Halfway down the Danube

The Wall

It's good to be back.

Claudia has gone into some detail over on the other blog, so I needn't repeat it. Let's just say I agree. Bucharest has come a long way; it has a long way yet to go, but it's moving fast.

But here's an odd thing. The last couple of days have left us feeling very positive about Romania. I'm even cautiously optimistic about Romania joining the EU in January. (Not that they will join -- I'm almost certain of that -- but that it will work out okay, at least in the short-to-medium term.)

But not one Romanian I've talked to shares this optimism. Or any optimism at all. The wall of cynicism and pessimism remains unbroken.

Given Romania's recent history... no, wait, given pretty much all of Romania's history... this is understandable. But it does get a bit annoying sometimes.

The economy is plugging along, unemployment is falling, inflation is coming down. If you don't like the current government, you'll probably have a chance to vote them out soon. And y'all are joining the EU!

Is there no enthusiasm out there at all?

Bucharest again

So we're going to Bucharest.

I have a conference in Sofia, Bulgaria, and it's inconveniently in the middle of the week, Tuesday through Thursday. Since travel from Armenia to Bulgaria is not exactly quick, that means next week is pretty much a wipe.

So, Claudia and I decided we would bring the whole family to Bucharest. We haven't been back to Romania since we left in March, and we miss it. We'll rent a little apartment for a week, visit with friends, let the boys run around in the parks. We'll be there Saturday to Saturday, and I'll pop down to Sofia for three days in the middle. (It's a one-hour flight, a five-hour drive, or a ten-hour train ride.)

We'll post if time allows. Watch this space.

Sad House

The house looks sad. There are piles everywhere -- a car pile, an airship pile, a "this goes only to Germany" pile. Already, the house doesn't look like it's being lived in anymore.

Tomorrow morning, the packers will come and take everything that isn't in the car by then. We will spend one more lonely night in an empty house, without internet access, a camping adventure for the kids. Then it's off to Germany in the car, and to Yerevan next weekend.

It's the end of a chapter in our lives. We had wonderful times in this house, and we had difficult times. We rejoiced over the birth of David and Jacob, and we mourned the loss of Benjamin. We saw Alan walk out of the door to his first day of school, and we heard David speak his first word. We felt safe during earthquakes and sheltered against snow storms. We had friends over for Thanksgiving dinners and for board game evenings. We had a big Christmas tree in the corner, Easter eggs hanging off the chandelier, Halloween spiders dangling over the doors.

It's a good house. I wish the next tenants as much happiness and luck in this house as we had.

It's time to take the mezzuzah off the door frame.

Good night, old house.

The death of a stranger

The packs of dogs prowling the streets of Bucharest are dangerous to begin with, and this is even more true in the winter when food is scarce. They become vicious and unpredictable. They attack from the back, they work together, they are desperate. I fear them.

The culling of the Bucharest street dogs has been called for many times. It has been done before, with mixed results. Romanians love dogs, in general, and it's hard to push through anything which looks like a cull. So they are doing it differently now, but they are doing it with a vengeance.

Why? Because on Sunday, a member of the Japanese Embassy died after a dog bite.

From what I've been hearing, the man was attacked Sunday night and died because one of the bites tore open a vein. He bled to death before anybody could do anything. It's not as if this happened somewhere in the outskirts of Bucharest. Nicolae Titulescu is a 15 minutes walk from our house, off Piata Victoriei.

Now, the dogs are pulled off the streets again. No, they are not killed. But an amendment to the law that will be pressed through in a hurry says that dogs picked up from the streets are to be kept at the shelters for 72 hours now and not for 15 days anymore. They are then to be sterilized and then... well, what happens then I have not been able to find out.

It's a bit sad that it takes the death of someone (and of a foreign diplomat to boot) in order for the stalled campaign to move again. The stray dog situation is a political mess. 70 to 80 people are bit every day in Bucharest but politicians are fighting over cognizances. Nothing has been done in the last two years, after the Animal Monitoring Agency was dismantled and its activities were taken over by the District of Bucharest from the City of Bucharest. (Still with me? I said it was a mess.) Blame for the suspended "stray dog campaign" which had been introduced by Basescu (then mayor) in 2001 is handed out in troves. Nobody is responsible and it's always the other one's fault.

But it's not only the politicians.

People are picking up dogs from the shelters only to set them free again. What the hey? That is an extremely short-sighted thing to do but it's impossible to argue with dog lovers. Almost all Romanians I've talked to said two things: Yes, the dogs are a problem. No, they should not be killed.

I'm going to make myself really unpopular now: I say, kill them all. As a mother of three kids, who has herself been attacked, who has a friend who needed rabies shots after a bite, and who sees the packs roaming the streets, I am very firm on this one.

Pull the damn dogs off the streets and cull them. Introduce a steep dog tax. Register dogs, give them tags. Give them stupid microchips so irresponsible owners who set their dogs free can be traced and penalized. It's time to get this problem solved once and for all, so that the citizens of Bucharest can wander their streets without fear. It would be nice if all the tourist guides had to be reprinted, too.

Harsh? Maybe. But come to Bucharest and meet a pack. And then we talk again.

Fly Taxi

I've been travelling a lot lately. Which means I've been in and out of Bucharest's Otopeni Airport.

Sometimes, Claudia can pick me up. But when she can't, I use Fly Taxi.

Fly Taxi is the monopoly taxi service at Otopeni Airport. It's been around for about two years now. And the story of Fly Taxi is an interesting little parable of how things work in modern Romania.

Some background. Bucharest has just one commercial airport: Otopeni, recently renamed Henri Coanda. It's about 20 km (12 miles) north of the city. It gets twenty or so international flights a day, plus lots of local ones to other cities in Romania.

Now, up until last year, if you arrived at Otopeni Airport, you really, really, really wanted to have someone to pick you up. Either a friend or a pre-arranged taxi driver. Because if you didn't have someone to pick you up, then you had two choices, neither of them good.

1) You could take the bus. Very cheap, but also crowded and painfully slow. About an hour to reach the city, most of which you'd spend standing.

2) You could take a taxi.

This option would present itself very quickly. Step out of the arrival gate, and you'd be surrounded by men yelling at you. "Taxi! Taxi!"

They were pretty aggressive. They'd pluck at your sleeve, get in your face, try to grab your luggage away. "Very cheap! Where do you go? Good taxi, here!" You could wave them away, but they'd follow you persistently right out of the terminal.

If you actually gave in and took one of their taxis... well. I did it twice.

First time: I negotiated the driver down to about $20. I knew the going rate should be about $14, his opening offer was $50, I was tired. Fine. But... he spent the entire trip trying to renegotiate another $5 out of me. We weren't out of the airport before he was turning around in his seat to leer at me in what he obviously thought was an ingratiating sort of way:

"Twenty five dollars!"

"No, twenty dollars."

"Twenty five dollars very good!"

"No. Twenty."

"Come on... twenty five dollars!"

"No."

"Where are you from?"

[thinking, no, we are not making friends here] "America. Twenty dollars."

"America very good! Very --" [gesture of rubbing money with hands. I am not making this up.]

"Twenty dollars." [Remember, all this was after we'd already agreed on a price. Apparently getting into the taxi reset the negotiation.]

"Is very good! Twenty-five dollars. Very good."

"NO."

"Twenty-five dollars."

"Okay, stop the taxi. Stop."

[With an 'aw, come on' look'] "No, no! My friend. Is no problem."

[Thirty seconds silence]

"So, twenty-five dollars?"

It went like that all the way home.

I won't even mention the guy who dropped me off at Piatsa Dorobants... well, okay. I told him I lived 'near Piatsa Dorobants'. As we got close, I said it was on Strada Bruxelles, which is about three blocks away from the Piatsa. For driving those three extra blocks, he immediately tried to charge me another $10. We could not reach agreement, so I ended up piling out of the car with all my luggage and walking the last three blocks, garment bag over my shoulder and suitcase rolling along the sidewalk behind.

(The taxi driver followed me the first 50 yards or so, waving his hands and yelling. He went down to five bucks, okay, stupid rich foreigner, five lousy bucks... then he just yelled something unpleasant at me and drove off.)

My, my, the memories. My point here is: you didn't want to take a taxi. Bucharest taxi drivers are not generally that bad, but somehow the airport attracted the most obnoxious and dishonest ones.

Which brings us to Fly Taxi.

I mentioned it was a monopoly, right? Well, it was set up that way. And then bid out, with a bid process that was public and open to all. Transparent procurement! Very modern and European.

Except that the bid was structured rather oddly. It said things like, "To qualify, you must already have a fleet of at least sixty large taxis. Painted silver. And you must be willing to post a rather large bond. And your taxis must all have antilock brakes and, ummm, air bags."

As it turned out, only one taxi fleet could fit these rather precise requirements. This taxi fleet ended up being the only one that bid on the contract. So, no surprise, it won.

You'll probably be shocked, shocked to hear that the fleet was owned (through an intermediary) by someone who had previously served in government at a high level, and who had very close connections to the former PSD administration. Also that he expanded and upgraded his taxi fleet a few months before the bid went public... doing things like painting the cars silver, and adding air bags and antilock brakes.

So: a smelly little sweetheart deal, which got past Romania's rather toothless Competition Council (the local equivalent of the FTC) and is now locked in for years to come. (IMS Fly Taxi's monopoly runs until 2014 or so.)

And -- again, big surprise -- Fly Taxi, having a monopoly, charges monopoly rates: more than double the normal taxi fare.

But.

Fly Taxis are good.

Okay, it's not Tokyo or even London, but by Bucharest standards they're terrific. The taxis are clean, and are roomy enough to hold our entire family plus luggage. The taxi drivers are polite and know their way around the city. And -- this is quite unusual here -- they're pretty good drivers. (Bucharest taxi drivers tend to be really awful drivers. Not just fast, but scary bad.)

Use Fly Taxi, and you'll pay over double the normal rate. But that's still pretty low -- it's just over a dollar per mile -- and you'll have a decent experience.

In a perfect world, there would have been three or four licenses, and the bidding would have been fair, and competition would bring the cost down to normal rates. We'd be paying about $8 for the airport trip instead of about $15.

But at least now you can take a taxi from the airport. Before Fly Taxi, you really couldn't. The airport taxis were just too horrible: dirty, dishonest, bad drivers, just awful in every way.

(They're still around, BTW. Not as many -- I think Fly Taxi has eaten a lot of their business -- but still a few, hanging around outside the gate from Customs, muttering "Taxi? Taxi?" to every foreign-looking traveller.)

So, as with a lot of things about Romania, I end up of two minds. Fly Taxi is a state-granted monopoly, bestowed in a pretty overtly corrupt manner. It's charging well above the market rate. Every time I use it, I'm putting money in the pocket of a crooked businessman.

But... I'm really glad that Fly Taxi exists, I think it's a huge step forward, and I use it a lot. And if you're coming to visit Bucharest, I recommend you use it, too.

Maintaining the contradictions. It's just that kind of place, I guess.

First snow

Meanwhile, back in Romania

Because we do still live here, and not in Kosovo or Albania.

Things that are going on here:

-- It was National Day yesterday, and we managed to miss the big parade for the third year in a row. Boooo.

In our defense, it was miserable weather again... chilly rain falling in sheets from a steely sky. Not to ring the American bell, but there is something to be said for having the national patriotic holiday in the summer.

-- Condoleeza Rice is coming to town next week, to sign a treaty allowing the construction of US bases here in Romania. This has been in the air for a while now, but it's finally going to happen. Base construction will start next year.

-- Meanwhile, potential scandal continues to simmer around the issue of secret CIA bases in Romania. Many of you may recall that, a few weeks back, the Washington Post broke a story about the CIA using unnamed "Eastern European countries" to detain terror suspects -- holding them without trial and (everyone assumes) torturing them.

But while there are some very suspicious records of CIA flights in and out of Romania, there's no smoking gun: nobody can point to such a base, nor has anyone come forward and testified that it exists. And without hard evidence, it looks like this one is going to blow over.

-- Romania's projected economic growth for 2005 will be around 4.5%. This is not bad, but it's the lowest since 2001; the average 2001-2004 was over 6%, and last year saw a blazing 8.3% growth rate.

Growth has slowed in part because of the terrible floods this past summer. Agriculture is a big part of Romania's GDP, and the floods (and accompanying bad weather) probably knocked 2% off GDP. Also, several important Romanian exports -- things like steel and concrete -- saw prices level off or fall in 2005. And the strong leu has slowed export growth.

But it may also be that Romania has picked all the "low hanging fruit" in terms of economic reforms, and that growth will slow unless deeper changes are made. We won't know for a while yet.

Me? I'm cautiously optimistic. It looks like most of Eastern Europe had a weakish year. Several of Romania's neighbors -- Bulgaria, Serbia, Hungary -- saw a drop of 1%-2% in growth since last year. The projection for next year is around 5.5%, and that hasn't changed.

And that was the Friday news update from Romania.

Dirty but dry

The heavy rains have stopped and the waters are receding. Here is an article about why the floodings were so severe. The picture shows how the situation was in many streets. We also find out that really we are to blame for the flooded streets -- don't shower when it rains, seems to be the morale of the story.

On a funnier side note comes this from Nine O'Clock News:

The Senators worked yesterday in the plenum hall of the new Parliament’s headquarters among raindrops. Rain came through the cupola of the foyer in front of the plenum hall too. But the Senate Speaker Nicolae Vacaroiu had to face the hardest problem, namely had to receive the Jordanian Senate Speaker in the protocol hall, with all the solemnity required, but among drops of rain which were leaking from the cupola inside the room. In the plenum, behind the official tribune where Vacaroiu stands, rain was pretty obvious. The first victim was Democrat Senator Jan Vraciu, who opened his umbrella. Several Senators rushed to help him and wiped his desk. Finally, Vraciu moved to another desk, between UDMR and PRM. The Power Senators and those from PRM blamed the Speaker and the secretaries of the Chamber of Deputies, who were the coordinators of the works that were conducted in the People’s House wing which hosts the Senate.

In other parts of the country, the consequences of the rains were much more dire, though. (There is no permalink for this article - if you can't find it, look under "Headlines". It might expire in a few days, though.) It's not been a good year so far.

More rain

It's been raining hard those past two days, almost without interruption. It is still raining hard. The sewers can't take all the water anymore and the soil is quite thoroughly saturated by now. So the water collects in the dips and potholes. Entire streets are flooded.

This gives car rides a certain thrill -- how deep is the water? Are there any scary potholes hidden under that giant puddle? Will the car in front of you break down and have you stuck in water up to your car door? And just in how deep water can you drive this particular car?

Alan especially loved the ride to his school this morning - the water splashed up on either side of the car, right to the rooftop. Any pedestrians on the way - we apologize, but you really have no business walking next to this new lake on the street. That was just careless of you.

The rain is supposed to stop tonight, then resume and finally give up on Thursday. We can hope.

The nicest bathrooms in town

When we moved to Romania in 2003, my (up-to-date!) guide suggested that if we were to go out to a restaurant, we should take some toilet paper with us, as this is not always supplied.

Even back then -- two years ago! gasp! -- this wasn't true. We've seen some truly disgusting toilets in Romania, yes. Some were just not usable at all. And were out of toilet paper. But the Bucharest restaurant toilets were usually OK. However, we did notice a trend over the past years.

Bathrooms are getting some attention now. The new (and old) restaurants are using their interior designers not only for their eating areas but also for their bathrooms. Some go a bit overboard but when a new place opens, it's always fun to check out the bathrooms for some innovative ideas.

My favorite ones are:

1. Mica Helvetia -- The toilets in this Swiss restaurant have their seats covered in a nice Heidi theme. You almost don't want to sit down.

2. Piccolo Mondo -- The Lebanese/Turkish restaurant sports a regular big well in the anteroom to the toilets, complete with a nice hanging basket of plants over it and big stones at the bottom. Both Doug and I walked back and forth some little while in search for the sinks until we realized that the well was the sink. The taps are hidden in the hanging basket and the drains are below the stones. It's -- different.

3. Rogue Cafe -- Very modern, very stylish with brown mosaic in white washed walls and a sleek, elegant sink. Quite my thing. Just the big mirror in which you see yourself pulling down your undies is somewhat disconcerting.

Any suggestions for other contenders? We are looking for the coolest restaurant bathroom in Bucharest. Of course, it would be more impressive for our readers outside of Romania if we supplied pictures. Maybe one day.

Walnuts

On the corner of Strada Brasilia and Strada Bruxelles, just across the street from our house, there's a walnut tree.

It grows in the corner of a garden, behind a cast-iron fence. But its branches arch out over the sidewalk and the street.

Two years ago, at the end of our first summer here, we saw an old woman and an old man out collecting walnuts. Alan was a toddler then, 18 months old, and David was a tiny baby. The old man and the old woman had very long sticks, fifteen feet (5 meters) or more. They hit the branches with the sticks and the walnuts rained down on... on the garden, on the sidewalk, and on the cobblestones of the street. Then they got bags and collected them.

Last year, we saw them again. Whack, whack the sticks. Patter-patter, the nuts. Alan was two and a half, David fourteen months.

This weekend, we saw the walnut collection one more time. I was taking Alan and David for a walk down Strada Brasilia, to look at the motorcycle shop. (Wow, do they love the motorcycle shop.) But walking down Strada Brasilia is always interesting in its own right. There are dogs both friendly and not so friendly; big old houses with overgrown gardens behind fences; cats zipping across the street, or basking on top of concrete walls; snails hiding in cracks, waiting for the rain so they can come and raid the gardens; abandoned cars slowly rusting in place. Always something to look at.

And this morning, there was the old lady again. The old man wasn't there this time. I don't know why. But she was still going strong with that stick. She had opened a second floor window and was attacking the top of the tree.

Alan is three and a half now, all scraped knees and wild hair. David is just past two. We were walking slowly up the street, looking at fuzzy caterpillars -- there were a lot of them suddenly, fallen from the treetops I suppose -- when we heard the whacking. The boys rushed to the fence and clung. (Alan had to be firmly dissuaded from climbing over it into the garden.) Eyes wide, they watched the nuts falling, bouncing, the green husks breaking open to show the fresh brown nuts.

After a few moments, the old woman came out of the house. She immediately began smiling and laughing with the boys, chattering away in rapid-fire Romanian. Alan and David were a little shy at first, but this just made her more enthusiastic. She filled their little hands with walnuts. The boys, excited, passed the nuts back and forth, stared at them, tapped them against the ground, stuffed them into their pockets and mine. She gave them more.

I finally had to leave -- to flee, almost -- because there were so many walnuts. And she wasn't going to stop giving them to the boys. As soon as a hand was empty, another nut was pressed into it. By the time we left, their pockets and mine were bulging. We all waved goodbye (which felt a little odd, since we were just crossing the street) and left with many a "la revedere!", "multsumim!" and "traiasca!"

We sat on the kitchen floor with Claudia and cracked the walnuts open. Fresh walnuts are a little softer than the ones you get in stores, and the nutty taste is much stronger. There's a little skin, right by the flesh of the nut, that you can peel off; if you leave it on, it's edible, but adds a bitter aftertaste. The boys broke shells, picked through the bits, dug soft nut-flesh out, and laughed and laughed.

Closer...

Every day, Romania creeps a little closer to joining the EU.

Here's the short version: Romania and Bulgaria are scheduled to become the 26th and 27th EU members on January 1, 2007. That's less than 16 months away.

But! The accession treaty has a special "safeguard clause", providing that if the candidates don't show enough progress, accession can be delayed by a year -- pushing it back to January 1, 2008.

And accession could also be delayed if any of the 25 EU members don't ratify the accession treaty. This has never happened, and it probably won't happen this time... it would create a major crisis if it did. But it is out there.

So what's the status at the moment?

-- Only two of the 25 have yet ratified Romania's accession: Slovakia, about a month ago, and Hungary, just this week. Given the sometimes troubled relations between Hungary and Romania, this was a nice gesture. None of the "Old 15" have ratified yet.

-- German Chancellor Schroeder, however, once again expressed his support for Romania's membership. This would be more encouraging if Schroeder were not in grave danger of losing his seat; Germany has elections next week, and Schroeder's party is running neck-and-neck with the Christian Democrat Union opposition.

Worse yet, the CDU is distinctly cool to further EU enlargement. If they win next week, then the EU's largest member will be run by a party that wants to slow or stop expansion. At a minimum, they'll probably push for activating the safeguard clause.

-- A recent (last week) EuroBarometer poll shows that only 45% of EU members’ citizens support Romania’s accession

Croatia got a support of 52%. (Croatia has, IMO, a much better reputation than it deserves.) Bulgaria received 50% and Turkey only 35%. Out of all EU members Sweden, Greece and Denmark gave the strongest support for Romania, while he countries with the least support were Austria and Germany.

Head of the European Commission Delegation in Romania Jonathan Scheele said: "I am worried by the 45% support that Romania has received. You have to try hard to become more popular. Romania is the least known country in the EU".

'You have to try hard to become more popular'? What is Romania supposed to do? Get a makeover?

(Seriously, this is something that deserves a post in its own right. Romania has a pretty negative image in Europe. Basically, it's Ceausescu, Dracula, orphans, poverty, corruption, and maybe guest workers. It's ridiculous that a country with so much to offer is stuck with such a stupid set of stereotypes, but there it is.)

-- The recent bout of mild political instability has not helped. The on-again, off-again elections, the Cabinet reshuffle, the constant blowing hot and cold on key issues (we won't raise taxes! Yes, we will! No, we won't!) don't look so good. I posted recently over at A Fistful of Euros about the EU punishing Albania for severe political immaturity; it's not impossible that something similar could happen here.

