| Submitted by: Mark R. LeeperUnited States |
| Submission Date: 10 February 2005 |
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Then Evelyn, Steve, and Mary bought wine. Suddenly there were two of these things flying around. I told Evelyn it was the wine that was attracting them and asked her to move her wine glass away from me. She didn't believe me and would not move her wine glass away. The insects started to get thicker. I pushed Evelyn's wine glass further from my plate a few inches and she told me to cut it out. The insects (Mary thought they were fruit flies) kept thicker. Two were on the outside of Steve's glass and one was 'doing the backstroke' in the wine. There were a bunch on the wine bottle itself. I had to keep waving them away from my plate. Finally I had to get forceful and told Evelyn to please move her wine glass away. By this point there were a bunch of fruit flies on the wine bottle and finally Evelyn had sufficient evidence to invest the effort to move the wine glass a foot away. Evelyn claimed that she didn't think I was serious and didn't think wine attracted insects. I am glad she is not a smoker. Eventually we ended up moving the bottle and three glasses to another table. That attracted the flies over there except for one who just couldn't appreciate it when humans treated him to a bottle of wine. Or maybe he had taste and didn't like the wine. Dessert was a cream puff.
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The water in our hotel is an unwholesome yellow. Breakfast was fried eggs and not too bad. After breakfast Evelyn went back to the room and I went to photograph the view behind the hotel. I had guests. There was a large herd of cows grazing on the small piece of grass behind the hotel. We exchanged pleasantries and I took one or two pictures before wishing the ladies a nice day.
Our first stop of the day was to see the local St. Mihail Church. Evelyn's friend from New Jersey was there and we exchanged pleasantries. The church is in a sort of Gothic style. It was founded in the 14th Century, burned in 1698, and rebuilt. It is the largest Roman Catholic Cathedral in Romania. It has a baroque pulpit. Felicia said that now it was legal more, and more people were coming to church. And with liberalization religion could now be taught in the schools. How interesting. In the United States liberalization means religion shouldn't be taught in the schools. Outside the church there is an interesting statue to St. Matthias. There is also a banner in support of an upcoming miners' demonstration in Bucharest. And we should be just getting into town then. There is also a banner from last year saying 'Communism down, God is with us.'
Getting back on the bus we saw the New Jersey tourist a third time. He asked me if I wanted to change money. So I was right about him all along.
We then got back on the road. The major road here is like those in Nevada. Every few miles you have to slow down and go through a town. People here are a bit more friendly than they are elsewhere. Children wave a lot and are interested to see foreigners. You see a lot of use of Mickey Mouse to represent America. A place will advertise American pizza and show a picture of Mickey Mouse. Uncle Sam represents the political side of America and Mickey Mouse the fun side.
We are having temperature wars on the bus. Evelyn and Susan like it warm. Sam and I like it cool. In the sun the bus can get very hot. Somehow whichever side of the bus I sit on, the sun seems to follow me.
The buildings in this part of Transylvania have interesting two-tiered roofs, like there is a smaller roof over the larger one.
We stop in Tirgu Mures for lunch. Most of the group go into the hotel and have pizza. We still have cheese from Hungary. We open up what looked like a cake of smoked cheese only to find it is a long rolled strip of smoked cheese. We have that with bread, then explore the town. Evelyn finds a bookseller and we look at his wares. I see a mystery by A. Conan Doyle. The first chapter is 'Sherlock Holmes.' I tell Evelyn it must be A STUDY IN SCARLET in Romanian. After some studying, she agrees.
We see a theater that offers older films and has 'Video Cinema' with newer films. Apparently they get them on VHS and project them. There were about six films, of which I recognized NAVY SEALS, LEVIATHAN, and a Jackie Chan kung fu movie.
We look in at a grocery. It is dimly lit. There are four ten-foot aisles of shelves. Detergent seems to be in a gray cardboard box with light orange labeling stamped on the box in varying degrees of translucence. Bottled products are in green bottles that could use a washing on the outside. There is no produce, but there are jars of canned fruit and pickles. It is not a happy place. At the end of the street there is another nice monument to the Soviets who liberated Romania from the Nazis. 'Thank you, sir. May I have another?'
A street vendor is advertising Coca-Cola, but when we get some it is not from a Coke bottle and is bitter and flat.
There are large numbers of gypsies. Some beg; some dressed in finery want us to take their pictures and pay them. They never seem to get off of work. They perpetually look for money. The men all wear hats, supposedly the trademark of Hungarian gypsies.
There is beer in a shop window with a label that says 'export.' That seems to be true of a lot of what Romania makes.
We go back to the bus. Mrs. Hale is there already waiting for Tone to open things up. A gypsy boy of eight or nine comes along and asks for money. Mrs. Hale gives him a little and tells him to go (or rather motions). He does not go. He stares fixedly at us and whatever we do. He edges closer and closer to my camera. I move away and he starts over edging close. Suddenly more of our group show up and he starts asking them for money also. More gypsy boys show up. Their behavior is similar.
