The Bacchae in Bucharest

Goodbye to Bucharest

2008-06-12T23:43:00.000-07:00

We have departed. Our Bucharestian adventure has come to a close with big doses of the good and the, well, evil...

The good: with Kerry gone to Serifos, I went to Neptun on the Black Sea with A. and S. They combed the beaches and stormed the pool and we all had a grand time (see the photos above for evidence of that). I was surrounded by wonderful poets and writers from all across Europe, including Orhan Pamuk, who was given a prize by the festival; meanwhile, the kids were basking in the glow of their beloved Andreea, who kept them busy from dawn till dusk most of the days.

The evil: indeed, the final confrontation with Lady Tenescu, our insane landlady, turned out to be a nightmare. She arrived at our negotiations determined not to give us back a cent of our one thousand euro security deposit, arriving with a laundry list of invented reasons we owed her money. I'll spare you the gory details (all absurd, exploitative, and embarrassing for her), except for one: she wanted us to give her 200 euros for the plastic shower curtain we replaced (remember the one covered in mold from an earlier blog?) . Yes, ladies and gentlemen, that's nearly 300 U.S. dollars for a shower curtain made in Eastern Europe! In the end, thanks to the negotiating powers of the Fulbright Commission (e.g. Mihai Moroiu), we got back about a third of our deposit--morally insulting, yes, but that should keep us in tiropita for the next few days at least. And we paid only 75 euros for the shower curtain. With that money, the slum-lord of Lahovari can buy herself twenty rubber shower curtains....ahem...

The night before we left Bucharest, Sophia asked me to take her to the balcony. When we got there I understood why. At the top of her lungs, Piata Lahovari buzzing and lit-up before her, she shouted at the top of her little lungs: "Goodbye, Bucharest, I'll miss you. Pa!."

Perhaps we'll toss off a missive or two from Greece. Stay tuned (and thanks for tuning in these past months).

Christopher (in Athens)

Bucharest Beatitude, 2

2008-05-31T07:35:00.000-07:00

Blessed is the nostalgia of those who are leaving. The Greek nostos (the homecoming journey...the journey back...the journey home) combines with algos (pain, grief) to give us nostalgia, the pain of going back, or the pain of going home, which is broadly speaking the pain associated with memory, which there's no doubt one can feel before the memory even becomes memory, before the departure itself, since we can predict what will be painful to miss when it--and we--are no longer there.

Yes, we are officially counting down our last days in Bucharest, taking all the same old lovely walking routes (to market to playground to beer-garden to home) one last time just to wallow in what will soon become our urban nostalgia. And of course we're systematically saying goodbye to the parks: the rowboat lagoons of Cismigiu today, the trampolines of Herestrau tomorrow, and every day from now until departure we'll be kicking back at Icoanei.

Surely S. will have memories of her school, her bus riding and ballet and language classes, since she's old enough for such details to form the kind of narrative required by memory. But I wonder what A. will remember about his two seasons in Romania. Surely we expect that something (and it probably will be a thing...a single image that he'll come back to again and again later in life, not even knowing where to locate it) will become imprinted on his young memory banks: perhaps the smiling face of Andreea, his pal and guardian most mornings. Or maybe the winding pathway through Icoanei Park, which leads into the business of laughter and playground equipment. Or maybe the sound of his sister arriving home (at last) from school.

As for me, here I am with a week to go noticing exquisite houses I've not seen before, even though I've passed them almost every day: a cascade of ivy here, a gorgeous bit of iron-work there. And I’m thinking ahead to the people I will miss—not the ass in the BMW who accelerated in the direction of A’s stroller and the rest of us on the crosswalk yesterday—but the generous and brilliant souls who’ve been kind to my cranky expat self these past months. And I'm thinking ahead to missing the sense of living in a massive city, where the constant is NOISE and mayhem, which means it felt like a miracle today when we turned off Stribei Voda on to an alley leading down toward Cismigiu and noticed how quiet it was for a fully sustained moment, right there in the heart of teeming Bucharest. And I know I'll think fondly of the approach to Icoanei, whose little tree-lined horizon breaks up the landscape of rooftops when approached from any direction....Icoanei, which we've seen in every weather, which has been our daily oasis, our locus amoenus, our blessed refuge.

Sophia gets Photographic

2008-05-27T09:00:00.001-07:00

The roving Kindergarten photographer, S., now has her own photo-blog. Check it out at:

http://sophiabakkenpics.blogspot.com/

Vote A.B.

2008-05-26T21:32:00.000-07:00

My brother is thinking of running for public office. Here he is testing out one particularly popular local marketing strategy.

Bucharest Diatribe, 1: The Customer is Always Wrong

2008-05-26T04:52:00.000-07:00

Bucharest Diatribe, 1: The Customer is Always Wrong....or So Many Good Restaurants, so much Terrible, Terrible Service...or, In the Middle of my Journey Through Life I found myself in a Crappy Restaurant

CURSED ARE THE WAITERS AND WAITRESSES OF BUCHAREST!

Dear Reader,

Before you decide at the outset that what follow are little more than the ornery ramblings of a spoiled, bourgeoisie American, hooked on middle-class materialist concerns and spoiled beyond belief, let me sketch my qualifications for critiquing (as consumer and expert both) the state of restaurant culture in Romania (for it is a "culture," and will only change if customers revolt against it):

I worked a decade in both terrible and excellent restaurants in Houston, New York, and Madison, Wisconsin, employed in almost every capacity: dishwasher, bus boy, prep cook, grill man, bartender, waiter, head waiter, even assistant manager (admittedly, I was the only employee who was more or less sober during the day, qualifying me for a short-lived managerial position at a night club in Houston). Since then, I’ve become a competent cook, not to mention the owner of a wood-burning pizza oven (pertinent to what follows). In short, I know how to make good food, I know how to run a restaurant, and I know something about how to treat the human beings who come to a restaurant hoping to eat.

The general rule in the U.S. follows this cliché: “the customer is always right.” What does this mean? Complaints about food that has not been cooked correctly (or even if it has, not to the customer’s liking) are handled graciously.... since one comes to a restaurant EXPECTING to pay for what one wants. And because restaurants want, well, more business than less business, they follow that cliché to an almost irrational degree.

The general rule in Romania follows this standard pattern: “the customer is always wrong.” Case in point: we are at a beer garden on the gorgeous piazza of Brasov, having already spent a lot of money on several rounds of drinks and snacks. I order one more Gosser and when the waiter opens it at the table, we all smell that something is amiss—the beer smells like a week-old camel fart and tastes even less appealing than that. This happens with beer, right? The waiter ignores our disgusted reactions, forcing me to rise from the table to take the beer over to him:

Christopher: “I’m sorry, but this beer is clearly spoiled. Can you replace it?”
Waiter: “How is this my problem? I didn’t make the beer…”
Christopher: “But this is your restaurant and you served me bad beer. Please, taste it.”
Waiter [to my surprise, he does, with a slight grimace]: “Well, this is Austrian beer, and that’s how it is supposed to taste.”
Christopher: “But it tastes NOTHING like any of the other Gossers we’ve been served.”
Waiter: “Sorry, you ordered this beer.”
Christopher: “So do you want to be right or am I right? Charge me for an extra beer if you really think you are right.”
Waiter: [bewildered silence]

In the end, he did bring me a new beer and didn’t charge me for it. What did that take? An argument, complete with passionate gesticulations and angry faces from both parties.

Case in point: two weeks ago, I’m served room-temperature sarmale at La Mama, a usually reliable Romanian “diner” here in Bucharest. Really, the sarmale and accompanying polenta are cold to the touch (!), having been feebly micro waved a few seconds. When I tell the waitress, she looks at me coldly, takes my plate into her hands and says, “but, sir, the plate feels warm underneath.” Perhaps this is true, since microwaves heat ceramic plates before they heat the food slopped upon them. The implication? You are wrong, dear customer, since there’s no way you could be right.

Which bring us to today: the scenario, or, a typical day in our restaurant lives in Bucharest:

I have graded essays all morning in a Bucharest café, drinking very good espresso (which, alas, I had to go to the bar to order, since the waitress ignored me for at least 45 minutes until I did), enjoying the sunshine at my outdoor table. I meet Kerry at 12:30 so we can have a bite of lunch together before picking up Sophia from school a bit later on. Since we’ve got almost two hours, I suggest we try out a little Mexican stand that’s looked mildly appealing to our expat eyes these past months, even if it is a bit of a walk...

First Stop: the Mexican stand looks remarkably like a little outdoor taqueria in the U.S., with a steam table proffering various kinds of braised flesh and bean accoutrements, not to mention rice. There's an actual Mexican man in a sequined white mariachi suit, with matching sombrero, who sits outside this place every day, lending the place a paradoxical mixture of kitsch and authenticity. When we step up to order and find the menu baffling (it lists more Romanian food than Mexican food), I turn to him and make small talk in my entirely passable Spanish, then explain to him that we’d like an order of chicken tacos and a cheese quesadilla. “No problemo,” he assures us, but the employees behind the counter can do nothing but shove refrigerated, pre-made tacos in our direction (am I supposed to microwave these here on the street? eat them cold?) and they refuse to concoct a quesadilla, since it is not listed on the menu. The mariachi-man, though he is the owner, fails to convince his employees to do otherwise, so we give up and stroll on…

Second Stop: a little “Pizzeria Napoli” which has a good-looking wood oven and nice looking pizzas. They have no seating here…you just step up to the counter and order. Some guests eat their pizza right there. I order two little pizzas, worried a little about the time, until she assures me they’ll be ready in “ten minutes.” We wait, and wait. The woman who took our order smiles at me occasionally through the window, acknowledging the fact that we are waiting. Twenty minutes later, when I step from the street up to the counter, I see fifteen pizzas being assembled on the counter. Our two pizzas are only now about to be put in the oven. Rather than expedite orders as they came in, three people have haphazardly assembled fifteen raw pizzas in twenty minutes without putting a single one in the oven. “Only ten more minutes, sir,” she pleads, when she sees that I’ve noticed their incompetence. “I’m sorry,” I tell her, “but we had to leave five minutes ago to pick up my daughter from school.” “Shame on you, sir!,” she hollers at me when I leave without paying.

Third Stop: now very hungry, Kerry goes off to fetch Sophia and I take the now sleeping Alexander to a nearby pizzeria on Dorobantiler where we’ve had one decent pizza a few weeks earlier. I order two simple pizzas and even watch them being assembled (rather well, it appears) and even fed into the oven. My hopes have been raised! By the time Kerry and Sophia arrive, our pizzas are delivered to the table. They are completely charred: the little bit of proscuitto on each piece is utterly blackened and the mushrooms are curled into little charcoals. But we decide to try it anyway. To our surprise, the dough on the bottom hasn’t even been cooked, so we have been served burned ingredients on top of raw pizza dough. Since I own a pizza oven I know this is a sign the oven was turned on just to cook our pizzas, which means the floor was improperly primed and the top heat was too intense. This is the most basic rule of managing a pizza oven. And yet the place has five other tables, so it’s not as if they opened just for us.

We each finish our pieces, thinking how much we’ve been through to get lunch, thinking we might as well just tough it out. But it becomes impossible to go any further and I am provoked to take the pizzas back (needless to say, there is no sign of our waitress, no attempt to see if what we were served was to our liking).

Me: “These pizzas are unacceptable, burned on top, raw on the bottom,” I show her and her two managers. They nod, apparently in agreement.

“Do you want a new pizza?” she asks.
“Of course,” I say, “we are hungry.”

“Ok, sir,” she replies, “but we will need to charge you for the pieces of this pizza you already ate.”

“You want to charge me for undercooked, disgusting pizza?,” I retort.

“You did eat it,” she says smugly.

“Well, wouldn’t you try food served to you in a restaurant before sending it back? This is the restaurant’s problem, not mine. Please don’t punish me for that.”

“Actually, sir, it’s nobody’s fault,” she replies with complete seriousness, “We don’t get much business this time of day, so the oven isn’t as hot as it should be.”

Which means: the customer must share all faults with the kitchen. Bad food is a shared responsibility, not something that can be blamed on the oaf who can’t cook a pizza or the waitress who serves an undercooked pie or the restaurant who hires such uncivilized morons.

We storm out, refusing to pay for anything but the Stella Artois and the orange juice, complaining our way down the street toward home.

All this activity prompted Sophia to ask one of her usually profound, basic questions: "Daddy, this is a pizza parlor, why don't they know how to make pizza?" Granted, she has been spoiled by our kitchen...

Waiters and waitresses in Romania are almost categorically unfriendly, surly, idiotic, inefficient, and often down-right asinine. They worry about meticulously pouring out every beverage you order for you (as if this is the essence of French style), but have no concept of timing (so everyone’s entrée arrives simultaneously, for example) or graciousness. One becomes hesitant to ask for anything, since every request is met with a scowl. Touring Romania with my family was embarrassing (until we reminded ourselves that we were not responsible for the incompetence of the Romanian restaurants to which we delivered them) and frustrating since, as my brother puts it, "if only they knew we were the best tippers in the world!"

Waiters are paid a set wage in Romania and in general Romanians don't tip; considering the service, that's no wonder. This creates a vicious cycle of apathy and dread on the part of waiters and reciprocal dread on the part of patrons.

There are exceptions to all this badness. There’s our man, Dan, the elegant and sublime maitre d. at French Bakery, who has his place marked out among the sacred pantheon of waiters. And there was the pretty blonde waitress who smiled at us and served us efficiently at Bistro del Arte in Brasov two weeks ago. There are a few others here and there. No doubt we're not the ONLY people handing out substantial tips to these professionals.

Beyond the two of them, there’s an unsmiling horde of nasties who deserve some special torture in one of Dante’s Infernal circles. What was it he did to those who treat guests with disrespect?

Crankily, hungrily yours,

C

Bucharest Beatitude, 1

2008-05-25T23:10:00.000-07:00

Blessed are the walks to Cambridge School, up Dorobantiler Avenue, where our dear little S. must be delivered each weekday morning. These are the occasions for the most remarkable encounters, sparking in S. the most remarkable bits of verbal flourish and humane curiosity. After all, she is fresh into her day, which means only several hundred sentences into her day (she wakes up talking and does not cease until she sleeps at night), her intellectual engine firing already at a pace that’s hard to match.

…from the mundane:

Why is the sidewalk so hard?

Why is that woman wearing red shoes?
Why are there so many holes in the ground?
Why do people like to write all over the sides of buildings?

to the profound:

Why is that man begging?