On the plus side... every day helps. The closer Romania gets to January 1, 2007, the harder it will be for the EU to activate the safeguard clause.

The next big hurdle? The annual report on Romania's progress, which will come out next month.

The odds? At this point I'd say they're about even.

Romanians and "EU values"

Andy over at Csikszereda Musings reviews a recent study on Romanians and "EU values".

There's lots of interesting stuff in there. Andy's short review is a good one, but it may be worth your while to read the whole thing. (pdf file.) Okay, maybe not the whole thing -- it's 85 pages long -- but you can find the executive summary on pages 8-14.

And if you're interested in a foreigner's-eye view of Romania, check out the rest of Andy's blog, too. It's very good.

News roundup

Odds and ends of Romanian news from the last week.

You remember all those floods from last month? Well, Romania got hit with more of them. Another 25 or so people killed, and a couple of thousand homeless, and maybe another couple of hundred million in damages.

(American readers: to scale up, multiply everything by 15. So, in a US context, it's maybe 400 people dead and ~$3 billion of damage. In American terms, it's like Romania just got hit with two major killer Florida hurricanes in two months.)

A Romanian woman killed the popular 90-year-old priest Brother Roger, founder of the Taize movement, by stabbing him while he was celebrating Mass. The word at the moment is that the woman was mentally ill. Is anyone else reminded of the 2003 assassination of the Swedish Foreign Minister by a mentally ill Serbian man? Let's hope this isn't a trend.

The government got reshuffled, with four Ministries -- including the very important Ministries of Finance and European Integration -- getting new Ministers. The politics of this are not completely clear to me, but it looks like Prime Minister Tariceanu is either trying to make peace with President Basescu (one of the appointees is a close friend of the President), or trying to inoculate his government against Basescu's ongoing attempts to force early elections. Or maybe both.

Readers may recall that Tariceanu resigned a few weeks ago, setting the stage for new elections... then changed his mind and de-resigned. President Basescu was very unhappy about that.

This all takes place against a background of Romania desperately trying to get confirmed for entry into the EU on January 1, 2007... the EU can (and may yet) delay that entry, if Romania doesn't seem to be reforming fast enough. It's not clear if these political games will hurt Romania, but it doesn't look like they will help.

The Romanian government forgave 80% of the debts owed to Romania by Iraq... $2 billion out of $2.5 billion. Presumably this is part of Romania's effort to play nice with both the US and the EU; many EU members did the same thing last year, as part of the Club of Paris deal. It's not clear to me how big a sacrifice this was, because I'm not sure how valuable that Iraqi debt really was. Worth 90 cents on the dollar? 50? 5?

Still, even if heavily discounted, it's not chump change; 5% of $2 billion is still $100 million, which is a lot of money in Romania.

Low cost airlines multiplied like weeds all over Western Europe in the late 1990s. In the last couple of years, they've been spreading to the East as well. Now they're coming to Bucharest. Blue Air, a "Romanian low cost airline", will launch twice weekly 737 service from Bucharest Baneasa to Madrid on October 30. The market will presumably be the huge population of Romanian guest workers in Spain, but perhaps some Spanish tourists will trickle back to Bucharest as well.

Car sales in Romania in the first six months of 2005 were up -- take a deep breath now -- 60% over the same period in 2004. This suggests serious real growth in the Romanian economy, since cars are quite a bit more expensive relative to average income here than in the West. On the other hand, it's less good news for Romania's balance of payment (there's a domestic industry, but most cars are imported), and not good news at all for those of us who have to brave Bucharest traffic every day. Road construction and maintenance is, alas, not up 60%. Or even 6%.

The block below Strada Lisbon

So there's this block.

A "block", in Eastern Europe, is what Americans call an apartment building. ("Block", to Americans, is a measure of urban distance. It has no meaning in most European cities. Another story.) "Block" sounds rather ugly to an American ear, but it's too often appropriate... most Communist-era apartment buildings are, indeed, pretty unattractive.

We live in an older neighborhood of prewar houses set on tree-lined streets. Before the Commmunist takeover this was the edge of town, a comfortable area for Bucharest's doctors and lawyers. Most of the houses got nationalized under Communism; today, most of them are suffering from decades of deferred maintenance. The streets are potholed and the sidewalks so crumbled as to be almost impossible to navigate with a stroller. Still, it's a very nice neighborhood, and we've been very happy in our house.

The neighborhood is walled along one side by blocks... big apartment buildings built by the Communist government as Bucharest's population soared in the 1950s and '60s. This gives the area a funny feel sometimes, like it was walled off, neglected and half forgotten.

Which I guess it was. A bit further west, along Strada Victorei and Bulevar Aviatorilor, are the big villas that used to belong to the Communist party elite. But our neighborhood was home to lower-level Party members, and it seems to have sort of fallen through the cracks... it wasn't scheduled for demolition (like so much of Bucharest was), but neither was it particularly well cared for. So the nice old houses peeled and sagged, but survived. Most of them were chopped up into smaller apartments. Sidewalks crumbled, ironwork rusted, gardens got very overgrown, but a time traveller from 1940 would still recognize the neighborhood... which is not true for a lot of Bucharest.

Anyway, the block. If we look out our bedroom window, there's this one block squarely in the view. It's just south of Strada Lisbon, which puts it about two blocks... er, a quarter of a mile... um, say three or four hundred meters south of us. It's a big one, twelve or fifteen stories. Built in the late '60s or '70s, of a peculiar pale yellowish-orange brick.

The block isn't beautiful. It's, well, a block. But it's been part of our landscape for two years now, and we've gotten used to it. And it has its moments. In autumn and winter, on clear afternoons, the long light of sunset hits the yellow-orange brick and briefly makes it lovely, like a mesa in New Mexico. On winter mornings, it blocks the sun for the first half hour or so, but then releases it; I remember a morning in January, watching the block's shadow pulling away from our street as the sun rose over it, and all the little birds telling each other to wake up! because the sun was here!

And then, just a few minutes ago, I watched the full moon rise over the shoulder of the block -- slowly growing from a sliver, to a half-circle, then sailing off into the velvety summer sky.

And that's all.

Floods

There is massive flooding all across Romania this week.

"Massive" here means thousands of houses destroyed and nearly 10,000 people turned into flood refugees, with ~$1 billion of damage. Five provinces have declared a state of emergency. Last time I checked, there were eight people dead and five missing, but those numbers are sure to increase.

Most of the flooding seems to be around the arc of the Carpathians. Bucharest has barely been affected. (Though I did notice that the little Dumbovitsa river, the one that runs through a concrete chute downtown, was at an all-time high.) This makes me wonder if deforestation may have played a role; a lot of trees have been cut down in Romania in the last 10 years. But that's just a guess.

It doesn't seem to have made the news outside Romania too much.

Beginner's mistake

Well. It's a scary story. Don't read it if you're pregnant. Or, maybe, you should, if you're pregnant and living in Romania. Also, you should not read this if you are squicky about a woman's inner workings. You are warned.

In order not to jinx things, we haven't announced to you guys yet that I'm pregnant again. After Benjamin, it was a scary thing to do. Months of anxiety and endless hours of worry. I can not - did not - count the times I ran to the clinic to see the heartbeat of the baby. The weeks just wouldn't pass.

But, somehow, we got over the dreaded milestone of 18 weeks, and things seemed to be fine. Baby was kicking and growing and turned out to be another boy (the fourth one, really, what are the chances of that?), and we were happy to hear that he was fine and healthy and all his chromosomes were accounted for.

Everything went off like in a textbook pregnancy.

Next stop: the big 20-week-ultrasound for physical anomalies. If you know us, it won't come as a surprise that we were a little late with that, at the end of the 23rd week. Unfortunately, this was also the week when Doug was in the States on a business trip. It couldn't be helped, though, and I promised to send him a picture of the baby as soon as I got home from the scan. We didn't really expect any problems -- I had been feeling fine, just gained way too much weight but that was due to potato chips and ice cream, not to gestational diabetes or similar.

This being a country where certain things are cheap, we could afford to get an appointment with the leading ultrasound specialist in Romania. He's booked solid until October but I lucked out and got the appointment of someone who cancelled. Let's call him Dr. P., for legal reasons.

The clinic he works in is right around the corner from us and turned out to be very spiffy. In Romania, you often find even top class doctors in small, cramped apartment-style offices, but the new clinics that cater to the wealthy and the expatriates are mostly modern and big.

The doctor himself was the very taciturn kind. I'm the very talkative kind, especially when I'm a little nervous. It's hard for me to lie on a stretcher silently, while the doctor stares at the screen that I cannot see and does his endless measuring. Finally, I broke the silence by asking if anything was wrong with the baby. No, no, the baby was fine. He printed some pictures for me, and briefly showed me the kid rolling around and waving his little hands (with all five fingers).

He gave me a towel to wipe to goo off my belly and then sat me at his desk. The baby was fine, but.

But. The dreaded but. He diagnosed me with an incompetent cervix. For all males who've never been closely acquainted with a pregnant woman, a short explanation. No, it doesn't mean that the cervix gets tested on algebra and geography and fails big time. It means that the end of the uterus, the exit, is opening up. It's a big no-no this early in pregnancy.

Babies born at 23 weeks do have a small chance of survival and there are stories galore about those who made it -- but it's not the norm. You need a lot of high tech gear, and very good doctors, and very, very much luck to get a 23-week-old fetus to survive. Most of those who do beat the odds suffer horrible long-term damage such as blindness, mental retardation, severe lung problems, the works. It's not a fate you want for your baby. And you definitely don't want to have such problems in a country where the newest prenatal technology is just not available.

Dr. P. told me that I had 2.6 cm of cervix left (you ought to have at least 4 cm). This came as a total shock to me. I had anticipated problems with the kid, maybe. Not with my body, never. My body is a fierce pregnancy machine. I can tell I'm pregnant even before the test stick turns blue. It's as if my body jumps into each pregnancy with all throttles open. No slow starts for me. And no easy endings. I never did go into labor on my own and my cervix has always been extremely reluctant to open. And all of a sudden my body betrays me?

And what to do now? Was there a magic pill? Some treatment?

The solution is bed rest. Actually, he told me simply to rest. He didn't say anything about bed rest. I know, he said, not easy with two little ones. Try to rest some during the day, though.

Somehow, this didn't satisfy me. I called my regular German Ob-Gyn with the news and I could hear her heart sinking. She gave me detailed instructions: Strict bed rest. No lifting at all. Magnesium in high doses to stop the contractions. (Not that I had felt any contractions but a cervix doesn't open without contractions, so they must have been there, ergo they needed to be stopped.) She ordered me to keep this up until week 29, then fly off to Germany until the baby was born. At week 29, he would have a fighting chance.

Remember, I was home alone with two little boys and the husband away in the US. Poor husband.

Things were arranged. I hired another nanny to cover bed times (no lifting!), my friends outdid themselves and helped wherever they could, supplying a steady stream of supportive phone calls and tacky magazines. I tried to keep a positive attitude.

It was very, very scary. Being told that your baby is about to drop out of you is frightening in the best of times. Being told this after a miscarriage or a stillbirth adds another dimension, though. You start listening to your body. A pregnant body will do odd things but when you start paying attention, these odd things take on a sinister meaning. Twinges everywhere. Odd pulling sensations. Sharp stabbing pains. After two days, I started feeling the contractions. Four times an hour, six times an hour, up to seven times an hour. The contractions hurt like hell. The baby himself was very restless, turning and kicking like mad, seemingly without a pause. Then, I got lower back pain. That's when I went into panic mode because lower back pain can indicate back labor and that basically tells you your body is trying to give birth. Now.

I called my doctor in Germany, and another doctor here in Romania. They both said, get yourself on the next plane to Germany and into a hospital. My German Ob-Gyn added, "and make your trip as little stressful as possible. I don't want you to give birth on the plane."

Easier said than done.

I had to leave my kids behind, buy the most expensive air fare ever, order wheelchair service but not tell the airline I was in labor (since they wouldn't have let me step on the plane, of course), ask my parents to pick me up and drive me to the hospital, and inform the hospital that I was coming in with problems. No stress at all.

The trip was uneventful, if long. We started an hour late, leaving my parents in knots at the Frankfurt airport whether or not the plane had made an emergency landing for their daughter. Then, it was stop and go traffic on the autobahn until Schweinfurt. All the time, I had contractions and was in pain, and scared.

The Leopoldina Hospital in Schweinfurt is wonderful. I've given birth to all my three boys there. The doctors are great, the equipment state-of-the-art, the nurses are the best you can get. They've dealt with Benjamin's birth and death in a gentle, thoughtful, and compassionate way that helped me enormously. I love this hospital (my only gripe is the food but heh, nothing is perfect).

So I waddled into the maternity war, and the doctor on duty looked at me and said this:

"Frau Muir, I know you. Your body doesn't do labor. Your cervix never opens up by itself. I've just checked your file again. I cannot believe that there is something wrong. But - let's have a look."

And she did.

And she cursed.

Loudly.

She called it a typical beginner's mistake.

She said many things about how you cannot make such a diagnosis merely based on an abdominal scan, such as Dr. P. had performed. That you always have to back up with a vaginal scan but even without that one, she could see that the cervix was fully closed and 5 cm long. What Dr. P. saw, obviously, was just a fold in my lower uterus. She showed it to me and it looked like an opening cervix -- but I'm not earning loads of money for being Romania's No. 1 ultrasound specialist. That's why my second opinion in Romania didn't hesitate to send me to Germany - he had trusted his famous colleague's diagnosis.

Nothing was wrong. Nothing at all.

So, in the end, I was out of well over 1500 bucks for the flights but not in any danger. The contractions stopped the moment I heard the good news. Stress. It was all the stress. The lower back pain? That was just lower back pain, from lying around so much. The pain during the contractions was caused by my prior c-section scars. There had been no danger, although over time, the stress and the fear might have had the exact same result as an actual incompetent cervix. At some point, the contractions would have had an effect. So, it wasn't a harmless misdiagnosis.

The doctor himself is going to suffer little. Some of my friends have cancelled their appointments but, as I said, he's famous and booked solid, so he won't notice. "Sue him," is the American response, but that won't fly here.

I'm upset and relieved at the same time. I'm writing a letter to Dr. P., complete with copies of all the scan pictures and a full description of the diagnosis. If I'm lucky, he will pay more attention in the future and not just tear the letter up and throw it away.

The fear, the panic, the tears - they were in vain but they were real. After Benjamin last year, this was a nightmare. Not only I, but Doug, our families, and our friends were shocked, scared, panicked. As I said, this wasn't a harmless oops. This was a serious mistake that could have had tragic consequences.

Please don't get me wrong. I've had wonderful doctors here in Romania. I had dental work done and it was great. We will still frequent our regular doctors just as we had before this happened.

That said, it is true that the overall prenatal care here sucks big time. I do have a regular Ob-Gyn here and he's never wanted to know my blood pressure, tested my urine for proteine, or watched my weight. No blood tests for toxoplasmosis, rubella, or diabetes. Where in Germany I have a big file with all the available data at the doctor's office and at the hospital, there are no records kept here. And this is not a simple hole-in-the-wall doctor, either.

Yes, there are cultural differences even in medical procedures. In Germany, many more ultrasound scans are performed during pregnancy than in the UK or the US. We also do more amniocentesis tests, and have more frequent routine visits. Not everything that is done in Germany is necessary or obligatory.

However, I've gotten very interested in antenatal, postnatal and maternal health in the last years. In the meantime, I know quite a bit about it, so believe me when I tell you that Romania has some catching up to do. I'm not saying this because I have my own axe to grind. I say this because the future of every nation lies in its mothers and children. It's important to take good care of them.

And yes, I'm stepping off the soap box now, thank you very much.

The Hostages Are Back

So Romania's hostages got freed.

This will be old news to our Romanian readers, since it happened nearly two weeks ago. Non-Romanian readers may not have noticed that Romania had three hostages in Iraq. (Hardly anyone outside Romania seems to have.) Two reporters and a cameraman, they were taken on March 28 and released nearly two months later, on May 22. They had a very frightening and stressful time, but seem to be basically intact. The whole country is very happy that they're back.

Once you get beyond those very basic facts, though, things start to get weird.

What follows is from Transitions Online, but TOL puts all its stuff behind a pay-only wall after a few days, so the link is to the front page. (Check it out anyway, it's really good.) I'm quoting Romanian journalist Razvan Amarei now.

It now appears that they were victims of a plot by the two businessmen of Arab origin who had organized and financed the trip: Mohammad Munaf, their guide and translator, played the role of the fourth hostage for 55 days, while his business partner, Omar Hayssam, was apparently pulling the strings behind the scenes.

Omar Hayssam is a very wealthy Arab-Romanian. There are a surprising number of these. They're not recognized as an official minority, but there are probably enough of them that they could be if they tried.

Why? Well, Ceausescu liked the Arabs, is the short answer. He enjoyed hobnobbing with Arafat and Qaddafi, and signed agreements that brought thousands of Arab students, technicians and businessmen to Romania. Some of them stayed.

The day after the hostages returned to their families, Bucharest officials issued arrest warrants for Omar Hayssam and Mohammad Munaf. They could face between 10 and 15 years in prison for their role in the abduction if convicted. Munaf is still in U.S. custody; Hayssam has been in jail since April, charged with various financial felonies.

True. About a week after the hostages were taken, the Romanian government arrested Hayssam for "tax offenses". He's been in jail ever since.

There are reports that over 30 other people -- mostly Arab-Romanian or Arab -- have been arrested here in Romania, but it's not clear if that's true or not.

According to the Romanian General Prosecutor’s Office, Omar Hayssam’s bizarre plot was to unblock his bank accounts –- frozen as part of an unrelated financial investigation –- pay a fictitious ransom, and become, when the hostages were released, a “national hero.” The investigators said he was hoping all his previous crimes would then be forgiven. But they also discovered that Hayssam had been financing several Sunni terrorist organizations, though they did not specify which organizations.

An anonymous Arab businessman based in Romania was quoted by the daily Averea as saying, “Munaf got involved in the kidnapping at Hayssam’s order... Munaf is Hayssam’s servant more than his partner.”

Hayssam has rejected all the accusations. He said Munaf organized the trip in order to impress the Iraqi authorities, since he was planning to bid for a public tender for the procurement of 25,000 tons of sugar. “I only put him in touch with the journalists. I didn’t pay for the trip, and I didn’t plan the abduction,” Hayssam told investigating magistrates.

Interesting. Munaf, as noted, is "in custody" in Iraq, presumably in American hands. Romania has 850 troops in Iraq, which is a lot for a country that's neither the US nor Britain. (Last time I looked, Romania was the seventh largest troop contributor to Iraq. As other countries pull out, they might be up to sixth by now.)

The first rumors regarding Hayssam’s and Munaf’s involvement in the affair started circulating immediately after the kidnapping. Omar Hayssam, a prominent Syrian-Romanian businessman whose $100 million in assets puts him on the list of the 300 wealthiest Romanians, compiled by the magazine Capital, claimed on 30 March that the kidnappers had called him to demand a ransom of $4 million.

The media soon discovered the close relationship between [hostage] Marie-Jeanne Ion’s father, Social-Democratic Senator Vasile Ion, and the two businessmen. Hayssam said he and the politician were “friends,” but Ion, a former governor of Buzau county, denied this, saying he knew Hayssam as he knew many of those doing business in his county.

"Former governor" means "former prefect", I think, which is not exactly the same thing. A Romanian prefect is appointed by Bucharest. It's a bit as if the US President could appoint state governors. As such, he's usually a heavy political hitter. Prefects have traditionally had... how to put this delicately... many opportunities to engage in extracurricular activities. There are clean prefects, but "former prefect", in Romania, instantly brings certain things to mind.

Anyway:

The authorities may have unravelled the plot behind the abductions, but many questions remain, chiefly how the kidnapping ended.

“It was a 100-percent Romanian action, and I want to thank the secret services for everything they’ve done,” President Basescu stated. But others reported the Iraqi police and the coalition forces also played a major role in the action.

To add to the confusion, the Arab news network Al-Jazeera broadcast a tape on the day of the release, showing the four hostages and one of their kidnappers reading a statement attributing their release “to the pressures of the Muslim community in Romania and of the Saudi Muslim cleric Salman Bin Fahad.”

"Muslim community in Romania". Somehow I don't think they're referring to the quiet and retiring Turks of Dobrogea.

The relief of the former hostages was palpable. After a moving reunion with their families, they were placed in a double quarantine: medical and informational. “This period will help them to get back to their ordinary life,” Dr Florin Tudose, chief of the Psychiatric Clinic at Bucharest’s University Emergency Hospital, told the media.

[...]

The government’s statements weren’t much more substantial. The prime minister said that no ransom had been paid, while the president assured Romanians that no negotiations on its present or future foreign policy had taken place – a reference to a possible troop withdrawal from Iraq.

[...]

“When everything is over, we’ll hold a press conference,” Basescu told impatient journalists, adding that some information would only be made public years from now.

Fifty years, he said. He also said that Romania did not pay any ransom for the hostages, nor make any sort of commmitments. Which seems a stretch, but there it is.

Interestingly, the country seems to be accepting this. (But then, Romania has plenty of fifty-year-old secrets that have never been revealed.)

So it's possible we'll never learn the truth about what happened. Presumably bits and pieces will emerge when the hostages start talking, and when Hayssam goes on trial.

