Halfway down the Danube

Picture of the Day

David and Alan taking a bath together in the sink. Well, it's making our life exciting.

Orthodox Wedding

We went to a Romanian wedding last weekend. The groom was our friend Milo, a Serbian-American attorney. Milo has been consulting all over the region for the last few years. Some time ago, while working in Bucharest, he met a lovely Romanian woman (also a lawyer). One thing eventually led to another, and so there we all were.

It was our first Orthodox wedding ceremony, and it was very interesting. It was in the Sfetu Eleftereu church in central Bucharest. This is a beatiful large church, obviously recently renovated; the interior is dark and cavernous, but every surface is covered with paintings, in a very interesting sort of Byzantine-Academic style. Chairs were available, but everybody stood.

One big difference from Catholic and Protestant weddings: the ceremony is sung or chanted, not spoken. The priests sing for a bit, and then the choir responds. Very lovely.

Another touch that I liked: early in the ceremony, the bride and groom are given crowns, which they wear until the end. (Well, silvery tiara thingies.) These crowns, I was later told, have two meanings. One, they symbolize the new authority of the couple; they have entered into the formal estate of matrimony, and so have taken on both power and responsibility.

Two, they're crowns of martyrdom. I admit, I like that. Marriage involves sacrifice, which means suffering. Sure, a good marriage is much more good than bad. But I like a ceremony that is up front about the difficulty, right at the start.

Finally, at the end of the ceremony the entire wedding party walks in a circle, three times around the altar. Nothing special there, except that the bride had a train about 15 feet long. A little boy, perhaps a young cousin or some such, was holding up the end. The geometry of the situation was such that he had to trot quickly in order to keep up; he was panting visibly by the end of the last circle...

-- And how was it different from the Serbian Orthodox version, I asked our Serbian friends? "The Serbian crowns are gold, and bigger," said one. "Yes, and the Serbian version is longer." "Yes, much longer." I don't know why, but somehow that didn't surprise me.

Mogosoaia

We visited Mogosoaia this weekend, too.

Mogosoia is a former royal palace that has seen a bit more history than is really good for it. It was built in the late 1600s by a fellow named Constantine Brancoveanu, who was the ruler of Wallachia. (Wallachia is now southern Romania.) Brancoveanu was an enlightened fellow with a taste for modern architecture, so his palace was an interesting mix of traditional Byzantine construction (lots of Roman arches) and elements imported from elsewhere (like a Venetian loggia, Baroque decoration, and some very fancy Austrian-style brickwork).

Alas, Brancoveanu conspired against his overlord, the Ottoman Sultan. The Sultan didn't take it well, and had Brancoveanu taken to Istanbul, tortured, and beheaded. (His wife recovered his head and brought it back, and Brancoveanu eventually became a national hero and martyr, but never mind that now.) The Sultan had Mogosoia turned into a "han" -- a sort of Motel-6 for caravans -- and for the next century or so, that's what it was.

By the mid-1800s it was pretty run down. But by that time Romania was independent of the Ottomans, and an aristocratic family bought the crumbling old palace and renovated it.

It stayed in the family for nearly a century, eventually passing to a Princess Martha Bibescu. Princess Martha was a remarkable woman. Born in 1887, she corresponded with Marcel Proust as a girl, was friends with the Romanian and Russian royal families, smoked cigarettes in a jade holder, kept a Parisian salon full of Dadaists, wrote advanced and decadent novels (under her own name) and pot-boiler thrillers (under a pen name), was vaguely involved with some sort of espionage in Berlin in the 1930s, and lived to be 85, dying a very old woman in her beloved Paris.

By that time Mogosoaia had been taken over by the Communists, who turned it into a museum. Princess Martha had renovated the palace again, planted a long alley of poplars along the front drive, and also added a variety of Jazz Age innovations -- fancy mosaics on the floors, an elaborate rose garden. These were allowed to stay, but the Art Deco furniture mysteriously disappeared and has not been seen since.