Where does that dog sleep at night?

Can dead people really live on clouds?
Why are there pictures of God on that house?

Certainly our walks to school through the leafy provinces of Pennsylvania are lovely too, not to mention utterly safe. But the urban landscape, even so early in the morning, has myriad distractions and details to stir a million questions in any self-respecting inquisitive girl. Blessed, then, is the mayhem and crud and tree-lined chaos of the Bucharestian street, beautiful in its offerings of human and animal business.

S. grips my hand tightly while we cross the perilous intersection at Dacia, then lets go entirely to run ahead (only a few steps, since she knows people DRIVE on the sidewalks here, which even she finds outrageous), her grey skirt and bedraggled white dress-shirt flapping in time to the flopping of her pony tails, her black “dragon” Chuck Taylor high-tops (she eschews the dress shoes that the other kids wear) scuffing along the sidewalks, all the while improvising questions and little goofy songs, until I swear she almost levitates.

Driver Magic

2008-05-21T05:25:00.001-07:00

Around their grandmother, Karen, a.k.a. "Yia Yia," our kids are the frequent recipients of "magic" (anything from little toys, to items of clothing, to the occasional bit of candy). After three days of driving jam-packed rental cars around the unreasonable highways of Transylvania, it was decided that my brother Aaron and I deserved some "driver magic" to compensate for our road-weariness and to speed our safe return from Sighisora to Bucharest yesterday. The magic we received from Heidi and her fiance Kyle? Fancy Szeckler-style hats that every farmer and shepherd from Miclosoara to Biertan props upon their sweaty craniums. These are part Fedora, part straw cap, part elfen sombrero. Which means we ended up taking to the highway looking like a weird blend of the Blues Brothers and Romanian peasants. That didn't stop the other drivers on the road from attempting to pass us on hairpin turns and nearly run us off the road now and then. But we escorted the whole gang safely back into Bucharest, our fancy Romanian helmets intact.

Farmhouse Fit for a Prince

2008-05-19T07:50:00.000-07:00

As it turns out, just last week Prince Charles himself was mucking around the estate of Count K. in the Hungarian/Romanian village of Miclosoara, where we hung our hats last night. Ever since we arrived in Romania, the Bacchae have been looking hard for the kind of agritourism gigs that are easy to find in places like Italy and France (and more recently Greece): sustainable, more or less working "farms" where guests can experience traditional culture as it was (or as it still is) by living and eating with a host family. This kind of tourism, oddly enough, doesn't require huge amounts of money or fancy accoutrements to pull off--in fact, all that's needed is for a "local" to take a leap of faith and believe that wandering strangers might want a glimpse into their lives, as they live it, rather than the imitation, kitsch, over-priced comforts that pass for tourism almost everywhere. I'm willing to give up scalding hot water and satellite television for a stroll through a Transylvanian meadow any day. And so at last, that's what we found (even if the English royalty had discovered it before us): a very beautiful side of Romania that had seemed impossible to access. We were greeted with tiny cordials of palinca (plum brandy) infused with caraway, which made it rather exotic and soft upon the tongue (it is usually very much like fire-water), then shown our rooms, some of us in a guest house (once a stable, now decorated tastefully and comfortably) and some in the farmhouse proper. After the kids rolled up their pantlegs and ran around barefoot chasing the chickens for an hour or so (freed from the confines of the car at last!), we strolled down through town, across a few meandering streams, up to the top of one of the preternaturally green hillsides that streak past our speeding rental car all day. From there we posed for some "Sound of Music" family shots and admired the fecund corrugations of our Saxon Land environs. Parched from our little exercise, we retired for beverages upon rough hewn benches and tables back at the farm...even tossed down a few hands of sheepshead (the Bakken/Seibel family card game, which Kerry has now picked up) along with some smoked local cheese and slightly sparkling white wine. Dinner was served downstairs in the Count's gorgeous wine-cellar. The culinary offerings were not exactly overwhelming, but the atmosphere (with "Medieval" music piped in, candlelight, and a sweet musty dampness emanating from the old casks) made it delightful nonetheless. We stepped from that lovely dungeon only to find a full moon hovering over the orchard, wrapped in a skein of ominous clouds, leaving us all thankful that tidy bundles of garlic had been nailed over the entryways to our sleeping quarters...thankful too that Count Kalnoky was watching over us rather than the other famous Transylvanian Count...

Transylvania, the Spring Version

2008-05-17T23:40:00.000-07:00

During our drive through the Prahova Valley north from Bucharest to Brasov this past March, everything seemed one of two colors: grey or more grey. Mud was everywhere. The famous Carpathian mists hung about the valleys and hillsides mournfully. The inhabitants seemed categorically depressed, as if they all knew winter would never end. By contrast, what produndity in the lanscape of Transylvania in the spring! At least eight colors of green comprise the lushness of every hillside. Up around the ski resort town Predeal, the Carpathians begin making their own weather and we were treated to a perfectly spooky bit of fog and rain, just as we made our approach to Peles Castle, which caught the occasional blast of sunshine. Finished only about a century ago on behalf of the Saxon kings of Romania, the castle was tastefully opulent and gorgeously tucked into one of the slopes behind the village of Sinai. Even our kids were impressed (what's not to like about rooms full or armor and Medieval weapons?), mouths agape the whole time while we took in the rooms full of Murano glass, Klimt friezes, and Moorish finery. We decompressed yesterday afternoon with big Austrian beers in the sun-flooded central square of Brasov (my love affair with this fair city continues), girthing up for another round of castle touring tomorrow at Bran. Then into the hinterlands of Transylvania for a night in a traditional village house. We'll let you know how that turns out, provided we survive the horse-cart ride through the mountains! Enjoying this dose of shameless tourism? Yes, indeed!

C & All

Porcine Interlude

2008-05-17T23:37:00.001-07:00

For your salivary pleasure, Ladies and Gentlemen, a panorama of pork!

Cheeseheads, Movie Stars, and Diamonds

2008-05-16T07:55:00.000-07:00

The Wisconsin invasion of Bucharest has begun. My family arrived from the U.S. a few days ago and that's given us the opportunity to go from lonely expats to expert tour guides here in our adopted city. The first night started off with a bang: we made reservations for my sister's 30th birthday and Mother's Day at French Bakery, a groovy little neighborhood spot. Josh Hartnett and Ryan Gosling and their Hollywood entourage had a huge table there, but that didn't much interest us (though it is a little surreal to be surrounded by American actors in the middle of Eastern Europe) since before we'd even hit the first appetizers, Heidi's boyfriend Kyle had dropped to his knees and proposed to Heidi. Yes, she said "yes," giving us plenty to celebrate in the coming months. Horray!

After roaming about here in the city for some time, we'll head off for a weekend in Transylvania, which you'll read about soon enough if you tune in here again.

The Stray Dogs of Bucharest

2008-05-08T09:25:00.000-07:00

While previous posts might suggest that what we miss most about home is the bourgeois comfort and largesse of our American kitchen (those gleaming racks of immaculate All Clad pans and the hundred gadgets that clog our hundred cabinets), the truth is, what we miss most about home is the quiet, but utterly faithful presence of our remaining dog, Daphne, and our affectionate calico cat, Delilah. Granted, we get weekly updates on the state of their appetites and bowels, their state of animal happiness in the American springtime, which makes leaving them behind more acceptable. But the feeling that we’ve left two family members behind (since that is, in the end, how we think of our beasts) is irrepressible at times.

With regards to Delilah, we have every faith that she is just fine without our presence: except for around feeding time (when we are indeed the center of her universe), we typically feel a little superfluous around our haughty, independent little cat. But Daphne, like most canines, makes it her life’s business to melt into the emotional lives of her human companions, utterly dependent and needy, trapped within the domesticated halls of our big house, sprawling about on the Turkish rugs.

Knowing this, imagine how utterly defeated, selfish, and also very inspired we feel while studying the thousands of stray dogs populating our neighborhood. We are frequently astonished at their ingenuity and endurance, their ability to adapt to a world we find nearly impossible to navigate ourselves. To our surprise, it’s rare to see a dog here that looks under-fed. They drink from the public fountains. They hang out next to the beer gardens and meatball stands for tidbits to drop beneath tables. They cross the streets on crosswalks at the correctly appointed time, when the human herd crosses (I have yet to see one come close to being hit by a car...though I've seen enough looking hobbled to know that it probably happens a lot). If there’s a patch of green grass on a boulevard, it’s not unusual to see a few dogs romping there, oblivious to the hum of urban activity around them. And they sleep everywhere, just underfoot most of the time, tucked in next to the ATM machine in the sun, or under the bench of a bus-stop, or in the expensive landscaping of Belle Époque mansions. They set up camp within the blossoming precints of the botanical gardens and the city parks. They are resilient and hilarious, and often heart-breaking. Only one in twenty wears the yellow “tag” in its ear, indicating that it's been properly vaccinated and sterilized, that it has official permission to survive.

Undoubtedly, behind the scenes and the cover of dark, along back alleys and in vacant lots, their lives are violent and awful. Yesterday we approached what we thought was a gorgeous black and brown mutt sleeping in the sun. “Oh look,” one of us said, “that dog is dreaming of chasing rabbits.” When we got closer, however, we saw that the dog’s eyes were wide open, that he was having a seizure right there on the sidewalk. What could be done for such a dog? Hope is about all we could offer. And, to our great relief, about three hours later we saw the same dog frisking about behind an apartment complex in the neighborhood, bright-eyed, tail high in the air, exploring a garden with his spotted nose.

It's said that the population of strays in Bucharest is a hangover from the Communist period here. When Ceascescu "nationalized" housing (kicking families out of their homes and apartments only to relocate other families, and often several at a time, into those homes....so there were twelve people now living where there had been four), the canine "comrades" were not part of the plan... so family pets were simply set loose upon the streets to fend for themselves. Several generations later, these diasporic dogs are still looking for homes; lucky for them, the new capitalist era comes with certain benefits. Now the locals have enough food and money of their own to afford a bag of dog food now and then for the "neighborhood dogs" (it's not uncommon to see bowls of clean water and kibble set out by some samaritan in the local parks). They are ignored, but not entirely unnoticed.

Case in point: just as I am writing this, sitting here in a blast of sunshine in a sidewalk café on Dorobantiler Blvd., a bedraggled blonde retriever pup—no more than six months old, her fur slightly dread-locked with tar, her yellow coat streaked with street dirt, has plopped down right in the middle of the sidewalk. Pedestrians must walk around her to make progress down the street. She is staring intently across the boulevard and two lanes of clogged traffic at, yes, another dog. I see her sniff the air to try to catch a whiff: friend or canine foe? Then, two old ladies step down from the curb to cross the street with their canes, parting traffic in their wake. The puppy jumps up clumsily to join them at their heels, using their slow pace to make a safe crossing, looking warily from side-to-side at the multi-colored bumpers and massive tires that loom about her, off to some adventure in the secret world of the Bucharestian dog.

C

(P.S. Double-click on any of the photos to see these impressive curs up close)

Adventures in Our Post-Communist Kitchen

2008-05-04T05:41:00.000-07:00

in our little kitchen, we have exactly:

-1 usable "Dutch Oven" braising pot, of inferior quality
-1 unusable "Dutch Oven": the cheap faux-ceramic finish became, well, unfinished after the first attempt to put good color on some chicken about to be braised—hence, this pot is a “way station” for cooling soups, leftovers, and draining spinach. We are terrified of eating the paint chips, lead chips, enamel chips, metal chips that flake off with each cleaning...of coming back to the USA with liver and brain cell damage. Of not making it back into the USA at all, because our bodies won’t pass the security check points but instead, will vibrate, setting off the magnetized sensors.
-1 pasta pot.
-1 small non-stick frying pan (brought from the local "Quality Market" at home, and the only piece of equipment that is fully functional).
-1 little blue vessel used to boil water for coffee and tea, steam peas and broccoli, and melt butter and chocolate for the half-baked (literally) attempts at brownie baking.
-1 small sieve (overflow pasta inevitably tumbles out into the sink)
-4 plates, 4 sets of silverware, washed 20 times a day. Alexander likes to run around the house playing a game he’s invented: EEE! Knight! The spoons are his swords which he then hides under his mattress, in the spooky back cupboard, or behind the meant-to-be-diaphanous-but-are actually-gray-and-filthy curtains.
-A stack of plastic cups we inherited from a former Fulbrighter (some of which, coincidentally, have University of Wisconisin logos).
-A very dull butcher knife.
-A bendable serrated bread knife.
-A 12 inch x 5 inch cutting board that is already splitting in half.
-A cheese grater that does not work except to accidentally grate knuckles and thumbs.
-We’ve gone through 2 vegetable peelers—both broke on first use. So—the dull butcher knife it is.

What we don’t have?
-Measuring spoons or a cup. (All recipes are approximations which explains why my brownies won’t rise or rise too high.)
-A temperature gauge for the oven. Two settings: on "FULL BLAST" or "NOT REALLY". (Which explains why my brownies are either charred or goopey).
-Water hot enough to wash the dishes and pots and pans clean.
-Counterspace. There is a two foot workspace on which all prep work must be done. The other possibility? A precariously balanced counter-ish wedge (deceptive as it is made from the same “laminate board” as the counter) that sits on top of the radiator.

What to do? Invest in stupidly over-priced "real" furnishings, or rough it? Eat in restaurants for every meal...or attempt to be our Bakken kitchen-centered selves? The answers are pretty self-evident.

Yesterday was a particularly frustrating, perfectly ordinary day for cooking in the Bakken kitchen. I used the usable pot to attempt to make Lemon Shortbread bars. Try zesting a lemon with the dull edge of a knife. And baking shortbread cookies in a pot rather than a sheet pan or even a baking dish. Of course, without any real measuring implements, it was mostly guess work (far too much lemon topping—so the shortbread was more curd than cookie). But this also meant that as soon as possible, when the bars were just cool enough, I had to chop them out of the pot (yes, they candy-fied) so we could then transfer the Vegetable soup to that pot to reheat. Forgetting, of course, that we were also going to make Baked Ziti (with the remnants of a very passable Bolognese Sauce scraped together by trips to 4 separate supermarkets and the local Halal butcher). Which meant transferring the soup from that pot to the unusable pot. Forgetting that we had to heat up the soup for the kids—which I dumped into the pasta pot. Forgetting that we had to boil water for the pasta for the ziti. So transferring it back to the usable pot for another turnaround (feed kiddos quick!) then putting the soup back into the unusable pot. Post-ziti noodle boil, transferring the soup back to the soup pot so we could heat it up for ourselves for a first course.