Or... maybe not. This is a big deal here, and highly politicized. The whole country was waiting for the hostage situation to be resolved (there were enormous photographs of them in public places, with BRING THEM HOME printed across), and getting them out intact -- and finding a villain, and a suitably wicked non-Romanian villain at that -- has sent President Basescu's popularity over the moon, at least for now.

A strange ending to a strange story.

The Last Defender of Bucharest

A Romanian friend sent us this picture (under the fold). The memorial commemorates the last stand when Bucharest fell to the Germans in 1916. It stands by the main road north to Ploiesti and the airport; we've driven past it a hundred times. The inscription says "The Last Defender of Bucharest".

Personally, I think the dog looks very alert.

Eurovision 2005

Well. Third place for Romania is not so bad. Really. I mean, the German singer ended up on the last place. That is bad.

I can't really talk about this. I haven't heard any of the songs and we missed the contest due to extreme exhaustion after an action-filled day with the kids. (We went to the circus! More about that later.) Poor Doug was really disappointed. He likes the Eurovision so much because it's so... European.

You can hear the Romanian song here, if you like. Or go to Fistful of Euros, where we are still nominally co-blogging, although we never write anything. (Shame on us.) Doug Merrill has some cool links, if you're interested.

Hm? Oh, yes. The winner. Greece. I think that's sort of cool but again, I don't know the song.

Red circles

Romania has high exposure to seismic activity, but many of its urban structures are incapable of withstanding a powerful earthquake. With the help of the World Bank, authorities hope to address the problem before catastrophe strikes.
From the Southeast European Times

It seems to me they are a little bit late with this plan but any time is better than never, I guess. But the article boggled my mind.

The Times goes on to write:

Between 1992 and 2000, more than 3,400 buildings across Romania were examined by construction experts, evaluating their readiness to withstand earthquakes. The experts placed 578 buildings in the highest category of seismic risk, meaning that they could collapse in a quake measuring more than 6.0 on the Richter scale.

This number comes a little bit as a surprise to me. 578? Not only in Bucharest but in all of Romania? That seems like a very low number. Also, the predicitions are for a quake of close to 7.0 or above before the year 2006, according to Gheorghe Marmureanu, the director of the national seismological institute. But wait, there is more:

Most of the high-risk buildings are apartment blocks, while some are home to restaurants, theatres and stores. Furthermore, no fewer than 67 hospitals in 55 cities -- among them, three out of the four emergency hospitals in Bucharest -- are on the list. That leaves many wondering where the victims would be treated in case of a major catastrophe.

The buildings most risk-prone are marked with a red circle, and it is believed that as many as 17,000 people inhabit such houses. The efforts to reinforce the structural integrity of these buildings is noble, and needed. The World Bank is giving a 155 million dollar loan to Romania to do the necessary upgrading. Since it's a loan, Romania expects the owners of the buildings to chip in. Here's where things get tricky.

By law, the public budget can only provide support for families with a monthly income of under 165 euros. The others must pay their part over 25 years, in installments without interest. Many people are reluctant to pay, despite the constant danger they face.

Hm. Maybe the owners don't actually live inside the endangered buildings themselves but are safely tucked away in houses without the ominous red circle? Just a thought.

For the past 13 years, the government has promised to take action. But so far only 26 high-risk buildings have been reinforced -- less than one out of 20. This year, authorities allocated the money necessary for another 47 consolidations, including 40 in downtown Bucharest. Work should start on the remaining 500 buildings by the end of next year, the government says.

Hm. That would be 2006, right? Maybe they can just use the money to rebuild the rubble if the big one hits according to schedule. Ah, but that's just me being sarcastic, again. Surely things will work out all right.

Dang, another one

Another earthquake this morning. I woke up at 4:55 - for no reason at all. Then I heard something like a loud rumble and a moment later, the house shook hard. I felt it much stronger than the last one -- or maybe, my memory has edited the sickening feeling of a house moving around you. It was only a 5.1, compared to 5.6 last time. It was short, over in a few seconds. No (palpable) aftershocks so far, although I lay awake until the kids woke up at 6:30.

It wasn't the big one Romania is waiting for. Sigh.

Operation Clean Sweep

You all know that I don't like the new law on abandoned and orphaned children. I've made that clear in the past. Now, you might be thinking that I'm foreign and without understanding and arrogant and all that. However, I'm in good company in my dislike - namely people working in orphanages, people from the National Agency for Child Protection, lawyers, nurses, doctors. All Romanians.

They all hate the new law because it's bad for the children.

Why is the law so bad? It looks like a law with good intentions and I'm sure that the men in the green silk rooms were thinking of doing something good for Romanians left-behind children (and Romania's chances for accession to the EU).

But:

The law requires all abandoned children under the age of 2 to be placed in foster families. This means that the countless private homes for babies are obsolete. The main problem, however, is that there are only foster families for about half of the babies. Half are left... behind, again. Good solution, that.

Remember that international adoptions are now illegal, except under very constricted circumstances? Many of our commenters found this not a problem, even when I pointed out that Romanian society is not very conducive to adoption.

The solution Romanian politicians have come upon is, hm, very Romanian. The rumor says that international adoptions are going to be allowed for a very short while again, in order to clean out the hospitals and get rid of the accumulated human capital. (This is coming directly to me from people inside the Agency for Child Protection. No names can be given, as I'm sure you understand.)

Then, back to square one.

I wonder how many times per year, or per decade, this "Operation Clean Sweep" will be necessary. Last year alone, 2,000 babies were abadonned in Bucharest hospitals. Consider 1,000 babies between the ages of two and newborn up for grabs. Want one?

You may have to wait a little, though. The accession to the EU is not yet certain. If Romania wants to go ahead and lift the ban for a short while, it would be best to do it at the end of the year, after the signatures have dried -- otherwise it could cause a backlash (Brussels having been the driving force behind the new law).

And why do I know about this and why does the EU obviously not?

After Easter

Two things about the days after Orthodox Easter.

First, nobody is eating much. Everyone says they have burta plena -- full bellies -- from all the feasting over the long weekend. Orthodox Easter is both a family holiday and a food holiday; great masses of food are cooked, and it's bad manners not to eat. As a result, after the weekend everyone is indopat -- stuffed.

Second, there's a cool little tradition involving eggs.

Romanians make colored eggs for Easter, just as Americans and Germans do. But when they eat them, there's a little ritual they go through. Two people face each other, holding eggs. One says "Christ is risen!" The other replies, "Truly, he is risen!" Then they tap the eggs together until one breaks. This is usually done in a group, with people sort of competing. The person whose egg breaks last is supposed to have good luck in the coming year.

Googling around, it seems there's supposedly some symbolism here... cracking the eggs represents Christ coming out of the tomb, or something like that. But nobody mentioned this to me. (Well, nobody explained the tradition to me at all. They just asked if I wanted an egg, and suddenly, boom, there I was, muttering in my bad Romanian and smacking my egg against one rival after another.)

Interestingly, I didn't see this tradition at Easter (I was still in Albania) nor in the first couple of days after Easter. But suddenly today, everyone is showing up with eggs from the weekend.

I'm guessing that's because, before today, everyone was still indopat.

Spring in Bucharest

Actually, it's been chilly and rainy those past days but the flowers and the blooms are out in profusion -- it's good for the soul, it is.

Two movies about a bank robbery

Way back in 1959, there was a major bank robbery at the National Bank in Bucharest.

This was very strange for a couple of reasons. One, the robbers were stealing large amounts of a non-convertible currency that couldn't be used outside Romania. And two, bank robberies weren't supposed to happen in a Communist state.

And, generally, they didn't. Like most contemporary Communist states, 1959 Romania had very low rates of this sort of crime. Officially, this was because Communism had removed the incentive for such perverse behavior. In reality, it was because Romania was a police state.

Everyone had to carry an internal passport to move around the country. All telephones were bugged as a matter of course. Police informers, though not as pervasive as they would later become, were common. All personal records -- from medical files to bank accounts -- were open to state examination. There were still over 15,000 political prisoners. This was the bad old days under dictator Ghirghiu Dej, who was an unreconstructed Stalinist, old school. Police beat and tortured suspects as a matter of course, forced confessions were common, and draconic sentences were the norm. And criminal acts that could embarrass the state were pursued with merciless rigor.

Nevertheless, there it was: several gunmen had robbed the bank and made off with over a million lei in cash. In those days, that was... ohh, maybe half a million contemporary, 1959 dollars? So maybe three or four million dollars in 2005 money. (A million lei today is about $40, but that's a story for another post.)

The Romanian government went ballistic. The police and the Securitate swept up hundreds of people, interrogating and torturing with a free hand. Several victims died under the questioning. Eventually, six people -- the so-called "Ioanid Gang" -- were charged with the crime. I say so-called, because these people weren't professional criminals. They were all intellectuals, medium-ranking nomenklatura Party members. And they were all Jewish.

Here's where it gets weird. Just catching the crooks wasn't enough for the outraged state. The six were encouraged to make a "reconstruction" film, showing exactly how they planned and committed the crime. (Apparently they were told that this would allow them to escape the death sentence.) The film was made by one of Romania's best directors, and was, technically and aesthetically, a minor masterpiece; it's been described as "sinister", "deeply creepy" and "surreal". It was shown all over Romania, presumably to show the Romanian people that, no matter how clever the criminals, Crime Does Not Pay.

Then five of the six were taken out and shot. (The sixth, a woman, got off with a long prison sentence.)

Forty years passed.

In the last few years, there have been two documentary films about the crime. The first is "Reconstruction", by Irene Lusztig. Ms. Lusztig is Romanian-American, and the granddaughter of the sole survivor of the gang, the woman who was "let off" with a life sentence. The movie is her grandmother's story. Apparently it's quite something.

The second film, "The Great Communist Bank Robbery", came out just last year. It's about the crime, the investigation, the trials and the film. Apparently it includes interviews with former cellmates of the bank robbers, the cameraman for the "documentary" film, ordinary Romanians who saw the film in theaters... It's been shown in over twenty countries already, and has picked up rave reviews at international film festivals.

But it doesn't seem to be very popular here in Romania. I've asked half a dozen people about it -- colleagues, educated and literate Bucharesters -- and gotten back nothing but shrugs. Nobody knows about the old bank robbery, and nobody knows about the films about the bank robbery.

Some of this may be generational... hardly anybody that I work with is older than, oh, early 50s. (Which is a point worth a blog entry in its own right.) But it does seem a little odd that nobody has heard of the documentaries.

Romanian readers, thoughts on this? Has anyone seen either of these films? (Non-Romanian readers, can you even find them?)

Hostages

Romania has three hostages in Iraq.

They're journalists, and they went to Iraq on a reporting trip -- one of them interviewed Prime Minister Allawi, the day before they were kidnapped -- and they got grabbed on March 28. So this has been a continuing story in Romania for the last two weeks.

Romania participates in the occupation of Iraq. There are about 850 Romanian soldiers there -- one full battalion, with the catchy name of "The Red Scorpions",deployed in the Al-Nasyria area -- and this number was scheduled to rise to about 1000 by the end of this year.

It probably still will. The involvement in Iraq is not particularly popular in Romania; a recent poll showed 55% of Romanians indifferent or opposed. Nevertheless, President Basescu has said that the Romanian troops will remain "until democracy is established". Former PM Nastase said much the same thing, so it appears that support for Romania's participation crosses party lines.

Why? Well, Romania places a high value on the security relationship with the US. (A cynic might suggest that they're keeping up the payments on their national security insurance policy.) The numbers involved are not large, and no Romanian soldiers have been killed yet, so up until now it hasn't seemed like a very expensive investment on Romania's part. So, while there's not much popular support, the political class is pretty solidly behind it.

One interesting effect of this is that by the end of this year, Romania may be the fourth largest coalition partner in Iraq, after the US, Britain and South Korea.

Back to the hostages: there are some weird aspects to the case. It's still not clear who kidnapped them. They were accompanied by a fourth person, an Arab-American who may also have had Romanian citizenship (or maybe not); it's not clear what his involvement is. A videotape of the hostages surfaced; it has some peculiarities (like, hostage guards who don't seem to know how to hold their guns) that make some people wonder if the whole thing is some sort of set-up.

As to what happens next... it's really not clear. More than 150 foreigners have been kidnapped in Iraq over the past year. (Many more Iraqis, of course.) Most have been freed after negotiations or payment of ransom, but about a third have been killed.

More on this when there is more.

Tunnel vision

Another excerpt from the memoirs of an American poet, this time Andrei Codrescu. He's from New Orleans -- originally, from Sibiu -- and is probably best known in the US as a commenter on National Public Radio, although his writing has its charms too. (Was he the one who quipped how great it was to live in a country where those three words, "National Public Radio", symbolize boredom, not nationalism? Might have been Daniel Schorr.) This is from The Muse is Always Half-Dressed in New Orleans The Hole in the Flag, his account of his trip back to Romania in December 1989:

The metro entrance gaped at our feet like a huge open mouth. We had read that the metro entrances of Bucharest were also entry points into Ceaucescu's maze of tunnels, a secret subterranean network constructed to outlast even nuclear war. There were reports of rooms stocked full of canned and frozen delicacies, armories containing missiles, communications centers gleaming with the latest technology. The underground network was reputed to be thousands of miles long, multilayered, a complicated nervous system whose exact shape and direction no one single person knew. Architects who had worked on portions of the system had been killed. [...]

The land of Romania is combed with the tunnels of various ages. When I was a kid, I could get from my school to my house via an old tunnel that began just under the wall adjoining our chemistry lab. It was one of many built to serve as escape routes during a Turkish assault. It connected to older tunnels that honeycombed the city and ended in the mountains. We could sink under the city at the blink of an eye, and often did, when we skipped history, which was taught by a horrible man with an eye patch named Comrade Rana. But the tunnels existed precisely because history was one subject the Romanian people had been unable to skip. [...]

A brief article, written in spare soldier's language by a certain Major Mihai Floca, described the tunnels under Bucharest being deactivated by his elite commando unit. He wrote of giant refrigerators stuffed with a variety of meats, stores of foods that "most people have forgotten the taste and color of," immense closets filled with quality clothes and shoes, comfortable dormitories, ultramodern workshops equipped with the latest electronic monitoring equipment and computers, caches of weapons, sophisticated bombs, germ warfare shells. The brightly lit "labyrinth" was vast, leading everywhere, under secret buildings, under the television and radio stations, under the Ceaucescu's many palaces and safe houses. "They were prepared to live forever in there," he concluded sternly.

You know, I might think that Major Floca might be indulging in a bit of post-Revolution urban legend, except now I've seen that damn Palace of the People. Now I wonder how well the tunnels' Ceaucescu-era concrete has dealt with the local water table and earthquake tremors. Codrescu continues:

What is it about Commies and tunnels? Harrison Salisbury reports in his book on Tiananmen Square that the Chinese troops that burst out of the Great Hall of the people and the historical museums ringing the square had slipped there secretly from tunnels under the Forbidden City. "There is even a branch railroad line with an underground station in Zhongnanhai," writes Salisbury. If one considers that the chief metaphor used in Communist propaganda is the "light of communism" or the "dawn of the new age," the tunnels become even more baffling. On the other hand, it makes perfect sense: A movement born and elaborated underground that came to light through violence and then ruled illegitimately must always make provisions to return to the darkness of its beginnings.

Ceaucescu, hunter or butcher? Take a wild guess

There is a type of despicable person that, as one learns more about them, one finds even more reasons to loathe them. Not even the smallest part of their lives seems free from the internal corruption they exude, and whatever they touch becomes tainted.

Of recent historical figures, I feel that way most strongly about Imelda Marcos. But old Nick is certainly in the running. David Quammen, in his recent book, Monster of God (on what he calls 'alpha predators' and the rest of us call 'man-eaters'), gives an unusual perspective on old Nick's loathsomeness: Romania from the bears' point of view.

What proved helpful for Romania's bear population was not so much the lofty ideals of sustainable management as the realities of Communist autocracy. After the war, things were different in the mountains. Common people had no guns. Common people were afraid of the central government, its regulations, and its means of enforcement. Bear hunting became a prestigious privilege reserved mainly to the nomenclatura, the Party elite. [...]

The history books don't say whether Gheorghiu-Dej, an urban agitator in the proletarian vein, fancied bear hunting personally, although there is a record of his hosting Nikita Khrushchev to a hard-drinking, bear-killing junket up in the Harghita district. Nicolae Ceaucescu, similarly, had shown no interest in woodland shooting sports during his earlier years. But in the late 1960s, while Ceaucescu solidified his position as supreme leader of both the Party and the country, he did discover a zeal for hunting -- or, more accurately, for the sort of pampered travesty of hunting that only a despot gets to experience and only a delusional egoist would enjoy.

Truth to power, baby! Quammen continues:

Beginning in the late 1960s, Ceaucescu made himself the hunter in chief of Romanian forests as well as the commander in chief of the military. He arrogated hundreds of hunting areas -- the best of them, so far as large game is concerned -- to his personal use. Forest managers at the district level, and the hunting wardens who worked for them, and the gamekeepers who reported to the wardens, came to realize that any estimable animal emerging within their purview was an animal the Conducator might want to kill. They recognized that pandering to his blood lust, to his lazy greed for trophies, was good professional politics. One district competed against another for his visits, offering big bears and rack-heavy stags as easy targets for his pricey imported rifles.

For a typical hunt, Ceaucescu would fly in by helicopter and land on a cleared pad within the hunting area itself. From there he'd be taken by rough-terrain vehicle (in earlier years he favored Jeeps, then a Russian make, the Gaz, and still later a rattletrap Romanian imitation, the Aro) along forest roads, to a point very near the spot where hungry bears or rutting red deer were expected to appear. He would walk the short distance to a strategically placed high seat -- in a tight little draw that served as a game corridor, say, or along a stream, where the gurgling water would cover noises made by a hunter. Usually he was accompanied by at least one security officer, who would carry his weapons and ammunition, and a forestry official from the district office. Many other Forest Department personnel would have been involved in preparing for his visit, but they were kept at a distance during the actual hunt.

In the high seat, he had little patience for waiting and watching. His attention span, according to a witness who worked with him often, was five minutes. But for this brand of hunting, patience wasn't necessary. Bears came to the feeding troughs; red deer stags congregated in response to hormonal imperatives and the attraction of hinds; or, in some cases, both bears and wild boars were pushed toward a high seat in organized drives involving dozens of beaters. Ceaucescu took his shots, admired his kills, posed for photographs, and then departed.

The report of his short attention span comes from Vasile Crisan, a forestry official who later published a memoir, in German, the title of which translates as Ceaucescu: Hunter or Butcher?

During the twenty-five years of his reign, according to Crisan's tally, Nicolae Ceaucescu shot about four hundred bears. In the earlier years, he sometimes hosted shooting parties at which guests were welcome to kill game -- deer, boar, even some of those precious bears. On a day's hunt in 1974, Ceaucescu himself shot twenty-two bears and his guests another eleven. In later years he more jealously kept the bears for himself. Between 1983 and his death in 1989, Crisan reports, Ceaucescu bagged 130. His most notable fit of excess occurred in the autumn of 1983 when, during a single day, aided by four separate game drives toward his position, Ceaucescu personally shot twenty-four bears.

That slaughter occurred in a hunting area called Cusma, within the Bistrita district, not far from a luxurious hunting lodge known as Dealul Negru (the Black Hill), which had been built expressly for Ceaucescu and his wife. Informed that the 1983 bear crop was bounteous at Cusma, Ceaucescu announced his intention to visit. This triggered a scramble of kowtowing preparations. The high seats were repaired. The forest roads were improved. The bears were fed -- generously, with two tons of fruit and two hundred kilograms of bear chow poured into the area each day for six weeks. The hunting lodge, Dealul Negru, was made spiffy. The local Party office recruited four hundred citizens to serve as beaters, and from among the local police and the Securitate came a hundred more.

Ceaucescu arrived by helicopter on the morning of the hunt, October 15. The plan was to split the beaters into three groups, for three separate drives, and then marshal them all into a giant sweep of the forest for a climactic fourth. Crisan describes how the day unfolded, with Ceaucescu blasting at bears, killing bears, wounding bears as they fled toward his position in one high seat and then another. After the first drive, in which he killed three medium-sized animals and injured two but missed two others that ran back into the forest, Ceaucescu complained petulantly about the arrangements. God forbid that two bears out of seven should escape -- or if God wouldn't forbid it, the Conducator would. Next year, he commanded, there should be a fence along here, dammit, to channel the animals inexorably toward the high seat. Yes yes, the district director promised, next year there would be a fence.

After the second and third drives, having killed seven more bears, Ceaucescu was still unsatisfied. The fourth drive began, the big one, with hundreds of beaters moving down brushy hillsides toward a valley. The security men carried semi-automatic rifles; the foresters had small-gauge shotguns; they all shouted, fired into the air, setting up a din. Vasile Crisan took refuge on a high seat, from where he could watch without too much danger of being mistaken by Ceaucescu for a bear. As the beaters pushed within a couple of hundred yards of the firing line, they came virtually shoulder to shoulder. "The bears were running in every direction, trying to escape," Crisan writes. "But it was useless, it was impossible." Bears fell dead, bears fell wounded, and amid the chaos Crisan couldn't tell just how many; but few if any seemed to be escaping.

