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 wi