Eventually Tone shows up and opens the bus. We board. He tries to get the boys to go away, but they still mill around begging from new passengers and seemingly looking for an opening.
Eventually the bus pulls out. On the road we are behind a truck with gypsies. A boy waves at us and I take his picture. He holds out his hand as if I could reach out of a sealed bus and pay him. I do pretend to toss him money and he laughs.
Some of the crops we pass have a funny blurry visual effect. I told Evelyn in Austria that there seemed to be a breed of evergreen that, if you looked at a bunch of them, they looked weirdly out of focus and blurry. She thought I was nuts. Later in Hungary I saw more and started to point them out to Evelyn. She said she had seen them and was just thinking about that comment. They looked blurry to her also.
We stopped for a while in Sigisoara. It has an interesting clock tower and a yellow building that claims to be Dracula's birthplace. Now it is a sort of restaurant. While we waited for the tour members all to come back, I talked to Felicia about the Jewish community in Romania. Before the war there were 80,000 Jews in Romania. The Holocaust reduced that number to about 40,000. Now the figure is 20,000. A big reason the figure keeps dropping is anti-Semitism. Like Spain, Romania would like to rebuild the Jewish community and the rest of the middle class. I don't see a whole lot to attract Jews to either Spain or Romania. There is a song in Yiddish that is a homesick lament for this country. It says in Romania you can get anything you want. I think it says you can get a mamalige, a , a pastrami. Mamalige may still be here; I doubt pastrami is. (Mamalige, incidentally, is probably something like polenta, a sort of cornmeal mush that is good with gravy, I think.) Anyway, there isn't much you can get in Romania today. Earlier I said I thought ice cream was universal. I have not seen anything as unstable as ice cream in Romania. Felicia says that Jews do come back for visits, but I think our friend would be afraid she could not leave.
We continued on to Brasov, which on the outside looks like a prosperous community, if slightly polluted, with a pleasant view of the local hills. We saw on the outskirts of the city a company that looked like a polluter with the apt name 'Fartec.' Our room looked fairly nice at the Hotel Carpathia. (The one negative touch was the toilet, on which the seats would go no higher than an eighty-degree angle and would fall back down if not held up.)
We walked around the town square and there were shops but not much selection. The store windows were pretty empty.
Steve wanted mineral water so we went into a grocery. This one was darker and grimmer than the one we'd seen earlier. There was insufficient lighting even to see what you were getting. There were not many different types of items on the shelves. Steve found a mineral water in what looked to me like a grubby bottle. We got in line to pay, but there was an argument between the person ahead of us and the cashier at a hand-cranked cash register. Apparently the guy claimed he paid more than the store claimed he had. Steve got his water and took it out on the street. There were specks and a dead insect floating in it. Really healthy, huh? He was going to drink it anyway. Mary convinced him just to throw out the bottle. Ah, Romania.
Our dinner was going to be at a restaurant called the Carpathia. It was back in the square we'd been in before. They led us into the restaurant past a trinity of deadpan Baccuses and two guys in local costume using seven-foot horns to make highly unmusical sounds. We were led down to a wine cellar and past huge and probably fake casks (I knocked on them and they really didn't sound full of fluid). We were taken into a room for a wine-tasting. There was a plate with canapes and they poured four glasses of wine. I gave mine away, detesting as I do the taste of alcohol. The canapes featured entirely too much liver. Liver is almost as bad as alcohol. Almost.
They took us upstairs to a large hall where we sat and were served a meal while in the middle of the hall a band played first general music, then local music with local dances. This was called a folk music and dancing show, but it was more a night club sort of thing. I asked if I could be served something other than wine and Pepsis were brought to the table, enough so that we'd each get half a bottle. That didn't seem like much, but it was enough since some didn't drink Pepsi. Evelyn kept picking up bottles and refilling my glass. I couldn't complain. Most of the people at the club were high school students. This was the last teaching day of high school before the summer. They were celebrating.
At one point the band played consecutively 'If I Were a Rich Man,' 'Avenu Sholem Aleichem,' and 'Havah Nagila.' Romania used to be anti-Semitic. It probably still is, but tour-related industries cannot afford to be.
Sam seemed to be having a pretty good time. He was getting fairly drunk and making lots of jokes.
At some point he said I should stop sitting there so deadpan and should try to have some fun. So I made a little like a party animal. I made a hat out of the napkin, that sort of thing. Most of the folk music was about as authentic as a plastic piece of the True Cross.
We stayed pretty near midnight. We returned to our hotel. Steve, Mary, Evelyn, and I pushed the button for the elevator, got in, and went to our floor, and the door wouldn't open. We returned to the lobby floor. We rang for an elevator and got the same one. We let the door close and rang again and got the same elevator. Obviously we had to make the elevator busy. We could not climb the stairs with Mary. I pushed the button for the tenth floor in the elevator and stepped out. The lights went out. This elevator was too smart to go empty. I picked up the big lobby ashtray and put it in the elevator, pushed the tenth floor, and stepped out. No, the sensors said that an ashtray was not a sentient life form. |
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