| Submitted by: Evelyn C. LeeperUnited States |
| Submission Date: 10 February 2005 |
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Each family with
a car can get a certain amount of gasoline for 15 lei for a liter;
anything more than that is 30 lei a liter. I gather one goes to
different stations for the different prices, and these lines were at
the cheap stations.
On the way to Bran, Felicia told us about the Romanian royal
family. King Michael is living in Switzerland and has been trying
to come back, but the government, citing potential security
problems, has refused to issue him a visa. His wife Anna and their
five daughters do not speak Romanian, and according to Felicia, Anna
is even worse than Ileana Ceausescu--she only wants to return to
reclaim all the royal family's property and possessions. Fat
chance. I can't see the people here handing over all this stuff
after wresting it away from Ceausescu. Maybe as figureheads the
royal family might return. But even that is questionable, given
their German origins, and the fact that they've been out of touch
with Romania for over forty years.
History here is only now being learned. In the schools,
everything from 1918 was very slanted and much was concealed. Only
now are people rediscovering those seventy years.
One thing they do seem definite about is that they don't like
Communism. On one wall we saw painted the equation '[hammer and
sickle] = [swastika]'.
We got to Bran Castle, a.k.a. Dracula's Castle, to find
it ... you guessed it, under renovation. Yes, there was scaffolding
everywhere. Felicia managed to convince them to let us in to walk
around a bit, but the atmosphere was somehow wrong. If it had been
in disrepair, it would have been atmospheric. If it had been
renovated, it would have been nice to look at. With all the
construction materials around, though, it just looked as though they
were building Dracula's Castle while we watched. Sort of like a
Transylvanian Disneyland.
Even with all this, however, the castle on the hill flush with
the cliff was worth seeing. Mark said the whole thing looked more
like Hammer Films' version of Dracula's castle than like
Universal's. In any case, Dracula's *real* castle is about twenty
kilometers west, the Poienari Citadel in the Wallachia province.
(Vlad Tepes was actually a Wallachian prince.) But it's almost
completely in ruins and hard to get to besides, so tours make do
with this one.
The vendors make do also--there were a dozen souvenir stands.
All but two were selling woollen goods and sheepskin hats. The
other two were selling wooden items (plates, flasks, etc.) decorated
by wood-burning and painted portraits of--you guessed it--Vlad
Tepes. We got a plate and a flask, both decorated with a picture of
the castle and the legend 'Bran Castle.' But the flask can be
turned around to show a flower design on the reverse side. The
flask was 300 lei; we paid US$3 and might have been able to get it
for US$2, but we were in a hurry. We also got one of each postcard
they had. At 3 lei each, that was 6 lei.
Driving up into more mountains on a shortcut road to Bucharest,
we stopped in Sinaia for lunch. The hotel restaurant Felicia
recommended wasn't open yet, so Steve, Mary, Mark, and I went to the
'Expres Palace' across the street. The menu was entirely in
Romanian. My menu reader doesn't cover Romanian, so we looked at
what other people were eating and what was being cooked behind the
counter. The 'look-and-point' method got us an assortment of soup
with chicken (and tripe?) and sour cream, beef tongue, and mititei
(skinless sausages) with fried potatoes. The mititei were very
good! With four orange drinks this came to 200 lei for the four of
us (about US$3 at the official rate, or under US$2 at the black
market rate). After lunch Mark and I wandered down the street and
got some soda in a hard-currency store--it is hard to find anything
drinkable here.
Felicia continued to marvel at the number of people in the
fields. Up until last year (a lot of sentences in Romania--and
elsewhere in Eastern Europe--start that way: 'Up until last year,'
'Before 1989,' etc.), most of the food was exported to pay off
Romania's foreign debt or to keep the Soviets off their backs. (The
Romanians used to pay tribute to the Turks; more recently they paid
it to the Soviets.) Anyway, their debt is paid off, the land is
private again, and the people can either eat what they grow, or sell
it for money to buy things. What things they can buy remains a good
question, but they must believe there will be something.
We drove through the Ploiesti oil fields, heavily bombed during
World War II. They are producing still, but not as much (the reason
wasn't clear--there still is a lot of oil there). So now Romania
imports crude oil from the Middle East, refines it, and then exports
it. The roads were much better here. We saw more cars and also a
gypsy caravan headed toward Bucharest. Felicia thought they might
be going toward the demonstration there. She (and some of the tour
members) are not reticent to express their negative feelings about
gypsies. I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, many do look
dirtier than the population as a whole. On the other, it could be
that their living conditions are worse and water less available.
Are a higher percentage of them thieves and pickpockets? I don't
know. Do they have a lot of other options open to them? I don't
know that either.
