On the platform in Brasov, I had a coffee cup to get rid of. The nearest garbage was an orange metal one fixed to a pole. There was a coffee stirrer and a low black hill of garbage stains beneath it. I checked, and the bottom had rusted completely out. I found another. A Romanian woman walked by, chucked an iced tea bottle into it, and then had to pick it up off the ground.
The train to Bucharest is 45 minutes late. There are no displays on the platform, and no platform numbers, but my train is an international one, so the announcement is multilingual. Announcements are heralded by a twenty-second long piece of music, recorded on out-of-tune church bells and piped out through old metal loudspeakers. They make a lot of announcements. While I'm waiting, a chorus of hooting breaks out on another platform. An old silver train has pulled up too far, and people are running down to catch it. There are Roma families and men carrying rolled-up carpets and bindle sticks. When they reach the train, people jump up onto the steps and start prying the doors open.
My car on the train to Bucharest is red and plush and mostly empty. Some of the passengers have been on since Vienna, and are standing around drinking beer and eating sandwiches and scattering crumbs everywhere. A vendor works his way down the aisle with baskets of pomegranates. An old woman nearby tries one and there are some negotiations, but no business results. I go back looking for the restaurant car. A 20-year-old Englishman in parachute pants, a pirate earring, and an undershirt comes out of a compartment in front of me. I follow him; he courteously holds all the doors. In the restaurant car, he buys a beer and goes back, and the steward offers me chicken. It's all they have. No, thanks. Pork? No? OK, but that really is it.
We pass an abandoned village covered in graffiti that says 'Basarabia e Romania'. Then a family traveling parallel to the train in a pair of horse-carts. The second one has just a boy in it; he either waves at the train or gives us the finger with a lot of enthusiasm -- I can't tell which. The soccer pitches we go by have goals made of two forked saplings and a third for the crossbar, and men are fishing in a river with lines tied to sticks. Then we climb into the Carpathians, and suddenly stick-based technologies vanish and there are new, modern train platforms, with seats that haven't had their backs snapped off, and even signs that tell passengers what train is next.
Taking the Bucharest metro from the station to the hotel is simple and painless -- it's a good system, actually -- but the room is a bit of a shock. The hotel is a nice one in the centre of the old city, but, like a lot of small hotels, it has one weird, terrible little room. Because they can't bring themselves to list it on Booking.com as a "Dismal Garrett", they call it a "Tourist Class Room"; and if you're just blowing through your list of cities and reserving the cheapest room in a bunch of decent-looking hotels, you end up staying in it. It's a small, oddly shaped room made of left-over space. It has one small window, which looks onto the courtyard. "Courtyard" is a bit grand; it's the little enclosed space between the buildings, full of air conditioners, things to block parking spaces with, a yellow cargo bicycle, and inches of dust that began to be laid down when Vlad the Impaler was a toddler who wasn't very nice to his pets. At night, plaintive violin music floats in on a cloud of cigarette smoke and car exhaust.
The old centre of Bucharest is a maze of pubs, but when you get a block outside it there are so many strange and interesting things that it's hard to get where you'd planned. Around the corner from the hotel, a stray dog snoozes on the steps of the National Bank of Romania. Down the street, a dusty statue of the Capitoline Wolf stands in a neglected courtyard; behind it is a completely derelict 6-storey building bearing a 5-storey Red Bull ad. Beyond that, an overgrown parkette with a bronze statue of Mihail Eminescu, who Wikipedia says is Romania's national poet. A block up the other way, a statue of Kemal Ataturk in front of a theatre showing Un Tramvai Numit Dorinta (A Streetcar Named Desire).
The old centre is the scrap of Old Bucharest that survived the effort to rebuild it in the name of "systematization", the development philosophy Ceausescu swiped from Kim Il-sung. Systematization didn't so much set urban planning back by decades as teleport it into a dreadful new universe.
Ceausescu -- one of a very small number of people to tour North Korea and go away thinking Wow! What a great idea! -- wanted planned cities full of apartment blocks, and so knocked down a fair bit of Bucharest to erect a forest of slumping, waterstained high-rises. The showpiece was Bulevardul Unirii ("Union Boulevard"; formerly prematurely named the "Boulevard of the Victory of Socialism"), a wide street running west from the parliament building. The apartment blocks here are much nicer than those elsewhere, in that there's some ornamentation, they've been washed since the revolution, and they're not crumbling away like huge gray graham crackers. In the middle of this road is a system of elaborate fountains that would probably be spectacular if turned on. As it is, they're bone dry and surrounded by yellow grass stray dogs like to nap in.