Today Mogosoaia sits on the edge of a rather gummy little lake, surrounded by a park that has seen better days. On the other side of the lake, several large new houses are under construction; they'll do nothing for the view /from/ the old palace, but the people who live there will have a very nice view /of/ it.

But the palace itself is well worth a visit. Claudia and I enjoyed walking around the grounds and climbing up the long staircases to the various verandas and balconies. Alan enjoyed... the gravel. Gravel walks; lots of little pebbles. Pebbles are very interesting. They come in many different shapes. True, they're not good to eat... but you can throw them! When I undressed him for his bath that night, I found a dozen or more inside his clothes.

Anyhow. If you're in the neighborhood of Bucharest, Mogosoaia is well worth a look, especially if you're a history or architecture buff. One day Claudia will show me how to implant links in this thing; meanwhile, you can find lots of pictures by plugging "mogosoaia" into google. Most of the pages are in Romanian, mind you, which suggests that this site isn't too well known outside of this country.

(It's pronounced Mogo Sho Ai-yah, by the way. I'm guessing that's Turkish, though who knows.)

Tomato trail

So we took the "telecabina" up to the mountain top at 2000 meters. Maybe we would have thought twice, had we noticed the "Built 1970" sign, or the crud-covered emergency handle, or the picture of the Virgin Mary above the emergency phone. However, we hadn't and up we went, high above the tree tops, swaying madly to and fro. "At least", Doug said, "we'd all go down together". Not much of a consolation that was.

(Click on the pictures to see the full versions!)

We walked up the last five or so elevation meters to reach the plateau and were rewarded with a breathtaking view of the southern part of the Carpathian mountains, a few of which had snow crusts clinging to them. The air was so good, so clean - our lungs had a little fest up there. It was quite nippy but the sun shone and we happily set out to hike down the "Red Trail" to the mid-mountain station. We figured that as a first, a two-hour hike with the kids would be enough.

The trail turned out to be erratically marked. Sometimes, we'd have a cluster of two or three signs quite close to each other but other times, the signs were barely detectable. The trail itself was often washed out and barely visible, so we ended up asking people for directions. Those people usually reacted a bit confused when Doug asked for the "drum rosii". Only hours lately it came to us that "rosii" doesn't mean red ("rosu") but "tomato". Well, if I encountered some tourists asking me for the "tomato trail", I'd be confused too.

We did find the mid-mountain station, though, and in no bad time, either. David slept through the entire hike; Alan was pretty well-behaved and was rewarded with a stick and was allowed to walk the last 500 meters down the rocky trail. Oh, if I could ever be as happy as a little boy with a stick! It was a great day for all of us - we got some color in our cheeks, worked up an enormous appetite and our muscles were nicely sore the next day. Definitely something worth repeating.

Automatic for the People

Today we drove up to Sinaia, to go hiking in the mountains there.

Sinaia is an old resort town about two hours north of Bucharest; the former Romanian Royal Family had a palace there. Today it's a big ski resort, right at the southern edge of the Carpathians.

Maybe tomorrow we'll write about hiking around Sinaia with the babies. Tonight I just want to describe the drive up. The drive out of Bucharest isn't exactly delightful; very crowded, with the usual horrible and hair-raising driving. Then once you hit the countryside, it's sort of stop and go; the "highway" keeps going through small towns, with the speed going down to 50 km/30 mph. And for the first half hour or so, both Alan and David were fussing from the back seat.

But after a while they quieted down and fell asleep. And the road got, not better, but at least less busy.

Claudia had bought a few tape cassettes in Hungary when she and Michael drove down last month. We grabbed one more or less at random and popped it in.

