January 24, 2004
The next day
The blizzard is passing, leaving more than 30 people dead across the region -- including at least one man who went off the road last night near Galati. So my unpleasant experience was, unfortunately, far from unique.
I should add here that the road was not the problem. The road was actually pretty good -- smooth, straight, and usually well engineered (no blind spots, well drained, etc.). It wasn't a very big road, no; in the US or Germany it would be considered a good country road, not the main link between the capital and the nation's third largest city. But the road was OK.
And so was Galati. Having heard that it was an industrial town -- steel mills, shipyards -- I was expecting a larger Calarasi. But parts of Galati are actually quite nice. I even got a view of the Danube for about 30 seconds from the city esplanade, before the snow closed in again.
One interesting difference between Galati and Bucharest: there are a lot of Moldovans in Galati. Moldova is the little independent country that used to be the Soviet Republic of Moldavia. It was part of Romania before 1944, and most of its people are ethnically Romanian. Arguably it ought to be part of Romania now, but for a variety of reasons it's probably going to stay a separate country for at least another generation.
Many Moldovans come to Galati as students, many more come to find work (with varying degrees of legality), and there's even a little cross-border trade. It makes sense; Galati is right on the border, with easy access by rail, road and river, and it's bigger than any city in Moldova itself. Moldova is part of the city's natural hinterland.
And the Galatians seem to like the Moldovans pretty well. There's a certain amount of looking down the nose, but it's not nearly as bad as in the rest of Romania -- where I've noticed a strong tendency to view the Moldovans as dumb country cousins, good only for unskilled labor, if that. It's a relationship that's probably going to get worse before it gets better, since Romania is sure to join the EU a long time before Moldova ever will.
Anyhow. I said the road was OK, but one thing was really annoying: the plows. Romania has plows, but seems curiously reluctant to use them. Once again, we passed at least eight of them, but not one was actually plowing; they were just driving around with the blades held daintily 20 or 30 cm off the road. This got rather irritating after a while, especially once the snow started drifting in long white fingers across the pavement.
The roads were still closed today, but the worst seems to be over; the blizzard is now blowing itself out over the lower Balkans. It was a huge thing, with tentacles extending as far west as Venice (several cm of snow in St. Mark's square) and as far south as the Suez Canal (closed for several hours because of the gales; very unusual). And large parts of Turkey and Bulgaria are still in a state of emergency.
The worst of it seems to have passed Bucharest by [crossed fingers]. We've had a slow sifting of flakes all day, amounting to another cm or so on top of the 3 or 4 that fell last night, but no heavy winds or freezing cold.