red light?
What kind of meat is this?
How close were the fields these vegetables were grown in to Chernobyl?
How do you take the bus? No, not take the bus AWAY, you know, TAKE the bus, er, ah, RIDE the bus?
Do I pay for this before or after?
Is this a gift? Or will you have me arrested if I walk out of the store with it.
You pronounce that like HOW!!? You’re kidding, right? Even a lesbian’s tongue would have trouble pronouncing that correctly.
How do you turn on the oven without blowing up the building?
What kind of cheese is that yellow one?
Don’t you people believe in elevators?
What do the funny symbols on the washing machine mean?
Is it safe to drink the water?
Where’s the dryer? You’re kidding. From the balcony? OK, if you say so.
Does the power go out like this all the time? Or was it my current converter and the iron?
How do you make a call from a pay phone?
Which taxis is it that I’m never supposed to hail on the street?
Yeah, but is it REAL Coca-Cola?
Is this shampoo, body cream or anti-fungal plant food?

Do I love it? Every second. Well, nearly every second. And maybe by this time next year I’ll be nearly fluent, know what time it is on a 24-hour clock, and have figured out how much it all was in real money.

Gas Doesn't Come By The Gallon Here.

2007-08-23T21:11:00.000+03:00
Bucharest, Romania
Thursday, August 23, 2007

Ok, now where was I before I was so toothily interrupted?

Oh, right. I was telling you that I’m back in Bucharest.

First, let me answer the most asked question from y'all, so we can get it out of the way and get on to some good, juicy dish about people you don't even know yet.

"How much does a gallon of gas cost?"

Everyone wants to know, so here goes.

Gas in Bucharest is now about 3.3 RON per litre. Approximately 4 litres to an approximate gallon. like quarts, or bottles of Pepsi. So 3.3 times four would be 12 and 12/10ths per kililitre. Oh no. Let me see. 10 tenth’s to a RON with two left over and three times three is nine, oops, no, three times four is twelve, plus the two extra from the 12/10ths. Okay, got it. That’s 13.2 RON. RON is new Lei, which removed three zero’s from the old money, which they changed out of after I left last time. Now where was I? 13.2 RON, which as of Yahoo financial today, is worth, um, forty two cents, oh, wait, let me check again, because the RON is rising against the dollar (darn!) and every penny counts. Ok the RON is at forty one and an half cents. (Hey, I made money. Half a cent. I think. Or I lost a half. This is too confusing.) So forty one and a half cents USD times 13.2 equals …ta da!...FIVE DOLLAR$ AND FORTY-EIGHT CENT$ A GALLON. Approximately.

YIKES!

Welcome to my daily world.

I get to do the same math dance for every loaf of bread, can of corn and IKEA chifferobe I decide to buy.

Before, it would have cost me 132,000 (yup, thousand) Old Lei. It was mostly an all cash society when I was here in 2003-2004, with no credit cards, certainly, and absolutely no debit cards. But now Romania is part of the EU and getting ready in half a dozen years or so to switch over to the Euro, just to make poor foreigner expats like me even more confused.

When I was here before, I got paid mostly in wire transfers into the US, but still got about an inch of old Lei on payday for my everyday purchases (like expensive benzina/petrol (gas).

The people who worked for me, and didn't have a US bank account to wire transfer into, all got paid with about 3-5 inch thicknesses of money monthly. In a sealed white business envelope the likes of which you could just imagine George Raft slipping subtly into the breast pocket of his expensive suit jacket while Eliot Ness (to mix my metaphors again) looked the other way.

It was even tougher calculating the price of anything on the spot then than you just joined me doing above. But you know something? I kind of miss the old lei system.
Sure it was hard to count and looked like monopoly money to an expat. But for about thirty bucks a million, once a month, I could honestly tell my folks that I was, at last, finally, a multi-millionaire.
Today it would have cost forty-one, fifty.

The Tooth Of The Matter.

2007-08-20T07:48:00.000+03:00
Bucharest, Romania

So, my worldwide friends,

I am once again in Eastern Europe for those who didn’t already know this.

My American English has almost automatically dropped away into an old familiar cadence I call Eur-o-peen Ing…leash. No, not Brit. That’s a language and rhythm all its own, and a bit of all right it is, that, but that's not this. This is a slower, clipped language that individuates each word for listeners who know English at various levels, any of which are indeterminate, and who may or may not understand words like “individuate” and “indeterminate.” So if my words seem a bit oddly paced, it will be, I think, because now I am thinking in this rhythm and may well be typing in it as well. (But put me in the presence of another American – few and far between so far – and I fall back into our pace and jargon in a flash.)

I am struggling to learn Romanian, a language which will be of absolutely no use to me anywhere else in the world, but which, without, I am separated from a world of nuance and subtext which is critical for the work I am now doing. One of my colleagues here lovingly presented me with a Romanian dictionary for children 4 to 7 years old. She’s gotten it about right. After a thousand walks around a long Northern Virginia block before I left, much to the dog’s delight, repeating by rote 654 Romanian vocabulary words like “pasta de dinst” (toothpaste- which you will see is coming in handy right now) I can speak like a native. A native, slow 4 year old. Well, maybe not that well yet, but I have plans.

So, here I am, sitting in my car, yes I got a car immediately, in downtown Bucharest, outside of a radiology clinic for dental x-rays. It was right out of every Ami’s nightmare, (to have to have Eastern European dentistry) because I bit into a piece of crusty bread at lunch on Thursday, and heard the crack of an already fragile back tooth.

