<\/p>\n
You know what GS needs?\u00a0 GS needs totally unedited notes from my
\nlittle travel book.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Because I’ve been drunk and busy
\nfor weeks and I’m leaving to tour Ireland without programming content
\nfor the page.\u00a0 Oh, and, because my little travel books fill this
\nbox and I never do anything with them.\u00a0 So, for today, and on the
\n13th, a little thing from Romania written in 2004.<\/p>\n
I spent my trip to Eastern Europe drunk, so I did edit this
\nsomewhat.\u00a0 I took out the “Gosh!\u00a0 I’ve been drunk since 8am!”
\nnotes written in the margins.<\/p>\n
Brasov
\nJune, 2004<\/p>\n
All of the travel guides and clever resource sites, besides
\nsnarling at Romania’s
\npoor infrastructure, said Dracula’s tomb was easy to get to.\u00a0 Hire a car, go to Snagov, get a boat and go
\nto the island where Dracula is buried.
\nEasy.<\/p>\n
Of course, it’s not at all that easy.\u00a0 Like Bram Stoker, I think it’s pretty clear
\nthat the authors of the travel books holed up in some luxury hotel and
\nfervently typed everything out while living off of room service and laudanum.\u00a0 Speaking for myself, you couldn’t pay me to
\ndrive in Romania.\u00a0 Then, in Snagov, there are no boats to
\nrent.\u00a0 The lake is all private or
\ngovernment property – the latter protected by trigger-happy citizen soldiers
\nwho race up to your car with machine guns ready, screaming maniacally.\u00a0 That wasn’t just my unique experience — once
\non the island, the last remaining monk guarding the crumbling tomb of Dracula
\ntold us that he might see one or two people every six months.\u00a0 Though, when I visited in June of 2004, he
\nsaid it had been nearly a year since he’d seen anyone, with the exception of
\ngypsies conducting midnight raids on his food supplies.<\/p>\n
I went with my two English friends, Bob and Antony,
\nand a Romanian-born Californian, Sherban, who I’d met in a bar in Brasov where I was having
\na good time buying Pilsner Urquell for 25 cents a bottle.\u00a0 The four of us formed an impromptu Romanian
\nTour Group, which is the only way to get around the country.\u00a0 Our guide, who had accosted us violently at
\nthe train station, was “hotel” owner Gabriel.
\nHis hotel was actually a seemingly random series of flats scattered throughout
\nthe city, all of them in dodgy apartment buildings.\u00a0 He stuffed travelers in wherever he had
\nspace, charging five Euros a head.<\/p>\n
Gabriel was a great guy, if not a little bit insane.\u00a0 We soon
\ndiscovered that his eccentricities
\nwere far outweighed by his usefulness.\u00a0 A
\nformer cab driver who had taught himself English, Gabriel was the rock
\nupon
\nwhich our Romanian trip rested.\u00a0 He was
\ntranslator, driver and negotiator.\u00a0 He
\ntold us which bars and restaurants to go to, what kind of cabbies to
\ntrust, the
\nsafest routes back and forth through the city, and the places to
\navoid.\u00a0 Even then, in the tourist hotspot at Brasov’s city center,
\nAntony nearly fell through a six foot hole in
\nthe sidewalk to the rushing, open sewer below. That sort of defines the
\nRomanian experience.<\/p>\n
The ridiculous exchange rate was impossible to get used to.\u00a0 You could drink yourself to death for a Euro
\nor two and grab a good meal at an out of the way pub for the change at the
\nbottom of your backpack.\u00a0 The penny,
\nunlike in the US,
\nhad true power.\u00a0 A bottle of local
\nmystery beer for eight pennies? No problem.
