Halfway down the Danube

The Empty Lands

I woke up at dawn. The train was rolling along smoothly, the teenage girls in the next compartment had finally giggled themselves to sleep, and the sky outside was filling up with light. I got out of bed and looked out the window.

Outside was an absolutely flat plain. Fields of straggly, unhealthy looking corn alternated with fields of sunflowers. Miles away in the distance, at the edge of vision, a line of cypress trees marched against the horizon.

And that was all. There were no roads. No towns. No grain elevators. I looked in all directions but I couldn't see... anything. Just absolutely flat land,

stretching to the horizon. Withered-looking corn, millions of sunflowers. And the cypress trees far, far away.

I wanted to go back to bed -- Bucharest was still a couple of hours away, and I could use the sleep -- but the sight was arresting. I'd never seen such an utterly empty country. Minutes passed, miles went by, nothing changed. It was hypnotic.

Then I saw someone: a man, with a scythe. He was chopping down some of the nondescript plants -- grain? weeds? -- that grew between the corn and the sunflowers. A few yards away, a horse stood in front of a wagon, head down.

The sun slowly pulled itself over the edge of the world. The air filled with a faint haze. More miles passed. I saw another man with a scythe, and then a third. I don't know what they were doing. Every mile looked just like the last one: sunflowers, withered corn, sunflowers. There was no breath of air; no frond of corn rustled, no sunflower nodded. Nothing moving except for the train. There were still no towns, no houses, no roads or cars. No tractors. Just mile after mile of the emptly lands and, very occasionally, perhaps every mile or two, a man with a scythe. And the cypress trees in the farthest distance, painted on the dusty dome of the sky.

Eventually I went back to bed.

Later, in Bucharest, I looked at a map. Sure enough, there's a stretch of flat and empty land to the east of the city: Cimpea Burnazului, the Plain of Burnaz. The name sounds vaguely Biblical, though it's probably Turkish.

At a practical level, it's about the poverty of rural Romania and the aftereffects of Communism. Planned villages in inconvenient locations, and no cars or tractors or paved roads in the countryside. No irrigation canals or sprinklers to lay the dust and give relief to the struggling corn. All very understandable.

And yet it was very like a dream, that absolutely empty land, silent and motionless, with the sunflowers bowing their heads to watch us go by.

I Like Belgrade

Man, I like Belgrade.

Not that Bucharest isn't just fine. Bucharest is very nice. But Belgrade... Belgrade has that special something.

It's hard to put my finger on just what. It isn't a particularly beautiful city architecturally; there are a lot of nice old buildings, but also a lot of nasty crumbling socialist stuff. And the air's not very clean, and it can get really unpleasantly sticky in summer.

But it doesn't matter. Somehow I just like Belgrade. Is it the cherry strudel at the little cafe on Teraziye? The view from the top of the Hotel Casina? The friendly booksellers on the Knez Mihajlova? The summer outfits? The mostly honest taxi drivers? The countless little cafes? The rivers?

Or maybe it's just that I have friends there, so I see the place differently.

Anyhow, it was good to be back. I took the overnight train on Thursday night, which gave me three days and two nights. The Hotel Casina is a grubby little place with painfully slow elevators, but it sits in the center of town, and if you know which room to ask for, you can get a balcony with a breathtaking view: eight stories down to Teraziye, with the cathedral to your left, the pedestrian mall on your right, and the Sava River directly in front of you. It's really something.

(Oddly enough, the balcony rooms cost the same as the no-balcony rooms. This suggests to me that the Hotel Casina is still owned by the state. In a few years someone will buy it, and turn those rooms into very, very expensive apartments. Progress, I suppose.)

It was a very full three days, with friends and business and shopping and more friends. At the end, I was very glad to collapse back on to the train. There was something wrong with the electrical system in the sleeper car and the lights wouldn't work and -- this is how tired I was -- I didn't care. I didn't even want to read (well, not much). I fell asleep as soon as we crossed the border and didn't wake up until sunrise, seven hours later and 500 kilometers further east.

Mm, Belgrade. Hope to see you again soon.

Damn, That's Ugly

The Palace of the People was Nicolae Ceaucescu's great monument to... well, himself, really. He had to destroy much of downtown Bucharest to build it; it was completed less than six months before the Revolution. Life Problems for Dictators: you finally get your house finished the way you like it, and then you're put up against a wall and shot.