Today; the leftover Baked Ziti is in the fridge in the usable pot. But I am going to make Hershey’s Cocoa Perfectly Chocolate Cake (or attempt to) which means….and then, post-cake bake, needing to use the usable pot to sauté spinach which means trying to lift the cake out of the usable pot and transfer it to…what? A puzzle once again. It's a wonder we haven't give up completely and just moved into McDonalds down the street.

Thank god, of course, we haven't. Christopher does manage to produce between eight and twenty respectable cappucinos a day (old espresso boiler, plus whisk, plus elbow grease) in that space. Alexander is robust and healthy as ever. And Sophia BEGGED for MORE SPINACH today, the kind of sign something good is happening in the kitchen in spite of all the arcane pot gymnastics.

Kerry

Some Things Along Strada C. Rosetti

2008-05-04T00:03:00.000-07:00

Some Things Along Strada C. Rosetti

Far too quiet last night out on the street.
Dreams of police. Today we hog four chairs
in a café off Revolution Square,
where solitude and expensive coffee
agitate our collective memory.

The man in the blue bathrobe, he is ours,
blabbering, twisted like an ampersand
on his perch between bank and bar: one hand
on his cane, the other held out for beer.
He hasn’t had a shave in nineteen years.

We claim the palaces and museums,
the royal portraits on the Atheneum,
but blame the stray dogs and immigrant scum
on the old regime, whose blank bravado
still hardens all the faces in the Metro.

This week the diplomats and presidents
will affirm Europe’s doctrine in the East;
the yellow stars of the Union will increase
another star or two, new flags to cover
the old murals, the sickles and hammers.

Still, some things along Strada C. Rosetti
blur more than they clarify: budding trees
compete with wide Ottoman balconies
for the right to make shade. Light, meanwhile,
stagnates in a satellite dish. All style

is sacrificed to communication,
all music to the traffic’s cloying hiss.
The beautiful civil servant knows this,
since she works with facts, and yet her high heels
and headphones imply there’s something she feels

we all feel—we want to hear ourselves think,
we want to rise above the uniform
sidewalk blocks. The old cobblestones were torn
up years ago, along with the mansions
and monasteries. The old city was done

being old, we were informed. Not that we asked.
Those who were shot have had twenty years
to make peace with the silence they silenced here,
the dictator’s noise muffled with a noose,
his concrete horizon left to remind us

what it takes to scare the mind out of a man.
We want to see ourselves too. The police
block every street today, but they are our police.
Neither gypsy dogs nor glue-sniffing teens
can take that from us. We know it means

something now to sit and read a book,
to read something true. Yes, we want to be
seen, but don’t want to be watched—this, the relief
of a generation who couldn’t say, but knew
the National Library belonged to them too.

There are five real newspapers to read now
and a sign across the street can advertise
LEGAL TRANSLATIONS, but it’s still not wise
to have speech handled by professionals.
Better now to just shut up, pay the bill,

join the amateur rabble on the street,
or claim our place along the balustrade.
Just outside, the uniformed riot squad
is shoring up its bulletproof phalanx.
The anarchists will refuse to break ranks,

will affirm their faith in all disorder.
Yes, we’ve had disorder here. On this square
in fact, here on display, the souvenir
of a body politic that has a soul:
our library, still pocked with bullet holes.

Bucharest, 2008

[A poem written on the eve of the NATO Summit here last month.]

Christopher Bakken

Oswiecim/ Auschwitz

2008-04-30T07:58:00.000-07:00

On Monday, we left the kids with Klara, a confident, blithe, blonde actress/babysitter, and sped off into Poland’s lush countryside in our tiny rental car headed for Auschwitz. Spring had arrived in Krakow, so all the fields were green, all the trees in bloom, and all the red and yellow tulips were arranged in careful color bursts along fence lines and flowerbeds.

The irony was not lost on us—the contrast between our existence and what we were seeing and doing in our time here (wandering the Krakow cafes in search of our third and fourth cappuccinos of the day, chasing our kids who were chasing the pigeons on the piazzas, collapsing for late afternoon naps on the giant European king-size bed, complaining about the lukewarm water, reveling in the spectacular Polish and Italian food served up in fancy restaurants) and what all those hundreds of thousands of people imprisoned or ‘exterminated’ in Auschwitz did not, could not ever see or ever do. More disconcerting? The skies were brilliant blue, the sun shining. A day when nothing awful could happen. A day that felt oddly innocent. That contrast kept us primarily silent on our drive to the death camp.

Then: outside Auschwitz’s gate, “Snack Stands” with people buying hotdogs, enormous bags of Cheetos, Snickers bars, then walking through the gates, junk food in hand. An internet café. And an espresso bar and picnic tables. It all felt grotesque. But of course, this is the Way We Live Now.

We expected Auschwitz to be larger—an endless monolith. Instead, it was a tidy, orderly place—25 barracks, one after another, row after row. How could all those people who died here have lived here? Of course, the prisoners who came through here didn’t last long—4 months was the average life expectancy at Auschwitz in the early stages of Hitler’s Final Solution. And they slept 2 to 5 in a bed. Later, of course, there was no life expectancy at all.

Walking through the camp was exhausting, brutalizing, as it should be: the relentlessness of the violence that occurred there—and the life that was exterminated there—and knowing we were walking the same grounds, standing inside the same buildings, inside the gas chamber even, as the prisoners who died or survived the camps. But also where the Nazi soldiers and commandants once stood and opened up the cans of Cyclone B or pulled the triggers at the execution wall. The exhibits in the prisoners’ “barracks” were wretched. An entire room filled with shoes: woven sandals, wooden clogs, serviceable heels, tired slippers, wing tips. Another room filled with suitcases carefully labeled with names and addresses by the long-dead hands. Another filled with coils of women’s hair removed after they were gassed or shot—and used to make Nazi textiles. Another filled with prosthetic legs and hands and back braces. Thousands of spectacles. Thousands of cooking pots. Thousands of combs and hairbrushes. One porcelain doll, her face broken, her wedge of cheek lying beside her.

And after each exhibit: walking back into that blessed sunshine and into the jaunty trills of blackbirds and swallows. Realizing that Auschwitz, too, lived under that sun, with those birds, even then. Shouldn’t the earth have gone dark during those years? Shouldn’t the birds have flown away?

By the end of our 3 hours, we were flattened, and yet, felt absolutely certain that it was indeed important….essential that we had come—that we had walked through that place. And thankful we had not dared to bring our children here. Sophia would have been wrecked by it—as we were.

On the drive home, we stopped for lunch. Tired, heads aching, hearts aching, wiped out by the morning, we were somehow empty and thus ravenous and so we stopped at this tiny “bar”—one of the lovely kitchens that serve cheap, “Grandma” food. We had pickled herring on pickled onions, a mustardy coleslaw, beef goulash soup, and cheese and meat pierogies. We were hungry and hated our hunger after that morning, which called even the most basic human necessities into question.

When we returned back to our apartment, the kids were delirious. Klara had them running laps in the park outside, digging up worms, eating Happy Meals, playing with their plastic junk-toys that came with Happy Meals. Sophia and Alexander’s joy, their profound happiness, was wonderfully ordinary and prosaic. When they ran up to us babbling about their day, hugging our knees, showing off the new cache of “dragon nuts” they’d collected? What an innocent, necessary refuge from that morning’s horrors. What a privilege.

Kerry

Sophia Talks Ontology with The Poet

2008-04-29T23:08:00.000-07:00

We have just returned from glorious Krakow, a city of poets. The place is unreasonably beautiful, the population unceasingly literary (the face of Czeslaw Milosz is visible upon posters hanging in the front windows of bookshops; the local playshop is performing something written by or related to Zbiegniew Herbert).

That said, The Poet for us is Adam Zagajewski, who along with his exquisite wife Maya, made the city accessible to our crazy band of Bakken gypsies (infamous across the Balkans, and now along the Baltic, for our ruthless sacking of cities): finding us a spacious apartment and introducing us to the mushrooms of Poland (who knew the Italian porcini, for which I have enormous expectations, have now been unseated by their wild Polish cousins Boletus edulis, the "borowik"?).

We had told Sophia and Alexander that the legend of Krakow's founding involved dragons, or the slaying of dragons, and that they might reasonably expect to find dragon eggs...or even "real" dragons in Poland. Indeed, after about ten minutes of investigation in the city park across from our apartment they returned with grubby handfuls of "dragon nuts" (walnuts that were probably scattered for the benefit of the local squirrels), which they presented to The Poet with great pride.

From the park, we began a leisurely stroll through the old city toward Castle Wawel, where Adam and Maya told us we would see an actual fire-breathing dragon. With her pockets stuffed with dragon nuts, her excitement growing at every step, the mind of Sophia began whirling with expectations and questions:

Sophia: "Do dragons really eat people?"

Dad: "I don't really know, but I suppose they might if you steal their dragon nuts."

Sophia: "Will the Krakow dragon eat us."

Dad: "I hope not."

Then a pregnant pause.

Sophia: "Are dragons real, Daddy."

Dad: "I don't know, Sophia, what do you think?"

This answer did not satisfy her, so she put it to The Poet:

Sophia: "Are dragons real, Adam?

Adam: [without missing a beat]: "Well, Sophia, that depends on how you define the nature of reality."

Not much for philosophical ambiguity, Sophia replied with a vaguely satisfied "hmmm," then remained speechless for at least two minutes (which is, we all know, almost unheard of....).

Christopher

Cranky Day

2008-04-22T13:52:00.000-07:00

So Momma Bakken’s day began splendidly. The skies were blue. It was 80 degrees outside. We had our much-needed and beloved babysitter, Andreea, here to watch both Bakken bambini as it is the custom, in Romania, to give kids 2 weeks off from school for Orthodox Easter. Christopher, alas, headed to the National Library to grade a sackful of papers written mostly by students who are wonderful and appear frequently in his class, but also by students who almost never appear, yet are registered and wind up getting grades—he is encouraged to pass such students even though, say, they are studying abroad in Sweden for the semester.

So. Momma can’t complain. I head out, stopping off at a new pastry window I’ve been eyeing the past few weeks. Pastries I’ve never seen nor tried before. Breakfast? A Strudel cu Cascaval. Strudel with the Sour-ish cheese. I thought it would be spectacular. But then I felt like Jig in Hemingway’s short story, “Hills Like White Elephants”—it tasted just plain ordinary and not worth my wait. What does Jig say? “Everything tastes like licorice. Especially all the things you’ve waited so long for. Like absinthe.” Or something along those lines. Or there’s the other line: “”That’s all we do, isn’t it? Look at things and try new drinks?” That’s what I felt like post-Strudel cu Cascaval. Blah. Tired of pastries. Nothing sublime there—just toasted dough folded around mealy cheese. (Granted this is on the heels of yet another pastry disappointment yesterday—mass-produced Strudel cu Spinaci). Alas. Maybe I’ll just go back to my morning dose of Muesli—or what we fondly refer to as Horsefeed cu Raisins.

Despite the downturn in my-life-as-pastry-taster, I continued on my walk up to Herastrau Park. My goal? To walk to around lake. I set off, removed my Ipod and listened to the birds and the weed whackers and the tennis ball thwackers. And walked. What looked like an easy 30 minute circumnavigation quickly became an hour and a half as the lake kept pocketing out. And I kept walking (at one point, over a train trestle). How many kilometers? All I knew was that I had to get back home as Christopher and Andreea had an “appointment” with our Landlady T. (some fence-mending with Andreea’s interpretive help)—so I needed to remove Bakken Bambini from the apartment towards donuts or sundaes.

The result: things were smoothed out with Lady T. (though she is still irked by our shower curtain removal), and we hiked over with her to the Internet Billing office (to make sure we will cancel our contract and she won’t be billed), then had some mediocre pizza at an outdoor ristorante. How did this day end? Ah. We have felt surely we might, at the end of our Bucharest stay, receive some small portion of our apartment deposit back from Lady T.--minus the ancient toilet repairs, the shower curtain, and Alexander’s washable (but not entirely washable, apparently) magic-markering of his bedroom wall. A few of our hundred Euros might be ours again?

As Christopher blew off some steam drinking an ouzo and playing some much-need online poker (though not for real money), and Momma pre-cleaned the kids’ room in anticipation of our batty cleaning lady’s arrival tomorrow, we heard: CRASH! Alexander knocked the TV over. Cracked, dented, but miraculously it still works. Honestly. Christopher is, as we speak, watching Liverpool vs. Chelsea Champions League Soccer. Clear picture. I knew there was a reason I was going to Medjugorje in October. To thank the Blessed Lady who will perhaps intervene with our more cantankerous Lady T.

Krrrrry

Another gorgeous day at Herestrau Park

2008-04-20T11:48:00.000-07:00

80 degrees and sunny in Bucharest today. Alexander entertained a large crowd of pedestrians while doing his ecstatic, hilarious Zorbatic dance to the lively beats of a Transylvanian bouzouki-band.

Such sublimity inspires, what else(?), gratuitous snapshots of our sublime bambini.

C & K

Confronting Power (and losing), or, Archaic Toilets and Plastic Bags

2008-04-18T05:35:00.000-07:00

We’ll call this the week of disconcerting run-ins with the Romanian powers that be. Generally, we Bakkens like to keep a low profile—though this is often difficult as Sophia skips down the street singing “Yankee Doodle” and Alexander tears up the playground with great American bravado. But a few days ago, our Soviet-era toilet pretty much fell apart. The “guts” rusted out and so the odd pulley flusher system went kerplonk. Christopher admirably scoured all the local plumping stores for replacement parts, thinking to save our equally ancient landlady the hassle of repairs. But each dour store clerk shrugged and laughed at us. “No, no,” they each said. “No more.” By this we think they meant: Are you crazy? This rusted out contraption is 30 years old!

So we finally called Lady Tenescu over for a plumbing inspection. Now, she is sweet, but—and we have this on the authority of our wonderful Romanian babysitter Andreea-- Lady Tenescu is at least a little bit “crazy.” (So, too, our cleaning lady, who insists on showing me each room as she cleans, pointing to the dirty rags and gleaming floors. I’ve assumed she’s been asking me, “Good job? Does it look good?” To which I’ve been answering, “Bravo! Multemesc!” But Andreea corrected me: “Oh no,” she said. “She’s saying, ‘Look at how good a job I’ve done for you! It was so dirty and I am the best cleaner there is in all of Bucharest!’”)