Ceaucescu blazed away with a pair of Holland & Holland .375s, a minion beside him reloading one rifle while he fired the other. When the shooting and the hollering stopped, the forest workers started dragging in carcasses. Twenty-four dead bears were lugged back to the hunting lodge (where Elena could admire them) and laid out in two rows, framed with freshly cut brush, like trout on a platter garnished with parsley. Ceaucescu posed for photos. "We, the foresters, gathered at a certain distance," Crisan recalls, adding the tight-lipped understatement, "Contrasting feelings governed us." He had devoted much of his life to hunting, but he labels this sorry episode the Massacre of Bistrita.

You know, as I read this, I thought to myself, what a splendid opportunity for a 'hunting accident'! Oh well.

The Kindness of Strangers

Bucharest is being hit by snow again, and this time it's almost worse than the last time. Our car pool broke apart because the designated driver couldn't get his four-wheel-drive to move out of the masses of snow. So Doug and I shoveled the car out of half a meter of snow in record time and I set off to take Alan to school with my mini-van and the summer tires. I had almost no problems (barring horrible traffic). I got stuck once at the school where a nice stranger helped me and gave a good hard push.

Then I heard it's going to continue to snow for three days and thought it would be better to stock up on groceries. Just in case.

So off I went to the Billa supermarket. And I got stuck again. It was a little hill and I would have made it if not for four other cars which got stuck. Once stopped, there was no more going forward -- or backward, because I had cars backed up behind me.

Two young men offered to help me. How nice! They said something about a taxi which I didn't understand. Instead of speaking slower and using simpler words, they did the universal thing: THEY JUST SPOKE LOUDER. Stupid foreigner that I am, I still didn't understand. However, they proceeded to push the car and I slowly got a grip with my poor, old, worn down summer tires. Then the two young men hopped aboard and it dawned on me that they wanted a ride in exchange for pushing. OK. Fair deal.

All of a sudden, I remembered that I had had my wallet on the front passenger seat. I know, it's a stupid place to begin with and not a habit of mine. It was a hectic and unusual morning.

Anyhow. I said I wanted my wallet, the wallet turns up, I want to take it but the guy behind me proceeds to put it into the glove compartent. OK. I was distracted by traffic and the wallet was safe.

The guys hop off at the next intersection, I go to the supermarket. At the cashier, I open my wallet and it doesn't contain the 100 Euros I had in there this morning.

The kindness of strangers, indeed.

Mulţumim!

I really have a good sense of orientation. I can drive into Budapest and find Keleti station without a map, having been to the city only once before. Give me a map and a street name and I will find just about any place in Bucharest. I do that regularly and I rarely get lost. Unless... unless I'm somewhere close to Calea Plevnei.

Calea Plevnei is one of those strange places like Stonehenge or Salisbury Hill. It has it's own magnetic distortion field and no sense of orientation will help you. Even messenger pigeons get lost when they come close to Calea Plevnei. I swear that's true.

Yesterday evening around 6:30 the boys and I were on our way back from a play date. Going up Magheru Boulevard, Alan spotted one of those giant posters with a hamburger and the familiar "M" on it and cried out: "Mommy, I want French Fries!"

Now, I am not wont to give in to these demands when we are at home. We eat horrible food enough when we're traveling but at home, we eat sensibly. I mean, sensibly enough.

[Cough.]

It had been a tough day for Alan, though. He'd had a bad accident at school and looked like the loosing party in a major boxing event. His right eye black and blue and swollen almost shut, he elicited cries of woe and sympathy wherever he went. And both boys had been very good this afternoon, I had no idea what we could possibly have for dinner, Doug wasn't coming home until late... oh, what the hey.

Now, there is only one McDonald's I know of in the relative vicinity of where we were that had parking. The one on Calea Buzeşti. There are a couple ways of getting from here to there and I could have avoided Calea Plevnei easily enough. I don't know why I didn't. It was a nice evening after a nice day, I felt at peace with myself and the world, I had a map... come on, I can do that! I didn't even want to go on Calea Plevnei itself, just in the vicinity - up Berzei and then Buzeşti, easy-peasy.

Hah.

It was easy getting close to the neighborhood itself. Zip, zip, and we were there. And then it happened. All of a sudden, I lost my orientation and couldn't tell east from west or north or south. Hadn't I just come from this direction? Didn't I need to go in a 90 degree angle now? But this street was tilting backwards, or wasn't it? And before I knew what happened, I found myself - on Calea Plevnei.

I pulled over, with flashing lights, and pulled out the map.

Alan said, "Oh-oh. We are lost."

Calea Plevnei makes an odd turn in the middle, and it... oh, it's just a mess. We were far from where we wanted to go. And since I was in the center of magnetic distortion, I had no hopes for escape. Calea Plevnei is the Bermuda Triangle of Bucharest.

Guess what. A young man knocked on the window. Asked me where I wanted to go. Well, Calea Berzei. No, Buzeşti, really. Actually, the McDonald's on Buzeşti. Oh, he said. Come on, just follow me.

I don't usually do that. Who knows who this guy is, what he really wants. And my perception was distorted enough that I couldn't fathom which route we were taking. Past the Gara de Nord? But... And then right, and left? But wasn't that taking us away?

But all of a sudden, there it was, the big golden M right in front of us, the kids shrieked in delight (and what does that say about my cooking, I wonder?), the nice young man declined any money I offered him and disappeared with a nod and a smile into the night.

Mulţumim, stranger. This is why I love Bucharest.

The adoption thing again

We're talking about orphans again, and the ban on international adoptions out of Romania.

No, not here. It's happening over at Randy McDonald's LiveJournal.

Brother, hast thou a shovel?

This was by far the nicest aspect of the recent heavy snow fall: all the neighbor men helped together to dig the cars out of the snow. They even helped me, although I was whimsical enough to start the digging process two days after everybody else. Thanks, neighbors.

Snow falling on Bucharest

We haven't had much snow this winter - so far. Friday night, it started snowing seriously and it hasn't stopped since. Snow in Bucharest is almost always yucky - wet slush on the streets, turning brownish-black, mixed with dog poop...

But after two days of snowing, the snow is up to half a meter at some points and covers everything. No snow ploughs ever venture into our little side street and few cars have dared the elements, so the snow on the street is untouched. Since we were too cheap to buy those expensive winter tires, it also means that we're stuck for the time being. Shopping will be by foot at the expensive 24-hour supermarket. Good thing we live in a neighborhood that has shopping and restaurants in easy walking distance. (How easy that walking will be with toddlers who will be up to their hips in snow, we shall see.)

Mind you, I'm not complaining. The kids love it. It looks beautiful. It's a nice cozy feeling of "nature prevails" without actually being in any danger.

Spring sometime next week would be nice, though. (Yeah, I'm a wuss. But you knew that, right?)

A picture of our winter street and one of our landlord digging out his car are under the fold.

Snow, Flower, Car

Pictures to Trans-Fagaras Highway

Under the fold, some pictures of the Trans-Fagaras Highway. No pix of our trip through the clouds, though -- that was just plain white boring stuff. But you can see bits and pieces of the road through the clouds from the top. With a good connection, click on the pictures to see them slightly bigger.

Street encounters

I was in Mogosoaia today, to get the car fixed. (If you're familiar with the area and wondering why I go so far out of town... well, the repair shop there is fast, cheap, reliable and German.) On my way back, I saw something that wouldn't be remarkable at all in the US, quite remarkable in Germany and I've never seen it in Romania so far.

Have a look:

I know what you're thinking. A truck, so what? Well, have a closer look at the printing on the outside:

I looked up the company, Transallianz GmbH. It's a German freight shipping company located in Neu-Ulm in Southern Germany. Transallianz has subsidiaries in Romania, namely in Timisoara and Bucharest.

Neither the homepage nor any googling revealed what this slogan is all about, though. The homepage is as plain as can be, with no reference to anything Christian or religious.

The Romanian caption is from Philippians 4:13 - "I can do everything through him who gives me strength." That's a pretty appropriate slogan for a moving company, eh?

I still wonder about the story behind this truck. There's gotta be one.

Horse Trading

Hard haggling and much behind-the-scenes scrambling as both major parties struggle to form the next government.

New President Basescu has said that he'll put forward a Prime Minister from his own party. But (as noted in previous posts) his party doesn't have a majority in Parliament. No one does. So, horse trading.

It gets complicated because -- I'm going to simplify this -- PSD is unified, organized, well-financed and desperate; but on the other hand, Basescu is one stubborn SOB. So it could be an irresistable force vs. immovable object sort of thing.

The two smaller parties, UDMR and PUR, can make or break a government. They were very close to signing an agreement with PSD yesterday, but backed off at the last minute... probably because Basescu threatened to force early elections. Early elections might be bad for Basescu's party, but they'd be potentially lethal to PUR and no fun for UDMR either. So it's a powerful card to play.

(Constitutionally, if Basescu puts a PM candidate forward three times, and gets rejected by Parliament three times, then elections are mandatory. So Basescu could force it. Would he? Or is he bluffing? Can't say just now, but it adds an interesting twist.)

One big problem for Basescu is the perception that the Alliance is weak, indecisive, and internally divided. (I don't know if this is true, but that's the perception.) Even strong Basescu supporters seem lukewarm to the prospect of an Alliance government. Everyone remembers 1996-2000, when Romania went through a series of unstable coalition governments and the country seemed to suffer accordingly.

Will Romania have a government for Christmas? We're all watching with interest.

11 random reasons to love Romania

Apropos of yesterday's post and the slightly cranky comment thread that grew out of it. After nearly two years here, we are still trying to figure out the mysteries of the Romanian self-image. Pride and defensiveness, patriotism and constant self-criticism -- it can be a little confusing. This probably deserves a long post in its own right.

Meanwhile, here are eleven random things that foreigners like about Romania (not necessarily in order of importance, nor claiming completeness):

1. The people.
2. Wonderful peaches.
3. The Olt Valley.
4. Christmas carollers.
5. Bucharest parks.
6. Best tomatoes ever.
7. The Carpathians.
8. Good economic growth.
9. Child friendly.
10. Governments can lose elections.
11. EU material!

I challenge you to add more! Let's have it for the good things!

Europe glows

... is the title of a recent Zeit-magazine article about the borders of Europe and how to define what is Europe and what not. The article is interesting in its own right but I really like the photo that came with it. It shows Europe at night - glowing. You can pick out single cities easily enough. You can see the borders of the Alps by the chain of lights gracing its northern slopes.

And you can pick out the shape of Romania. Because it's a black region in the sea of lights.

See for yourself:

UPDATE A friend of mine once said that in Serbia, everybody has a persecution complex. In Romania, everybody has an inferiority complex. It's an oversimplification but there is some truth to it.
How else could readers of this blog react like this? I mean, isn't this picture amusing? As obviously photoshopped as it is? With the entire Republic of Ireland black? Almost all of Switzerland and Austria uninhabited? The region in Germany where I come from is also pitchblack, by the way. I mean, it's so clearly tampered with, didn't anybody see the irony in this? Sheesh.

Women's Shelter?

A quick plea for help: Do any of our Romanian readers know of a women's shelter here in Bucharest? I know there is at least one (it's small, I hear -- four persons tops). Does anyone have the number, is there another, can I have that number too?

No, it's not for me. Doug is the kindest human being you can imagine, and he has a big, big heart. (I love that guy, I can't help myself.) In any case, I'd take the credit card and stay at the Hilton. With room service. (And he knows that.)

But, please. If you know, send me the number by mail: claudia dot muir at gmail dot com. Thanks!

Basescu?

As of 11:00 this morning, it looks like Traian Basescu has defeated Adrian Nastase in the runoff election for the Romanian Presidency.

If the mood in my office is typical, then most Romanian readers of this blog will already be celebrating. Non-Romanians will be wondering what it's all about.

Short version: Nastase, the current Prime Minister, was very much the business as usual candidate. He ran a campaign whose message was (I am paraphrasing), "who cares if there's corruption? We're getting some good economic growth. We're going to join the EU. Sit back and don't worry your pretty little head about politics."

Basescu... well, Basescu at least presents the possibility of change. He's a former naval officer who's been the Mayor of Bucharest for the last few years. He has his little quirks, which I may blog about later, but most urban and educated Romanians consider him vastly preferable to Nastase.

This result is unexpected, to say the least. Nastase beat Basescu by 8 percentage points in the first round, two weeks ago. And he had near-total dominance of the media, a much larger and more powerful party machine, and pretty much unlimited funding. Even Basescu supporters had seemed more or less resigned.

If this result is confirmed, it means that Romania will be entering on a period of "cohabitation", with the Prime Minister's office and the Presidency held by different parties. This will be a new thing for Romania.

The Rules

Driving in Romania is horrible, and driving in Bucharest is worse. The German in me despairs of the continuous ignoring of street signs, lines on the street, other traffic, traffic rules, and common sense. After over a year of driving in Bucharest, though, I'm quite adjusted to local standards, so when shuttling the kids to school or making a grocery run, I just unleash my inner barbarian. It's not pretty.

However, I observed and I learned and I found there are rules that people are sticking to. They are just different from rules anywhere else. So, here are The Rules for Driving in Bucharest for you.

Traffic lights

Observation: The unexpected fact is, Romanian drivers stop at red lights. Mostly. There is a subspecies of drivers that doesn't but I'll explain the various categories of Romanian drivers later. In any case, as soon as the green light turns orange, most people stop.

Sort of.

They stop, and then they inch forward. A little bit. And a little bit. And some more. If you are a pedestrian in the crosswalk, this is more than a little unnerving. It's like walking past a cage of hungry hyenas: you're pretty sure the bars will hold, but you can't like the way they're looking at you.

Then, the light turns green.

Nothing happens.

For about five seconds or so, nobody moves. Then, somebody honks and everybody gets moving.

Rule: Green lights aren't actually green until five seconds have passed. This is to make sure the traffic light isn't bribed by crossing traffic and suddenly morphs back into being a red one.

Left turns

Observation: Left turns are immensely popular here, especially when they are forbidden. Romanians love left turns. In fact, they love them so much, that there usually is too little space to accommodate all those fans of left turns. So they ingeniously line up in rows. Four, five cars side-by-side at a left turn are no uncommon sight. Since they all have to merge into a single or double-lane road after making the turn, it can be a bit tricky not to be cut off by other drivers making the turn.

Rule: Never give in. Never leave a space big enough for another car to fit into. Honk at everyone. Ignore traffic lights and oncoming traffic. Watch your left side, always.

Roundabouts

Observation: Roundabouts are busy and Romanians love to take them at high speed. Roundabouts are great for enforcing your dominance on the road -- the bigger and stronger you are, the further left you drive, especially when you want to make a right turn, like, now. Those pesky drivers who are in the middle lane and want to go straight, heaven knows why? They will yield if you just honk very loudly.

Rule: Everybody can make a right turn, even those in the innermost lane. Stand your ground. Honk back.

Overtaking

Observation: If there is so much as an inch on your left side, you will be passed. Tram tracks are just a rather bumpy pass lane.

Rule: There is none. Regard that dent in your car as a rite of initiation. Don't cry.

Honking

Observation: Everybody honks. You honk to remind the idiot in front of you that he is napping at a green light. You honk to make the pedestrian scamper a little faster. You honk because your car is bigger. You honk because your kids are screaming in the back. You honk because you are.

Rule: Honking is OK. Don't get hung up on it. Only exception: buses. Never, ever honk at buses. You may even honk at one of the four hummvees that are driving around town because they have to stick to The Rules too. Buses don't. And they are much bigger than hummvees.*

*I did witness a hummvee honking at a bus once. Everybody was stunned, even the bus driver - for a moment. The hummvee driver was Canadian and I'd love to hear his story one day. I left the scene as quickly as I could. I had kids in the car, after all.

Diplomacy

Teo Peter, founding member of the Romanian rock group "Contact", was killed in a traffic accident in Bucharest on December 4.

Peter traveled in a taxi that was struck by a US Embassy vehicle driven by US Marine Robert Christopher. Witnesses report that 31-year-old Marine drove his car at high speed through an intersection, did not heed the traffic signs, and hit the taxi. The impact was so forceful that the taxi whirled through the air and hit a pillar in front of the Sudanese embassy. Rescue workers could not save Peter's life, the driver of the taxi was severly wounded but is said to be in stable condition.

Christopher was brought to the police station, where he was questioned and took a breathlyzer test. He agreed to these procedures and also signed a sworn statement.

Daily News reports:

According to Bucharest Police, the breathalyzer test showed the American driver had a 0.09 milligrams alcohol level in his blood, where as, under Romanian law, drivers are not allowed to drink at all. When police saw the breathalyzer results, they tried to take the marine to the National Institute of Forensic Medicine to perform a blood test, but he refused, saying the institute does not use the "medical instruments offered by the embassy," according to the police press release.

The U.S. Embassy announced the marine has already been taken out of the country, guarded by a security officer, and is now in a U.S. military base in Europe.

The Romanians are understandably upset about this incident. They demand the return of the Marine and a waiver of his immunity. They refer to the case of a drunk Georgian diplomat who killed a little girl in an accident in the US in 1997. Back then, the US demanded of Georgia to waive the diplomat's immunity and the request was granted.

U.S. Ambassador Jack Dyer Crouch said the Romanian authorities were informed that the Marine officer would be taken out of Romania, adding that the Convention in Austria states that any embassy employee has the right to leave the country in order to be investigated in his own country. Crouch said the Romanian authorities did not need to give their approval for the American Marine to be evacuated to his own country, as his departure was in the interests of those involved in the case and that it was a decision of the American government.

Well.

A random thought about the elections

One reason that Romania's government is getting back into office is that the opposition parties can't work together.

The Democratic Alliance can't abide PRM, Partidul Romania Mare, the nationalist Party of Greater Romania. And this is understandable. PRM is pretty odious.

But what if they weren't?

(Here follows some completely random, uninformed political speculation.)

An Alliance-PRM coalition would be just as big as the current PSD/PUR -UDMR union. It would control a clear majority in Romania's Senate, and would be just a few votes short of one in the Chamber of Deputies.

A PSD-PRM coalition would be even better. "Drop the Hungarians, and those silly minority members in the Chamber. We're your natural allies. Join with us, and govern with a clear majority instead of one that's vulnerable to random defections."

It would be great, from PRM's point of view. They'd be kingmakers.

Except it can't happen, because they're just too hated. Right? The Alliance has said it won't ally with them under any circumstances. PSD/PUR hasn't said that in so many words, but there would be heavy European pressure on them against taking PRM as a partner. It has been made quietly but firmly clear that PRM is just not acceptable as a member of government. And this is not a time for Romania's governing party to be offending Brussels.

But what if PRM could purge themselves?

A lot of odious nationalist-populist parties have managed to get into government following a makeover. It's a Europe-wide phenomenon. To give just an obvious example, consider the Freedom Party in Austria. Far-right, xenophobic, nativist, anti-immigrant, and inclined to be just a little too upbeat about some of the nastier aspects of Austrian history. Four years ago, when they first got into government, it was a major diplomatic issue.

But that was then. By now the Freedom Party has been in government twice. Nobody even notices them any more.

So the thing is possible. And the easiest way for PRM to do a makeover would be to dump Vadim Tudor.

Think about it. He's the public face of the party, and he's almost universally despised outside of it. Former court poet to Ceausescu. He's arrogant and pompous. Eccentric. Used to be a loud anti-Semite; now claims he loves the Jewish people. Has said that Romania "can only be governed through the mouth of a machine gun".

Dump Tudor, and the PRM would have a chance to rebrand itself. Still nationalist, still populist, but within acceptable limits.

Is this plausible? I have no idea. Comments by Romanians welcome.

For sale

We've blogged about the Romanian treatment of the orphan and street kid problem, the EU reaction and the Romanian response to that before.

Sky TV, a British TV station, showed a report last week that stirred some blood here. A team of reporters with pocketsful of Euros grazed the poorer areas of Bucharest, trying to buy babies.

Did they succeed?

You bet they did.

Sky News' Lawrence Lee reports:

It proved remarkably simple to buy a baby. You go to the outdoor market in Bucharest, and look for the poorest people, who, inevitably, are laden with young children.

You pretend to be a couple desperate to adopt; in the space of a single afternoon we met one man who offered us whichever of his daughter's 20-or-so children we wanted; another offered us his wife's unborn child for 500 euros (£350).

Not only does this seem to raise grave questions about Romania's suitability to be a part of the EU, it also causes a huge headache for the agencies who continue to fight a losing battle against gangs engaged in people trafficking.

This comes as no surprise to people living in Romania. The recent changes in the adoption law -- namely, that foreigners are only allowed to adopt if it's proven that no Romanian wants a specific child -- have not improved the situation. It's a remarkably stupid law in the first place, and then, of course, it's not enforced consistently. Money will buy you anything, also the cooperation of an official.

Speaking of enforcement: how do you think the authorities reacted to the Sky News report?

They are now seeking the families who offered their children for sale in order to prosecute them. The National Authority for Child Protection and Adoption is helping the Department against Organized Crime and Drugs [sic!] which is conducting the investigation.

Where is the Child Protection service when those children end up on the street because their parents cannot feed them anymore? Why the Police Department against Organized Crime? What is anybody doing against the roots of the problem?

Sky News:

The Mayor of Bucharest, a forward-looking man who's one of the few here prepared to admit that big problems still exist, was apoplectic.

"You wouldn't treat a dog like this," he said, and he was obviously right. "But what to do?" He reckoned it was about education, but in truth many Romanians regard the Roma as an internal cancer, keeping their country in the middle ages.

This is true, I'm sorry to say.

St. Martin's Day in Bucharest... or not?

How times flies, it St. Martin's Day again. Just like last year, we'll be having a lantern parade for the kids... or that's the plan, at least -- it's raining here in Bucharest.

