| Submitted by: Mark R. LeeperUnited States |
| Submission Date: 10 February 2005 |
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The elevator refused to ferry just an ashtray to the tenth floor. Defeated, I got into the elevator alone, had it take me to the third floor, then walked down to the second. The other three took another elevator.
The hallways are very dark in the hotel. There are light bulb shortages. In spite of the Pepsis I fell asleep fairly quickly. This isn't a bad hotel. In spite of cigarette holes in the bedspread, a television that doesn't work, and sheer curtains, the Hotel Carpathia is better than the Hotel Transilvania.
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Breakfast was scrambled eggs and ham. The ride was particularly bone-shaking this morning due to bad roads. We passed a line of cars about a half a mile long. It turned out to be for a cheap gas station. There are cheap and expensive gas stations. You need ration tickets to buy at the cheap gas station. The expensive station does not ration. And the lines are shorter. If you have a car you can get only so much gas cheap, then you have to go to the expensive station. If you are allergic to long lines and can afford it, you only go to the expensive station. There are people who sit in line overnight to get cheap gas.
Our first stop of the day is Bran Castle. It is Castle Dracula, except it is a Castle Dracula. The Castle Dracula is in ruins. Dracula did live here at some point, but it was not his last castle. It does, however, fit Bram Stoker's description. It does have the cliff face Jonathan Harker saw Dracula climb. It does look a lot like the Dracula Castles in the Hammer films, though may not have rooms quite as big as they appear in the films. It is nowhere near as big as the castle shown in the 1930 Bela Lugosi film. No stairway is more than about thirty inches wide. It has lots of rooms laid out in a totally weird pattern. It is at the top of a small hill and Steve had a tough time pushing Mary up. Unfortunately, it is under renovation and has more the feel of a new home still being worked on than of a very old castle. As you climb you just keep finding more and more stairs up. The castle itself is not where Stoker said Castle Dracula was, but there never was a castle there. I think someone built a hotel or a restaurant there. But this one does help a reader visualize the castle and is very likely the actual castle Stoker described. So it isn't the fraud I thought it would be.
Lunch was in Sinaia. After a false start or two we found a place called the Express Palace. I saw a soup on another table and pointed. The others ordered sausage. Both were quite good. I had a sort of a sour cream and meat soup. The sausage tasted like gyros and came with fries. We all ate well and enjoyed. We all ate for about $3.35, including tip. Oh, that included a soda for each of us. Orange soda, not very carbonated but good.
The road to Bucharest was a bit smoother and we saw a few rich farms. Earlier the farms were smaller and many people do the back- breaking work. Finally we made it to Bucharest.
Our arrival in Bucharest has been less than totally auspicious. Like everything in Romania, it is just a little better than we had been told and a little worse than we really expected. To a very minor extent, we lucked out. We arrived on a Saturday afternoon, will be here through Sunday, and will leave early Monday. This means by rights that it would be one pretty dead burg. But one year ago the students had a demonstration demanding things like greater freedom. The miners broke up the demonstration in return for government promises of job security, better working conditions, and higher pay. Iliescu made them lots of promises which he has not kept. The miners are now demonstrating and this time with the students as allies. We can take a look at these goings on and can go see if we can find the apartment where Jo Paltin lived. Jo is a friend who was born in Romania and fled as a teenager (about 14 years old, I think).
Like most hotels in Romania, the Ambassador is a real piece of work. We have a window to help cool the room but it has an inner and an outer pane. The inner pane can be unlocked and is on a hinge, but it can be opened only about ten degrees before it runs afoul of the curtain, which can be moved only part of the way out of the way. There is a little one-and-a-half foot by five foot balcony to one side with a door and an outer door. The outer door cannot be opened. There are sheer curtains and opaque ones. But the opaque curtains are limited by the curtain rod, so there is about an eighteen-inch-wide section of window that the curtains will not cover. Part cannot be covered by either curtain. This means that the light will stream in despite the opaque curtains. But at least we got our ration of opaque curtains for what they are worth to us. There are two light switches, one that does nothing and one that turns on a three-bulb chandelier that has only one small bulb. There is a radiator but no air conditioning (including not being able to open the window). The room is hotter than 82 degrees Fahrenheit.
The toilet seat is made of clear soft orange plastic one- sixteenth of an inch thick. The toilet was not clean. It will flush only once, then needs about ten minutes to recharge its phasors. The toilet paper is scratchy stuff akin to crepe paper. As is usually the case in Eastern Europe, there is no shower curtain. That's why we have a drain in the bathroom floor. You have both a faucet and a hand-held head for the shower, but it cannot be turned to faucet. Nothing will come out. The faucet in the sink cannot be turned off.