But back to Lady Tenescu. When she realized that the toilet wasn’t a simple repair, she called in her plumber who laughed, too, at her and apparently told her the same story: the toilet is outdated, the parts impossible to find. It would require a complete overhaul. He spent the good part of 3 hours camped in our bathroom chipping away at some strange calcified stalactites that were inside the tank—then trudged off to the plumbing store for an entirely new system. What we got: a weird push button system that only works half the time, and now, as the tank refills with water, it sounds as if an industrial sprayer is inside the tank itself. 10 minutes of this racket. But, okay. The toilet flushes again.

When Lady Tenescu came for the rest of the rent money, she insisted that we would have to pay the 100 Euro plumbing repair job since it was under our supervision that it stopped working (“you must have pulled too hard on the flusher,” she insisted, through our babysitter’s expert translations). Apparently this is the custom. Renters pay for everything that stops working—even when it is a 30 year old toilet. Christopher balked. She chattered angrily at him then disappeared into the bathroom. She called him in, fingering the new shower curtain we’d purchased from Ikea to replace the disgusting, mold covered, dirt encrusted curtain that was left-over from the previous occupant. What could Lady Tenescu want? The old curtain back up? Alas, that was long ago tossed in the garbage. So—we don’t know what to expect when we try to get our security deposit back—100 Euros taken for the plumbing? Another 50 for the curtain? Andreea explained, “These old people cling to their things. Even the plastic bags are precious.”

Which brings me to plastic bags. Today, I walked Alexander over to Rainbow Supermarket—for the 56 and 57th bottle of milk for the week, for my own twentieth 2 Liter bottle of Diet Coke (somehow I’m addicted to it here), for Sophia’s “cow pudding,” and for sundry other heavy items. Since it’s a longish walk and I have to hang the plastic bags from the stroller handles, I usually double-bag, and usually without a problem. But today, as I was double-bagging the Diet Coke, a stern woman, backed up by a uniformed security guard, said, “Doamna! No!” They both the proceeded to de-double-bag my groceries to my great, public humiliation. So, it will be many days before I step foot in Rainbow—and now must return to the cramped aisles of the the ever-open, ever-shabby, “NonStop Nic” across the street.

Oh, and now the light in the bathroom refuses to work. As you can imagine, we look forward to the arrival of an electrician with great dread. No wonder it was here in Romania that Eugene Ionescu, great innovator in the Theatre of the Absurd, was born. No wonder he fled to Paris, where everyone knows they have excellent baguettes...and, um, beautiful toilets.

Kerry

Sunday in the Park and at, um, Hard Rock Café?

2008-04-15T09:25:00.000-07:00

Sunday has strangely and melancholically become the-day-we-give-in-to-being-homesick. Perhaps it is the lack of our Meadville rituals that we can’t transport here: Huevos a la Mexicana, multiple cappuccinos frothed out from our ridiculously expensive but perfect espresso machine, the CBS Sunday Morning Show, lazing about the attic with the kids while they run around pell-mell in their avalanche of toys. And of course, there is the phone which rings—family and friends calling to catch up, to send love and gossip, or to recount the multi-course dinner held at our house from the night before.

Here in our Sex Shop apartment, the kids wake up ridiculously early each Sunday because of all the traffic noise—car alarms, horns, sirens, weird screaming matches between the glue-sniffing vagabonds on the street below. We stare at our kitchen—no tortillas, only stale bread, and more importantly, no home canned salsa. We manage to supply the kids with pancakes from scratch, then try to entertain them with crayons and the menagerie of very small action figures they hauled overseas. But soon feeling apartment-claustrophobic, we stumble out into the mean streets of Bucharest for an excursion to the park. (“Shall we?” Christopher and I say to each other. This is said with a note of resigned desperation, as we often feel thoroughly fatigued by the multiple, daily trips a day we make to Bucharest’s playgrounds in an attempt to help our kids burn off their endless, insane energy.)

This past Sunday, we hopped the subway and got off at Herestrau Park—an enormous, weirdly formal, but certainly beautiful park filled with elegant beds of tulips, a long line of peasant caryatids (plucked from the farms of Transylvania in Romanian peasant dress instead of the chiton-wearing babes of the Acropolis) serving as a gateway into the park, and a weird sculpture garden consisting entirely of five-foot “Heads” (truly, heads only….of famous and/or obscure Balkan politicians) arranged in a circle. Famous heads, granted, but it seemed more like a scene out of some acid-trip John the Baptist dreamscape. The heads stare dispassionately, impassively at each other—despite looking as if they’ve just been decapitated and are now being served up on a cobblestone platter.

So we strolled and stopped off at playgrounds with suspect (hazardous and rusty) equipment, and Sophia jumped on a trampoline while Alexander pitched a tantrum because he was too young to bounce on a trampoline. And then we watched as the hilarious and charming stray dogs of Herestrau drank from the opulent fountains, unperturbed by the rollerblading kids and unstable rollerblading adults. And then suddenly everyone was STARVING—so we searched the park and came across countless Mici Stands selling platters of little grilled meatballs/sausages, white rolls, and a slather of mustard all for about 3 bucks. But I am tired, so tired, of the meatballs. So we trudged on—kids whining, Momma whining, Daddy whining. And as we exited the other end of the park, what did we find?

Sadly and gloriously? Hard Rock Café. We'd never thought to step foot in one, ever. But the place took Visa. We pigged out. They had a kid’s menu. Nachos and hotdogs and pulled pork sandwiches and hamburgers and fries. It tasted so perfectly, blandly, necessarily filling and tasty and, yes, American. And even better? A highchair (the first I’ve seen) to keep Alexander tame for an hour. Better than that? A beautiful Disneyfied princess who painted the kids faces (Sophia became a glittery Princess Kitty, Alexander became a hilarious, full-on Spiderman) and a clown who made balloon animals to order.....basically free babysitting while Christopher and I swooned over the platters of food and guzzled our Carlsberg (which is, truly, cheaper than water here!).

Kerry

Return to Brasov

2008-04-15T08:25:00.000-07:00

Having been invited to give a reading and a lecture at the University of Transylvania, I got another chance to attempt to find Brasov, which I missed completely the last time around.

Technically, we visited Brasov back in early March, even spent the night in one its better hotels, but we never really found Brasov. We got some bad directions, walked the wrong way (away from the center, not towards it), took a taxi into the “center” after much frustration, then stumbled into the first authentic-looking restaurant we could find to appease our starving kids. Previous blog entries detail those mis-adventures. The next day we pulled out for Sighisoara, wondering what all the hype was about…

Suffice it to say, this time around I actually located the real center of Brasov and spent a good amount of time wandering in it. Brasov, as it turns out, is the Siena of Romania: adjacent to the gigantic “Black Church,” haunting and beautiful, is a giant “campo”-like space humming with pigeon and human life. On every side of this huge square are Saxonesque buildings of every shape, each painted a different bright color. From there, numerous narrow alleys radiate outward, each one offering a bevy of attractive cafes, archways, and secret little restaurants.

Above all this, as if rising out of the buildings themselves, is Mount Tampa, a wall of impenetrable foliage whose rounded heights are always disappearing into the Carpathian mist. It is one of the most pristine and charming city centers I’ve ever seen, and certainly the loveliest in Romania (though I’m told that Timisoara will give Brasov a run for its picturesque money).

All my joy at rambling about in this evocative and delightful place was heightened that much more by the brilliant students and professors who attended my reading and lecture, peppering me with perfectly delicious questions, exhibiting a largeness of spirit and curiosity that it was impossible not to love.

Ah, Brasov, city of long sighs and excellent coffee…. it’s good to have found where you were hiding all along, even in a steady drizzle!

I write these rhapsodic notes aboard the train back to Bucharest. For twenty minutes, we have been steadily rising into the curves of a spooky mountain pass. The rivers are gushing after two days of rain and…surprise, surprise…out of the low-hanging clouds huge, swollen snow-flakes are suddenly falling.

Photos above of the alpine approach to Brasov, and of the city itself...

Wish you were here,

Christopher

Ode to Cismigiu

2008-04-12T08:12:00.000-07:00

When I first arrived in Bucharest, the gigantic Cismigiu park was a source of anxiety: it was there, in that grey, nasty, polluted, mud-hole that the glue-sniffers and pan-handlers haunted the shadows. The place has become progressively more hospitable, as we've noticed during occasional visits these past two months. Then, suddenly, today the place became nothing short of miraculous: flowers have exploded everywhere; green spaces have taken over where before everything was the color of muck; children run in circles around old people; the old people sit in groups talking about young people; strange dogs wander about looking important; and even the giant concrete pools (which I didn't believe would ever be full of water) are suddenly lakes...upon which couples in rowboats paddle beneath haughty willow trees... upon which swans glide about doing their swany things. To enter Cismigiu, in short, is to leave Bucharest behind and enter a vegetative dream.

SEX SHOP, or, It Was Bound To Happen

2008-04-10T09:49:00.000-07:00

Though we live on Piata Lahovari, on Strada George Enescu, the easiest way to guide taxi drivers and friends to our apartment is to simply say, "Next to Sex Shop." There are a variety of Sex Shops across Bucharest: "Amsterdam Sex Shop," the redundant "Sexy Sex Shop," and our very own Plain Jane, "Sex Shop" which is usually guarded (fronted) by a friendly, rather upstanding chap who often tossles our kids' hair. (Though there is his counterpart who often sets up drinking camp beside Sex Shop's doors--a grizzled, irritable, glue-sniffing, and dwarfish guy, likely a junkie. Generally harmless, but he often tries to scam a beer or some Lei out of us.)

Thus far we've managed to keep Sophia's interests firmly on the ever-changing billboard outside our apartment's gates (one week an add for Nivea, the next week, a strange suspended orange and red faux-bubbles-ball ad for Orange Fanta). And we also kept her convinced that the way to recognize home was to look for the giant green "Plus" sign of the pharmacy located on the other side of our building.

Alas, Sophia, now the adept and sophisticated reader, sounded out the Red Neon "Sex Shop" the other day and identifies home as "Sex Shop." Granted, she has been imitating her father as he hails and instructs taxis. "Ta-xi!" she barks, hand raised in the air. And when we tumble into the cab, she says with equal authority, "Sex Shop!" When we were in Maramures last weekend, she asked (in her cranky moments), "can't we just go home to SEX SHOP?"

But today, as we we passed Sex Shop's door, usually firmly closed, she discovered it had been left ajar. Sex Shop has thus far remained a mysterious structure--its window's blacked out in red paint and covered over in black grates, the door always, always closed. But now, ajar. And over my shrill demands that she "Step Away From the Door!" (or because of them) she peeked and then stepped inside.

"It's a toy store, Momma!" she exclaimed in wondrous delight. On the wall? All the expected magazines and adult toys unwrapped and on display.

"No, honey," I said. "That's a toy store for grown-ups."

"No, Mommy," Sophia corrected. "See? There's a toy car on the wall."

I couldn't imagine what she was mis-seeing or perhaps really seeing--some sort of miniaturized, motorized four-wheeled gadget?

Thankfully, Sex Shop's guardian, who was laughing, gently shooed her away and pointed to the sign on the door: "No one under 18.: (in Romanian but still understandable). That seemed to help me tug Sophia along and through the gate of our apartment. But then, smart kid that she is, she turned to me and said, "But Momma, I can't wait eighteen years in Romania to go back inside! Can't we go in now?"

The Pastry Windows of Bucharest, or, Where I Spend a Whole Lot of Lei

2008-04-09T03:55:00.001-07:00

As we’ve walked around the mad streets of Bucharest, dodging cars parked on the sidewalks, the piles of poop and their attendant shaggy, dreadlocked dogs, and driven through and through and through the more remote, muddy, rural countryside of central and northern Romanian, we have made sure to stop off at the scores of pastry stands and pastry windows (literally! windows that slide open and dispense pastries by the warm bagful) along the way.

First and always and everywhere is the chain Fornetti; in Bucharest, there’s a Fornetti window (sometimes two) on every block and people lined for the mass-produced Merdenele, Streudel, or slabs of pizza topped with ketchup. Christopher swears by their chicken liver stuffed pastry—something about the earthy saltiness and bizarre composition (a pastry stuffed with mashed innards?) speaks to him. I, however, view Fornetti as the Dominos of Sweets. Every last streudel or merdenele is uniform and greasy, baked off site, and reheated in a stainless steel oven. Of course, back in the States if a Fornetti opened up at Chestnut and Arch in Meadville, I’d be smacking my lips over a Merdenele cu Branza every day. But here? When you can find little pastry stands that bake their goods in wood burning ovens?

My favorite: Patisserie Dacia. This stand, like all true specialists, only sells 4 items: pretzels with poppy seeds and salt; strange, sugared, foot-shaped donuts; Merdenele (pastries filled with a feta-like cheese); and the blessed Streudel cu Mere (see our previous blog on the subject). No matter the time of day, there is always a line snaked down the block, people clutching their lei and salivating. I can’t walk by this stand without eating one, or two, of the just-fired-in-the-oven, half a foot long streudels—cinnamon apple goo drips from the ends of fire-charred rolled up pastry, confectioner’s sugar dusts my mouth and hands and sweater. Small-scale out-and-out gluttony (streudel inhaled right there on the sidewalk) now seems like a necessary Rite of Spring in Bucharest. The pretzels cost .6 lei (20 cents) and the streudel? 2 lei (75cents).

Yesterday, I branched out and tried a new pastry window and something called Tragon: a triangular shaped, still-warm, flaky pastry filled with drippy sweet cheese and raisins and dunked in confectioner’s sugar. I tried to parcel out my bites—nibble here, nibble there, which nibble to save for last? Yes, of yes, one with the cheese. Or one with the raisins. Or maybe just the pastry. Of course, I still had to adjust my walk away from Patisserie Dacia as I felt pulled by the yodel of the streudel….

Every now and then, Christopher and I stop at the local hotdog-wrapped-in-pastry stand that also sells a divine cross between sour cherry pie/tart/coffee cake. The bottom of this tart (Prajiture cu visine) is a dense sweet cheese custard which is topped by sour cherries and preserves. We usually fight for the last crumb of this—and don’t have to decency or patience to carry it home and eat it properly with our café lattes. Instead, once again, we piggishly inhale it on the sidewalk corner, oblivious to the car exhaust, the dog poop, and the hundreds of harried pedestrians.