Defiantly, I spent all afternoon making two lanterns for my boys. What do you think, aren't they nice?

We'll go out, come rain or snow. The boys will be clad in their full-body rain gear and if the lanterns die, well, that's what lanterns usually do on this day. (The traditional end is to go up in flames but I've opted for the electrical sticks again, wuss that I am.)

I'll let you all know how it was and maybe post a picture or two.

Earthquake, update

Our friend Christine sent us some links, to which we woke up this morning after a quiet night. Apparently, it was a 5.8 or 5.9 magnitude one, located some 100 miles northeast of us.*

Our friend Dragos at @rgumente and Kit have commented on it too. I have to agree with Kit -- 20 seconds seemed like an eternity. It was enough time to wake up from a light slumber, wondering, realizing, saying "Doug?", hearing the answer "earthquake!" from the study, running to the kids, getting them out of bed and standing in the doorway. Time does stretch.

For me, it also awoke memories of 1977. That big Romania earthquake? I lived in Istanbul with my family back then and I remember that evening clearly. Everything shook heavily and we, too, stood in the doorway with my parents clutching us children. The next day, we had huge cracks in the walls of our house. Not this year - our house here is built very earthquake safe. It also means that you cannot get a nail into the walls if your life depended on it, which used to annoy me mildly a number of times. Yesterday evening, though, I was quite content to live in such a sturdy house.

My nanny didn't sleep all night. She, too, was plagued by memories of 1977. She used to live in a house next to a huge empty patch of land. After the earthquake, all the rubble from the flattened houses was brought there.
She remembers seeing body parts mixed in with the concrete and pieces of buildings - arms, legs, heads. Gruesome pictures, guranteed to keep one's mind far too busy to sleep. Ceausescus Romania was an awful, awful place.

*That's pretty close to Zabola. I wrote them an email, hoping to hear back from them soon.

Update: Reuters reports that "Romanian officials said buildings, such as the historic Bucharest city hall, had suffered mostly cracks in walls and falling plaster and some roads were slightly damaged but utilities were functioning normally." The strength has also been upped to 6.0.

Beet, the unknown root

OK. This is the weirdest thing and I'm not sure I got it down pat. I'm actually quite sure it can't be the way I understand it from the meagre sources I have available. Follow me and then explain to me where my thinking is wrong.

All right. Says Mr. Vasile Puscas, Romanian Minister Delegate and the Chief-Negotiator with the European Union:

Concerning the sugar sector, I must say that the negotiations were extremely tough, taking into account the low production obtained in Romania during the last years (the average production during 1998 – 2002 is 99,000 tons, with 55,000 tons in 2000) and the considering that Romania is net sugar importer country. In these circumstances we succeeded in obtaining a total sugar quota (quota for sugar beat plus processing quota), which together with the quota obtained for isoglucose covers entirely the domestic consumption in Romania. This quota is about four times as much as the quota presented by the mass media as being the Commission proposal. We have chosen this strategy in order to support the sugar industry. I must underline the fact that we obtained the best results in comparison with all the other sugar importer countries that acceded to the European Union in May 2004.
Via The Periscope

OK. This is what I understand:

1. Romania is a sugar importer.
2. Romania is allowed to export an amount of sugar to the EU that equals its sugar consumption.

Confusing? Yeah, well. Then read this:

European Union regulation number 2007/00 from September 18, 2000, and amendment RC 2563/00 from November 20, 2000 opened the market of the European Union to the import of the sugar produced in Yugoslavia and other countries of the Western Balkans without any restrictive measures or customs burden. Price of the protected sugar on the European market amounts to 650 EUR/ton, and the average price in the world are below 300 EUR/ ton. The average sales price of our sugar exported to the EU market approximated to 600 EUR/ton. In order to enable the import of our sugar the EU has simultaneously reduced the production sugar share for their sugar producers. One of the main objections to the EU regarding its market opening to the import from the countries of the Western Balkans is that these countries have shortage of sugar, which they mostly import themselves; therefore the import from these countries is in fact a fabrication.
Yugoslavian Government Anti-Corruption site

See, with the prices as they are, my first thought was -- why not export all your sugar to the EU for 600 EUR/ton, then supply for your own needs on the world market for a less than half of the price? Probably because its forbidden in the contract. (See below.)

The second thought was - why is the EU doing this? They are actively throwing away my tax money! They are cutting subsidies in the EU and redirecting them to non-EU members. Very humane, furthering poor countries and all that, but economically utterly stupid. Or is there a twist I'm missing?

I mean, they could just buy sugar on the world market for lower prices (OK, with the demand and whatnot, the prices would go up but not by 100%). They'd save 350 EUR/ton on the EU product and 300 EUR/ton on the Balkan import.

Anyhow, the ultimate goal is for those countries to up their sugar production, thus being self-supplying plus able to export sugar. Sugar beet is a highly intensive crop. You have to pump fertilizer in like mad. Not good for the soil at all. Hm.

Also, if Romania joins the union, and the EU succeeds in cutting the protected price, then Romania would end up getting a lot less for all that sugar they are now producing. Is anybody taking that into account?

It all seems rather pointless to me. But then, I'm suffering from post-pregnancy-mother-of-toddlers-brain which is a good excuse for almost anything, not the least being European economic policy. So if someone can explain this mystery to me, I'd be grateful.

BTW, the fact that the quote above is from the Anti-Corruption web site of Serbia? Well, it turns out that Serbia exported imported sugar branded as Serbian sugar.

The real surprise in my eyes is that everybody seemed so surprised by this.

This is how it was

Dragos from @rgumente asks:

so how was it? hope you had the chance of a better weather than the one from Bucharest today :)

Indeed, the weather was good. It didn't start to rain until we were already on our way back, past Sinaia. And it was just lovely. The area east of Braşov which was once (still, really) inhabited by Hungarians is potato country, so both Doug (Irish) and I (German) felt quite at home.

I'm quite busy at the moment but here are some pictures to give you an impression. If you find yourself in the region, we can only recommend Mikes Castle and the Swiss Hunting Lodge. I had the best food ever in Romania, and we came back happy and relaxed. More to follow.

The Swiss Hunting Lodge, now a B&B

Dinner time!

As happy as a boy with a stick

The fortified church in Hărman

Posted by claudia at 11:06 PM | Comments (0)

Weekend trip

We're going away for the weekend, to a place named Zabola, or rather, in Romanian, Zăbala. It's northeast of Braşov and we are staying at the hunting lodge. There are fortified churches nearby and lots of autumny greens and golds and reds. We've packed the kid carrier and the hiking boots and are hoping for lots of time outside in the fresh air. See you all on Monday!

The beast is rearing its ugly head

"Rich countries must provide practical support to developing country governments that demonstrate the political will to curb corruption. In addition, those countries starting with a high degree of corruption should not be penalised, since they are in the most urgent need of support," said Peter Eigen, Chairman of Transparency International (TI), speaking today on the launch of the TI Corruption Perceptions Index 2003 (CPI).
Transparency International

On the Transparency International Corruption Perception Index, Romania scores 2.8 points on a scale from 1 to 10 (worst to best), leaving it in 84th place behind such countries as Colombia, Ghana and Bulgaria (3.9/55). That's not so great but we all knew that.

I haven't had much experience with this dark side of Romanian culture, mainly because I'm not venturing much into bureaucracy and politics. This morning, however, we received a letter from Alan's school. And suddenly the whole issue was brought uncomfortably close to home.

The school is small, and there are a lot more applications than there are places for children. So there are waiting lists for most classes. We were lucky -- Alan got in after just a short wait -- but it's not unusual for children to be on the list for six months or even longer before a place opens up. Because of this, the school has a strict first come-first served policy; if you want your child to go there, you apply, pay a fee, and wait your turn.

So, the letter. This morning all the parents who dropped off their children got a letter from the director. Key paragraphs:

We had an unscheduled (3 hour) visit on Monday from the Sanitary Police who are asking for wide ranging changes regarding the lunch arrangements. They also informed us that we would be liable to 20 million lei [$600] fines and possible closure. However, it was suggested that if we admitted 2 children (one on the waiting list and one not) then these problems would go away.

Today, I was also approached via an intermediary of the President of the [deletia] who was intervening on behalf of another parent who has a child on the waiting list.

The letter went on to say that the school had decided not to move the children up the list.

This is upsetting and appalling. I do not want the school closed but I am absolutely supporting the decision of the Head of School and the Board of Administrators not to give in. I so do not want a child of such a person in my son's class. It actually makes me want to punch someone. (Someone who deserves it, of course, so don't worry about Doug or the kids!) I guess it's a good thing that we have some kids from Diplomats and that other parents are high-ranking business people. Maybe there is some counter-pressure that can be applied. Personally, we're thinking of spilling the story to a journalist we know.

Ironically, Transparency International has just a month ago or so launched a big campaign called "Nu Da Şpagă!" (Don't bribe!). They have a web site, and a very cool TV spot which they air on national TV and on National Geopgraphic. (It a big file, so not for dial-ups!) Is it going to help? I don't know. Webster's Online Dictionary states that " the campaign seeks to solve a problem which has remained since Communist times in Romania but which has recently improved."

I have to say that the bribery problem is not a Communist product. It existed before Communism, and, obviously, has outlasted it. Suggestive that it might not be so easy to fix, eh?

I don't know what the answer is. But in this case, we support the school, and we hope (a little nervously) that their brave stand will not be punished.

A world without squirrels

Only in Europe, an entire parking lot covered in acorns could be... empty of squirrels.

We do have squirrels in Europe, of course. But they are smaller, a lot fewer in number, red instead of gray, and very, very shy. I see them around my parents' house all the time, where they like to steal our harvest of hazelnuts. Why none of them would hang around this parking lot on the banks of Snagov lake, where acorns are literally strewn about, I can't say. It sure looked like squirrel heaven.

Fix that!

Some days ago, I received an email from a dear friend, with a link and the subject line: "This needs to be fixed!"

I couldn't agree more. So may I direct your all attention towards this charity. I know the people who run this place and it is a good thing. They always need money, so if you have not yet thought of a charity to give to for the holidays (I know they are months away, so what?), consider them. The government is certainly not doing anything for the street kids and orphans, so it's left to private efforts.

(They are still so grateful for the generous donation of yours, Pouncer!)

In the meantime, I'm happy to report that my little friend is doing well. He's as charming and adorable as ever, and he had a good day today. Among his loot were a big loaf of bread, a meat pastry, a bottle of water, and a banana (the latter from me - I thought he should also get some vitamins. I don't always give him bananas, though!) I so wished I could just take him home.

Bomb threat, the Romanian version

So David and I arrived from Germany on Sunday, at 3:15 pm. Our flight landed, touched a little hard but no problem. We got off the plane and to my delight I found the stroller waiting outside the airplane door (not necessarily a given). I strapped David in and walked to the passport control. A long line but we were waived to the Diplomatic passport control and got through in no time. I expected to be out of the terminal and reunited with husband and oldest child in less than fifteen minutes.

The walk from the passport control to the baggage claim area is about 100 meters. Down a little ramp, around a ninety degree corner to your left, and then either walk or take the transport belt to the automatic doors that will open to the baggage claim area.

I got exactly as far as to the corner. There was a backlog. I mean, the entire corridor was packed with people. Packed. The transport belt had been closed off, and one could see that the doors to the baggage area were closed too. That was all we saw and all we knew. It was the first time I had ever seen anything like this, and I've been landing at Otopeni airport (oops, make that Henri Coanda Airport) many, many times.

I assumed that the doors were broken, that some high ranking politician had arrived, something like that. I even tried to wiggle my way through in a Romania fashion -- "my baby has a poopy diaper, I need to change him really badly, can you let me go through to the bathroom?". I knew there were no bathrooms on this side of the passport control, so it seemed a good scam. Oh, and David was very poopy, and very obviously so. When that didn't work, I started to worry a little bit. Babies usually get you everywhere, and poopy ones even more so. And then I called Doug to tell him about the delay, and he said, "the entire terminal is sealed off, I'm not allowed to park, I can't even get close".

Oh.

At the corner where we were standing, there was a little booth with an official. He was grilled, by all of us. He didn't know a thing. I said, "So, is there a bomb threat?" which for some reason seemed amusing to us. He shrugged and looked embarrassed. That, we found less amusing. I changed David right there on the floor. It did give us some breathing room, if you wanted to breathe that air...

During the next half hour, we only heard announcements of planes landing. London, Amsterdam, Brussels. (I think, it's hard to remember.) Rumors began to fly. Bomb threat, yes. An abandonned suitcase in the terminal. No, a security problem on a plane. Yes, it was the plane to Chisinau. Of course, Moldova. They were always causing problems, the Moldovans, everybody knows that. My argument that a plane to somewhere wasn't likely to be the problem, since we were in the arrival terminal (the departure terminal being a separate building), only increased the confusion.

I have to say that the general mood was pretty upbeat, considering that there might have been a bomb nearby. I think everybody had the same thought as I did -- who would care to bomb Bucharest airport? One man handed out "Merci" chocolates that were clearly intended for someone waiting outside the terminal. Another man gave me a bottle of water for David. Children started playing with each other. People smiled.

I have to say that I never took the bomb threat seriously. I mean, Romanians may not be the world's most efficient people but surely they wouldn't let a plane full of people walk smack into a bomb, right? There were no new passengers joining us, BTW, so the planes that landed after us weren't even deboarding. Hm.

After a while, the announcements changed. "Ladies and Gentlemen, Henri Coanda International Airport apologizes for the delay. Thank you for your understanding." I was glad the airport was apologetic but I would have been grateful for some more information.

After about an hour in that hot, stinking corridor (a mass of sweating people will do that and David's diaper wasn't making things better), suddenly it was all over. We poured into the arrival hall, the bags were already there, nobody at customs even glanced at any of the luggage hauled by people who were just frantic to get out. I could have made a fortune smuggling just about anything. Oh, well.

We never were told what had been going on. My nanny saw it on the news in the evening, though. Here's what AP has to say about it:

Plane Bound for Israel Forced to Land in Bucharest When Letter Warning of Bomb Found
The Associated Press
Published: Sep 15, 2002

JERUSALEM (AP) - An airplane flying from Amsterdam to Tel Aviv was forced to land in Bucharest on Sunday when a letter was found on the plane that said a bomb had been planted on the aircraft.

A Romanian bomb squad found nothing on the plane, said Israeli civil aviation spokesman, Pini Schiff. A search of passengers and luggage also revealed nothing, Schiff said.

It was not clear who wrote the letter, who found it, or what language it was in.

The plane belonged to a Dutch charter company, Transavia, Dutch border police said.

About three hours into the flight, the pilot announced there was a technical problem and said he was landing in Bucharest, said Israeli passenger Itai Yona. After an emergency landing on a special strip opened for the airplane, the pilot told the passengers before they disembarked about the letter and its warning.

"It was a little tense but we remained relatively calm and got off the plane very quickly," Yona said.

The passengers were slated to board a Bucharest-Tel Aviv flight of the Israeli airline, El Al, later Sunday, the radio said. Israeli authorities granted special permission for the flight since it was slated to land in Tel Aviv an hour after the airport would close for the Yom Kippur holiday, or Day of Atonement, Israel's Channel Two TV reported.

AP-ES-09-15-02 0447EDT

Corruption 101

Via Dragos at argumente, here's a good introduction to corruption in Romania, by a foreigner for foreigners.

Several good bits. For instance:

Gonteanu shared with me fascinating May 2004 OSI research on the public attitudes that result -- 89% of Romanians surveyed think the state should “provide jobs for everyone who wants to work”; 55% think the government should start new state enterprises to boost employment; 58% think the majority of parliamentarians are corrupt; a shocking 51% think that most judges are corrupt … and 14% have themselves paid bribes in court.

And this:

What’s surprising to an outsider like me is how widely and in how much detail all this corruption (and more) are known. This was certainly somewhat a function of my milieu, which trended seriously toward young urban professionals or cultural figures sympathetic to the Liberal Party. But it’s also a measure of the deep and perhaps decisive urban/rural split in the country, which is more pronounced than any country I’ve witnessed, with the possible exception of Milosevic’s rump Yugoslavia.

In Bucharest and the other large cities, there is no shortage of critical newspapers, muckraking revelations, national and international television news, student populations, and what one diplomat called “the most youth-obsessed culture I’ve ever seen.” Not surprisingly, the opposition alliance (composed of the center-right Liberal Party and the center-left Democrats) won nearly all of the major cities, while losing most of the countryside (where plumbing isn’t widely available, let alone cable television or aggressive newspapering). According to OSI research, something like 70% of the rural population doesn’t even venture into the nearest decent-sized town more than once a month...

This is entirely consistent with what I've seen. Bucharest, Timisoara, and to a lesser extent three or four other cities (Galati, Brasov) are already a completely different world from the rest of the country. Rural Romania -- and keep in mind that roughly half of the country's population is rural -- is much poorer and, well, traumatized. They're very little-c conservative out in the countryside. Understandably so; change, for the last three generations, has meant nothing but trouble. Still, they're not going to be out in front pushing the country forward into the future.

I think the Romania-Yugoslavia comparison is also very apropos. The city of Belgrade never much cared for Milosevic -- it was a relatively cosmopolitan place. But Slobo used to overrun it with rent-a-crowds, poor rural Serbs that he'd bring in from the countryside by the busload to attend his rallies and "spontaneous" demonstrations of public support. And while one meets Serb nationalists everywhere in Serbia, it's out in the countryside that one encounters the really overheated conspiracy theories and true, deep paranoia.

Mind, the article doesn't touch on the fascinating topic of private corruption in Romania... how, for instance, the foreign purchase of a Romanian firm may have to fire half the management in the first few months, because so many of them may have various scams going on. But it's a good introduction to the topic generally.

More on this in a bit.

Is the EU just blind, or in fact stupid?

EU enlargement commissioner Guenter Verheugen on Tuesday congratulated Romania for a new law restricting the possibility for foreigners to adopt Romanian children.

Verheugen called for the law, which parliament voted last week, to be strictly applied in order to bring Romania in line with European Union legislation.

"This law is very clear. International adoption is now possible under very strict conditions," Verheugen told a press conference.
Source: EU Business.com

I know. I'm not really one to judge harshly. But I can't find words strong enough for my outrage over this latest development in the adoption law.

Honestly, I do wonder whether the EU has lost its collective mind. Does Verheugen have any idea what this law will actually do - and what not? It seems to me that he doesn't.

If he thinks that the restrictions on international adoption -- namely, it has to be made sure that a child will absolutely not be adopted by a Romanian family before it will be made eligible for international adoption -- if he thinks it will stop child trafficking, then he better think again. The only thing the law will actually do about child trafficking is it will raise the profits of those performing it and the receiving ends will pay much more than they did before. Hello? Romania is a corrupt society. Did someone not pay attention?

What this law will do is to ensure that children, who otherwise could be adopted into families in the EU or the States, and have safe and happy lives, will now stay in the Romanian orphanage system for years before it's clear they will not be adopted nationally. Romanians are very peculiar about adopting, it's not a generally accepted social phenomenon. It's not as if thousands of desperate Romanian families are standing in line for adoption. Plus, Romanian bureaucracy is... slow, if you want to be kind. It really will take years for each child to determine that it isn't wanted in Romania.

What this means for the children is clear to anybody who doesn't have a potato for a brain: the children will suffer neglect and be traumatized for the rest of their lives. Romanian state orphanages are horrible, to say the least.

In particular, this law is bad news for gypsy kids. While they might very well be adopted abroad, hardly any Romanian will give adopting a gyspy kid a second thought. But the system won't release those kids any earlier. Again, the minorities are those who will suffer most.

Is Verheugen aware of this? Is the EU? I can't imagine they aren't because there are a lot of people, including now-Ex Ambassdor Guest from the USA who kept arguing against this law. The facts are on the table.

America's ambassador to Bucharest described the law as a "tragedy", which would bar thousands of childless couples legitimately providing some of Romania's 40,000 orphans with a high standard of living in the US. Source: Deutsche Welle

No, it's not about children only being happy when they are raised in the US. It's about the fact that spending your most important childhood years in a Romanian state orphanage will screw you up for life.

Verheugen and the EU are guilty of child neglect in the worst possible manner. I'm disgusted about the behavior of both the Romanian government and the EU. Shame on you both.

Enemy of the State

My osteopath has told me a wild story today. She's a member of MISA, the Romanian yoga movement "Miscarea de Integrare Siprituala în Absolut" (Movement for the Spiritual Integration in the Absolute). She was very shaken and upset. Apparently the police has launched a nation-wide crack down on the highly criminal and subversive subjects known as "yogis". We all know how dangerous yoga practitioners are, don't we?

Sources on the internet are readily available, like here and here, but I found this a very moving, albeit difficult to read document. Wizards? In this day and age?

My osteopath warned me not to tell anybody that I am practising yoga. It could be "dangerous". Her praxis has been searched and the police questioned the neighbors whether they'd noticed any sex orgies in her rooms. Good for her that the neighbors were outraged by this slander.

She also gave me a movie CD with footage of the police raids -- chilling documents indeed.

MISA has protested in Brussels against this treatment. We can only hope that the EU listens and acts. I have small hope of that but we'll see.

On Tuesday, there is a big protest planned downtown. I will try to be there and let you know how things go.

I find this whole story so absurd.

False start 1

I've been having a tough time getting my thoughts on Bucharest in order. A little unnerving. When that happens, I usually go for a walk.

