Omidumnezeu!

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.

Second Childhood

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.

The Tooth Of The Matter.

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.