The most charming window of all is up by Sophia’s school. The same cheerful woman greets us through the open window, her head topped by a hairnet and white cap, her body tied up, hygienically, in an spanking white apron. “Hello!” she says, smiling. She is the exact vision of an Eastern European Pastry Mama you might expect—sturdy forearms, perfectly applied red lipstick, hair bunned and netted, the expectant helpful expression on her face. Yet she speaks elegant English, which makes her especially qualified to help us choose between the Sweet Cheese Merdenele and the Feta Merdenele and the Merdenele cu Cascaval (a vaguely sour white cheese). She sells, by the kilogram, finger-sized puff pastries filled with cheese, sausage, or mushrooms. Here, too, are S-shaped pastry-cookies smeared in raspberry jam which Alexander attacks with great, heathenish pleasure.

Sophia, on the other hand, is obsessed with all things Covrigi (pretzels). There are specific stands that only sell pretzels and one happens to be on the walk to her school. So most days she gets a pretzel to and fro. The covrigi (like hot pretzels in the States only smaller and baked longer) are dipped half-way in either: salt, sesame seeds, poppy seeds, or onion crisps. Sophia has made a recent discovery of a circular pretzel that is pretty close to a sesame bagel—only it is softer and about the size of a life preserver. Little S is also a fan of the mammoth Pig-in-a-Blanket, and eats it sans ketchup or mustard, on her walk back from school. (A strange custom: “lunch” at Sophia’s school is called “breakfast”—so she is only too happy with the breakfast-pretzel-breakfast-pretzel/hotdog-snack-dinner-dessert daily schedule.)

On our trip to Maramures we tried one of the many versions of Placinta—deep fried and folded over calzone-style and stuffed with jam, onion and potato, or cheese. We also had some of the best Papanasi:homemade donuts coated in cherry or apricot preserves and slathered with sour cream. Also served hot.

And though this doesn’t qualify as a pastry “window,” we’ve discovered a Lebanese sweet shop that sells splendid baklava and coconut squares and a yellow lemon sponge cake topped with pistachios. Oh yes—Christopher is also a fan of their lamb pies. But the pleasures of Bucharest’s Middle Eastern offerings are for another posting.

Kerry

Sophia's Global Gregariousness

2008-04-07T07:00:00.000-07:00

Little Alexander Oscar is still young enough to just kick back in his stroller looking adorable to earn baby-noises and googly glances, not to mention kisses and free candy from random pedestrians and grandmothers across Europe.

Sophia, on the other hand, must work her charismatic magic. And work her magic she does, receiving generous hand-outs from nearly every shop-owner she encounters after just a few coy phrases in English, a well-placed word or two of Romanian, and her sneaky little smile.

Pictured above are a few of her international friends, from the Amalfi Coast, to the Hungarian border towns of Romania, to the mean streets of Bucharest.

She reserves some extra special magic for the ever-charming Marius, the not very intimidating security guard at Sophia's school, who is a source of endless fascination and hilarity to her.

Eligible Daughter: Good Pans, Excellent Buckets, Nice Jugs!

2008-04-05T01:01:00.000-07:00

Among the more hilarious things we saw while driving around Maramures: trees, bushes and even hand-made tree-like racks festooned with bright pots and pans and buckets. Was this a peasant method for drying dishes? Who would use so many pots and pans for a single meal? Was this a kind of Easter tree?

The mystery was solved by our friend Lia, who explained that in the villages of Maramures families announce that they have a daughter they are hoping to marry off by decorating their trees with pots and pans: the nicer the pans and the fuller the tree, the bigger the dame's dowry (so a giant redwood covered all over with All-Clad would advertise the ultimate babe, I guess!). These are matrimonial, culinary billboards, in essence.

Along the same lines, the front room of many houses is dedicated entirely to the display of a girl's dowry, all of it (chests, carpets, doilies, implements, china, etc.) arranged strategically to attract the eyes of inquiring local hunks.

La,

Peasants: the beautiful and the awful

2008-04-05T00:13:00.000-07:00

Peasant culture? Well, yes, as Kerry describes below, the region of Maramures offered some fascinating glimpses of how life was lived in the northern Balkans for hundred of years: each house has its own well for water (with, yes, the old winch and pulley and bucket system), its own stable, its own congregation of busy yard beasts. And everyone seems to be making something out of wood: elaborately beautiful wooden gateways mark the entrance to most family dwellings. Some of these places look entirely gorgeous, demonstrative in their illustrations of agrarian pride--they are tidy, carefully groomed, myriad-flowered visions of simple living inhabited by cheerful, robust looking folks. Often, I felt like I'd stepped into the world of Brueghel. In contrast, I also saw some of the most profound, heart-breaking scenes: houses built out of scraps, built next to rivers of garbage and sewage and chemical run-off (even our two year old son remarked "oh, yuck" when we walked him down to the "river" bank), inhabited by people who look as utterly defeated as their surroundings. In short, there was no question of romaticizing this area. The quaint and the kitsch are juxtaposed everywhere with the pitiful and the awful. It's not as if I arrived in Romania with some idealized version of peasant life tucked inside my American consciousness. Having spent time on my grandfather's dairy farm in Wisconsin as a kid I know first hand that a farmer's life is as much hell as it is agrarian heaven. But I felt moments of actual shock driving through the Romanian countryside, which led me to certain questions: What was it like here under Ceauşescu? Was it exactly the same, minus the satellite dishes and conspicuous cars? Was there any bread? Was there any corn for the mamaliga? Was I really seeing the IMPROVED version of rural conditions, the result of two decades of capitalism? Such questions were all the more poignant when, always unexpectedly, against this backdrop of peasant poverty and/or prosperity would rise one of the brand new, often quite garish concrete and re-bar houses, opulent compared to the surrounding huts, as if bizarrely relocated from some version of the Romanian suburbs.

Go to Maramures, I say! You would have to be dead not to be moved by a place as enticing, fascinating, and off-putting as this.

Christopher

[P.S. Double click on any of the photographs to expand them to full screen]

2008-04-04T03:03:00.000-07:00

I am sitting in the Baia Mare library watching Sophia and Alexander wreak havoc on the play area—thankfully it is well stocked with blocks and farm animals and coloring books. Christopher is upstairs at “The American Corner” giving a poetry reading to 60 students and faculty from the nearby University. He is also being filmed by the local news—his second appearance on Romanian television in as many months.

We’ve spent a lot of hours in our rental car up here in North Country. Yesterday we drove to Sepanta to see the “Merry Cemetery,” a site featured on Anthony Bourdain’s “No Reservations” episode on Romania. Chef Bourdain did not have a favorable impression of Romania and in many ways it is possible to understand why: there is an odd mix of poor rural peasant culture crossed with very garish, neon cement houses. We were told by our lovely Baia Mare host Lia that these houses are built by the younger generation who go off to Western Europe, make some cash, then return—raze the wooden huts (and sell the wood for good money for floorboards) and then build these hot pink or lime green mini-mansions that have an attached apartment for shriveled crone grandma out back.

As Christopher commented, driving through these villages you get a sense of what medieval Europe must have looked and smelled like. Every wooden hut has chickens in the yard, stacks of firewood, a skinny bedraggled horse (for the ever-present carts that slag their way across the roads), and dogs, dogs, dogs of various shapes and sized either snarling at passing cars or curled up fast asleep in the mud. Of course, not all is medieval—every hut, no matter its condition—seems to have enormous satellite dishes. Dissonant for sure. Grandma Crone in her headscarf and flouncy above-the-knee skirt and Wellingtons, bent over with hoe and rake in her small front yard garden, then goes inside to watch the latest episode of “Dallas,” “Law & Order,” or “Ghost Whisperer.”

“The Merry Cemetery” was both exquisite and bizarre. A local folk painter created row upon row of tall wooden gravemarkers; on these markers, he painted pictures of the below-the-ground residents; the pictures show either: 1) how the resident died (i.e., “Mr. XYZ is about to be hit by a train; Mr. ABC is decapitated by a bayonet or 2) what the resident did for a living (i.e., Mrs. EFG is baking cake; Mr. LMN is giving a shot to a cow. Apparently, the grave markers have very funny inscriptions but we don’t read Romanian so had to content ourselves with the painting alone. We were concerned when we reached a back corner of the cemetery and found the graves to be flooded out and gurgling up greenish muck. So we hightailed it out of there for the souvenir shops across the road. A wooden cobra (not a local snake) for Sophia, a “Female Saints” bracelet for Momma; a wooden alphabet train and a box with a wiggly wooden bug for Alexander; Poppa was in search of these charming hats all the local men wear but in the end, we couldn’t find anything but flowered, tasseled straw caps so he passed.

We’ve been finding that eating out with the kids has become a more trying affair. In part, the Romanian restaurants serve the same standard fare: meatball-sausage fingers; mamaliga (the polenta mixture—though at a restaurant in these sad, gray mining town it was served with crisp bits of bacon fat and pan juice, which was delicious); potatoes fried, mashed, fried, or fried; and mushy pickles. We broke down twice yesterday: we found a “pub” in Sighet (a very depressing city filled with young swashbucklers dressed to the nines in their fancy “Football” track suits and matching sneakers (think: Red track suit? Glossy red sneakers; Silver striped track suit? Silver sneakers. The women are dressed similarly only many seemed to have the fake-and-bake tan going and frosted blonde hair). That said, Christopher enjoyed a perfectly sloppy hamburger, the kids had some awful white bread and pizza, and I had a bowl of tasty vegetable and bean soup. For dinner last night we broke down again and dined at a hotel-restaurant in Baia Mare—Tagliatelle with porcini mushrooms and speck; baked ziti. It was very, very pleasant. But of course, we spend most of our meals in wrestling matches with the kids who seem to transform directly into barbarians the moment we sit at a table. Alexander flings his spoon and fork around pretending to be an “EEE Knight!!” and Sophia happily obliges and plays dragon.

On our hotel room television we’ve caught snippets of reporting on the NATO Summit—watched the motorcades travel down our street, President Bush leave his hotel and arrive at the Palace of the People, and all the First Ladies be subjected to a pretty rudimentary folk-dance recital. The highlight of this recital: Romanian dancers and singers dressed in their flower-bedecked costumes, sitting at long tables, pretending to slug down tankards of beer and take pretend bites of sausages and mamaliga all the while still singing something about something (“Oh the mud is our friend, we wallow, we wallow! I marry my sister, we wallow, we wallow!). Mrs. Bush had a very forced, pleasant smile on her face—she even tried to clap in time. It was obvious, though, to both Christopher and I that she was in deep, deep pain. It turns out the first ladies also went to the National Art Museum, where they almost certainly heard Christopher recite Romanian art history over the audio-guides. Had he known the first ladies would be listening, he might have supplemented those facts with a certain amount of commentary on the state of current world affairs and American foreign policy, but...

So now we get ready for lunch at McDonald’s (we are giving into the kids, their need for some home comforts even if we have to pay 1 Lei for ketchup packets), then wander off on a woods excursion in search of the Magic Waterfall (where Sophia has already stated she will wish for a dragon), and then dinner, and then back on the overnight train to Bucharest, our gold-sandpaper-walled apartment, and Christopher’s home cooking.

Kerry

2008-04-03T08:44:00.000-07:00

We fled Bucharest and Bush and the NATO Summit and its attendant anti-terrorism/biological warfare units. A ten-hour overnight train ride with our very own romantic “couchette”—2 narrow beds, bunked, nary a space to sit down except on the bottom bunk. But we felt like a family of throwback travelers—after all, the Orient Express’s final destination used to be Bucharest. We delighted in the fact that our little, narrow couchette had a call button that pictured an attendant carrying a tray of drinks. We never bothered to buzz this illusionary help, mind you, which we assumed to be pure fantasy.

Instead, we packed our own hastily, haphazardly thrown together snacks—candy and chocolate, bread and cheese (the remainders of our pepperoncini-inflected scamorza from Italy), potato-cheese pastries, vino, etc., etc. It carried us all the way to Baia Mare, the gateway to “Wooden Maramures.”

The train pulled in at 5:30 am—we all staggered to our rental car and proceeded to drive outside Baia Mare to Motel Lostrita—a trout farm many miles beyond anything. What is Lostrita? A cross between a large, pastel-painted motel (bad carpeting, cheap envelopes of shampoo) and agritourism—definitely NOT Italian style. There is, sadly, a youngish mule buck kept in a pen on the edge of the grounds which Sophia and Alexander are, of course, obsessed with. His nubbin antlers are covered over in velvet. He is not afraid of our kids though he is afraid of the very husky peasant-chef woman who stomps back and forth between the trout pools and the restaurant kitchen. We were told, on Lostrita’s website, that we would have the “pleasure” of watching the “many trout dance and splash playfully while we ate.” This has not yet happened. The trout seem content to hide beneath the bridges in the dark, murky waters. There is also a bizarre “duck pond” area filled with decoys—Sophia is not yet convinced that they are fakes and demands we watch them to hear when the quack. We've spent two full days driving through several mountain ranges, several climates (including snow), and through hundreds of entirely fascinating, entirely unsettling peasant gatherings (where they decorate trees with pots and pans, among other wild customs).

We’ll send a full report upon our return. Believe us, there is a lot to tell!

C & K

Big Brother Back in Bucharest

2008-03-30T00:33:00.001-07:00

This year's NATO Summit is being hosted by our newly adopted home-city, which means that within two or three days our neighbors will include Bush, Putin, Sarkozy, and Hamid Karzai. The highlight of the summit, according to the latest round-up of world news, will be discussions of Afganistan. The "Macedonia" issue is also slated for discussion (whether FYROM, the Former Yugoslav. Republic of Macedonia, whose very name the Greeks reject for complicated reasons, should be allowed to join the NATO party).

With the imminent arrival of so much blustery power in one city, here in the "age of Terror," things are feeling a little spooky. Our normally boisterous Piata Lahovari (just steps from the massive Howard Johnson's, where surely many dignitaries will be staying) is utterly empty, since the streets surrounding us have all been barricaded. Snipers are already practicing their drills and finding suitable perches on nearby buildings (not a comforting thought, or perhaps it is supposed to be a comforting thought...); stray dogs are being "removed" from their usual pooping and sniffing routes to who knows where; they are reinforcing the windows of the local McDonald's and KFC (American businesses are famous targets for protestors); and all the million man-hole covers in town have been sealed with bright rubber tape, to indicate whether or not they have been pried open. The reason for that last precaution is fascinating: Ceausescu and his evil Securitate forces honeycombed the city's underworld with elaborate systems of tunnels, primarily for the purposes of spying upon the citizens of Bucharest. Since these tunnels connect the most important buildings in town, they are an obvious security concern.