Anyhow, the Palace of the People is either the second or the fourth largest building in the world, depending on who you talk to. The Lonely Planet says that "Romanians have a love-hate relationship" with it. Maybe. I haven't yet met a Romanian who didn't hate the damn thing.

This weekend I was walking around the downtown for several hours. (It beats sitting at home bored and lonely and missing Claudia. Also, I'm running out of books to read.)

I decided to circumnavigate the Palace.

This took over an hour and was strangely unpleasant. The Palace sits on an artificial hill. It is completely detached from the city around it. And it's really ugly, although it's a very subtle sort of ugliness. Banal rather than brutal. "As if Albert Speer had decided to bore you to death," said our friend Carlos after looking at a picture.

There's also something slightly disorienting about it. It's so big that the brain doesn't really want to register it as a "building". At the same time, for something so big it's strangely... unimpressive, somehow.

The Palace wasn't Ceaucescu's only accomplishment. He thought that Bucharest, as a major European capital city, should have a river flowing through it. Unfortunately the only river available was the tiny Dumbovitsa. It was rechanneled through the middle of downtown and then its flow was slowed down to make it bigger. Unfortunately this made it prone to floods. So they had to put it in a canal, with concrete banks.

It's not exactly the Rhine, or even the Thames. It's maybe two meters deep and 15 meters across. Thick clots of algae float on the surface. If you spit into it, you can see that there is a current, but a very very slow one -- five minutes per meter, maybe. It smells strongly of old socks.

(Remarkably, I saw people trying to fish in it. People will try to fish in all sorts of places. I truly, truly hope they're just doing it for sport.)

I don't want to paint too bleak a picture. The Romanians have turned part of the Dumbovitsa into a sort of promenade, with a little stretch of park along either side and some nice little bridges and paths. Couples stroll along it in the long summer evenings. It still smells like old socks but you stop noticing that after a while.

Still, when you look at what was done to a perfectly nice little stream, you would want to slap Ceaucescu. If, of course, he hadn't already been put up against a wall and shot.

Sometimes I wonder how much of the fall of Communism can be traced to ugliness. Maybe none, and it was all about the obvious issues: people wanting to have food on the table, a decent job, the chance to travel and speak their mind. Freedom and wealth.

But surely at some level people must have gotten tired of concrete.

TMI, probably

"Blocked milk ducts" sounds so harmless. It's PAINFUL! Plus, it comes with fever, which I hate, and very frustrating nursing sessions with David. The poor little one doesn't understand why it's so hard to get some milk out all of a sudden. He's constantly hungry but in order to get rid of the block, he has to continue nursing on the painful side.

Is this TMI?

Probably. But that is what is happening in my life right now - and you wouldn't believe how much pain can reduce your world to one particular body part. I can't even muster enough righteous indignation for Bush's hugging of Berlusconi, it's that bad.

Juggling

Having a newborn and a toddler is more demanding that I had anticipated - and less. I forgot about the interrupted nights and how taxing those are. David is recovering from his jaundice and nursing stronger and stronger with every passing day - which means that the nursing sessions get shorter and more effective. Which also means that we don't have to be up half of the night and I am more rested in the mornings (mind, that is comparative!). With Alan, I could just rest when he rested. Now, when David sleeps, Alan demands his rights. But so far, we're handling it pretty well. Last night, David slept five hours straight which was pure bliss. He's also a very content and calm baby - not a screamer, not a fusser. He just lies in his crib and looks at the world with this curious expression on his face, sometimes smiling as if we were the most amusing thing he's ever seen (which is probably true). We are very blessed. Another high-maintenance baby like Alan would definitely not go over so well!

The first cut...

... was very gentle. I only trimmed the very unruly, very long bits of Alan's hair, most remained untouched. He looks, hm, very German now, in that 30's kind of way. It's a good thing that he has this very "unneat" expression on his face, otherwise it would creep me out.

Spawn II

Late but finally being announced - Spawn II. Born on July 7, 2003 at 9:08 in the morning. He weighed 6 lbs. 9 oz. and was 20 inches long. He's doing very well, I'm recovering and trying to get adjusted to nightly wakings again. It's funny how quickly one gets used to nights of uninterrupted sleep!