Meanwhile, we were taking the bypass road around Ploesti. Ploesti is the site of Romania's great fields of oil and natural gas. Or it was; the oil is mostly gone, and the natural gas is going. But much of Ploesti is still a Communist-industrial moonscape of oil rigs, refineries venting flames, huge cooling towers, vast inexplicable pipes diving in and out of the ground.

Meanwhile the R.E.M. tape is playing: "Automatic for the People", their dark and strange album from the distant year 1992. The only song that got much airplay was "Everybody Hurts Sometimes", but there are at least four other tracks that are as good or better. ("Everybody Hurts" is actually one of the more upbeat songs on that album. Listen hard to "Try Not To Breathe" sometime, which is about an old person trying to die. It's a great song, and actually sort of uplifting, but it's not what you'd call feel-good whimsy.)

So anyway, there we are driving through this crumbling industrial landscape of megalomaniacal concrete monoliths and rusting pipelines... and on comes "Man On The Moon", their tribute to Andy Kaufman. Followed by "Night Swimming", which is one of the most sweetly melancholic songs ever written by a rock'n'roll band. (I mean, it's piano, violin, and Michael Stipe's voice. With a little bit of oboe at the end. Brrr.)

And, I don't know: the kids were sound asleep, the car was rolling along, and I just thought how strange it was to be here, but how good. Sitting next to this particular woman, driving across this particular ground. Maybe it was the blighted land around us that made me suddenly feel how precious was this moment and these people. And maybe the music helped. Yeah, it's sort of jejune and hokey to get that kind of feeling from pop music, even good pop music. But that album is about how death and sweetness, hope and decay and absurdity are inextricably tangled. So it was weirdly, obliquely, absurdly appropriate.

Or maybe it's just that I love my wife, and don't have too many undistracted minutes with her these days, to just put my hand on hers and be quiet together.

Anyhow, it was just a... happy moment. Strange but true.

Then after a while the cooling towers and refineries dwindled into the distance behind us, and we saw the first blue line of the mountains against the northern sky.

The Hatchet

"Having made the world, the Lord God put order among the nations and gave each a distinctive sign.

"He taught the gypsy to play the fiddle and to the German he gave a screw.

"From among the Jews he summoned Moses, and unto him he said: 'Thou shalt write a law, and when the time comes shalt let the Pharisees crucify my best beloved son Jesus; after which thy nation shall endure much suffering and persecution, though in compensation I shall let gold flow over you like abundant waters.'

"He beckoned to the Hungarian and chose a number of gewgaws for him among those he had at hand: 'Here I give thee Hessian boots and spurs, and resin to make the ends of thy moustaches stand up stiff; thou shalt be full of conceit and be fond of revelry and women.'

"The Turk then came forward: 'A rich share of wits thou shalt not have, but by the sword shalt thou prevail over others.'

"To the Serb he gave a spade."

Thus begins _The Hatchet_, by Mihai Sadoveanu. Published in 1930, this is one of the modern classics of Romanian literature; it's taught in every school, and (I have recently discovered) most adult Romanians remember it very well.

The plot is admirably simple. Nechifor Lipan, a prosperous shephard, sets out on his annual trip across country to buy and sell sheep. He does not come back. His wife, the redoubtable Vitoria, eventually sets out to trace his steps and find him -- to bring him back if he's alive, and avenge him if he isn't.

I just picked up an English translation last week. There are two blocks of booksellers downtown, on Strada Elizabet near the University. Mostly they sell Romanian books, but one finds the occasional English volume, and the very occasional piece of Romanian history or literature in English. (To buy _The Hatchet_, I passed up the chance to buy a volume of speeches praising Ceausescu, now a historical artifact commanding a surprisingly high price. Maybe next time.)

It's a short book -- I read it in an evening -- but nicely put together. The descriptions of the Romanian countryside are vivid, and Vitoria is a powerful and convincing character.