There are many strays. There used to be more, the guidebook says, but there's still no obvious shortage. At night, they scrounge; during the day, they hang out and snooze. They favour shady doorways, dry fountains, central banks, and small parks with busts of Mihail Eminescu. Some kind of trap-neuter-release program seems to be operating, but without a whole lot of determination -- I see one ear-tag, but only one. The dogs seem to get along well with locals and with locals' pets -- it's strange to see one of them them greeting a pampered pet dog in a pink harness -- but also apparently maul people to death from time to time.
They mostly look alike; and they don't just resemble each other, they're very like stray dogs in India or Istanbul. Shaggy and medium-sized, they don't look much like any particular breed; if there's anything to hybrid vigour, these dogs may be immortal (which is awkward for TNR programs). Wikipedia reckons that this could be the emergence of the "long-term pariah morphotype" -- the form of ancient breeds, to which dogs revert (or with which they converge) with a few generations of uncontrolled mating.
My travel guide suggests getting rabies shots for a trip to Bucharest, then notes that the last human case was in 1979. My feeling is that, if there haven't been any cases of a disease in 35 years in a city of 2 million, then you do not need to get shots for it. It's not a good disease to get, what with the 100% fatality rate; but the Hindenburg disaster was also pretty bad, and is not a reason to get zeppelin insurance. Anyway, you can prevent rabies by getting shots after being bitten, while -- as the proverb says -- you can't uncrash a blimp.
'Basarabia e Romania' graffiti and stickers are everywhere in the city centre. It's apparently part of a campaign to convince the Romanian government to pursue unification with Moldova (which was a part of Romania at one time, and where the same language is spoken, under the name "Moldovan"). I stood behind a couple of campaigners on the metro at one point: Men of about 20 who got off at Universitate. One carried a plastic toolbox, and the other talked a lot and jokingly tried to stick a yellow 'Basarabia e Romania' bumper sticker on things. He had a small Romanian flag tied around his wrist and was wearing a vest and hat, a traditional outfit I'd only otherwise seen on shepherds and men over 70.
I took a walk through the major parks. In Izvor park, across from the parliament building, small groups are lying in the shade of trees and teens wobble by on roller blades. Bucharest's teens seem to be learning to roller blade en masse; it's very odd. There are enclosures set up for dogs to run loose in, dogs running loose everywhere but in the enclosures, and a hoarding set up for taggers to paint, in an effort to deflect the national passion for graffiti away from historical landmarks.
Cismigiu is older and lusher, with sculpture gardens and a tiny lake. It suddenly gets very dark while I'm there. Paddle-boaters strike out grimly for the dock. A paddle-boat is one of the worst things to get caught in in a thunderstorm. I don't know whether it's dangerous or not, but pedaling furiously for shore in a vessel that can't go above 2kph is unpleasant for you and hilarious for everyone else. This almost never happens, but I'm actually prepared, having brought a raincoat along. Not because I checked the forecast, but because I've checked the forecast every day for a week and know it has no more than a chance relationship with what actually happens in Romania. It's not even very good at getting the present conditions right. There may confusion with a Bucharest, Idaho, or something.
If you penetrate to the very centre of Cismigiu, you end up in a little flagstoned glade full of blocks of ancient stone and tables with chessboard tops. Here, the old men of Bucharest play chess with maniacal focus. The rain gets heavier, and none of them move. They carry on no matter what, like a beer-fueled animatronic display.
The ones who don't play chess work as security guards. All the parks, and most tourist sites and metro stations, have them. They're employed by a huge variety of private-security companies, all called "xxx Security Solutions". Private security's a huge employer of Bucharest's shabby, furtive old men. Most of them would be hanging around park entrances eating pistachios anyway, so why not slap a hat on them and tell them to keep their eyes open?
Parcul Herastrau is an enormous place in the North end, with another lake and a weird collection of garden statues: Charles de Gaulle, then a long colonnade of peasant-woman caryatids, and then a turkey. Then an eagle eating Prometheus' liver. Then a circle of huge bronze heads of European diplomats. Then Hercules clubbing a centaur. Outside is a hugely busy traffic circle, and within that is the Arcul de Triumf, a massive triumphal arch that celebrates the victory of the Romanian driver over the Romanian pedestrian. Also Romania's participation in the Russo-Turkish war, apparently.
On Saturday, everyone in Bucharest got married and then went to tourist sites to be photographed. In the open-air village museum in Herastrau Park, brides threw back their heads and smiled with slightly parted lips on the stoops of 19th-century peasant houses, in front of chickens, and on the porches of old wooden village churches. Back in the old town, I got mixed up in a wedding party while going out for a pizza. Photographers were documenting their walk from one shooting location to another. I tried to imagine their delight at looking over the pictures later and finding me in them. Luckily, I was wearing the most formal thing I'd brought -- a wrinkled windbreaker -- and so should pass unnoticed until the pictures are shown years later and one spouse asks the other, honey, who was that unshaven man in the elegant black windbreaker? What? He wasn't on your side?