\nThough I did have to explain American change to the family running the
\nsupermarket, all of whom clustered around me during the lesson.\u00a0 One, five, ten, twenty-five…<\/p>\n
Here we were in Europe, in
\na country that once held against the Ottoman hordes, and they had been stripped
\ndown to nothing by communism.\u00a0 Their
\ncurrency was shit, the rural areas were stone-age farmland which faded abruptly
\ninto crumbling cities, the cores of which were full of half-finished apartment
\nblocs, the hideous communist style that, even when dressed up, destroyed every
\ncity’s skyline. \u00a0They were ubiquitous
\nthroughout Eastern Europe.\u00a0 In places like Brasov, they were the epitome of social
\nhorror and decay.\u00a0 Ceausescu’s hands were
\nall over Romania.\u00a0 He’d been ousted and executed 15 years before
\nI arrived, yet nothing had really changed.
\nFrom the unfinished apartment towers – complete with rusting construction
\nequipment, all frozen in time – to the cruel urbanization of the rural
\npopulation.\u00a0 Masses of country folk had
\nbeen forced into the cities and, now, were unemployed and reckless.\u00a0 Packs of wild dogs, allowed to run free in
\nthe 80’s, had now multiplied beyound control.
\nThey ran the city streets, the countryside, even Dracula’s island was
\noverrun.<\/p>\n
Yet, despite such ruin, Brasov
\n– and Romania
\n– is in the midst of a comeback.\u00a0 A government,
\nthough twisted and corrupted, seemed to have some clear ideas on what to do in
\nthe new, capitalist world – tourism.\u00a0 At
\nall costs.\u00a0 Though the urban decay remains,
\nand the population lives in poverty, the tourist spots are being rebuilt from
\nthe bottom up.\u00a0 Ancient castles and town
\nwalls, left to seed under Ceausescu’s government, now rise from the ashes.\u00a0 Though where the west has grown used to the
\nVictorian-era rebuilding of monuments and medieval buildings, witnessing it now
\nleaves a somewhat empty feeling.
\nEverything is built from scratch, based on historical descriptions, on
\ntop of the shattered ruins.\u00a0 Visiting a
\ncastle in Romania’s
\nremote countryside is more like touring a construction site.\u00a0 Our vacation soon became less focused on
\nvisiting the castle and more to see how it was being put it back together.\u00a0 Warm days with penny beer, watching the crews
\nrip down the original walls of ancient sites and put up new ones, bulldozers
\nworking side by side with horse-drawn carts.
\nThere’s nowhere you can go where construction isn’t scarring the tourist
\nsites yet, in the city, nothing is happening with the old unfinished towers or
\nhomes or storefronts.\u00a0 Holes in the
\nsidewalks, open sewers, and the roads are a nightmare of potholes that call to
\nmind craters from a bombed out war zone.
\nThe bullet holes in the Brasov’s
\nhistoric church are patched but, for the surrounding residences, they remain as
\ndark reminders of what has been.<\/p>\n
There are no real long distance buses you can trust, a
\nrental car is a joke, and the trains are outdated and slow, clacking along the
\ntracks hypnotically. \u00a0You get to your
\nstop and that’s where you stay, unless you have a guide. Gabriel was our
\nsavior, his lunatic driving ferrying us around the countryside to visit more
\ncastles and sites than our tourist minds could absorb.<\/p>\n
Romania
\ndrifted into a sick dreamland.\u00a0 With the
\nnightmare decay all around, unexpectedly counterbalanced by the eager
\nkindness
\nof strangers, it’s a country in flux.
\nGrimy inner city buses, powered by overhead wires, race along unmarked
\nroads where, as far as I could tell, no rules existed except “Don’t hit
\nthe
\nother guy.”\u00a0 To cross the road, it’s a
\nmatter of waiting for a gap in the traffic and then running across in a
\npanic.\u00a0 A bit of a tall order when drunk.\u00a0 Though, in some
\nparts of Brasov, the roads are painted and top of the
\nline crossing lights have been installed.