It has some problems, sure. It's a picture of 19th century Romania written by a man writing 50 years later, and it definitely romanticizes the life of the mountain peasant: there's much contentment and generosity, but no poverty; the Church is everywhere and benevolent, and even the government authorities are well-meaning if not particularly competent. Me, I have a deep suspicion of literature that glamorizes the peasant life; I suspect the author of naivete, at a minimum. At a very minimum. This sort of thing is often associated with an Agenda, and usually not a good one.

Having said that, I still thoroughly enjoyed the book, and would recommend it. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be very available in the English-speaking world. Amazon has a hardback version, but it's -- yikes -- nearly $40. Maybe rummaging around on the secondhand market would turn it up for less, but I'm not so familiar with that world.

-- I said that most adult Romanians knew the book. They do, at least as well as most adult Americans know, say, _Huckleberry Finn_; and I have gotten some seriously startled looks for mentioning it. I'm getting the impression that Romanians don't expect foreigners to be reading their literature. This is in contrast to the Serbs, who are pleased but not surprised to find that a foreigner is reading Ivo Andric.

Incidentally, the book continued to be part of the regular school curriculum right through the Ceausescu years. This is odd, because it's not exactly a Communist sort of story. Nechifor and Vitoria are prosperous peasants and small-time capitalists of exactly the sort that the Party oppressed with particular energy. The Orthodox Church is presented in a very sympathetic light, and there's not a single member of the oppressed proletariat to be seen.

Well, one keeps hearing that the Ceaucescu regime was "Stalinist". But in many respects it seems more a sort of mutant hypernationalist-fascism with Communist paraphernalia. My views on this are still evolving.

First thing in the morning

Here's the first thing that I do in the morning, most mornings: I go and take my son out of his crib, and I give him a bottle.

Okay, actually it goes something more like this.

[Claudia nudges me]

[I grunt] "Nuhngl."

"Alan is awake."

"Gnuh."

"Go and get him before he starts yelling."

"Muh."

So I'll roll out of bed and stagger into Alan's room, where he'll be standing up in his crib.

(A word about this word "crib". "Crib" to me is a container for babys and small children up to age three or so. It has bars on the side, like a jail, and they sleep in it. But apparently this is old-fashioned. These things are now called "baby beds". "Crib" is either used for what I think of as "bassinets", or not used at all. Calling a baby bed a crib is like referring to running shoes as "sneakers", or some such. But to me it's a crib, and a crib it shall remain.)

He cannot, thank goodness, climb out of his crib. Yet. He can climb into and out of all sorts of places, most notably the bathtub. But he can't get in or out of the crib without being lifted.

He stands there with his arms up, and I lift him, and he puts his arms around my neck and gives a little sigh. Then I carry him down the stairs and sit him on the kitchen counter. At this point it's usually sometime between 6 and 6:45 a.m -- his waking schedule has been a little irregular lately, not sure why. We're both pretty sluggish. He sits quietly on the counter, feet dangling, while I pour milk into a bottle and pop it in the microwave. He used to fuss as soon as he saw the bottle, but lately I think he's been catching on -- it's gotta go into the microwave, kid, and then we wait for the beep.

So it beeps, and /now/ he fusses -- I see it, gimme, I want -- and I pick him up and take him into the dining room and he lies on my lap and drinks it down.

Alan seems to have inherited my tendency to wake up slowly, but that bottle gets him going: once it's done, he's off my lap and ready to attack the day. Okay, I'm awake, where's the ball?

But that first ten minutes or so is our quiet time together. Okay, we're both slouched and dopey and inarticulate, but hey -- we're together, and we have a little morning ritual.

John Reed Didn't Like Romania

I was recently flipping through my copy of "War in Eastern Europe: Travels through the Balkans in 1915", by John Reed. John Reed was an American newspaper columnist who travelled through the region in the middle of World War One. Since hardly anybody else who wrote in English managed to do this, his book is a fairly unique document. It's still interesting reading even today.

