Halfway down the Danube: PYCE spells Ruse

October 16, 2003

PYCE spells Ruse

Ruse is a small city on the Bulgarian side of the Danube. If you enter it by the Friendship Bridge, the first thing you'll notice is the set of enormous cranes on the shore of the river; Ruse is a shipyard and a port. Whether it's a busy port or not I can't say. None of those cranes budged an inch while we were there, but then, it was a Sunday.

We came into Ruse driving sort of randomly in what we hoped was the direction of the city center. By this time we were feeling a certain urgency. Alan was getting restless and bored after two hours in the car, the baby was getting hungry, and I needed a bathroom. Still, we did feel a certain frisson of pleasure when we realized that we were reading signs in Cyrillic again: PYCE for Ruse, XOTNL (with backwards-N) for Hotel, PECTOPAH for Restaurant, and so on. Nice to know the skills hadn't decayed.

We drove past several kilometers of mysterious pipeline, some sort of enormous memorial, around a couple of traffic circles, and ended up parked in front of a large apartment block. It was a random block somewhere in the neighborhood of the train station, chosen solely because it had a playground in front, so that I could run Alan up and down the swings and slides while Claudia nursed the baby.

-- Ruse, like every other city in Eastern Europe, has a lot of pretty dreary looking apartment blocks. The ones in this particular part of the city were notable for being at the less awful end of the post-Communist spectrum. That is, they were big ugly unfriendly-looking things, but they did not look as if pieces were about to fall off of them, and some had plots of green grass between them, with benches and a playground. "This is actually rather nice," I said to Claudia. "Boy, have our standards shifted," she replied.

But anyhow. I put Alan on the swings, and... there was this woman beating carpets. They were Turkish-looking carpets, very colorful. The woman had a headscarf and no expression whatsoever on her face. But she had a carpet beater, and she was hanging the carpets on a rack right next to the playground, and whack, whack, whack, she was just beating the hell out of these carpets.

It was fascinating. I mean, I'd seen carpet beaters before, but I had never actually seen one used to beat a carpet. It was fascinating for Alan, too. Except that he, being not quite nineteen months old, did not bother to politely conceal his interest. No, he stared. Absolutely motionless; enthralled. With his mouth hanging open.

This went on for a good ten minutes: the woman kept beating the carpets, and Alan just stood there staring at her. I put him on the swing; he swung, but he continued to stare with unbroken intensity. He didn't lose interest until she stopped. She, meanwhile, never changed her expression or acknowledged his existence in any way.