What does this mean for us? For the first time since we arrived in Bucharest, it was QUIET last night...almost too quiet to sleep. When we make our rounds to the nearby playgrounds, low-flying helicopters buzz overhead (are they watching us?). There are police of every variety huddled around walkie-talkies about every hundred yards on every sidewalk here in the city center. There are gangs of men in dark suits and dark sunglasses standing around very fancy cars with darkened windows. In short, we feel very much like we are being watched, like we might be under suspicion just for stealing out to buy another jug of drinking water and two more of the ever-insufficient containers of milk that we go through at an alarming rate.

It also means that our city is looking very spiffy all of a sudden: in a few short days of uncharacteristic efficiency, our square was dug up, landscaped, and festooned with shrubs and flowers. Everywhere you look there are fresh coats of paint, and supernaturally green sod where there was mud or dust just last week. There is the illusion of cleanliness where there was only a moment ago the reality of urban filth. In contrast, new kinds of graffiti (see a photographic example, above) are beginning to appear on the walls of just-scoured buildings.

Post-Communist Bucharest, we have seen, bustles with capitalist energy and its citizens now almost take for granted their personal freedoms...even if we do frquently note on the faces of the older citizens (those who knew the hard realities of the Ceausescu era) a hardened look of suspicion and weary stocism that just won't go away.

So this week's NATO Summit and the security explosion offers us just a taste of what it must have been like to live under constant surveillance. It's not a little ironic that the summit is being partly headquartered in Ceausescu's monstrous palace, now re-dubbed the "House of Parliament," or the "House of the People," which could only be built after bulldozing a huge portion of the old city, including monasteries and churches.

As for us, well we're heading out of town for the summit itself. If what we're seeing now is merely security "practice," we'd rather be storming the remote villages of Maramures in our rental car....far, far, away...where no dignitaries are likely to mess things up.

Christopher

Triple Archeological Invasion by the Bacchic Bambini

2008-03-27T09:32:00.000-07:00

Each day on our Italian sojourn, we enjoyed (or endured, depending on the mood of the little Bacchae) an archeological adventure. Our neighborhood site was Paestum; our agritourism rooms looked out over the plains upon which Paestum (one of the great cities of Magna Graecia) was founded. The massive temples were especially stunning set against the gunmetal skies of early spring, with an icy wind blowing hard from every direction at once, it seemed. Nevertheless, the old stones were surrounded by profusions of green--and the kids frolicked among the first flowers of the year and rolled around in the grass when they were not tight-roping along the marble refuse. Luckily, there was a great little "enoteca" across the street from the archeological site, where we could retreat to reheat ourselves after our ramble. On Easter Sunday, we roamed the ruins of Velia, a smaller Greek (then Roman, then etc.) site in a specatcular setting, with its series of Medieval towers and walls propped high up on a breezy acropolis overlooking the Greek and Roman layers beneath. The site was very beautifully labelled, with nice bridges yawning across mosaic floors and lots of spots for thrilling toddler gymnastics. Monday we stopped in at Pompeii for a look around. Obviously, there's not a single day of the year when the place isn't crawling with tourists, but the place is so massive that it hardly matters. Alas, it had just hailed and then rained, so the kids (very, very cranky after several days of travel) were as interested as jumping into every pool of muddy water between the Roman cobblestones as they were gazing upon what is in essence a beautifully intact Roman city. About a half an hour and several tantrums into our visit, the kids' Chuck Taylors entirely saturated in Pompeiian mud (don't people pay for such treatment at spas across New England?), we'd all had enough, so we beat a quick retreat into Naples in search of pizza. Photographic evidence of our little pagan bambini above... Ciao, Christopher

The Bakkens Jet to Italia for the Easter weekend

2008-03-25T11:01:00.000-07:00

The Bakkens Jet to Italia for the Easter weekend

We just like to say that. Weekend in Italy? Fly to Rome from Bucharest for cheap and in an hour and a half? Okay. So we had to fly on an airline called WizzAir and had to fly on a pink and purple airplane (though Sophia declared it the best possible colors in the world for our skyway adventures), and that we had to leave at 4 am and ply the kids, who stayed away from 4am on, with M & M’s, we actually did land at Ciampino Airport at 7:30am and were out on the Autostrada headed South towards Naples by 8:45.

Let me say that we did not know that we had chosen a region of Italy famous for its Mozzarella di Bufala and at every turn of the road there would be someone grilling baby artichokes stuffed with parsely and green onions and bathed in olive oil. We only intended to eat ourselves silly on genuine Neopolitan pizza and dive into the Amalfi coast for Spaghetti a la Frutti di Mare. So the fact that all these storefronts were devoted to fresh buffalo mozzarella was sublime. We ate the mozzarella every which way: a whole round ball drizzled in olive oil and set atop grilled bread with sweet cherry tomatoes; generously sliced on top of our many varieties of pizzas; straight from our own little plastic baggie picnic-style on the table in our room at our farmhouse in Paestum.

One of the funnier food “mistakes” of our trip: at a lovely Ristorante built into the ancient Greco-Roman walls of Paestum, we ordered what we thought were small meatballs (polpettini) in sauce for Alexander and Sophia. What we got? Baby octopus in a tomato-bean ragu. Alexander devoured them—tentacles and all—nonstop. And at our seafood Ristorante outside of the coastal town of Positano, the kids both CHOWED a cross between baby cockles and sea snails. They scientifically jabbed their toothpicks into the shells, tugged out the nubbin of meat, then popped it into their mouths. Afterwards, they spent the better part of an hour playing with “Monster Fish” with emptied out mussel, clam, and shrimp shells while our charming waiter told us stories of Sophia Loren (who used to live in the "neighborhood," just down the cliff from the restaurant) and plied us with contorni.

In four days, we put approximately 500 miles on our little rental Peugeot. On the first day we wound our way along the coast down to the Greek site of Paestum. Unfortunately, while there were some pretty Mediterranean stretches, it seemed like most of the road took us through the Italian version of past-its-prime beachside condo hell. Lots of boarded up bars (advertised as “American style bar!) and discos and shady looking espresso stands. Of course, it was Italian style so this meant there were also panini stands. We stopped off at one grocery stand advertising Mozzarella di Bufala intending to buy just some to sample. When Christopher returned to the car (after abour half an hour...since he'd made friends with the cheese-making owners and was threatening to just stay there for the entire weekend) he came carrying a plate of bread drizzled with olive oil, some varieties of Gaeta olives (Gaeta being a town we would soon pass), and a hunk of what we took for a regional ricotta salata. His bag was full with a spray of ripe cherry tomatoes, a litre of homemade wine, two balls of Mozzarella di Bufala, two logs of the spicy ricotta salata, aged pecorino, and two bags of olives. Snacks a la Campania.

Our Agritourismo Casale Giancesare was located up a hill overlooking the sea outside of the ancient city of Paestum. We were greeted with espressos and cappuccinos and a glistening Irish Setter called Milli who was happy to scamper around the lawn with Sophia and Alexander. Milli even tried to scarf down Sophia’s Hoppy bunny at one point, and a mouthful of Littlest Pet Shops toys. Our kids were in need of serious doggy-time though—they’ve been missing our dog, Daphne, so this was an excellent diversion for them and they, in return for chase-the-dog-who-stole-the-toys, they received, in return, slobbery licks.

We have realized, in our jam-packed four days, that there is a limit to S & A’s tourism. Generally in Greece, the weather is warm so they too can scamper about outside. Since this was March, our wanderings around the ancient temples and ruins at Paestum, Velia, and Pompeii consisted of me, Mamma, headscarved and looking like some babushka from the Eastern bloc, and the kids alternately invigorated by the windy-wind and throwing tantrums and complaining about “having to walk.” Papa Christopher dutifully carried both Sophia and Alexander, despite having to content with the deadly affliction of “crunched back” thanks to soccer Romania-style, the squirming weight of our kiddies’ bodies, and poundages of luggage, and a lumpy bed in our Bucharest pad.

Of course, all of this tourism was buoyed by really marvelous food. Our main aim for Easter Sunday was to find some sort of Agritourismo that served a fixed menu. Oh boy did we ever! Outside of the town of Velia—a small sign off the road, down a dirt road, to Agritourismo Azienda La Fattoria. For 30 Euros a person (the kids counted only as one person) we basically were fed like royalty. First: every other table was long, filled with Italian families passing around these enormous chocolate eggs (basketball-sized, nut encrusted). Then we were told that it would be better not to have bread because we had a long, long meal ahead of us. What did this consist of?

Round One: Bruschetta di Pomodoro and a fried bread fritter covered in pomodorino sauce and crumbled local Campania cheese.

Round Two: An antipasti platter. Thinly sliced pancetta. The house's Cappicola. Two different kinds of salami. Baby bell-shaped Riccotini. Pecorino. Lard-heavy pancetta. Artichokes and olives.

Round Three: Fresh Cannelloni Lasagna and "Napkin" Pasta with Asparagus Sauce.

Round Four:
The meats? Slices of Pork, Slice of Beef, and Chicken a la Forno.
La Verdure? Baby Five Beans, Chicory/Spinach/Broccoli Robe in Garlic, Roasted Potatoes with Rosemary, Eggplant Stacks a la Forno, roasted peppers, stuffed baby Artichokes, pickled zucchini Ribbons, and I’m missing something else.

Round Five: Dolci (Ricotta-Lemon-Raisin Torta), Grappa, Ferne Branca, Espresso and Cappuccino.

Round Six: A lovely Easter phone call from Christopher’s brother in California. “Where are you?” he asked. “Ahh, we’re somewhere in the South of Italy with our bellies full and our kids finally asleep in the car,” Christopher answered.

Round Seven: Later, much much much later, two beautiful pizzas for a late dinner. Two kids who thankfully and finally both simultaneously slept through a late dinner.

We all ate and praised the God and gods that be for our four days away from the less-Mediterranean inspired Romanian fare. (Why is it that even industrial poverty and concrete apartment blocks looks better on Italian hillsides than they do in the mountains of Eastern Europe?)

Kerry

From Puferleţi to Poop

2008-03-19T06:59:00.000-07:00

Today Alexander came back from the playground with his Romanian babysitter clutching in one hand two small azalea flowers, and in the other hand an enormous bag of Puferleţi Super Prix! At first, I thought he was munching on some Romanian version of Cheetos minus the orange powder. No evidence of the orange stain around the mouth, so I thought: Ah! These Romanians are wiser than us. No more orange shirt collars and fingers.

His babysitter, Andrea, explained that Alexander had made some friends at the playground—shared sand toys and Puferleţi. So on the walk back, he insisted he have his own bag—he, too, wanted to be just like the rest of Romanian toddlers. So Andrea bought him, for all of 2 Lei (approximately 75 cents), an enormous bag of his own puffed, processed nuggets.

To Alexander’s selfish cries of “No, mama,” I swiped one from him. Absolutely tasteless. No, not true. More like some sort of air-puffed wood glue with the merest whisper of sugar. None of the illicit pleasure I associate with eating the junk food of childhood—none of the manufactured salt or onion or cheese flavors. Not even MSG.

Andrea said, “These are the snacks of Communist childhood. Empty of taste and desire. Bland. Filler that is not even filler.”

So Alexander has now taken up Communist nostalgia. Ahh. Puferleţi.

And Sophia, upon seeing the bag, remarked, “Hey, can I have some of those…we get those at school. C’mon, I’m hungry for them.” So she too has been filling her Eastern European kindergarten emptiness with the fullness of popped vegetable product!

But, we have more interesting ways to fill such voids. Lately, my afternoon ends with a stop at our new favorite pastry stand. This one cooks the pastries al forno in the shop. So we bought two "Strudel con Mare"—apple strudels. One for the walk back, one for dessert tonight. The phyllo strudel dough was crispy, the edges slightly charred. The filling was identical to the stuff in good, fresh American apple pie. We ate one—hot and dripping apple goodness—within two minutes, all while navigating a sleeping Alexander through busy traffic in his stroller. Then decided, with one shared look of strudel desire, to eat the second one immediately as well.

Some of the apple filling oozed, then splattered on the sidewalk—which made me wonder if indeed all those splats of dog poop dotting the Bucharest sidewalks aren’t dog poop at all but errant spatters of Strudel con Mare. Which makes me think that rather than take the odd and hazardous detours around such piles and spatters I should just step into them, thereby embracing Bucharest’s sidewalk Strudel con Mare con Jackson Pollock. But no. Sadly, all of Bucharest’s strays and well-tended canines seem to prefer the sidewalk to the curb; and the occasional owner seems disdainful of any sort of poop-scooping. Alas, not spatters of apple ooze but dog poop pure and simple.

That said, the kids devoured what we got them at that same strudel stand: their own freshly baked wood-oven pretzels dipped in poppy seeds and salt. I think, fingers crossed, Alexander has forgotten the Puferleţi for the moment...

Wish you were here in Strudel Land,

Kerry

Blessing of the Icons

2008-03-16T05:09:00.000-07:00

This Sunday, people traveled from all over Bucharest to have their household and sanctuary icons blessed at the aptly named Parcul Icoanei ("Icons Park"). After waiting in long lines, they and their icons were showered with holy water and blessings. These photos give you some sense of their reactions to that encounter with the sacred.

Trios, Couples and Singles at Chismigiu

2008-03-13T03:27:00.000-07:00

Some photos of trios and couples (and sad singles) as they appeared on a Wednesday afternoon in March at Chismigiu Park...which is nick-named "Lovers' Park."

Spring in Bucharest

2008-03-13T03:16:00.000-07:00

Spring in Bucharest? How lovely to know that we have sunny days in the 60’s and back home in Meadville it is still snowing, snowing, snowing. The forsythia is already blooming here as is an errant magnolia tree. On Tuesday night, thanks to Christopher’s museum recording career, we received free tickets to see Romania’s best violinist play a Stradivarius at the museum. We sat in the second row and swooned over the Bartok and Rachmaninov.

Afterwards we headed to a fancy dinner at an Italian restaurant about twenty steps from our front door, where, to Christopher’s great delight, they had a wood burning pizza oven. As we are finding, however, fancy doesn’t necessarily imply attentive service. Our waiters were alternately neglectful and stubborn—refusing, for instance, to leave our many bottles of wine on the table so we could all help ourselves. We had to wait and wait and wait for the bevy of waiters to notice that our glasses were empty and forlorn. And as this is a restaurant frequented by the newly rich and ostentatious, we had to sit beside this mobster type who smoked his cigar and made a big show of the champagne he’d ordered for his much younger girlfriend.