(Reed was also a card-carrying Communist, back in the days before Communists were necessarily either tedious, wicked or silly. There's a very good movie about him -- "Reds", from 1980 or so. Yes, it stars Warren Beatty, but it's very good anyway.)

Reed spent a couple of months in Romania, bouncing in and out of Bucharest, before moving on to Russia. Alas, he didn't much care for it:

"The Rumanian... speaks a Latin language strongly impregnated with Slavic and Asiatic roots -- an inflexible tongue to use, and harsh and unmusical to the ear.

And he has Latin traits: excitability, candour, wit, and a talent for hysterical argument in critical situations. He is lazy and proud, like a Spaniard, but without a Spaniard's flavour; sceptical and libertine, like a Frenchman, but without a Frenchman's taste; melodramatic and emotional, like an Italian, without Italian charm. One good observer has called Rumanians 'bad Frenchmen' and another 'Italianized gypsies'."

Well, mee-ow. But wait, he's just getting warmed up.

"Shopkeepers and cabmen and waiters in restaurants are thieving and ungracious; if they can't cheat you they fly into an ugly rage and scream like angry monkeys. How many times have Rumanian friends said to me: don't go to so-and-so's shop, he's Rumanian and will cheat you. Find a French or a German place...

"There is nothing original about [Bucharest], nothing individual. Everything is borrowed. A dinky little German King lives in a dinky little palace that looks like a French Prefecture, surrounded by a pompous little court. The government is modelled on that of Belgium... Frenchified little policemen bully the market-bound peasants, who dare to drive across the Callea Victoria and interrupt the procession of kept women. Cabarets and music-halls are like the less amusing places on Montmartre; you can see Revues based on dull French ones... A surface coating of French frivolity covers everything -- without meaning and without charm."

Phew. Well, it's an interesting historical document, but why bother to quote all this bitchiness and bile?

A couple of reasons. One, _War in Eastern Europe_ was a very influential book, and to a certain extent still is. After _Black Lamb and Grey Falcon_, by Rebecca West, it may be the most-read book about the Balkans of the last hundred years. When Robert Kaplan wrote _Balkan Ghosts_ (which became a very influential book in its own right, unfortunately), he carried a copy of Reed with him. A number of the prejudices that Reed expresses do still seem to be around today, and I think Reed may have had at least a little to do with that.

Second, Reed is an example of an interesting phenomenon: the tendency of the traveller in the Balkans to fall in love with one Balkan nation, and then judge the others by how much (or how little) they resemble the loved one. One visitor becomes enamored of the Serbs, and defends them against all critics; another falls just as violently in love with the Albanians, finds tragic beauty in their history and truth in their way of life, and comes thereby to loathe and despise the Serbs.

Reed? Well, one chapter later we find this:

"But the key to the Balkans is Bulgaria, not Rumania. Leaving Bucharest on a dirty little train, you crawl slowly south over the hot plain, passing wretched little villages made of mud and straw, like the habitations of an inferior tribe in Central Africa...

"But across the Danube is another world... It is wonderful to see again the simple, flat, frank faces of the mountaineers and free men, and fill your ears with the crackling virility of Slavic speech. Bulgaria is the only country I know where you can speak to any one on the street and get a cordial answer... where if a shopkeeper gives you the wrong change he will follow you to your hotel to return a two-cent piece. Never was sensation more poignant than our relief at being again in a real man's country."

So Bulgarian is full of "crackling virility", while Romanian is "harsh and unmusical". And the shopkeepers, instead of being angry monkeys, are so /very/ honest. -- The point here is that this sort of thing isn't unique to John Reed, at all. (These quotes aren't really showing him at his best. Reed was actually a very interesting writer, usually a lot more sensible than this and often quite perceptive). I've read at least half a dozen other authors -- journalists, historians, political scientists -- who seem to have fallen into the same trap, from World War One right up to the 1999 conflict in Kosovo.