The elevator is unreliable. It usually goes right by two or three times. It is very small. It has two wooden swinging doors on the elevator itself. It is self-service. If you take the stairs rather than the elevator, they are almost in total darkness. The bed sheets stop about a foot from the top of the bed. That part is covered by the pillow anyway. The oversheet seems sort of thrown on over one of the covers and goes only halfway up. The edge is badly ripped. You are expected to remake the bed yourself, I guess.
In the hallway is a map of the floor. It shows my room as having a tear shape. The walls of my room are perfectly straight. My room shows up as being room 200 on the map. It is actually room 209.
How there could be any unrest in such a well-ordered society as this is beyond me, but we headed out to see the demonstration. This is at University Square, just down the street from my hotel. It is a protest reminiscent of the 1960s. There are protest folk songs and political speeches from a podium in the square. A lot of people are waving Romanian flags with holes cut in the center to emphasize that they do not have a Communist symbol at the center any more. It used to have a coat of arms and a red star. Evelyn and I take a few pictures cautiously. I don't think anyone objects, but who knows? One person is walking through the crowd surreptitiously throwing printed sheets. It isn't hard to figure out who is tossing the sheets. The sheets turn out to be ads for a student satire, 'Mineriada.' Probably poking fun at the miners who changed sides.
A student sees I carry binoculars and a camera and am making notes on a pad. He comes over, dead set on being interviewed by me, probably assuming that I am a reporter. Well, if you are reading this, maybe I am. 'English?' he asked. 'Yes.' 'My name is photography,' he said, pointing to our guide book. After that he launched into verbal fruit cocktail, not all in English nor all in real words. All we could give him were puzzled looks. He gave up on us as a way to get into the papers.
Next we went to see where our friend used to live. On one side of the building it looks run down, but the back faces a nice park. The run-down side appeared to have bullet holes.
On the way back to the hotel we passed a building in the process of falling apart. There was a big hole in the plaster front, revealing a layer of wood shavings. Somebody had the bright idea that wood shavings might be a great building material. So you have a building with this big stupid hole. The wall is just falling apart. I am sure it must have seemed like a good idea at the time, however. Would have been really great if it had worked!
One grocery seemed to have a lot of goods in the window. Inside, the shelves were empty. All the stock was in the window. Prosperity or what?
Back at the hotel we wrote for a while. Sam, Susan, and Mojca had gone to a movie they thought was just great. It had Burt Reynolds and Chris Reeve. The title had something to do with 'electric chair.' It later was translated as INTERVIEW IN THE ELECTRIC CHAIR. I asked if it also had Kathleen Turner. It did. I told them it was SWITCHING CHANNELS and was the fourth film based on the play THE FRONT PAGE. The best-known version was HIS GIRL FRIDAY with Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell, and Ralph Bellamy. Also I thought there was a version with Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon. I don't think they believed me and thought I was making some of the information up. It was all true.
Dinner was a little amazing. Mary said she didn't think that the plates were too clean. I wiped the largest plate with my napkin and the napkin came away with a long brown stain. The salad was not dressed, but had been sprinkled with a spice that was very bitter and the salad was inedible. The main course was chicken basted in some unpleasant oil that gave it a weird flavor, then broiled to the toughness of beef jerky. Dessert was the tastiest, but was no winner. It was a blintz with just a hint of apple, I think.
Through all this a noisy and unpleasant gypsy band played music that was so amplified we could not talk. Ever hear CARMEN on an accordion? Yug!
When we went to bed, it was very hot in the room. My thermometer said 85 degrees Fahrenheit. That made it hard to sleep so I stayed up late writing, then put on a wet T-shirt and went to bed.
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It was really noisy overnight. We do not get much breeze from the window and we do get a lot of street noises. And even more fumes.
Breakfast was sparse. It was one good tomato--much tastier than grocery store tomatoes at home, but not necessarily better than tomatoes you get on a farm. There were three cheese slices, three slices of ham, and coffee or tea.
The focal point of the city tour was the square where it all ended for Ceausescu. The whole square looks very shot up. It was tough to understand from Felicia's description, but it all seemed to fall apart with a sort of domino effect in a matter of minutes. With pro-democracy demonstrations going on throughout Eastern Europe, Ceausescu was still able to hold out for a long time. He had the army at his command. The generals were all loyal to him. He had his secret police. And he had a cadre of mercenaries to protect him. They were from Lebanon. They were mercenaries, though Felicia insisted the proper term was 'terrorists.' An interesting choice of word, incidentally. For a long time it looked like the anti-Communist movement would not work in Romania because there was too much force marshaled against it. There had been a demonstration in Timisoara, but Ceausescu's forces had put it down. Ceausescu arranged for there to be a demonstration showing support for his actions in Timisoara on December 22, 1989. The demonstration started, but so did a counter-demonstration. Ceausescu--interrupted in his speech and now angry--called in the army to put down the counter-demonstration. |
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