My neighborhood in Brooklyn, like many in this city, has its contingent of beggars: the very polite woman with the large dog who waits by the subway entrance and always calls me 'sweetheart'; the bearded, tipsy guy with the odd hat (and wasn't he wearing a tam last time?) sometimes swaying drunk by noon; the stocky guy whose story has progressed over the years -- out of work, has to feed a daughter, just got work but doesn't have enough money, just got work and doesn't need money, medical problems, AIDS medications not working (he was quite alarmingly gaunt at this point) -- and now, weight back up, he just asks. Then there's Grant. I like Grant. Grant had his fifteen minutes of fame a few years back. There was even a Law and Order episode, sort of. Grant likes Aerosmith, and always asks me how I enjoyed whatever holiday has just passed. He's been in the neighborhood for years. The begging is recent.

Anyway. I'm walking past the only grocery in the neighborhood that stocks the beer of my people, and then only occasionally, dammit. That corner has a regular, a tall guy with a horsey face who knows the names of hundreds of pedestrians, makes small talk. By the evening rush, he has enough money for Chinese takeout, most nights.

So he spots me. I do stick out, even in Brooklyn. "Hey! How are you! Haven't seen you around in a while."

"Well, you know, been out of town..." Man, I feel awkward in these situations.

"Oh, where you been?"

"In Romania."

"Romania?" He looks puzzled, but just for a second. "That's where they got that Cho-chess-koo guy, right?"

"Well, they did..."

"What's it like?"

So I told him.

The year of living interestingly

Every parent of a two-year-old can tell you that they are a species completely unrelated to human beings. They try to kill themselves constantly, and if they're not busy playing with scissors, carpet knifes, vacuum cleaners, and hammers, they love to take things apart.

Yesterday, Alan experimented with my kitchen timer. It's an electrical kitchen timer, precise, runs up to 24 hours, I love it. First, the tried to pry the lid off and the little buttons out, and when he didn't succeed, he put the timer into the microwave and turned it on. (Oh, don't ask why he was able to access the microwave.) The timer... well, it must have been very quick; I don't think it had time to feel any pain. The microwave, I'm happy to report, survived.

Today, Alan had an even better idea. While I was in the kitchen, he pulled a chair up to the alarm system control box in the living room and started punching random numbers. We don't have a panic button and the only way to set the thing off is to arm it with the right code and then disarm it with the wrong code.

Alan, being a two-year-old, managed this within three minutes. The alarm went off howling. It's a loud siren. It's supposed to alert the entire neighborhood and I can tell you, it did its job fabulously.

The problem was, I didn't know the right code. Neither did the landlord. Nor the landlady. Nor the security company. Nobody did, except Alan who didn't divulge his information. See, we had never used the alarm system and the landlord had never reset it from the former tenant. We were stuck with an alarm system that we couldn't disable. It went off periodically and slowly drove our neighbors and us insane.

Eventually, we figured out that the living room motion detector was overreacting. So we could avoid setting the alarm off... as long as we didn't enter the front door (which opens on the living room) or go up and down the stairs (which go up from that same living room). So, while we were waiting for the alarm people to figure out what was going on, I was trapped outside and Doug was trapped with the kids upstairs.

I sat on the front steps while Doug came out to the little balcony above it, and we tried to cheer each other up. I had nothing to read outside. Occasionally a few drops of rain would fall. The kids didn't like to stay upstairs; Alan kept trying to break away from Doug, climb over the stair-gate and run down the stairs. "Mommy! Mooommmmyyyyyy!"

It was dinnertime, almost bedtime. More rain began to fall. I could hear Doug upstairs, struggling. "No, Alan! Don't touch that! I said no!"

The high point, I think, came when Alan moved another chair -- clearly, he's made a major breakthrough with the chairs -- to the edge of the balcony. The balcony has a wall around it that's too high for a two-year-old to climb. A two-year-old on a chair, though, can climb over it easily. On the other side is a five meter (16 foot) drop to hard stone tiles. Doug reached him in time, but we now realize that we have to rethink just what "child safe" means in our home. And either watch our little boy constantly, or start teaching him that "no" really, truly means no.

And the alarm? It took almost two hours and the concerted efforts of two security guards, the landlord, the landlady, unknown people at the security company headquarters, and us to solve the riddle, disarm the sensors, and release us from captivity.

Alan is two years and three months old. He will be two years old until next March.

One year ago today

It was Doug's first day of work and our second day in Bucharest. Happy anniversary to us!

Sympathy for the Devil

The only way to really get to know a city, I find, is to get lost in it. Which is how I found myself walking towards the railyard on Bucharest's inner ring road. Literally kilometers and kilometers of high-rises from the bad old days. I doubt if they've ever been the focus of so much tourist appreciation before.

Now, I am going to be contrary here, and say that by recent global standards of architecture, the Ceaucescu-era buildings are not absolutely horrible. True, they're vast malignant shoddy wastes of concrete. But that was hardly unique to Romania. Consider Governor Rockefeller's showpiece center in New York's state capital, Albany. It's almost exactly contemporary with old Nic's rebuilding scheme. Then turn away, quickly. An eyewash might be indicated.

And in fact, when I saw these remarkably ugly buildings, I couldn't help but imagine them in an American context. So the state television building on the north side of Bucharest, a long low-slung concrete affair tiled several improbable shades of sea-green (and site of some major violence during the revolution; there are memorials), looks almost exactly what an aquarium in Cleveland built during the Johnson administration might look like. The infamous Palace of the People looks strikingly like the world's largest Ramada Inn. And so on.

The real crime isn't that Ceaucescu built ugly junk. Everyone was doing it at the time: east, west, north, and south. It's that he gutted a lovely, perfectly functional city to do it. There's enough left of old Bucharest to figure out what it must have been like. But it's rather like Cuvier extrapolating an extinct mammal from a single tooth.

2007 + x: The water cooler factor

I've always wondered why Romanians were so adamant about their country joining the EU in 2007. Listening to the talk, it appeared as if this date was fixed, absolutely certain. On May 1, the entire city of Bucharest was decked in European flags. For a moment, I was not sure whether Romania hadn't managed to do the impossible thing and make the EU a union of 26. On May 9, Europe Day was celebrated with a giant firework and President Illiescu declared that Romania was a "de facto member of the European Union".

Not so, my friends and I'm not the only one to think so.

The Economist had an article about this very topic just last month.

Romania's pantomime of optimism deters EU officials and visiting politicians from questioning its ambitions, at least publicly. The only blunter message has come from the European Parliament, which said last month that Romania's accession in 2007 would be impossible unless it tackled such issues as corruption, a lack of judicial independence, harassment of the media and police brutality. [...] Romania wants the negotiations concluded by the end of this year, but that looks unlikely. Even the completion of negotiations would not mean that Romania was “ready” to join the EU in any strict sense. Nobody thinks this poor, sprawling country, whose income per person is 10% of the EU average, will have an efficient government, decent judges, a sophisticated market economy and mastery of EU law by 2005, nor even by 2007.

You'd think with the end of 2004 approaching rapidly -- I'm not kidding, it's only six more months, considering that the entire country shuts down in August -- Romanian politicians would do everything to speed up the reform process. But no, they are in fact dragging their feet. Why? Because 2004 is also an election year. Nobody likes to make important and maybe unpopular decisions when at the same time he has to fear for his reelection. It's one of those things that drive my poor husband crazy but it can't be helped, apparently. I myself heard a Minister of Something or Other say "but it's an election year, nobody will do anything". (He didn't say it to me. I overheard him in the buffet line at the Dutch Embassy's celebration of Queen Beatrix' birthday.)

It hasn't helped that Romania sided with the US in the Iraq war. You could argue that Romania is a free country and can choose alliances as it wishes but the truth is, France and Germany were mighty pissed. As questionable as the influence of those two countries may be, one cannot deny that it exists. The EU is nothing without France and Germany. Having them be angry at you is not good.

See - we have a water cooler, and a subscription to a certain amount of water each month. I call, they come and deliver the canisters. Nice people, very quick service. I have to give three signatures on three different forms, every time. There's a lot of money, time, and workforce that could be saved if they only used one form. Multiply that with all the businesses in Romania (because they all use 3+ forms), and you have something to begin with. It's just one small example but it's typical.

The inefficiency in this country is a leftover from the Communist heydays but those are long gone and it should be corrected, and soon. All of my Romanian friends and acquaintances agree on that point -- so why does it seem so hard to change? Crusted structures are hard to break open, especially when people initially might loose their jobs. Walk into any retail store and count the sales clerks there. Count the many construction workers that simply stand around and watch the other construction workers work. Any change that will send countless people on the streets will not be popular, and, as I said, it's an election year.

I love Romania. I want things to be better for all my Romanian friends. I think Romania does belong into the EU, some day. But that day will not be January 1, 2007.

Considering all this, I dare a predicition: 2007 is out. When then? 2009? Even later than that?

I guess we have to wait and see.

Lost in the Palace (2)

So up and up the little spiral staircase I went.

Up and up again. The Palace is something like 25 stories high. I soon realized that it wasn't such a great idea to do this in a suit while carrying a folder full of papers. Also that I really, really need to start running again.

Still, all staircases end sooner or later. For this one, the end came at a strange low landing under a dirty skylight. I say "low" because there was only about a meter and a half of clearance between landing and skylight, maybe less. Anyone over the age of ten had to hunch or squat.

The skylight itself was propped open; a fat snake of cables ran along the concrete ceiling, up through it, out and away. If I'd been feeling very brave, I could have pushed it open further and crawled out onto the Palace roof. Since this would have involved leaning far out from the little landing over a 20-story drop down the center of the staircase shaft, and then doing a sort of diagonal chin-up and belly-crawling out over the dirty glass, after some consideration I decided that I'd rather not.

At the end of the low landing there was a little metal door. It looked locked, but when I hunch-shuffled over and turned the handle, it swung open.

Beyond was a vast dark space with an uneven ceiling, where a lot of big mechanical things moaned and hummed to themselves. The Palace's heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems? I don't know. In the distance was an area lit by a fluourescent lamp. A man was standing there, doing something to an upright surface -- it looked like he was writing on a whiteboard, but that seems unlikely.

Suddenly self-conscious, I closed the door and turned back down the stairs. I went down a couple of flights, picked a floor and random, and walked out.

Offices and more offices. People walked past me, but nobody gave me more than a cursory look. I went up and down stairs. At one point, I briefly blundered into the "Parliamentary Lounge". It was unoccupied except for a lot of tables, a waiter in a white coat, and an old lady sitting on a couch and knitting -- some Congressman's mother? -- but I ducked out again quickly.

Then I wandered in front of a window that looked out over Unirii Boulevard. It was a vast, spectacular, panoramic view, looking down on the great balcony (big enough for a dres ball) and out along the great tree-lined street stretching far, far across the city. This was the view Ceausescu had destroyed half of downtown Bucharest in order to get. But the fountains along the boulevard were turned off -- they cost far too much to run -- and the boulevard itself dead-ended, two miles away, in a wall of ugly apartment blocks. (Was that end of it left unfinished? Or was this how it was supposed to look?)

Still, it was impressive; and since nobody else on that floor seemed interested, I had it to myself.

Far below me, I saw some guys with weed-whackers mowing the Palace lawn. Since the lawn is the size of several golf courses, they weren't moving very quickly. It occurred to me that, by the time they had finished, it would be time to start over again; they were probably in orbit around the Palace, circling endlessly from April to October.

Eventually, I joined a little knot of people standing in front of an elevator. After some minutes, the door croaked open and we pushed in. The operator didn't look twice at me, and we all rode it down to the ground floor.

A few minutes more of aimless wandering brought me to the Museum of the Romanian Parliament, which meant that I wasn't lost any more -- the Museum, a single room, is quite close to one of the main doors.

-- It was actually pretty interesting, that little museum. (Well, okay, to me. I am a history geek, it's true.) It started with the assembly of boyars under the Russian occupation in the 1830s, moved forward through the 1848 revolutionary assembly to the royal years, and ended -- as a lot of things around here seem to -- just before the Second World War. It had all sorts of odd but interesting items. I particularly liked the royal chairs (not thrones!) in which the Kings sat when attending Parliament.

I was the only visitor.

And that was the end of my hour of wandering around the Palace.

Lost in the Palace (1)

Okay, not very lost. I just wandered up one of the big staircases when nobody seemed to be looking, then strolled down a hall. I didn't want to use an elevator -- they have attendants, and I was vaguely worried someone might ask me for ID -- but then I noticed an open door that led to a little, dimly lit spiral staircase.

I stepped inside. The stairs went down into obscurity, and up to a smudge of light -- a dirty skylight, many stories above. I stepped inside (making sure the door didn't lock behind me) and started to climb.

It was a long climb. The stairs were very narrow, and made of crumbling concrete, and the railing... wasn't really there, any more. After a couple of floors I paused, puffing a little, to pop my head out of the door.

To my surprise, I saw a floorspace that could have been in any US or Western European office building: a long hallway with faded carpet, punctuated by office doors. I could see people moving around behind frosted glass, and hear a faint murmur of conversation. The carpet was frayed and threadbare, but clean; a couple of artificial plants in black plastic pots stood in front of a door. I breathed deeply and smelled office smells: paper, people, dust. Somehere on the floor, someone was making coffee.

Well, apparently about one-third of the Palace is presently being used: by the Chamber of Deputies, by Romania's Constitutional Court, and as a convention center. Another third is mothballed but still usable. And about another third is going to need serious repair work before it can be used for anything. (If it ever is -- there are some inherent construction problems to be overcome, and then the demand for office space in the Palace may not ever be that great.)

But one-third of that huge building is still equivalent to one or two large Western office buildings. So there are hundreds of people working in the Palace... sitting at desks of varying degrees of antiquity, putting pictures of their grandchildren on the wall behind them, drinking coffee and setting artificial plants in the hall outside their office doors.

Of course, that's perfectly reasonable; but it was still a little... unexpected, somehow.

Anyhow, I popped back into the staircase and continued on up...

Inside the Palace

I went inside the Palace of the People yesterday.

Although we've been in Bucharest for almost a year now, this was my first time inside. Go figure. We've never gotten around to taking the guided tour (it's a popular tourist attraction), and this happened to be the first time that business took me down there. (A banking conference, and no, you don't want to know the details.)

I came prepared to sneer. As I've said before, the Palace is pretty damn ugly from the outside. So I figured it would be just as bad inside -- either tastelessly overdone, or crass and pompous and massive in a Stalinist sort of way, or both.

I was wrong. The inside of the Palace is actually pretty impressive.

Part of this is because it's just so... damn... big. I mean, imagine the interior of a royal palace, with marble pillars and great high ceilings and of course enormous curved staircases. I mean, really imagine it -- see it in your mind.

Got it? Now scale everything up by a factor of two -- higher ceilings, taller pillars, a hall you could play football in, staircases sweeping up through four or five stories.

So, at just a basic gosh-wow level, you can't help being impressed. But it doesn't end there. The decor is not horrible. I won't say it's great or even good. Actually, it's rather bland... lots and lots of huge columns, vaguely floral giltwork on the ceilings, repetitive geometric motifs on the marble floors, big red carpets. Nothing wow. But nothing yuck, either. That was a pleasant surprise.

I admit, I'd been expecting either "Louis XIV in Las Vegas" ghastly excess, or lots of sterile expanses of Socialist Spartan hideousness But it was not that bad, at all.

Oh, and I was also thinking there'd be either pictures and statues of the heroic workers and revolutionaries of Romania in their struggle to build multilateral socialism, or lots of blank spots where they'd been removed or painted over. Not so. Either Ceausescu never got around to installing those, or they've been very carefully removed. Or replaced -- there is some recent artwork, including some pretty good religious paintings.

Also, I think I was subconsciously expecting more decrepitude. Much of the Palace is not occupied, and never will be -- you can see from the outside that many of the windows, especially on the upper floors, are broken or boarded up. But the Romanians seem to have made a strong effort to keep the inhabited parts in good condition.

Of course, I wandered off from the inhabited parts for a brief exploration...

Summer errands

In Germany, nothing summer-related gets done before the so-called "Eisheiligen", the ice saints. In Northern Germany, those are the days of the saints Mamertius, Pankratius, and Servatius on May 11-13. In Southern Germany, it's saints Pankratius, Servatius, Bonifatius on May 12-14. The final mark is "Cold Sophie" on May 15. No delicate flowers are put outside, in case a late frost might harm them. After the ice saints, it's considered safe. Until the ice saints, no one is really surprised by frosts or even the occasional bout of snow.

We are daring and trust the nice weather here in Bucharest. Our orange tree has moved into the courtyard yesterday, and today we got our car tires exchanged -- the winter ones for the summer ones.

I should have done this earlier, I know. But the last switch was such a pain that I kept procrastinating the spring switch. Last fall, I went to a Mitsubishi dealer, the one across from the Selgros. It took them 2 hours (rather, a rather clumsy apprentice took two hours), and they took over 150 Euros from me. Granted, there was an oil change included. Still. An oil change is something I could do in half an hour, provided I have the right equipment and a ditch and the price of the oil itself wasn't so high. It was a very frustrating experience and I couldn't help but think that I got ripped off.

So today, we went to a little "vulcanizer" next to the McDonald's on Buzesti which had been recommended to me by our landlord.

They took 15 minutes, repaired one of the tires which I managed to pierce by driving rather vigorously through some construction, checked the air and the balance (both of which the Mitsubishi garage hadn't bothered with until I asked them to do it), were very friendly, and Alan could stare with open mouth and glazed over eyes to his heart's delight as they worked on the car.

I paid all of 9 Dollars.

Lesson learnt.

NATO

Today Romania -- along with Bulgaria, Slovenia, and three other countries -- joined NATO.

It wasn't a big deal. Nobody mentioned it in the office, and it didn't generate much by way of headlines. (I can't really read Romanian newspapers, but I usually pause to look at the headlines on the kiosks. Headlines, I can usually understand. And if I don't see any flattering pictures of President Iliescu or PM Nastase, I buy a package of chewing gum.)

That seems a bit strange when I think about it. Romania has been chasing NATO membership since 1997. In 1999, the Contantinescu government put itself in a very tricky diplomatic position in order to support the NATO intervention in Kosovo.

Right at the end of that conflict, Boris Yeltsin's Russia had send a few hundred troops into Kosovo, occupying Prishtina airfield. That raised the unpleasant possibility of Russia sending further reinforcements into Prishtina by air. But this couldn't happen without the Russians flying their troops across Bulgaria, Romania or Hungary.

Sure enough, Moscow asked each of these countries, one after the other, for permission to overfly. One after the other, at NATO's urging, they refused.

A diplomatic tug-of-war ensued, with Moscow leaning heavily on its former satellites, and NATO pushing just as hard in the opposite direction. Hungary had the protection of NATO membership, but for the other two countries it was a tense few days. And at one point, former NATO commander Wesley Clark says, he got a phone call from the Romanian Minister of Defense: if the Russians went ahead with a troop flight anyway, he wanted to know, what were they supposed to do? Shoot it down?

Well. It didn't happen, and now Romania is part of NATO. The Russians don't like this much, but they've grudgingly accepted.

In theory, at least, this should resolve Romania's security issues for a long time to come. But, as I said, nobody seems to care too much.

Maybe this means Romanians aren't too concerned about security issues these days; and maybe that's a good thing.

I don't know.

What the Minister said

"The national vice of Romania is pessimism."

So said the Minister to me this afternoon. Which Minister? Never you mind. I don't want to get anybody in trouble. But he -- or she -- was making a point about expectations, and how the perceived difficulty of reform can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It's not a new idea, mind you. Here's the late Emil Cioran -- philosopher, essayist, absurdist, friend of Ionesco and Beckett -- on his native land:

To concieve destiny as exterior to ourselves, sovereign and omnipotent, a vast cycle of failures is necessary. A condition which my country fulfills to perfection. It would be indecent for Romania to believe in effort, in the utility of action. Hence it does not believe in them and, out of propriety, resigns itself to the inevitable.

I am grateful to it for having bequeathed me with the code of despair, that savoir-vivre, that relaxation in the face of Necessity... Prompt to sustain my disappointments and to initiate my indolence into the secret of preserving them, my country has further offered me, in its eagerness to make me into a wastrel who keeps up appearances, the means of degrading myself without compromising myself too much.

I owe it not only my finest and surest failures, but also the talent for masking my cowardice and hoarding my compunctions.

Ouch. Beautiful -- I particularly love those last two sentences -- but ouch.

But then, at the end of the conversation the Minister said to me, "I am an optimist."

"I hope you're not too lonely," I said -- a little daringly, because one does not wish to upset Ministers, but I hoped he wouldn't take it wrong.

He didn't. "I am, sometimes, a little," he said. "But I must insist on hope."

I must insist on hope. Emil Cioran was a great writer and a very clever man. But... hope is just preferable, somehow. Putting aside the fact that resignation to inevitable failure makes failure inevitable, it just gets old after a while.

And so to bed.

A little sad, the staircase

I was downtown today for a lunch meeting -- yeah yeah, Saturday, don't ask -- and afterwards I had an hour or so free.

The History and Art Museum of the Municipality of Bucharest was right across the street. (It's just off Piatsa Universitate.) I had walked past it a dozen times and never thought it very interesting. I guess the title had turned me off. Maybe it's hard to get excited about anything that contains the word "municipality". But this time, on a whim, I crossed the Piatsa and went inside.

Here's where I stop and say: visit this museum. If you're in Bucharest, and you're near Piatsa Universitate, take half an hour and do it.