\nThe modern day catching up, as the infrastructure throughout Eastern
\nEurope is slowly rebuilt a strange mix of new and
\nold.\u00a0 Starting with today’s modern
\ntechnology, crossings, roads and intersections can be more organized
\nand flashy
\nthan the streets of DC.<\/p>\n
There’s no doubt that Romania will have a different face
\nin five years.\u00a0 When the roads are
\npainted, the ancient trams are gone, the crumbling construction sites from the
\n80’s are demolished and the tourist sites are glittering castles once again, Romania
\nwill begin to breathe.\u00a0 Perhaps for the
\nfirst time in its long, troubled history.
\nNow, tourists arrive because it’s the fringe of comfortable European
\ntravel.\u00a0 Like the Canadians who took
\nrooms next to ours, they cluster together on the balcony and mutter about the
\nbuses and the traffic.\u00a0 They move in
\nEnglish-speaking clumps to the tiny cathedral, the city wall, and then hurry
\nback to their rooms before dark.<\/p>\n
Brasov,
\nusing the Lonely Planet method, can entertain you for an afternoon.\u00a0 Gabriel stretched that out for two days and,
\nleaving on the third day, I felt nothing but remorse that I didn’t take Gabriel
\nup on his laundry list of extended adventures in the city and surrounding
\nareas.\u00a0 His itinerary could keep the
\ntraveler moving for a week.<\/p>\n
On our first night, he drove us to the worst part of
\ntown.\u00a0 There, the packs of dogs gave way
\nto an infestation of black bears, running through the garbage heaps outside the
\napartment towers and the playgrounds.
\nFor five Euros each, we followed Gabriel through what was, by day,
\nequivalent to gangland LA and, by night, ruled by bears that lurked in the
\nshadows and charged unsuspecting pedestrians.
\nGabriel moved like a hunter, which was amusing until the first charge
\ncame:\u00a0 A beer snuffling and snorting,
\nloping across the street, at which point Gabriel grabbed us all and hurried
\nback to the car.\u00a0 After that, we were
\nserious and obedient when we embarked on the next foray into the trash heaps.<\/p>\n
The bears were becoming a problem in Brasov, but it was against the law to hunt
\nthem. In order to stop illegal culling, the government put in a warden to
\npatrol the woods and trash heaps at night.
\nThe warden’s position had a high turnover rate – citizen vigilantes shot
\nand killed one every four or five months.
\nIn 2003, the death rates for wardens exceeded that of the bears.<\/p>\n
On our last day, we paid Gabriel to run us to Snagov,
\noutside Bucharest
\nwhere we had an evening train to catch.
\nSnagov is a sprawling sub-suburban town surrounding a fetid lake.\u00a0 The water-snakes and mosquitoes, stinking mud
\nand dirt roads, toothless gypsies and open sewage dumps of Snagov was Romania’s
\nversion of a holiday resort.\u00a0 In the
\ncenter of the lake was an island, guarded by an ancient monastery.\u00a0 Built by Vlad Tepes, the church, monastery
\nand “blessed” well marked his last resting place, maintained by his family up
\nuntil the early 1900’s. After the revolution, the government cut all funding to
\nthe site.\u00a0 Since 1991, the monks have
\nbeen dying out, leaving, today, only one guardian.\u00a0 When he dies, the island, monastery and tomb
\nwill be left to rot.\u00a0 Already, the island
\nis frequently raided by gypsies, who steal supplies and deface the tiny
\nchapel.\u00a0 In response, the government gave
\nthe monk a serious arsenal and a license to kill.<\/p>\n
Though, when we arrived, we had the Lonely Planet image of a
\nhappy, go-lucky monastery full of welcoming monks running a daily ferry back
\nand forth.\u00a0 Even Gabriel, who read the
\nLonely Planet entry, shrugged and said it sounded like a good detour on the way
\nto Bucharest.
\nHe’d never even heard of the spot. A machine gun toting holy man who existed
\nabove the law and was authorized by the Romanian government to kill us, on a
\nwhim, was a surprise for all of us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[352],"tags":[361,353,161],"class_list":["post-2511","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gsarchive","tag-brasov","tag-gs-archive-2004-2008","tag-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2511","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2511"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2511\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2734,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2511\/revisions\/2734"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}