The tooth is now gone, and I have survived the myth of Olga, the supposed communist dentist, putting one foot on your mouth and, with both hands and a pliers, yanking out an offending molar. Instead, I had Dr. Mihai Mandaj, a charming gentle man who didn’t overload me with too much Novocain the way lawsuit-nervous US dentists do, and who took pains, all puns intended, to explain exactly what he was doing and going to do and did, in words I barely understood, as he relieved me of the offending, fractured fang. I don’t know what the general state of dentistry in Bucharest is, but if this nice dentist is any indication, the US practitioners could take a lesson or two.

The Romanians also don’t give you too much pain medication after an extraction. Or any, apparently. Yikes! Guess you need childbirth in this country to get good drugs. Mere dental extraction pain is expected to be tolerable, so no free codeine laced Tylenol samples or prescriptions for this sissy American. Here’s the surprise: there was very little actual pain. And most of it confirms a theory of mine that the pain in the dentistry act comes from forcing a spit-load of too much Novocain fluid into your gum with a needle meant to calm large horses. A bit of acetaminophen, which I brought with me, a touch of mind-body meditation which I carry with me internally for all occasions anyway, and I’m fine.

Now I wait for the Medident to open for my x-rays, and then Dr. Mihai will build me a bridge that will cost a few hundred dollars instead of the thousands I could expect from the practitioners in urban Virginia.

More about what I’m doing here and what a good time I’m having doing it when I come back downstairs. And less, I hope, on the joys of Eastern bloc radiation.

Oh, yeah, I’m sitting in the car typing on the company laptop war driving (“borrowing”) someone else’s wireless network. I hope that isn’t a jailable offense here.

___________

Ok, I’m back, and in the office during a lull. And as long as we’re talkin’ teeth, here, I might as well take you up the stairs with me to the radiologie.

For those of you who are Europophiles, you already know that etaj (floor) 2 is actually on the third floor. No lift, er, sorry, went Brit there for a moment. No elevator. That’s odd for modern Bucharest, but, hey, this is an old building. So, up in the dark THREE flights of stairs, not two, in shoes not perfect for the foot that caught all the weight of the IKEA bookcase yesterday when I dropped it– well that’s another two stories, but for later.

Now this is beginning to feel like the ooh-ooh scary part of a James Bond movie about the Soviets. I hand in my form from the Dentist, which for all the world looks to me like a brochure for this place, and then realize that Dr. Mihai has scrawled something on it in that semi-Cyrillic number style we Westerners think of as out of Paris Art Nouveau. A description of what he wants 'rayed, I hope, and not an invitation to sell me into white slavery. Nah, he wouldn't do that.

The place was filling up, and three or four slim Romanian attendants dressed in angel white, but with Eastern European scowls were alternately standing on a chair flicking switches on a fuse panel and calling all the names of the people who came through the door in no particular order I could discern, pretty much using the same code as in the US. Or so I thought. Nope. On closer inspection, it turned out to be pretty much first come, first served, party order, except for exceptions like me who couldn’t speak Romanian, and who needed to wait for the Andreea/Irina who remembered enough of her party/high school English to be able tell me to start breathing through my nose, and actually get me to understand and start breathing through my nose.

Oh, boy. Dr. Mihai’s office looked like it hadn’t been re-habbed in a few decades, but this place? I think if Gorky or Trotsky had ever come for a visit and needed x-rays, THIS is the building he came to. Inside the only room that actually did have electricity – with who-knew-what-animal chasing a succulent, out of reach stack of hay around in a circle to drive a water wheel and a donkey engine – the x-ray machine glowed green and only seemed a bit overwhelmingly terrifying from the outter room!

I felt trapped between “I’m supposed to be here or I’d be somewhere else!! Ommmm.” and “Ommmm…igod, how many accidental roentgens I will be sending through my medulla oblongata for the sake of bridging over troubled orthodonture?!”

There I go again, underestimating the Romanians, and how quickly they have chosen to crawl out from under Moscow’s yoke. On the other side of the white tin paneled room out of some 1950’s anti-commie B movie was one of the best 360 degree surround x-ray machines I’ve ever seen. So maybe the sign I’d translated, as I practiced my burgeoning Romanian on every outdoor board and grocery weekly throwaway and wall sign I could find, was correct. Maybe they were “the 100% most visited dental radiologie in all of …” I ran out of translation time when they called my name, but it probably finished…”Bucharest.” Or maybe “Romania.” Could have been “most of the planet” for all I could read. Nevertheless, the “aparat” was state of the art, and didn’t I feel foolish?

So, I waited a few minutes while the next lineup of x-ray enlightenment seekers filled the side-chairs, then I was handed a 9x12 envelope and a bill for 37 RON.

That would be a full mouth x-ray in under 10 minutes for …wait for it…$15.83!

Yup. Sixteen bucks.

Wow. I hope none of these guys ever get to hear about the American Dental Association. Or any other D Association while I am still in need of friendly, low cost bridge building. I mean, hey, I’m probably going to be here for another few years or so anyway, eating the local food, right? So I might as well eat it with the same kinds of choppers the natives sport.

I’m sorry. I started to tell you that I am back in Bucharest, and I planned to tell you about my new swell job that pays well and provides my apt, car, internet, travel and lunch Monday through Friday, and to share some pithy aphorisms on how much things have changed for the better since I was here in the beginning of 2004, and, of course, invite you over for a visit.

Oh, well, I’ll save it for next time. I’m already twice or six times over the limit of the average attention span for an email. So for now, La Revedere (like the Italian Arrividerci). keep reading and I’ll have you speaking Romanian like a slow 4 year old native well before your plane lands at Otepeni Airport for your visit.

Loves n hugs,

Shelly.