Why? Well, it's not the collections. Though I suppose I should describe them. There's a modern art exhibit on the ground floor, which is pretty forgettable. Upstairs, there are modest exhibits of Neolithic and Roman remains. Nothing amazing there either. There is a nice suit of armor, and a sword that belonged to Brancoveanu.

Things pick up in the next room, when the visitor reaches the 18th and 19th centuries; lots of cool old books, very beautiful, and paintings and pictures of the city from back then.

-- No, actually that got pretty interesting. There was a painting of the Great Fire of 1832, when most of the city burned down. I never knew that even happened. But there was the fire, and lots of very upset looking guys in fancy uniforms on horseback waving swords at it. Kinda cool.

And then the collection got downright intriguing when it reached the late 19th and early 20th centuries: old street signs and adddress plates, the public water pumps that stood in crowded neighborhoods before running water came into the houses, the gas lamps that used to adorn the whole city.

Then, probably the high point of the collection: The old office of the Mayor of Bucharest. Complete with 1890s telephone handset, wood-and-leather swivel chair, massive clawfoot desk, and the Mayor's ceremonial regalia in a glass case. (When did Mayors stop wearing ceremonial regalia? A hundred years ago, the Mayor of Bucharest looked like Sergeant Pepper... and that was a good thing.)

There were also a lot of old maps, which is always nice. Our part of town, up around Piatsa Dorobants? In 1916 it was the edge of the city. There was a "Velodrome" just north of us -- I think that was for bicycle racing -- and a big orchard started just on the other side of what's now Strada Washington. Across the street from us stands a house that was built in 1896; as recently as 1918, that house was standing near the edge of that orchard, with not much but countryside beyond it.

The neighborhood we live in was laid out in the 1920s, the streets named after the capitals of friendly countries -- Strada Paris, Strada Londra, Strada Bruxelles, Brasilia, Roma... actually, come to think of it, I believe the streets were named after countries that were Romania's allies in the First World War. Huh. I never realized that before, but it fits.

Anyhow. The exhibits, taken as a whole, are pretty good. But if the exhibits were all, I'd be only mildly enthusiastic. There are only half a dozen or so rooms; at least half of the building seems to be closed, presumably for lack of money. So it's not going to keep a visitor occupied for more than half an hour, tops. There are no labels in English, and even the Romanian labels are pretty skimpy. And the exhibits stop in 1941... just as things were getting interesting. There's absolutely nothing about Bucharest in wartime or under Communism.

So why do I say you must see this museum? Because of the staircase.

The Museum occupies the Sutu Palace, which is a neoclassical townhouse built for the Sutu family in 1835. From the outside, the Palace is architecturally nice enough -- there's a particularly good ironwork awning around the door -- but nothing too amazing.

But when you step inside...

The staircase is two stories high, and it faces you as you walk in the door. It goes up from the ground floor, splits in two and does a dramatic double loop backwards. It's rather steep.

It is made of black iron with rivets, like a Victorian railway bridge. But the stairs and risers are wood -- some sort of dark hardwood, long since polished to a brown glow. The banisters are wood too, smoothed to a sheen by generations of hands. They would be perfect for sliding down -- steep, slippery, dangerous.

At the first floor landing there is a mirror. The mirror is about twelve feet wide and fifteen feet tall. It's the original; the Sutus ordered it specially from Vienna. It's Merano glass and doesn't look a day old.

Reflected in the mirror is a large clock face. The clock hangs from a balcony on the upper floor. The reflected clock tells the correct time, because the real clock is reversed -- it's a mirror image clock, with the numbers and the hands going backwards. The Sutus had that ordered specially from Paris.

Walk up the staircase, and you're in a sort of atrium. You've turned 360 degrees; the clock hangs below you, the mirror is in front of you, and you're looking down into the staircase. Twenty feet above your head is a very high domed ceiling. Around it, four windows let light into the atrium. The glass in the windows is stained, so colored patterns of light fall across the walls.

In the dark corners of the atrium stand four massive 19th century coal heaters.They are dull green except for their doors, which are some reddish metal -- copper or bronze. Their ceramic surfaces are decorated with frowning Greek masks.

The total effect is... quite something. I walked up and down the staircase several times, and then stood at the top for a few minutes, just trying to imagine being a child in this place. How wonderful, I thought, how great, how absolutely cool it must have been, to be a kid here. To play on that staircase. To read a book huddled next to the monstrous glowering coal heaters in the winter, or in summer to watch the colored patches of sunlight strike wild reflections from the mirror. To contemplate the great backwards clock. To have that staircase to yourself.

But then I found out: the Sutus never had any children. They were very rich, and they were famous for their parties and balls, and they were active in politics and the arts, and they lived in that house for more than 40 years. But when they died, they left it to the city. It became the Mayor's office for many years and then, eventually, a museum.

So: no child had ever claimed that atrium as her private playground or reading space. And no child had ever slid down the wonderful, smooth, deliriously dangerous bannisters.

It seemed a little sad, somehow.

(The Museum is at #2, Bratianu Blvd, just south of Piatsa Universitate. Admission is 25,000 lei, or about 75 cents.)

Rats

Today, I met a very nice American woman. She runs a drug testing company here in Romania.

Strictly speaking the company is based in the US. But it is very active here in Romania, and she is running their Romanian (and Bulgarian, and Serbian) drug testing programs. As in, giving experimental drugs to Romanians (and Bulgarians, and Serbs) to see what happens.

Yeah, it got my attention too. Here's how it works.

A big drug company (we'll call it BigDrug) has a new drug to test. Let's say it's a drug against... oh... blood infections. They contact this woman's company, which we'll call TestCo.

TestCo has developed a network of contacts all across Romania (Bulgaria, Serbia, etc.). They get in touch with hospitals and clinics, who agree to work with them on the testing.

Then: a Romanian comes into a clinic here in Bucharest. He diagnosed with a blood infection. Aha, says the clinic, blood infection; there's this new drug for that! They ask him if he would like to be part of the drug test.

If the patient says no, that's fine -- treatment proceeds in the normal Romanian manner. If he says yes, he gets a second choice: he can either take the experimental drug, or get the "best level of care". The "best level" means he gets treated as if he was in a Western hospital or clinic, with the best non-experimental drugs and treatment available there. TestCo pays for all this, although the ultimate payer is of course BigDrug.

Then the folks at the clinic monitor the outcome of the treatment -- whether with the experimental drug or the "best level" -- under TestCo's supervision.

When a sufficient number of people have taken the experimental drug, and been monitored, the results are collected and sent back to BigDrug. BigDrug is of course financing many other test runs in many other places; at the end, they have some statistically meaningful results suggesting whether the drug works or not.

Okay. So, why do this here?

1) It's cheaper. If the equipment is available (and it isn't always), low labor costs mean that it's less expensive to provide that "best level" of care. For a moderate fever, for instance, "best level" may mean just a clean bed in a quiet room, cold compresses, and a nurse checking you every hour or so. In the US or Germany, that might cost hundreds of dollars per day. Here, much less.

2) More patients. More in three ways. First, Eastern Europeans are less healthy than Westerners. So it's often easier to find people with blood infections (or whatever). Second, one legacy of socialism is a very centralized health care system. Except for rich people who can afford clinics, most folks end up going to a handful of big hospitals, where they're easy to locate. And third, health care here isn't as good as in the West. So people are more likely to be interested in participating in the tests -- whether to take the experimental drug, or to get the "best level" of care.

3) Competent clinicians. Africans (say) get sicker much more than Europeans. Why not test drugs there? Because in Africa, it would be much harder to find hospital and clinic workers who can properly explain the tests, inform the patients, and then keep careful and accurate records. Eastern Europe, on the other hand, has lots of good doctors, nurses and medical technicians. These people can observe carefully, record meticulously, follow protocols, and provide good results.

4) Not much competition (yet). TestCo might approach a hospital in France, say, only to find that they were already doing testing for a blood infection drug for some other company. (This actually happens more often then you think, because drug testing companies tend to cluster around certain hospitals and clinics). But nobody else is doing testing in Romania right now, although other testing companies are interested and will probably move in soon.

One obvious question: Is it clean? Are the patients really informed and free to choose, will they get the "best level" of care anyway, do the doctors really report back good data?

Well, TestCo follows EU and American protocols. (They have to, otherwise the test results wouldn't be accepted by the US Food and Drug Administration and/or the Europeans.) They say that everything they do is transparent and subject to oversight by both the Romanian and Western regulatory agencies. Their business depends on their product, after all, and their product is good data.

Let's say for now that this is true, and that corruption and corner-cutting plays little or no part in this. What should we think?

Ms. TestCo had no doubts. "This gives Romanians more choices," she says. "Nobody has to participate. But if they do, then they get access to Western level medical care, subsidized by the drug companies.

"In addition, the testing is pumping millions of dollars into the Romanian health care system. We pay the clinics top dollar for their data collection, and we also purchase supplies and equipment that stay with them after the studies are done. This is saving lives."

Perhaps. I got a different reaction from a Romanian colleague.

"They're here because we're poor and because our health care system is screwed. They do the tests, maybe we get a little money -- how nice. Then the drug company makes the drug and gets rich off of it. The drug company gets the money, Western patients get the drug, we get nothing.

"We're rats."

(Me? I don't have a clear opinion on this yet. Still thinking about it.)

Timisoara (1)

Ah, Timisoara.

It's in the very far west of Romania, in the area called "The Banat". The Banat is a perfectly flat plain, like a Balkan Iowa. It was part of Hungary for many centuries, but in 1918 it was divided between Romania and Serbia.

There aren't any natural boundaries on the Banat, so the border was somewhat arbitrary. Thousands of Romanians were left on the Serbian side, and tens of thousands of Serbs, Germans and Hungarians were left on the Romanian side. So Timisoara was one of the more ethnically mixed towns in Romania.

(It still is. Wandering around in the evening, I asked for directions from a random stranger. He answered in German.)

Now, Romania had plenty of ethnically mixed towns. We've mentioned our trips to Brasov, and encounters with the Hungarians and Germans there.

What made Timisoara unusual was that the different groups got along surprisingly well. Ceausescu had a very deliberate policy of setting Romania's ethnicities against each other. I'm not sure how much of this was Romanian nationalism on his part, and how much a very deliberate policy of divide et impera. Whatever the reason, though, it did painful and lasting damage.

But it didn't seem to work so well in Timisoara. The 1989 Revolution started there, and it started because Romanians and others joined in a protest supporting a Hungarian priest. Everyone stood together, and together they were the pebble that started the avalanche.

That's very encouraging, isn't it? What's... somewhat less encouraging, is: one of the things that still seems to unite Timisoarans is that they all look down on the rest of Romania.

"Giurgiu? Calarasi?" said a taxi driver to me. "Oh, holy God. Why would you ever go down there? The people are no good. Very dirty. Very poor.

"If I have to drive to Bucharest, I always go north -- through Sibiu. Never south, through Craiova. The roads are better, and when you stop to eat, you don't worry about what you're eating."

And what was the taxi driver himself? "Oh, Hungarian."

So, you speak Hungarian? "No, very little. My mother is Romanian, so we mostly spoke Romanian at home."

So, you're half Romanian? "No, I'm Hungarian. My mother was half Hungarian, though she spoke Romanian."

So she was half Romanian? "No, she was Romanian."

Well... er... what about Romanians here in Timisoara?

"What about them?"

Are they... um... like Romanians in places like Giurgiu and Calarasi?

"Oh holy God, no. Those people are like Gypsies. We don't have those kinds of people around here."

I winced. But on the other hand, at least they're getting along out there, in Timisoara.

Random note: everyone over the age of 30 in Timisoara seems to understand at least a little Serbian. This is because, in the 1980s, everyone was watching Serbian TV. Romanian TV only broadcast two hours per night, and it was mostly Ceausescu's speeches and the like. TV Belgrade and the other Serbian stations carried movies, music videos, world news, and all sorts of fascinating stuff.

Random note #2: the Opera House in Timisoara was playing "Medea" (the tragedy by Euripides) and "Dancing Queen" (the musical based on the works of the rock band Queen).

Grounded

I can't say that Tarom is the world's worst airline. Everyone who claims this has never flown with Merpati Air. But Tarom is not a great airline and when you're left without alternatives, you end up being frustrated a lot.

I am supposed to be boarding right now. Off to Germany for a weekend sans famille to frolic and shop and, above all, sleep.

I buy the Tarom tickets online. It's fast and quick and the frustrations don't begin until you try to get your hands on your ticket. There is an option on the site to have the tickets delivered to your home but for some reason, this never works. Whenever I tried this, I ended up with a call, an apology (no courier available or some such), and a trip to the next Tarom office.

So three days ago I get a call from Tarom. Our flight on April 1 -- to Frankfurt, then on to my brother's wedding in Spain -- is going to be 15 minutes early. However, it will arrive at the scheduled time. No explanation but my best guess is that Tarom decided to make a quick stop at Cluj. Thanks for the info, anyhow.

It also reminded me that I still needed to pick up my ticket for this Friday. I went to the Tarom office on Victoriei, only to discover that my ticket was at Otopeni (the airport). So, could I go then to Otopeni and pick it up there? No, that was not possible. Why not? The ticket wouldn't be ready until Friday. But if it's not ready yet, surely it must be possible to print out the ticket here in the office? No, it wasn't. Why? Well, it just wasn't. Okay then. When did I need to be at the airport to pick up the ticket? 7 am. Surely you jest. No, Ma'am. 7 am. But the flight isn't leaving until 9:35! Yes, but many people pick up their tickets, so there is always a line, so be there at 7 am.

Grumbling, I got up at 5:30 this morning, had lots of coffee, prepared breakfast for the boys, took the taxi at 6:30 to be there at 7 sharp.

There was no line. Just a lone woman in front of me, and the ticket - lo and behold! - was actually printed and ready, so the whole process didn't take longer than 1 minute. I was very favorably impressed, if a little peeved that it hadn't actually been necessary to be there so early. Now check in the empty suitcases (for the shopping spree, you know) and off to the cafe to sit and drink coffee and read the morning paper. When does the check-in open? Oh, not until 11 am.

Eh.

Just a minute. My flight leaves at 9:35.

No, it doesn't. Today it leaves at 12:30.

Eh? EH!!?? But, but... 12:30?? WHY?

Well. It doesn't leave until 12:30. It says so right here on your reservation. (SFX: printer spits out newly minted reservation -- Visual FX: Tarom agent pouting and apparently thinking it's all my fault because I didn't check my reservation)

But it says right here on my ticket that the flight leaves at 9:35!

Well, yes, but today, it doesn't leave until 12:30.

It's frigging 7 am and I'm tired and I will have to wait 5 hours at the airport because you guys weren't able to call and tell me?

I wouldn't have been so mad had I not received the call about the early flight on April 1st. I would have just grumbled about inefficiency and said some bad things about accession to the EU which I can't possible quote here in public because I don't really mean it.

But it just seems logical to me that when you are able to warn about a flight being 15 minutes early one month ahead, you should also be able to call someone when the flight is going to be very late the next day. No? Mind you, this was not a last minute occurance (last minute changes are not announced until - as the name suggests - the very last minute). This was known yesterday, just not by me. Apparently, Tarom has two planes grounded in London for technical reasons. (Not that this information is reassuring!)

They didn't want to route me through Vienna or any other place. They didn't want to do anything, actually.

So I'm back home now. I'll leave again in two hours and see whether or not the flight will leave. I'm missing out on an afternoon of frolicking in Frankfurt (the Palmengarten was on my list and got scratched out again). I might just be there in time to meet my brother.

Why am I getting all worked up over this? I have no idea. You should think I'd know better.

Oh. One more thing: the applications for the Tarom frequent flyer program which you cannot print out from the web but have to pick up at an office? They are all out. Not to be had. Why? Because.

Marţişor

Today is the first of March and that is a special day in Romania.

Yesterday, we picked up about two dozens of Marţişors which were on sale everywhere at little stands, open late just like the flower shops were all open yesterday.

Marţişor charms are little trinkets -- clovers, flowers, animals -- which are tied to little woolen strings of red and white. White symbolizes winter and red symbolizes summer, together the intertwined threads stand for spring.

Picture from thebans.com

Traditionally, the Marţişors are given by men to their sweethearts, friends and acquaintances. However, women give each other Marţişors as well, and parents may give them to their kids. The trinkets are tied to the wrist or worn on the lapel, the entire week from March 1 through March 8 which is International Women's Day. Additionally, small flowers (snow drops and hyacinths) are given away.

It's an endearing custom. Doug gave away lots of Marţişors today -- including one to the minister of something-or-other. Who knows? It might bring luck for both of them.

Business as usual

I know why Romania’s economy isn’t so hot. It’s because:

- everything takes forever,
- everything needs a gazillion plus one forms to be filled out,
- every single form needs a signature, and
- every single form needs at least one stamp.

I was at Astral.ro today to buy a cable internet connection. It struck me as funny that I had to go there physically so get the subscription but maybe that’s me.

I was there for 90 minutes. I had five different forms that needed to be filled and signed. I had to go to the cashier and wait for another twenty minutes all the while the woman worked on my forms, stamped them, handed them back me to get them signed a second time, collected my money…

It’s a very inefficient and highly customer unfriendly procedure. I mean – you want to give them money, why are they making it so difficult for you?

I ended up paying twice for the TV cable subscription which is a precondition for the cable internet and which we already have. Don’t ask.

The connection setup will be done, well, in about four weeks or so. [Sigh]

When I talked to Doug about my profound insight into Romanian economics, he answered that this is precisely what he was working on this afternoon. Good for him. Good for Romania, too.

On a brighter note, I did find an umbrella stroller today. After two days of driving all across town and paying double the price as in Germany -- but we do have an umbrella stroller now. Happiness comes in many forms.

Morning surprise

After some glorious days and nice, sunny, relatively warm weather, it's gotten cold again those past two days. This morning, we woke up to snow. Well, at least we have a little bit of spring inside the house.

Drat those Balkan winters.

The Black Church in Braşov

Here are some pictures of the Black Church in Braşov.

The Black Church was built by German settlers from 1383 to 1477. It's the biggest Gothic building in Romania and was dedicated to the Virgin Mary. Originally Catholic, the church became Protestant after the Reformation in Romania. The church was badly damaged in the big fire of 1689. The roof was completely destroyed and the walls blackened, hence the name. Rebuilding the church took another 100 years. The churches possesses the largest free-swinging bell in Romania and the largest organ in Romania -- 4000 pipes, 4 manuals and 76 registers.

In front of the church you can see a statue of Johannes Honterus who led the Reformation in Transylvania in the 16th century.

The following pictures are thumbnails. Click to get the full versions.

The Black Church from two angles

The sign warning about falling stones, and the table
announcing the deaths in the German community.

The land beyond the forests

Imagine you travel through a country where your fellow countrymen have lived for hundreds of years and are now on the verge of extinction. I found this to be incredibly sad and it's not about German nationalism or prejudices against Romanians. It's about witnessing an almost 1000 year-long chapter of history coming to an end.

Sic transit gloria mundi -- thus passes the glory of the world -- is the inscription on the clock tower of the German cathedral in what once was Kronstadt and is now Braşov. It’s a bold and telling statement, and deeply melancholic. The so-called Black Church is falling to pieces. There are no more Sunday masses read. There are signs on the outer walls, warning the unsuspecting to stay away from the building lest he might be hit by falling stones. Statues are missing from their pedestals, the roof looks in need of repair. This once so powerful and rich parish is dying.

The first Germans came to Siebenbürgen probably as early as 1050. (The etymology of the word "Siebenbürgen" is argued over - some claim it means Seven Castles, others think it derives from Seven Mountains. Transylvania is Latin and means "land beyond the forests". )

In the 11th century Transylvania was part of the Hungarian empire. King Geza II, who ruled the area from 1141 - 1161, called settlers from Germany into his lands. It was a decision based on military and economic reasoning. Even back then, the Germans were renowned for being industrious and hard-working, but Geza II needed people not only to tend his lands but also to defend them against the onslaught of the Mongols and Tartars.

The first hospites, guests, settled around Hermannstadt (Sibiu). The Saxons (not from Saxony, mind you, but rather from the Rhine and Mosel areas) were granted substantial and generous rights. Among them were free elections of judges and priests, judicial procedure according to their own customary law, freedom of tariffs, free markets, and more. In return, the settlers -- who were mostly farmers, craftsmen and miners -- obliged themselves to pay a yearly tribute to the king and serve in his military.

In order to protect their settlements, the Saxons built fortified churches wherever they lived, many of which can still be seen today. They formed the “rampart of Christendom” against the Mongols and later the Osmanic people.

In 1486, the “Universitas Saxonum” was founded, the Saxon Union of Nations. This was the highest authority in law and administration, making the settlement area of the Saxons basically a “state within a state”.

Freedom of religion was granted in 1568, at a time that saw the conversion of almost all Saxons to Protestanism. Education was excellent. Almost every village had a school, the first high school was founded in 1541 and in 1722 school attendance became compulsory.

Over the centuries, the Siebenbürger Sachsen managed to maintain a sense of community and only in 1867 the Union of Nations was dissolved and the Saxons lost their privileges and political autonomy.

Times became tough for minorities in general when, after the fall of Austria-Hungary, Transsylvania became a part of the new country of Romania in 1919. Land was taken away from the church and the farmers, Romanian became the compulsory language in schools, enrollment in universities became harder and harder for non-Romanians.