Thankfully, the foccacia made up for these minor irritations...as did the two wineglasses Christopher and I swiped—we have been drinking our market wine-$5 for two liters-poured from a cask directly into a recycled Orange bottle from teeny tiny glasses that make us feel like we are drinking $1 liters of wine. I can now report that we happily drank the swill from our new Bordeaux glasses and it now drinks like it's actually $10 liter (though this may also have something to do with our bootlegged copy of Lars and the Real Girl actually working! Romanians are adept at illegal downloads of movies so we’ve been watching all the current releases on our enclosed balcony at night. Though for some reason, 10,000 BC isn’t as compelling on the small screen as it might be on the big screen with popcorn and mammoth KitKats).

What else do we do here in the Spring? Go to cafes and drink a variety of coffees. Walk and walk and walk and buy Alexander giant soft pretzels from the pretzel shops (these are baked in wood ovens and sell for about 50 cents each). We’ve also been going to Chismigiu Park where Sophia delights in the trampoline and we delight in the beer gardens. People have started picnicking and we’ve been noting some very odd arrangements: a man skinning what looked like leeks, chopping them into small pieces, and then dumping them into jumbo Water bottles filled with water. Leek Tea? Another couple was happily dining on cheese, rolls, salami and an appalling bag filled with what looked like an assortment of innards. And then on the way out of the park, we encountered a man meticulously sponge bathing in a fountain.

We are also happy to report that Sophia is her usual self at school. She had to sit, for a few minutes, in the “naughty chair” for talking too much. She was then tickled by her teachers. Her teacher told us that they are all thoroughly enjoying having Sophia in class—and that they have never encountered a child who talks as much as she does. She has also mastered a few ballet moves and is diligently practicing her Romanian language lessons.

Kerry

Hoppy Levitates

2008-03-11T03:39:00.000-07:00

No doubt elevated in soul and spirit by the colorful, Vampiric sights of Sighisoara, Hoppy the Bunny levitates while a gleeful (but responsibly concerned) Sophia looks on with amazement.

Saxon Land, or Germans in Romanian Mud

2008-03-09T08:57:00.001-07:00

An excursion to Biertan, which was one of the more fascinating Saxon towns. Here we found what we found at all the Saxon Land villages we raided: another locked, gorgeous Lutheran church we couldn’t get inside to see, more mud pits, a dilapidated, abandoned winery, and another restaurant closed because of a private party,

Apparently, Biertan is home to a odd reunion every September: the German-Saxon diaspora gathers here for drunken revelry and cursing at what the Communists did to this country.

These Saxon towns are spectacular in their way: the road through each town is lined on both sides with what appear to be barns, each one connected to the next, all of them painted another bright pastel color. The inhabitants, unlike their abodes, were all rather dreary figures—dressed in the colors of mud, mainly, and violently sullen.

After Biertan, we returned to Sighisoara.

Defeated by meatballs and tuna mash, we picnicked on salami, bread, cheese, and chocolate and watched a very obscure version of MacBeth filmed in the late 70s (the heavy metal mullet on MacBeth gave that away). The intimidating visage of "Grossmutter" watched over us while we supped.

C & K

Sighisoara & Kid-un-friendly dining

2008-03-09T08:40:00.000-07:00

We finally arrived in Sighisoara, and to “Grandma’s House”—our 15th century Medieval cluster of rooms in the upper citadel. A strange mural greeted us on the living room wall: a grandmother who, upon first glimpse seemed to be clutching two small pineapples, but was, on second glance, grasping a book. On the opposite wall, the inscription: “Grossmutter’s Hause.” (Speaking of odd phrases, we kept seeing signs that read: “Drum Bun!” alone the highway. No idea yet what that might mean but we patted our fannies accordingly.) In the large bedroom hung a very lascivious portrait of a tiny, waisted, wide-hipped blonde who on first glance seemed to be clutching pineapples, but on second glance….
Sighiosoara is birthplace to Vlad Tepes (the Count). So we had to (at 50% off for residents of Grandma’s House) eat at Vlad’s home, which was decorated in medieval bloodsucking kitsch. Thankfully, there were enough dragons to keep the kids entertained (dragons even on the plates), while we all stumbled our way through a dreadful meal.

We keep expecting some version of Greek peasant food here—but what I keep reading on the menu (and what indeed shows up), are things like: “mush” (polenta mash), meatball-like sausages that resemble, well, lopped off appendages (though the kids shovel these balls into their mouths with abandon), chicken soup (real broth but Liptonesque noodles), and at Restaurant Vlad-Dracula, a tuna salad that was a lump of tuna mash surrounded by canned corn, chopped pickled cucumbers and peppers, and undressed cabbage slaw.
The effects? Both Christopher and I have sludge in the guts (though this may be the result of very sweet red wine we’ve been drinking to keep our sense of humor as our children shred napkins and bread, leaving a wide trail through all these restaurants).

We are discovering Romania is not built for children—most restaurants are ill-equipped and keep insisting on giving the Bakken bambina tall wine glasses and fancy china. While our kids have stepped up as best as they know how, stemware is just too tempting.

Bran Castle

2008-03-09T08:29:00.000-07:00

We left Brasov for Sighisoara, intent on improving our understanding of what a medieval Saxon city might look like. On the way, we stopped off at Bran castle, the ex-home of a Romanian king and queen, and now sold as a Draculaian outpost. The various hawkers were selling mugs and tee-shirts and masks all with the hyperbolic visage of Vlad Tepes, the original Count Dracula.

In truth, the castle was beautiful—massive beams and white washed walls and Spartan/Medieval L.L. Bean in decoration. More Greek island home than Transylvanian Alp fortification, in other words. Sophia spied every dragon motif (Dracula was a Son of the Order of the Dragon) and at the castle gates she convinced us to buy her a vaguely Peruvian bird flute (which we gladly bought over the weird sheep-skinned/bladder bagpipes the woman was trying to sell her). For the Bakken seniors? A hunk of smoked sheep’s milk cheese and a giant nut-crusted kutosh.

Kerry

Train to Brasov

2008-03-06T22:46:00.000-08:00

Weekend in Transylvania

In part because our recent weather in Bucharest had been spectacular (brilliantly sunny days with the temperatures pushing seventy Farenheit), and in part because I’d not actually stepped foot outside of Bucharest, we decided to take a kind of little spring break in Transylvania with the kids. Our plans involved a lovely journey by train through Wallachia, into the Transylvanian Alps, then several days wandering colorful Saxon towns, raiding castles (in search of dragon paraphernalia, on behalf of our dragon-crazed kids), and weaving our rental car down rustic detours whenever we felt the whim.

The reality has been profoundly and hilariously different. First of all, just about the moment we boarded the first class train to Brasov, winter returned and we had the pleasure of speeding through an absolutely grey and snowy rural Romanian landscape, which looked suspiciously like Meadville, Pennsylvania in early March (e.g. dark and probably about to snow). The outskirts of Bucharest are as filthy and depressing as anything we've ever seen.

By the time we entered the Alps, all the windows in our cabin were entirely steamed over and we huddled in our seats wondering when they would turn on the heat. The kids watched an episode or two of Clifford the Big Red Dog on their tiny DVD player, much to the amusement of every passenger who passed their way on the way to the bathrooms.

Along the way, the rugged landscape would break and we’d clatter past a tiny cluster of lean-to shacks propped in mud. There would be parked the iconic massive wooden wagons tethered to depressed looking draft horses, the occasional bundled figure hanging laundry, and endless fields of garbage. It was almost a relief to see a tidy looking nuclear power plant loom up over the horizon, and much more of a relief to enter the narrow mountain passes of the Alps proper, where we knew huge numbers of black bears and wolves still lived.

If we wiped the window with our sleeves, we'd get a momentary glimpse of the density and beauty of these forests, which spur the imagination in the direction of the Medieval almost immediately--I wouldn't have been much surpsised to see a line of figures on horseback, in full armor and animal furs, plodding toward one of the hundreds of castles in the area. Then the window would fog back over and we'd be listening to Clifford on the DVD player again.

Brasov is surely a lovely town, unless you end up walking the wrong way "toward the historic center" and end up in the industrial nastiness, with one crabby kid in a stroller and another begging to be held. Unless, that is, you then take a cab into the heart of said "historic district" and tumble, starving, into the first restaurant you see.... a four star joint where we are the only customers, ordering at random nearly every dish on the menu to placate our little beasts.

Once fed, the kids settled into their swanky surroundings nicely: to the horror of our two rather stuffy waitresses, over dessert we made farm animal noises and Sophia (wired on a rare glass of Pepsi) made up long narrative songs about her stuffed animals back in Pennsylvania. The kids passed out about the moment the lights went out back at Hotel Ambient and I'm not sure we remained conscious much longer.

Christopher

Root Vegetable Centerfold

2008-03-03T01:18:00.000-08:00

Fans of celeriac and parsnips, this is paradise!

Morning Meatballs and Bistros

2008-03-01T09:10:00.000-08:00

I am quickly learning that while this is a city designed for women in stiletto boots (the female Bucharestians are dressed up, up, up even at 8am when Sophia and I take our walk to school), this is not a city designed for the stroller set. All escalators down and up from the Metro are out of order (and look to have been that way for several decades), and most Bucharestians seem unwilling to make way for our umbrella stroller and Alexander’s flailing feet. On our way to Obor market today, we had to carry Alexander, in his stroller, down, then up, several long flights of stairs, and then hoisted him, god-like, over the turnstile. As a result, Alexander now flaps his arms the moment he is held aloft, pretending to be an airplane.

Sophia dutifully trudges along for our walks. Of course, the deal is sweetened by these little stalls that are on most street corners and sell odd trinkets (puffy hearts, chicks in a nest, plastic music boxes). She calls them “the little desk-stores that don’t have any walls.” She has corned us into giving her 1 lei a day to spend at the stalls (the equivalent of 50 cents) and now has a wide assortment of miniature junk. Today was a 3 lei day, so she came home with a fish keychain and a small cutout dog. We’re hoping most of this evaporates before we have to pack for home in a few months.

It is always a delight, however, traveling alongside Sophia as she narrates her way through the maze of streets and stalls. At the “Nursery” stand at Obor market, where they were selling saplings, Sophia pointed to the apple and pear trees wrapped in burlap and said, in her now street-savvy outrage, “What! Are those people crazy? Why would they try to sell people sticks?” The trees did in fact look like someone’s burn pile. And she is too smart to swap her leis on bundles of twigs.

The Bakkenaki do seem adept in conniving their way into free cookies. At Obor, Sophia flashed her smile at one of the vegetable vendors who remarked on our kids’ charm (though helped by Christopher who snapped the vendor’s photo beside her carrots and then called her Angelina Jolie). Outside our apartment, the kids got a bag of cookies from the Sex Shop bouncer who explained he didn’t need them because beer was his breakfast. (For reference: Christopher and I refer to our apartment as “next to the Sex Shop.” Sophia was delighted find that on the other side of our entrance is the London Snooker and Billiard hall which has a dragon as a logo. Sophia says we live “under the dragon.” Better than her saying, “next to the Sex Shop,” we’ve agreed.)

I am amazed by both the number of places and the times that one can buy sausages and beer. Even the littlest Bakkens were devouring sausage-balls at 10:30 this morning at Obor. I passed on the grilled meats and ate one of those kurtos pastries Christopher has praised. (And this city certainly knows how to do its pastries! All over are tiny windows out of which friendly women sell pastries and cookies. I recently had a walnut and apple strudel; Christopher had one filled with chicken liver). And on the subject of food, already I’ve had a wonderful meal at a French Bistro and had my first sample of Romania sarmale (minced meat wrapped with fermented cabbage--one of our Romanian pals mistakenly called it "rotten cabbage"--on an island of polenta).

Finally, while I seem to have come down with a nasty sinus cold, I am thoroughly enjoying what appears to be Spring in Bucharest. Every day since my arrival, there has been sun and temperatures in the upper 50’s.

Pa,
Kerry

In Praise of Kǖrtӧs Kalácsa

2008-03-01T07:51:00.000-08:00

In Praise of
Kǖrtӧs Kalácsa

To understand any culture's cuisine, as far as I am concerned, ignore the fancy restaurants boasting "regional specialties" and head straight for the seediest looking street food you can find. It's worth the potential risk to one's g.i. system, this eating "what the people eat." When in Bucharest, etc....

Thus, wandering through the Obor market for the first time last Saturday, just one espresso into the morning (and therefore susceptible to impulse eating), I stumbled upon a bizarre looking pastry: something like a honey-colored construction cone, cut into spiraling ribbons, and rolled in a kind of crunchy sugar crumble.

And, yes, I tried one. And I nearly had to sit down right there in the street (where gypsy women were hawking kitchen towels and men were trying to sell cell phones, and others were just walking by without knowing that they were marching past a holy Romanian donut stand…) and cry. Since I didn't have the guts for that, I just stood there in reverential silence and smiled stupidly, covered in sugar.

Obviously, I had to investigate how such a sacred snack is concocted. First a loose pastry dough is wrapped around a kind of spindle on the end of a long wooden pole, which is then spun over hot coals until it toasts a dark brown color. Then the screaming hot dough is showered in the crunchy bits, which adhere immediately. From there they are moved to cooling racks until they are bagged for the pleasure of public consumption.

Today, I marched the remainder of the Bacchae toward the kǖrtӧs at Obor and from that moment on we attempted to concentrate on buying produce, when really we were completely lost in Romanian donut reveries for which there is only one known cure: more kǖrtӧs.

Smittenly,

Christopher

Alexander Oscar the Great

2008-02-29T21:57:00.000-08:00

Alexander Oscar the Great

conquers Bucharestian Mountain

After playing Saracen for an hour atop the crowded playground "pirate ship" at our favorite afternoon hangout, Giardina Iconoae, our little conqueror grew tired of such small-time acts of intimidation and ran straight up the massive (to him, at least) gravel mountain in the center of the park where he pushed back the hood to his blue and white parka and beat his chest while ROARING loudly enough to awaken all the stray dogs in the vicinity. When I asked him what he was doing, he gave me his "are you stupid?" look, then answered:

"T. Rex, Dada."