We arrived at Bucharest about 3 PM. Our hotel was the
Ambassador, changed from the Bucharesti (which no longer accepts
groups). The Ambassador is equally well located, although since we
were spending Saturday afternoon and Sunday in Bucharest, all the
shops would be closed anyway.
Before we travel these days, we get information on the various
countries we are visiting from the international section of AT&T's
travel office. This includes things like brief histories, visa
requirements, currency regulations, and so on. There is also a
sheet saying what to watch out for and what precautions to take.
The sheet for Romania said to avoid all demonstrations and to steer
clear of University Square in Bucharest, known for its riots. And
if we were caught in a demonstration, we should not try to
photograph it.
So the first thing we did was grab our cameras and go to a
demonstration in University Square.
As the song says, 'I give myself very good advice, but I very
seldom follow it.'
The demonstration seemed like something out of the late 1960s
or early 1970s in the United States. Someone was singing a
Dylanesque folk song, although the only word I could pick out was
'libertati.' To one side someone was selling small candles to be
lit at a sidewalk shrine to the martyrs of the 1989 revolution.
People were waving Romanian flags, many of them with a hole in the
center where the shield with the red star was cut out eighteen
months ago. The newer flags were made without the shield. At one
point someone threw some flyers into the crowd and everyone
scrambled for them. Were they political tracts? No, they were
advertisements for a play (which may have been political--it was
called THE MINERS). The police were standing in groups of three
about a block away; we saw only a few dozen in all, and they had
only the usual nightsticks and pistols they always carry. The most
unusual thing that happened was that someone saw Mark with his
camera taking notes and came over, apparently wanting to be
interviewed. But he didn't actually speak English, though he seemed
to think he did, and eventually we gave up.
(It turned out that the demonstration was postponed until
Thursday, June 20, at which time they expect 3,000,000 people to
join the protest in Bucharest.)
We left University Square and went looking for the house
(apartment block) where a friend of ours used to live. (She now
lives in Tinton Falls, New Jersey.) We found it right next to
Cismigiu Park as predicted. Her new place is much nicer, at least
from the outside. The Romanian one is just a nondescript rundown
apartment building with bullet holes in the facing from December
1989.
Walking back we passed several movie theaters, all showing
older movies such as TOOTSIE and STARMAN. But they're cheap--15 lei
(10 to 25 cents).
Back at the hotel, Felicia told us that in the Soviet elections
Yeltsin had beaten the Communist candidate in Russia. I wonder what
will happen now.
Dinner was a tasteless vegetable soup, something that they said
was chicken (but didn't taste or even look like chicken--more like
pigeon), and a fruit blintz. There was a lot of gypsy music and
dancing in the restaurant, which Mojca joined in. She said there
was a gypsy family there who had just had a christening and were
having the party at our hotel restaurant. Throughout dinner the
waiters were going around changing money with anyone who wanted to.
It seems to be the national pastime and, if illegal, more ignored
than anything else.
Mojca, by the way, describes herself as a sociologist. She
used to teach sociology, but then that was replaced in the
curriculum by something called 'Self-Management and Marxism' (or
something like that).
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Breakfast was ham and cheese and tomato, with
Turkish coffee. The bread, as usual, was stale, but the tomatoes
were good.
Most of the morning's sightseeing was of sites connected with
the 1989 revolution. Unlike the transition from Communism to
democracy in most of the other Eastern European countries, Romania's
was *not* peaceful. Actually, high party members had been planning
to dump Ceausescu in March of 1990, but then events started moving
elsewhere and when word spread to Romania, the uprising there began,
on December 16 in Timisoara. On December Ceausescu tried to give a
speech in Bucharest to generate support. It backfired and the
students started demonstrating against him. The secret police tried
to put down the rebellion, but the army sided with the students and
Ceausescu tried to flee the country. He was caught, tried, and, on
December 25, executed (sort of the Romanians' Christmas present to
themselves).
We started with the main square, which used to be Palace Square
and is now Revolutionary Square (and they're *not* referring to
1917!). The palace and its balcony are still there, but the secret
police's building is destroyed, the library burned (when officials
tried to burn incriminating documents), and the other buildings
(including the Fine Arts Museum) heavily damaged. Some of the
buildings are basically covered with bullet marks; other further
away may have only a few. (Our friend's old house is only a few
blocks from here.)
There is now a memorial in front of the palace to the martyrs
of the revolution. In fact, there are memorials all over Bucharest,
frequently replacing the old Lenin statues (shipped to the Hungarian
theme park?). And you see people lighting candles and putting
flowers on them.
As with the Lenin Museum in Prague, the Museum of the History
of the Romanian Communist Party is now closed. |
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