Halfway down the Danube

But then, a beautiful Sunday

Gorgeous weather here today, like a day from early May come six weeks early. Sunny, light breezes. Kids on bicycles and roller skates suddenly everywhere. In the garden, a single yellow blossom opening timidly at the end of a forsythia branch. The first flies of the season buzzing slow and lazy around the living room.

Alan and David are loving it. Alan... well, there has been construction on Callea Dorobants (the big street that runs a block from our house) for the last couple of days; they're scraping and resurfacing. This involves lots of heavy equipment: scraper, grader, bulldozer, backhoe with... um... the smash-the-tarmac attachment thingy. Anyhow, they're all big, loud, smelly, dirty and dangerous, and Alan wants nothing else than to stand on the sidewalk and watch them all... day... long.

-- There's a guy down the street from us who is an auto mechanic. It's love, not work; when he's not doing it for money, he's chopping an old Citroen Deux Chevaux into an off-road vehicle, with which he competes in races across Romania. (Yeah, there are off road racers in Romania. Who knew?) He doesn't win -- if you're serious about off road racing, you need to chop something a bit more powerful than an old DC -- but he has fun, and that's what matters.

Anyhow, he says that the repaving of Callea Dorobants is a gigantic scam. The road surface gets scraped up, remelted, mixed with some new asphalt, sprayed back on the road, rerolled... and in a year, after another winter, it will be exactly the same. He's not sure what the point of it all is, but he suspects it has something to do with EU money.

I don't know; but certainly something is terribly wrong with the roads of Bucharest. They're in horrible condition. And in the eight months since we arrived, they've gotten worse.

The sidewalks are pretty awful, too, I'm afraid. Up at Piatsa Dorobants there's a hole in the sidewalk that's big enough to hold a two-year-old child. I know, because it held our two-year-old child. Alan climbed into it and it was up to his chest; when he stood up straight, it was like half a child growing out of the pavement.

(For some reason I'm reminded of Plunkett of Tammany Hall, and his lecture on honest and dishonest graft. Honest graft gets the road built.)

Anyhow. Bad roads and sidewalk holes notwithstanding, it has been a Sunday to make you glad to be alive. Spring in the Balkans tends to be short -- last year we went from snow in the middle of March, to sweltering by the end of April. We can hope it will be different this year, but meanwhile we will enjoy it as best we can, while we can.

Posted by douglas at March 21, 2004 08:51 PM