A Very Brief Interview with Sophia of the Bacchae

2008-02-29T01:12:00.000-08:00

This interview was conducted right after we picked up Sophia from her new school. Her pony tails were sideways, her grey and white uniform was a mess, and she was trying to draw pictures while we pestered her with questions. Known to all her family members and teachers as a kid who VERY much likes to talk, we though it worth recording this rare moment of near-speechlessness from our garrulous daughter.

So, Sophia, how do you like Bucharest?

Good. Because I really like my school…. because we do lots of stuff.

What kinds of things do you see when you walk around in Romania?

Stores on the sidewalks that sell little toys and stuff. And I see lots and lots of lots of houses. And lots of dogs and cats. I like to go on walks to the playground.

What do you miss about Meadville?

Our house and Daphne, Red and Delilah.

What do you like about our new apartment?

My room has a bed, drawers, and cupboards, and even Alexander. And there are animal pictures all over the walls.

What about the elevator?

I like it because I get to press the buttons.

What are your teachers’ names?

I forget. Oh, Miss Stefanie.

And Miss….the other teacher, the one with that long, long, long hair.

And what are the names of the other kids in your class?

I forget. I have friends but I don’t remember their names right now.

What Romanian words do you know?

Bunã=hello
Mulţumesc =thank you

What do you have to say to your family back in the United States.

“I love you.”

No more. Don’t write any more. I don’t want to do any more questions.

“Oh, and I want them to come to Romania.”

No more questions, Dad.

Two Anecdotes Regarding Bucharestian Traffic

2008-02-29T00:55:00.000-08:00

Two Anecdotes regarding Bucharestian Traffic

Since we live right in the heart of Bucharest, within walking distance of almost everything, we don’t often have to endure what the majority of commuters put up with when they decide to drive into the city.

When we have to take a taxi, we discover that the taxi drivers are almost always fueled by high doses of caffeine and venomous road rage. They all wear the expressions of people caught in the grips of incurable existential dread. The following anecdotes begin to explain why:

Traffic Anecdote #1

We are leaving Becker Brau, a lovely cavernous old Rathskeller in one of the seedier parts of Bucharest (rather symbolically located behind the gargantuan Palace of the People). They brew their own beer there, which they sell by the METER, made all the more tasty accompanied by the house oom-pah-pah band (with TWO tubas, even). Down the street from Becker Brau, it turns out, is the new Playboy Club, which brings out all the silicon disasters and fancy cars in the city.

Having accepted the generous offer for a ride from a new friend, we weave our way through the Bentleys and Mazeratis toward her poor little station wagon. The street is virtually clear until she actually pulls out when, suddenly and inexplicably, there is a rush of cars coming from both directions, trapping us at a sharp curve for nearly half an hour, vehicles at every diagonal, bumpers kissing, every single driver refusing to move an inch to alleviate the jam. There’s space at the front and back of the pile-up, of course, if someone would just stop pushing ahead for a moment and back up, but that kind of compromise isn’t likely here (everyone goes at high speed into every intersection, regardless of pedestrians and other vehicles, as if life depended upon getting in front of the other cars on the road).

Finally a cop car appears at the top of the hill and within a few minutes (not that the cops have actually directed traffic, or even left their car) we are up over the curb, around the uncooperative taxi that’s blocked our path the whole time, accelerating back into the post-Communist slums of Bucharest.

Traffic Anecdote #2

I’ve just come from the recording studio, where the national television channel has done a “culture” piece on us for their nightly news. Since they were not there when we actually recorded the six hours of art-historical text for the audio guides at the National Museum, they’ve asked that we return to the scene of the crime to “act” as if we were recording….to pose in various guises of pronunciation, editing, and intellectual fervor, to pretend that we are puzzling out the finer points of Broncovan iconography, in short, with our brows furrowed dramatically for the camera.

Leaving the studio and that exercise in publicity, we find ourselves in a traffic jam near Piata Unirii, one of the main squares of the city. Now, you must imagine a very small Romanian car: in the front is a rather intimidating driver and in the passenger seat is the jolly, curly-haired cameraman holding a tv camera the size of a retriever; in the back seat I am sandwiched between the very tall Alex (director of the Friends of the Museum) and Maria (the reporter). Traffic has not so much as budged for at least five minutes. We are all eating bananas, sweating profusely, about to fall into contemplative despair, when on the radio we hear the opening salvos of “YMCA” by the Village People, which just completes the picture somehow. It would be hard to invent such a perfect recipe for the absurd…

Yours in traffic,

Christopher

The Bacchic Bambini: Opening Assault upon Bucharest

2008-02-26T00:29:00.000-08:00

The Bacchic Bambini have landed, with alternating bursts of sleepiness and manic playground enthusiasm!

In spite of her jet-lag, Sophia put on a brave face and boarded a bus to her new kindergarten today. She admitted to being nervous, but when her teacher called to check in about her status this morning it was reported that Sophia had demanded a snack ("I'm staaaarving," she told her new teachers), ate it ferociously, and in the process inspired all the other students to also demand snacks. Thus her little mutiny begins...and she is clearly feeling like herself.

Alexander missed out on the playground yesterday, since he completely passed out in his stroller for a good two hours while we navigated the busy streets of Bucharest and the market. He is enjoying bottle upon bottle of pomegranate juice and very strange cartoons broadcast in Romanian (which even the jaded Sophia admits "sound really cool in Romania talk")...

More soon...

The Bacchae in Bucharest

Bakken Goats in Romanian

2008-02-22T07:34:00.000-08:00

I have been extremely fortunate to make friends with Ioana Ieronim, a Romanian poet who walked me around Bucharest one day narrating where and how the Revolution of 1989 happened in what is now called Piata Revolutei.

She has also arranged to have me invited to a literary festival on the Black Sea coast in June, where folks like Orhan Pamuk will be hanging out.

Here is one of my poems, "Eclogue 4 (Goat Funeral)," translated by her hand into Romanian. It certainly looks very beautiful, if I'm allowed to say so (and since her last translation project was to update the Romanian translations of Shakespeare, I think she knows what she's doing):

Egloga 4 (Înmormântarea caprei)

Am fugit din tavernă plin de băutură şi gravitate
la râu m-am împiedicat în tufe,
înjurându-i pe toţi, cu tot kitsch-ul lor de bouzouki,
avântul încrezător al gloatei,
m-am trezit abia când păstoriţa Iuliana
aprindea rugul pentru căpriţa născută moartă, bocind
către duhul care-o chemase la el prea curând.
Înţelege că era devreme – iarba
alunecoasă, lemnele ude scoteau fum.
Căprioarele se ascundeau în pădurice.
Ea avea flori de salcâm în cozi
şi i-am văzut pe umăr niţel polen
de când sfâşiase vălul de doliu.
Pe trupul mort erau împletite frunze de măslin,
o grămăjoară de boabe întregi la bot.
Eram ciudaţi la malul râului acolo:
două fiinţe omeneşti prea apropiate de morţi,
morţii încă aşteptând cineva să vorbească,
în jur sălbăticia ne urmărea,
în spatele nostru oraşul stupid adormit.
Eu ce puteam face? Capra murise,
Fata era frumoasă, râul crescuse mult.
Pentru ea s-a înălţat din bârlog
animalul din mine, a scuturat somnul iernatic,
am luat-o în braţe, am aprins focul, am ajutat-o
să ardă – oh zeu fără suflet –micuţa jivină.

2008-02-22T02:09:00.000-08:00

Football and Medieval Art… Soccer and Stradivarius

In addition to beginning my courses this week (which mainly involved tiresome speeches on the evils of plagiarism and the spiritual benefits of good attendance), I busied myself with three activities: shopping and cleaning in preparation for the arrival of the rest of the Bacchae; playing soccer (ahem, “football”); and talking into a very expensive microphone.

First, the Low-Ball:

The language of football is the same worldwide, of course, and I didn’t need much Romanian to drag my 40-year-old body out on to the pitch and beg it to cooperate. I’ve been invited to participate in two very different pick-up games here in Bucharest.

The Tuesday night game takes place inside a kind of red and white circus tent that looms over an expensive, state-of-the art artificial grass surface. The participants are comprised mainly of young professionals—businessmen poised to make a killing as Romania’s economy propels itself toward European Union vitality. As a result, most of them stepped off the pitch now and then to answer their cell phones and type things into their new i-phones and Blackberry devices.

The Thursday night game is out in the elements, “under the lights” in a kind of concrete hockey rink in which some rather slimy, battered Astroturf was once glued down. The players are mainly in their twenties, which means they spend as much time sparring verbally as they do actually playing. Since this game doesn’t begin until 8pm at night, the combination of cold air and recent snow-melt makes the turf sloppy and slippery, leading to spectacular spills and joint-wrecking acrobatics, none of which am I much in the shape for performing.

Romanians are not very big on passing….but they all have spectacular dribbling skills and seem determined make the highlight reels with every touch of the ball. The fact that most of them do this on a slippery surface while wearing really bad shoes (imagine very buff men playing soccer in white Keds, those little slipper-like canvas things we associate with ladies in nursing homes….I have to take some photos of this for you), makes for a certain amount of hilarity.

After three weeks of sloth, what a relief it has been to attempt some exercise.

Then, the Highbrow:

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I was asked to record the English-language audio-guide for the National Museum of Art here in Bucharest. In spite of my very rudimentary Romanian pronunciation skills, I was handed about six hours worth of art-historical text which I needed to perform in my best “God-voice” so that wandering pilgrims, tourists, and inquiring minds can stroll past the Medieval masterpieces while being educated about the exhibits. These recordings took place in a state-of-the-art recording studio on the edge of town; a heavy metal band had been laying down tracks before we arrived.

My task, in short, was to try to pronounce names like Constantin Brâncoveanu and Neagoe Basarab, and place names like Târgovişte and Mănăstirea Curtea de Argeş while sounding something like a native speaker. This was much harder than I expected it to be, but as a result I’m now reading street signs with a very different sense of the Romanian language, eager to find my way inside its Latinate grammar and Slavic pronunciations. All the Romanian words seem to have twice as many vowels as consonants; Greek words all seem to have more consonants than vowels….so, being as language-challenged as I am, these adjustments are happening rather slowly.

My payment for this service appears to be in two forms: in football (Alex, the director of the Friends of the National Art Museum is a former pro-soccer player and is the reason I found the Thursday night game) and in free tickets for all museum events. Next week they will “launch” the new audio system in the Medieval gallery with good champagne and the company of dignitaries (and me, hoping I don’t sound like too much of an ass on the recordings). The week after that the Romanian government will open the locks on one of the five Stradivarius violins it owns so that the greatest new Romanian violinist, Alexandru Tomescu (lauded by folks like Yehudi Menuhin), can use it to play a concert for us (Bartok, Sarasate, Rachmaninov, etc.).

Thank god my wife is about to arrive so I have a beautiful, brilliant date to accompany me to these events. I’ll surely feel less like an American hick that way!

Yours, in soccer and Stradivarius,

Christopher

Inscrutable Spray Paintings

2008-02-19T04:56:00.000-08:00

Beautiful buildings have their charm, but they must compete with the graffiti artists of Romania. When I tire of gorgeous Nouveau facades and architectural flourishes, I find myself pointing the camera at these strange and hilarious images, many of which are strangely beautiful (or beautifully strange). I'm equally attracted to the ruined Soviet cars, which serve as a kind of ugly punctuation for the sea of brand new Mercedes and Fiats that comprise most of the traffic in Bucharest....but I'll save those for another post.

Christopher

Setting up Camp

2008-02-19T04:37:00.000-08:00

Hello Everyone:

Joyfully, I have rented, scoured, and fortified (with pots, pans, IKEA miscellany, and one plant) a well-lit apartment on little Piatza Lahovari, just off very grand Piatza Romana (where Romulus and Remus are suckled by an emaciated she-wolf cast in bronze). If you point your finger right into the heart of the labyrinthine map of Bucharest, that’s where we live.

We have three “bedrooms”, two of which have windowed-in balconies from which I spend too much time sipping coffee and watching the action on the street below (mainly just pedestrians trying to negotiate traffic and icy sidewalks), a large kitchen, and a sitting room complete with nearly comfortable wicker furniture and a television that plays CNN. Lahovari square is home to one excellent restaurant with a wood-burning pizza oven (yes, I admit that I walk by now and then to press my face up against the plate glass just to admire their massive oven), one 19th century mini-palace with an impossibly elegant wine garden out back, and a series of little shops, including a garish red and white SEX SHOP. In fact, to find our apartment, I tell people to “come to Lahovari square and follow the arrow to the entrance to SEX SHOP….then buzz apartment 50.” We’re hard to miss.

Within easy striking distance (i.e. five minutes by foot) is the disheveled building where I teach (for an hour and a half twice a week) and where Sophia will board her mini-bus with all the other uniformed kindergarteners to depart for school each morning. In addition to doing “ballet” for gym class, her kindergarten offers the choice of three extra language classes: Turkish, Arabic, and Romanian. I think she’s going to have a blast.

Heading in the opposite direction is the Amzei market, with both indoor and outdoor vendors selling a wide variety of vegetables and fruits, not to mention a thousand unidentifiable pickled products, many of which look very delicious.

In short, the circumference of my daily rounds is limited to a space about the size of our block in Meadville, which is that way it happens in big cities. Beyond that, of course, there’s a zillion museums, concert halls, and old neighborhoods to explore in every direcftion. I’ll attend a concert of Schubert leider next week for eight dollars, for instance, and I’m going to hear an Israeli poet read her poems in Romanian tomorrow night. Tomorrow I volunteered to serve as the "voice" of the National Museum of Art; they are recording an English language head-set tour, and I'll be reading the six hours of text that tourists will listen to as they gaze upon the art. I’m even playing soccer inside a weird dome lined with Astroturf.

Needless to say, none of it seems quite complete without Kerry, Sophia and Alexander here. It has taken me the better part of three weeks to find us housing and to work out the kinks of daily existence, however, so they’ll be arriving just in time to participate in the fascinations of Bucharest without having to endure the frustrations and bewilderment that even the veteran inhabitants seem to find annoying.

My classes begin this week. Evidently the students follow two educational philosophies: rampant plagiarism and virtual non-attendance. I’m hoping to terrify them away from the former and cure them of the latter with my irresistible Yankee charms.

Once the rest of the Bacchae arrive, we'll update the blog with more details about our new existence here. We'll take accurate dictations from Sophia and Alexander, too, so they can report their impressions in their own words.

Love, from the Sex Shop,

Christopher