Glad I came to Bucharest. Tomorrow, I fly home.
The train to Bucharest is 45 minutes late. There are no displays on the platform, and no platform numbers, but my train is an international one, so the announcement is multilingual. Announcements are heralded by a twenty-second long piece of music, recorded on out-of-tune church bells and piped out through old metal loudspeakers. They make a lot of announcements. While I'm waiting, a chorus of hooting breaks out on another platform. An old silver train has pulled up too far, and people are running down to catch it. There are Roma families and men carrying rolled-up carpets and bindle sticks. When they reach the train, people jump up onto the steps and start prying the doors open.
My car on the train to Bucharest is red and plush and mostly empty. Some of the passengers have been on since Vienna, and are standing around drinking beer and eating sandwiches and scattering crumbs everywhere. A vendor works his way down the aisle with baskets of pomegranates. An old woman nearby tries one and there are some negotiations, but no business results. I go back looking for the restaurant car. A 20-year-old Englishman in parachute pants, a pirate earring, and an undershirt comes out of a compartment in front of me. I follow him; he courteously holds all the doors. In the restaurant car, he buys a beer and goes back, and the steward offers me chicken. It's all they have. No, thanks. Pork? No? OK, but that really is it.
We pass an abandoned village covered in graffiti that says 'Basarabia e Romania'. Then a family traveling parallel to the train in a pair of horse-carts. The second one has just a boy in it; he either waves at the train or gives us the finger with a lot of enthusiasm -- I can't tell which. The soccer pitches we go by have goals made of two forked saplings and a third for the crossbar, and men are fishing in a river with lines tied to sticks. Then we climb into the Carpathians, and suddenly stick-based technologies vanish and there are new, modern train platforms, with seats that haven't had their backs snapped off, and even signs that tell passengers what train is next.
Taking the Bucharest metro from the station to the hotel is simple and painless -- it's a good system, actually -- but the room is a bit of a shock. The hotel is a nice one in the centre of the old city, but, like a lot of small hotels, it has one weird, terrible little room. Because they can't bring themselves to list it on Booking.com as a "Dismal Garrett", they call it a "Tourist Class Room"; and if you're just blowing through your list of cities and reserving the cheapest room in a bunch of decent-looking hotels, you end up staying in it. It's a small, oddly shaped room made of left-over space. It has one small window, which looks onto the courtyard. "Courtyard" is a bit grand; it's the little enclosed space between the buildings, full of air conditioners, things to block parking spaces with, a yellow cargo bicycle, and inches of dust that began to be laid down when Vlad the Impaler was a toddler who wasn't very nice to his pets. At night, plaintive violin music floats in on a cloud of cigarette smoke and car exhaust.
The old centre of Bucharest is a maze of pubs, but when you get a block outside it there are so many strange and interesting things that it's hard to get where you'd planned. Around the corner from the hotel, a stray dog snoozes on the steps of the National Bank of Romania. Down the street, a dusty statue of the Capitoline Wolf stands in a neglected courtyard; behind it is a completely derelict 6-storey building bearing a 5-storey Red Bull ad. Beyond that, an overgrown parkette with a bronze statue of Mihail Eminescu, who Wikipedia says is Romania's national poet. A block up the other way, a statue of Kemal Ataturk in front of a theatre showing Un Tramvai Numit Dorinta (A Streetcar Named Desire).
The old centre is the scrap of Old Bucharest that survived the effort to rebuild it in the name of "systematization", the development philosophy Ceausescu swiped from Kim Il-sung. Systematization didn't so much set urban planning back by decades as teleport it into a dreadful new universe.
Ceausescu -- one of a very small number of people to tour North Korea and go away thinking Wow! What a great idea! -- wanted planned cities full of apartment blocks, and so knocked down a fair bit of Bucharest to erect a forest of slumping, waterstained high-rises. The showpiece was Bulevardul Unirii ("Union Boulevard"; formerly prematurely named the "Boulevard of the Victory of Socialism"), a wide street running west from the parliament building. The apartment blocks here are much nicer than those elsewhere, in that there's some ornamentation, they've been washed since the revolution, and they're not crumbling away like huge gray graham crackers. In the middle of this road is a system of elaborate fountains that would probably be spectacular if turned on. As it is, they're bone dry and surrounded by yellow grass stray dogs like to nap in.
There are many strays. There used to be more, the guidebook says, but there's still no obvious shortage. At night, they scrounge; during the day, they hang out and snooze. They favour shady doorways, dry fountains, central banks, and small parks with busts of Mihail Eminescu. Some kind of trap-neuter-release program seems to be operating, but without a whole lot of determination -- I see one ear-tag, but only one. The dogs seem to get along well with locals and with locals' pets -- it's strange to see one of them them greeting a pampered pet dog in a pink harness -- but also apparently maul people to death from time to time.