But the ultimate decline of the Saxons began with the Nazi regime in Germany. Romania sought Germany as an ally and in return agreed to various strange laws. As a result, Romanian Germans were drafted into the SS and the Organisation Todt, as well as put to work in the German weapons industry. Many died in the war, and those who returned found themselves arrested and kept in prison for years.

The now Soviet-friendly government took revenge on the Germans, blaming them collectively for “the partaking of Romania in the anit-Soviet war and the occupation of Romania by Nazi Germany.”

In 1945, the German population was largely deported to the Soviet Union to work in the coal mines and work camps as part of “reparations”. One has to say that Romanian government officials and the Romanian King protested against this, but to no avail. Of the 75,000 deported Germans about 15% died and many of those who returned were either sent to East Germany or released into the West.

Back in Romania, Germans lost all their rights. The minority protection law explicity excluded Germans. From 1946 to 1950, Germans did not possess the right to vote. They lost all their property – land and houses, together with livestock, fixtures and fittings. The political and intellectual leaders were imprisoned and sent to work camps in the Soviet Union and Hungary.

The situation got slightly better after Stalin’s death but much of the wrongs couldn’t be righted anymore. Families had been torn apart, village communities and the middle-class in the cities had been destroyed, there was a general loss of the feeling of identity, the Romanian Germans were separated from their language and their culture. However, leaving the country was not an option yet and the reunion of families was an exception still.

It was Helmut Schmidt who came to an agreement with Nicolae Ceausescu. The deal was the every year, 12,000 to 16,000 Germans were allowed to leave the country. In return, the German government agreed to pay a fixed sum per emigrant. This sum was 5,000 DM in 1978 and rose up to 7,800 DM in 1989.

The situation became increasingly difficult for the German minority. In the 1980s the use of the German language in public was restricted, and this, together with the large numbers of emigrants, led to the closing of many schools. This again encouraged even more Germans to leave the country since now they could not even guarantee their children a good education anymore.

80% of all Germans were determined to leave the country, if given an opportunity. After Ceausescu’s fall they poured out of the country in a panicky mass exodus – nobody was going to take any chances. Who knew, maybe the new government would soon restrict travel rights again. There was also the fear that Germany would close its gates to the many, many immigrants that now came into the country. In the first six months of 1990, 115,000 Germans left Romania.

In 1930, 745,421 Germans lived in Romania. In 1997, this number had decreased to about 80,000. Since 1950 almost half a million Saxons have left Romania to live in Germany.

In another generation or two, the Siebenbürger Sachsen will be but a faint memory. In Kronstadt, the Black Church in Kronstadt will have crumbled to pieces.

It’s the end of 1000 years of German history in Transsylvania.

--

Sources:
Die Geschichte der Deutschen in Rumänien
Rumäniendeutsche
Transsylvania (In English)

Sic transit gloria mundi

We spent the weekend in Transsylvania and have much to blog about.

We went to Braşov (Kronstadt) and stayed there over night. Today, we took the back route through Bran -- Dracula's castle, anyone? -- and on serpentines between the Bucegi and the Faragaş mountains via Piteşti back home. The trip was truly spectacular and heart-wrenchingly sad and you can read all about it in the next days. And yes, the title of this post is meaningful. You'll see.

Fortified church in Cristian/Neustadt (Click to see full version)

However, right now we're very tired. The kids didn't take the mountainous roads very well -- David screamed for an hour and Alan puked all over the car, twice. The roads are scenic but very bad. We saw a lot and have to digest a bit before we can write about our impressions. So we are heading straight to bed now. What do you mean, it's only 9 pm? We have two kids under two, OK?

(Oh, and Doug has to run out because the alarm in the office went off and we live conveniently close by. Stupid alarms.)

Good night, world.

Got Milk!

I ended up driving all the way out to Otopeni to the METRO (the big supermarket at the edge of the city) and found Aro milk there. I'm very happy -- I don't really care which milk we buy, as long as it comes in tetrapaks (boxes, for the Americans among us) and is homogenized so that it keeps for a while. I don't like to go grocery shopping every day -- I usually go once a week, buy tons of things and only add fresh veggies and fruit from the market as we run out.

Bogdan suggested Parmalat. Well. Besides the fact that I haven't seen it in the shops that I frequent, there was also that batch of milk that got recalled for health reasons in Italy but got sold in Romania. A friend's daughter got sick from it. No, I think we pass on Parmalat.

In any case, we have 30 liters of milk now, which should keep us for a bit. I just hope I don't have to drive to the METRO every week now.

I'm still wondering whatever happend to La Dorna. And why the shops, upon La Dorna's disapperance, did not stock other homogenized milk like Aro.

Oh. We'll never know. It's bugging me no end. :-)

One more thing. The street out to Otopeni is a two-lane street, split by a bulky plastic barrier. This barrier is always dirty, and I mean very dirty. Today I saw them being cleaned. That was nice. The thing that got me wondering was that the company cleaning the barrier was called "Eco Toilet Service".

Romania is full of surprises.

Got Milk?

So the entire city is swept clean of homogenized milk. "La Dorna" milk, the milk of our choice, has disappeared from the shops. Nothing at Billa, nothing at the Selgros, nothing at our local Nic supermarket -- for two weeks now. The only milk you can buy at the moment is fresh, non-homogenized milk, mostly low-fat.

Kids need milk and kids need whole milk, so that's not so good. We usually buy milk in bulk, 12 liters of whole milk and 12 liters of low-fat milk every week. We drink and eat lots of milk, as you can see -- Alan, cereal, coffee, it adds up. We like homogenized milk because of food safety and because we can buy it in bulk.

Now we have to buy fresh milk every day which is annoying. It also comes only in these wobbly plastic bags which have to be emptied into a pitcher. We have these bags in Germany too but we also have special containers in which those bags fit. I asked for those containers at various supermarkets but got blank looks. Apparently I was asking for something really weird.

Reasons? Nobody seems to know. I don't think La Dorna went belly up -- I should have heard about that. Maybe one of our Romanian readers can enlighten us. Oh, and if someone knows a source of red La Dorna milk, I'd be grateful for a pointer.

Calarasi

I went to Calarasi today.

Calarasi -- it's pronounced kuller-osh, don't ask -- is the poorest city in Romania. Here's what the Lonely Planet has to say about it:

"The surreal entry by road from the northwest beneath an ungainly 'bridge' of rusting conveyor belts forming an intricate maze to the city's steel works, says it all about this city. Largely industrial, the town offers absolutely no reason to come here except to catch the next ferry out -- across the Danube to Ostrov, from where you can cross into Silistra in Bulgaria."

This is perhaps a bit unkind. There are at least two reasons to visit Calarasi.

One is the aforementioned steel works. This is something that is really, truly amazing. It's an enormous industrial complex, covering many hundreds of acres. There are great vast factory buildings with thousands of windows; miles and miles of enormous metal pipes; huge conveyor belts, big enough to drive a truck along, hanging suspended dozens of meters in the air. Off to one side is a dock -- the quay is 600 meters long -- designed especially for the steel works; cranes dangle over a canal dug especially for the factory, reaching several kilometers to the main branch of the Danube. Sitting in the middle of it all is the cooling tower of a power plant -- not nuclear, I don't think, but big as hell anyhow.

And, holy weeping scrod, it's all dead dead dead. The factory windows are broken and the cold January wind blows snow through them. The special canal is covered with an unbroken scrim of ice. The immense pipes are brown with rust and have collapsed in several places. Pieces of the conveyor belts have snapped and are hanging off. It looks like the set of a movie -- a bad, but extremely expensive movie -- about a post-apocalyptic future inhabited only by vampires and mutants.

I'm not usually one to wax sentimental over the lost achievements of communism, but the sheer boggling scope of the waste here is truly jaw-droppingly eye-poppingly vast. It's hard to meaningfully estimate costs under a Communist system, but you can try to get a handle on it by looking at production. In the years of its full operation, from 1981 to 1992, Calarasi produced about seven million tons of steel. Trying to work backwards from that, I get a figure of about $1.2 billion US dollars. That seems high, but not grossly so. I'd believe half a billion.

So: half a billion dollars, slowly crumbling into rust flakes and blowing away into the greay January sky. That's worth going out of your way for, I'd say. In fact, if I ever go back to Calarasi, I'll leave early so that I have time to stop, get out, and walk around a bit.

(Surrealist bonus points: the road from Bucharest to Calarasi goes right through the complex, but you can see that it didn't always; it used to swing wide around. The complex was once surrounded by a high wall, and the road dead-ended at a large gate with a guard post. The complex was a sensitive State enterprise, and only employees and carefully screened visitors were allowed in. Today the gate has been removed and the road blasts right on through.)

Asking about the complex in Calarasi got contradictory responses, with comprehension made more difficult by the fact that no one in Calarasi speaks much English. A couple of people claimed that there was still some sort of life going on inside the complex. Could be -- it's big enough that you could hide a few hundred people, no problem. But it's clearly operating at some tiny fraction of its old capacity, and most of its physical plant is shot beyond hope of repair.

The other reason to visit Calarasi? The Museum of the Lower Danube. No, I haven't been there -- didn't have time. But, come on. The Museum of the _Lower Danube_. It doesn't even have a web page, that's how cool it is. If I get back to Calarasi, for sure that's the other thing I won't miss.

Maybe more about Calarasi in a bit -- but it may have to wait a day or two; it's off to Craiova tomorrow, weather permitting.

Problems with Press Freedom

Romania has some problems with freedom of the press.

You don't have to speak or read Romanian to realize this. I can read only a couple of hundred words of Romanian... but I can look at a newsstand and count how many flattering pictures of Prime Minister Nastase and (especially) President Iliescu I see every day. Iliescu smiling, Iliescu looking thoughtful and wise, Iliescu accepting flowers from little girls: it's clear that these papers think that they need to give the President favorable coverage, and lots of it.

Romanian TV news, same thing. I don't watch it that much, but when I do, Mr. Iliescu is there too, looking good.

And I do read the English language press here; and it's... tame. No investigative journalism that I can see, and a strong tendency to rely heavily on government press releases.

On the other hand, Romania is not a police state, at all. Opposition parties function openly, and their activities do make the news. I see articles that are openly critical of the government. Editorials and letters pages are full of lively commentary and debate. Problems like corruption are universally acknowledged. There are lots of very feisty internet sites. So, glass at least half full, right?

Well... maybe.

At the beginning of December, a journalist named Ivo Ardelean was attacked and beaten in the city of Timisoara, in the west of Romania. Ardelean had written a number of stories critical of local politicians, especially members of the ruling Social Democratic Party (PSD). Several of these stories implied or stated that the politicians were involved in illegal trafficking of various kinds. Ardelean's most recent report, published just a week or so before he was attacked, was about a local PSD representative who was also a school director, and who was allegedly forcing pupils to work for him for no pay.

Ardelean was beaten viciously about the head; his jaw was broken and he was left unconscious. His wallet, watch and ring were untouched, so it wasn't a robbery. In fact, it seems as if the attackers were making a point that it wasn't a robbery.

I had an indirect connection with the Ardelean case: one of our local contractors is a native of Timisoara, and he knew Ardelean well -- so well that he took a plane back to be with him and his family.

It turns out that this is far from the first episode of violence against journalists here. There have been a about a dozen of these incidents over the last couple of years, including at least one where the reporter later turned up dead. In almost every case, the journalist had been investigating or writing articles about local politics, and usually ones critical of the PSD.

(In fact, I found out that Ardelean isn't even the most recent case -- another journalist, Csondy Szoltan, was attacked and injured at the end of December.)

However, the Ardelean case has gotten more attention than the others. It even seems to have gotten a bit of international attention. SEEMO, the Southeast European Media Organization, is a Vienna-based media support organization; it has publicly protested the authorities' seeming lack of interest in pursuing these cases. And an international watchdog organization, Reporters without Borders, has written a letter to the Prime Minister.

"The growing number of physical attacks on journalists who investigate corruption within the political class in power, especially in the provinces, is extremely worrying," said the letter, and warned that, if nothing is done, "the enemies of press freedom, who are increasingly concerned to protect their image in the run-up to the 2004 legislative and presidential elections, will think that they can, with impunity, use violence against the journalists they consider troublesome."

The chairman of the organization then gave this interview, which was translated and picked up by Transitions Online. That link is to the Transitions Online website, which moves most of its content to a subscribers-only archive after a week or so; so if you're coming late, here's the money quote:

Q: Doesn’t this picture, with its beaten journalists, place Romania more
in line with countries from the former Soviet Union, such as Ukraine and
Belarus?

A: There is this perception that … there are several countries of Central
Europe, such as Poland, Hungary, [the] Czech Republic that have joined,
to put it this way, the camp of democracies and Western Europe, and
another country, Romania, that is still hesitant and is employing methods
that do not meet European standards, and, because of that, it looks more
like Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia rather than Belgium, Spain, and Great
Britain.

WIll this make a difference? On one hand, the present government is quite sensitive to international opinion -- especially now, when the European Union is about to decide whether Romania will be admitted in 2007 or forced to wait. On the other hand, it's also an election year here. That's bad for uppity journalists in a couple of different ways: it makes local politicians even more sensitive, and also makes the government more reluctant to crack down on local politicians (whose help they will need in the general election).

More on this in a bit, I think.

Slush

Unseasonably warm today. If it were the end of February, I'd be delighted; but since it's the first half of January, I know better. This is just an intermission, and we still have at least six more weeks of winter.

Anyhow, point is, it was all slush today.

You commentors who pointed out how much fun snow was, how invigorating and fun: you come to Eastern Europe and slog through several inches of cold, dirty water to the office and back. With drizzle falling all around, the drains plugging up, and a month's worth of dog droppings and cigarette butts bobbing in the mix.

If you've been reading this far, you know that we like Bucharest. It's just that the city wasn't showing its most lovely face today.

In the Clinic

"Please tell me that wasn't the reset button."

"Well, I don't know... what's 'reset' in Romanian?"

"Well, what does the damn button say?"

"It says... 'reset'. And the screen just went dark."

We are standing in the doctor's office, staring at the computer. Alan's finger has just lashed out, quick as a chameleon's tongue, and hit the tiny button on the back of the doctor's CPU. We thought we were watching him; we weren't watching him closely enough.

"Oh, crud, it shut down. It shut down."

"Well... 'reset' is 'reset', right? It should start up again in a second."

[pause]

"In a few seconds."

[pause]

"Come on... Alan! No! Not again!"

[parent snatches small child away from CPU] [small child squirms, whines]

"Hold him!"

[small child begins to wail miserably]

[SFX: Microsoft startup chime]

"Yes!"

[long pause]

[child continues wailing]

"Come on... come on... holy smokes, what is this thing, a 286? What's taking so long?"

We have been standing in the doctor's office for about half an hour, with the kids growing steadily more whiny and squirrely. Since we brought them to the clinic mostly because they were already whiny and squirrely, this is not so good. Alan is literally bouncing off the walls, which is one of those things that you consider a figure of speech until you see it happen. David's crying has begun to take on that ugly rasping sound that suggests no amount of parental jiggling and cooing will stop the incipient meltdown.

"'Improper shutdown detected, Scanning drives for --'" [Claudia slaps the 'Enter' key] "Ooh, good one, wife."

"Thank you -- No! It wants a password!"

The clinic is overcrowded, the doctors and nurses are obviously overworked and underpaid. The floor needs cleaning and the tiles on the walls are chipped. The interior of the clinic is a weird maze of temporary rooms and recently added partitions; the room just outside of ours is half file cabinets, half sink-toilet-shower. Nurses and doctors duck into the bath to change clothes and scrub, pulling a curtain across to give them a few square feet of privacy.

The clinic smells faintly of disinfectant and the wordless fears of tired parents. Somewhere outside a baby is crying -- another baby, I mean, not ours. The doctor has been gone for a long time now.

But: the doctor spoke English and seemed to know her stuff. She gave David a swift but professional examination, pronounced him slightly dehydrated, and prescribed electrolytes and carrot soup. Alan was something else: she heard sounds in his lungs, found inflammation down his throat, and stared long and thoughtfully at his flushed cheeks. Then she ordered an X-ray, which was done in just a few minutes down the hall. (Without any apron or protection for Claudia, but we're getting used to that.)

But then she had disappeared, leaving the four of us in her tiny office. With her computer.

"Hit 'Enter' again."

"What?"

"Do it. Sometimes people don't bother with the password."

"Oh... yes!"

Just above the computer, a sign announces -- in simple Romanian that even I can read -- that smoking is really, truly forbidden in pediatric emergency wards, because the government has passed a law against it, with fines of up to two million lei ($60), and they really mean it this time. The effective date of the law is June 1, 2003.

"Stuff coming up on the screen... Microsoft Instant Message?"

"Close it."

"Looks like some sort of virus update notice."

"Close that too."

I've lifted Alan up onto my shoulders and am swaying from side to side across an arc of thirty degrees or so. Sway, sway, swaaaay. Usually he finds this amusing, or at least soothing. All it's doing now is taking the edge of his whimpering. If I sway any further his head will bang into a wall, a lamp or the edge of a medicine cabinet.

"Umm... I think this is the desktop."

"Okay. So now what?"

"Well... I guess we wait until the screensaver comes back on."

I can't say this clinic is terrific the way that, say, German health care is terrific. It's not a cheerful place. The waiting room in particular is... grim; a small bare room, no toys or books or magazines, no cheerful paintings or prints on the walls, just worried-looking parents sitting on benches holding children.

On the other hand, it is, dammit, health care. We may have to wait for the doctor to get back -- we've been waiting for about 45 minutes now -- but we got in the door, and into her office, in ten minutes or so.

And, in the end: the screensaver came back on, the doctor came back in -- not giving the computer a second glance, bless her -- and looked at the X-ray. She said it was viral but not too serious, probably; and then she gave us prescriptions and instructions, and then wouldn't take the extra couple of hundred thousand lei that I tried to give her.

It's not a Mercedes, but it has four wheels and an engine. I'd go back.

I do wish they'd paint that waiting room a more cheerful color, though.

Snow (1)

It's January, we're in Eastern Europe, there's snow on the ground.

It's not that there's so very much snow. It's only 20 cm (8 inches) or so.

But the streets aren't plowed. (Well, the main streets are, but we don't live on a main street.) And nobody in our neighborhood has cleaned the sidewalk. Nobody, that is, except for the mysterious House Where Someone Important Lives, and I hesitate to walk in front of that house, because it distracts the security guards from their TV. People sweep and shovel from door to sidewalk, but it stops there.

So the walk from my house to the office, which is just four or five blocks, has become a slow, careful shuffle. Like a premonition of old age: in thirty or forty years, I'll walk like this all the time.

It's also cold. It went down to -10 centigrade last night -- that's about 14 degrees Fahrenheit for our American readers -- and it's going down to -12 for the weekend.

Oh, well, at least everyone seems to be healthy again [crossed fingers]. And the snow has brought some interesting changes. The Gypsies who wandered the streets calling for scrap metal and old clothes have gone indoors for the winter. They've been replaced by an old Romanian man who sells brooms. Big ones; he carries a dozen or so over his shoulder, and shuffles slowly along calling out his wares.

And our landlord's mother-in-law, who lives in the apartment under us, has started feeding the sparrows. So now there's always a crowd of them, little feathered freeloaders, lurking hopefully in the front garden.

Alan doesn't much like snow, by the way. Yow, it stings! Get it away from me.

That's my boy.

Justice and Trouble

A good article about the slow process of justice in the Balkans. (Via Amygdala.) It's about the Hague Tribunal and its side effects on Serbia, Bosnia and Croatia.

(Unfortunately it's the New York Times Review of Books, which moves their articles into a subscription-only archive after a week or two. So if you're going to read it, read it now.)

I was a bit hesitant when I saw it was by Tim Judah, because I've disagreed with some stuff he's written in the past; I think he was a bit soft on the Serbs. But this piece is very even-handed.

I do have some quibbles. I think he gives an exaggerated impression of the importance of Hague indictments in the collapse of Serbia's coalition government. A lot of those guys hated each others' guts from the beginning. They were a ramshackle alliance with nothing in common but overthrowing Milosevic, and some of them not even that. So the Hague played a rather small role in pushing them over the edge.

(On the other hand, it is entirely possible that the Hague indictments played a role in the death of Prime Minister Djindjic. But then, Djindjic was killed by people who had gotten very used to having their own way, and very ready to use violence when they didn't get it. So if it hadn't have been that, likely it would have been something else.)

I also think Judah's a little too easy on Carla del Ponte. Although she's been the regular subject of adulatory profiles in the British and European media, I've been distinctly underwhelmed by her tactical effectiveness as a prosecutor.

Mind you, I find her statement that she warned the Serbian government about upcoming indictments -- but to no effect -- altogether plausible. Mr. Micawber had nothing on the DOS coalition. With a few notable exceptions (Dinkic, Vlahovic) they spent three years living from day to day.

Anyhow. For what it's worth, I think that the Hague tribunal is indeed a lot of trouble. It's inconvenient, is doing a lot of political collateral damage (including harm to the innocent and not-so-guilty), is not very efficient, and is costing much more money than it should.

But, yes, I still I think it's worth it. On a moral level, to try for justice imperfectly is stilll better than not trying for justice at all. On a practical level, it's establishing a vastly useful precedent. (Okay, re-establishing it, but Nuremberg was a while ago and I don't think one set of war crimes trials every 50 years is unreasonable.)

And also, it's going to make it harder -- not impossible; it's never impossible; but harder -- for the various factions to write their own little histories and so to justify the next round.

Or so I can hope.