And us? Well, we did get pretty fond of Serbia and (some) Serbs while we were there, but I don't think it quite reached the point of infatuation. There were things to like in Serbia; there are things to like in Romania. You can be interested without becoming obsessed, you can get involved without getting sucked in. I think.

If I start to babble about having found a real man's country, though, it's probably time to move on.

Bucu Obor

Some things here in the Balkans (or, maybe better, Eastern European countries) just require too much time and effort.

I mentioned that moving from country to country means having to find a new source for meat every couple of years, finding a good supermarket (takes months, sometimes), a green market, an organic food store, clothes and shoe stores for the children...

So I'm knitting socks for Douglas. I confess, the latest pair was started sometime in March and the project was abandonned when the nice weather arrived. The unfinished sock including yarn and needles moved with us in June. Now, it's rainy here in Bucharest and cool and I decided to break out the needles and finish those socks off.

I'm knitting with five double-pointed needles, what in German is called a "Nadelspiel" (game of needles). One needle was missing. I'm sure I'll find it one day, I just can't find it now and I want to knit now. I'm impatient in these matters. I can't knit those socks with only four needles. So I decided to go out and purchase a new set of five double-pointed needles.

Hah. You thought it was so easy.

Our nanny sent me to a big "mall" named Bucu Obor. It's basically a big building with the single shops set up in nooks and corners or divided off by means of counters and shelves. Cubicles. That's what those were. Make-shift cubicles.

I took my mother-in-law and Alan and we toured the premises. We thought we were lucky when one of the first "shops" had wool and needles in the display case. We asked and yes, sure, they had knitting needles.

Circular ones. No double-pointed ones.

On we went. This place was huge. Sort of like a very low-grade department store. One place sold stoves, fridges and washing machines galore - they had at least 40 different ones. Another sold fabrics. Yet another more fabric. Balinese masks. Deodorants. Croissants. Pots and pans. Sequins. Shoes. Scents. Odd combinations were also galore: scents and pots. Books and light bulbs. Pens and hairbrushes. It was interesting.

However, we were on a mission. Another place had knitting needles.

Circular ones.

Where to find double-pointed ones? (I'd brought mine, of course, to show and point and grunt, my current mode of conversation in Romanian.) Down the aisle and left.

Yes, indeed! Another shop and they had different kinds of knitting needles!

Different kinds of circular ones.

But down that aisle over there, then right and straight on, for sure.

You guessed it. Circular ones.

I ended up going back to the first shop, purchased size 3 circular needles, cut the nylon string off and thus had two size 3 double-pointed needles, albeit a bit short ones. It's working. But I have one more item on my list of "things to get" once I'm in a first world country again.

Children Relief Network

Donations are needed:

The Children Relief Network

And lots of them, please.

Soon to come: pix and stories of the Baby House.

Moving in - part 3

And you thought there was an end to this story, eh?

We have some items in storage in Germany and were allowed to ship some of it (but not all -- there are about 1000 books, sigh) to Bucharest. Said, done. Six cubic meters aren't too much but we packed boxes and filled them with some favorite books and items we thought were necessary for our survival here. Liners for the diaper genie, warm fall and winter clothes for Alan in growing sizes, warm shoes for Alan, stuff for the kitchen...

The boxes were scheduled to arrive until the end of August. Two days ago, I noticed that a. Alan had grown out of his sandals and b. that the heat wave broke and we're having nippy temperatures all of a sudden. So we really needed those shoes which are in some box in that move. But the boxes were still not here. It's September now.

The German part told us that the crate with our stuff was on its way. The Bucharest end knew nothing whatsoever. The US end inquired why they were being charged storage fees - were we not living in a house where the crate could be delivered to?

Much confusion ensued.

Turns out that the crate has indeed begun traveling. At the moment, it's in Belgium. The storage fees were a mistake, apparently.

Don't ask.

The arrival of the shoes, among other things, is now scheduled for September 8-10.

We'll see.