They mostly look alike; and they don't just resemble each other, they're very like stray dogs in India or Istanbul. Shaggy and medium-sized, they don't look much like any particular breed; if there's anything to hybrid vigour, these dogs may be immortal (which is awkward for TNR programs). Wikipedia reckons that this could be the emergence of the "long-term pariah morphotype" -- the form of ancient breeds, to which dogs revert (or with which they converge) with a few generations of uncontrolled mating.
My travel guide suggests getting rabies shots for a trip to Bucharest, then notes that the last human case was in 1979. My feeling is that, if there haven't been any cases of a disease in 35 years in a city of 2 million, then you do not need to get shots for it. It's not a good disease to get, what with the 100% fatality rate; but the Hindenburg disaster was also pretty bad, and is not a reason to get zeppelin insurance. Anyway, you can prevent rabies by getting shots after being bitten, while -- as the proverb says -- you can't uncrash a blimp.
'Basarabia e Romania' graffiti and stickers are everywhere in the city centre. It's apparently part of a campaign to convince the Romanian government to pursue unification with Moldova (which was a part of Romania at one time, and where the same language is spoken, under the name "Moldovan"). I stood behind a couple of campaigners on the metro at one point: Men of about 20 who got off at Universitate. One carried a plastic toolbox, and the other talked a lot and jokingly tried to stick a yellow 'Basarabia e Romania' bumper sticker on things. He had a small Romanian flag tied around his wrist and was wearing a vest and hat, a traditional outfit I'd only otherwise seen on shepherds and men over 70.
I took a walk through the major parks. In Izvor park, across from the parliament building, small groups are lying in the shade of trees and teens wobble by on roller blades. Bucharest's teens seem to be learning to roller blade en masse; it's very odd. There are enclosures set up for dogs to run loose in, dogs running loose everywhere but in the enclosures, and a hoarding set up for taggers to paint, in an effort to deflect the national passion for graffiti away from historical landmarks.
Cismigiu is older and lusher, with sculpture gardens and a tiny lake. It suddenly gets very dark while I'm there. Paddle-boaters strike out grimly for the dock. A paddle-boat is one of the worst things to get caught in in a thunderstorm. I don't know whether it's dangerous or not, but pedaling furiously for shore in a vessel that can't go above 2kph is unpleasant for you and hilarious for everyone else. This almost never happens, but I'm actually prepared, having brought a raincoat along. Not because I checked the forecast, but because I've checked the forecast every day for a week and know it has no more than a chance relationship with what actually happens in Romania. It's not even very good at getting the present conditions right. There may confusion with a Bucharest, Idaho, or something.
If you penetrate to the very centre of Cismigiu, you end up in a little flagstoned glade full of blocks of ancient stone and tables with chessboard tops. Here, the old men of Bucharest play chess with maniacal focus. The rain gets heavier, and none of them move. They carry on no matter what, like a beer-fueled animatronic display.
The ones who don't play chess work as security guards. All the parks, and most tourist sites and metro stations, have them. They're employed by a huge variety of private-security companies, all called "xxx Security Solutions". Private security's a huge employer of Bucharest's shabby, furtive old men. Most of them would be hanging around park entrances eating pistachios anyway, so why not slap a hat on them and tell them to keep their eyes open?
Parcul Herastrau is an enormous place in the North end, with another lake and a weird collection of garden statues: Charles de Gaulle, then a long colonnade of peasant-woman caryatids, and then a turkey. Then an eagle eating Prometheus' liver. Then a circle of huge bronze heads of European diplomats. Then Hercules clubbing a centaur. Outside is a hugely busy traffic circle, and within that is the Arcul de Triumf, a massive triumphal arch that celebrates the victory of the Romanian driver over the Romanian pedestrian. Also Romania's participation in the Russo-Turkish war, apparently.
On Saturday, everyone in Bucharest got married and then went to tourist sites to be photographed. In the open-air village museum in Herastrau Park, brides threw back their heads and smiled with slightly parted lips on the stoops of 19th-century peasant houses, in front of chickens, and on the porches of old wooden village churches. Back in the old town, I got mixed up in a wedding party while going out for a pizza. Photographers were documenting their walk from one shooting location to another. I tried to imagine their delight at looking over the pictures later and finding me in them. Luckily, I was wearing the most formal thing I'd brought -- a wrinkled windbreaker -- and so should pass unnoticed until the pictures are shown years later and one spouse asks the other, honey, who was that unshaven man in the elegant black windbreaker? What? He wasn't on your side?
Glad I came to Bucharest. Tomorrow, I fly home.
 |
| Ceausescu gave his last speech from this balcony. It was received... poorly. |
