ay, 14 Mar 98

Tonight I attended a St. Pats Day dinner at the Hilton, the city's only five star hotel. The attendees were one-half Romanian; while that is fine, they were too reserved. No one got drunk, not even me. On the other hand the food was quite good and it was NOT corned beef and cabbage.

Out table had an interesting, if very depressing discussion of street children. I had seen them already: young, about ten years old, dirty, and begging. You want to say, "Why aren't you in school?" but they don't understand English. The great difficulty is about what to do. Some people at the table said that sometimes a child is begging apparently for himself but must give the proceeds to an older child or an adult. They can be beaten severely if they try to keep anything. The boy beggars (shades of Oliver Twist) are big into sniffing glue. I have seen as many as five of them sitting on a park bench. They were all between eight and eleven. They all had plastic bags in their hands and an older boy was pouring a clear liquid into a bag held by a younger boy. Tragic.

I was told that many of them live in the nineteenth century storm sewers perhaps because there are no working sewers due to collapses from lack of maintenance. Others told stories of children begging for money but rejecting food when it was offered instead of money. There seems to be some sort of philosophic fatalism about the problem, perhaps brought on by the difficulty of imagining a solution.

I am told another story of people who bought a coat for a girl who regularly begged at a certain spot. Later, she was begging again (in the winter) without the coat. Is she a plant? Was the coat sold and adult benefited from the sale? Whatever the facts, the situation is extremely depressing.

The question of "papers." You can't go to school without "papers." If you are born to someone outside the system, you can't get "papers," you can't go to school, and you can't get inside the system. It's Catch 22 Romanian style. The principle of universal free education is not part of the system here.

I have seen a fifteen year old boy lingering in the hallway of our office building. It turns out his name is Adi and he was brutally abused by his mother who has since died. He lives for affection from Judy, my boss. He waits for her every day and walks her home. He is completely illiterate and there is no hope for him. Judy, with all her connections -- and this woman has connections -- could not get him papers.

Poverty is the great crime in this country and it is so severe that it affects groups that are the most needy: the very young. Poverty breeds manipulation of children, it drives begging and it is the source of endless misery.

Well, this is the second email in a row to focus on the negative. I don't want you to get the wrong impression about the bigger picture: the upside potential of this country and its people is very great. Unfortunately the current conditions are rather more like London in 1840 than we would like to be the case. Things will get better.

Joe


Sunday, 15 Mar 98

A very sunny but rather cold day; not nearly as balmy as a week ago. I walked to the Romanian Opera hall, the home of the national opera and ballet companies. The structure was built in the 1950s as a socialist expression of support for the arts. It functions well in a practical sense but, in design and construction, it seems to be an imitation of older facilities that can be found in other cities. Apparently socialism had nothing to add to the arts of opera or ballet.

Across the adjacent Strade Stirbe is a huge structure that was intended by Ceausescu to be a museum of museums; every national museum was to be relocated to this enormous building but, like so many of Ceausescu's grand and crazed plans, this structure was not completed. Its windows are broken, the roof incomplete. Several construction cranes tower over the building, slowly rusting. There is no money and less desire to complete his acts of megalomania. The visible waste of resources is hard to grasp. Ceausescu clearly suffered from an "Edifice Complex" of the first magnitude.

Above, a fare card good for ten rides on Bucharest's Metro system. There is no free transfer to surface transportation.

The Metro, Bucharest's underground train system, has clean stations, clean, wide cars, runs frequently, and features a magnetic card fare system. It also has children begging. One nine year old boy sang rather badly and then accepted donations. A twelve year old boy played the accordion while his eight year old sister(?) held out a knit hat for donations. On another trip I saw a five year old boy carrying a two year old baby almost half his size onto the car. He leaned against the center pole and knelt on the floor while reciting something he seemed to have memorized. Everyone looked on without any expression of surprise. He stood up again and walked the length of the car. Finally placing the baby on a seat, he sat beside it until the next stop when he picked up the baby, left our car and entered the next on the train. At that same stop a man with one leg slide himself across the full length of the car. The sound of the fabric of his pants scrapping along the floor is in my ears as I write.

On one platform and eight or nine year old dirty faced street urchin was playing with a Bic lighter. He would turn it on high and light it and hold it up in the air. Then he would put his hand over the flame. Then he took a corner of his oversized shirt and set it on fire just to see it burn. A nearby woman gently chided him but he paid no attention and eventually ran down the platform.

Food shopping here continues to be an experience. I asked Ken, Judy's husband, how I could buy heavy cream here (mostly for coffee). I think my request may require an explanation. Flash back to my childhood. At meals when I was young my mother drank tea, my father coffee and my brothers and sisters and I drank milk.

Somehow I never started drinking coffee until my late teens when I used to go to the parish lottery drawing on the third Thursday of the month. There they had free donuts and free coffee but no free soda (or milk). I didn't like coffee so I would fill a coffee cup with cream and drink it. Various wags suggested, "Why don't you have some coffee with your cream?" Being immune to sarcasm, I took this advice to heart and gingerly added small amounts of coffee to my cream. Eventually I made up to about 50 percent. Later, following the great American dictum that "if some is good, more is better, I switched from ordinary cream to heavy cream. Yummmm. Delicious!

Flash forward to Bucharest. Ken told me that he didn't think that heavy cream existed here but that regular cream could be found from time to time and from place to place depending on unknown factors. In other words, there is no way to systematically get it. I told him that in a market I had seen a carton of something that had a design of a dollop of whipped cream on its side.

"You just can't tell," he said. "What you have to do is go into the store and buy what you think is cream and walk outside with it; open it and have a taste. If it isn't cream then throw it away and go back inside and buy something else. When all else fails, you go to the next store and repeat the process." So the fun begins.


Joe

Monday, 16 Mar 98

Some one asked me if it is true that French is the second language of Romania. He had heard that Romania is a bastion of Francophone culture in Eastern Europe and that this historically goes back to Romania being a major outpost for Latin culture during the Roman Empire. He also read that this is the reason that French President Chirac pushed so hard (albeit unsuccessfully) for Romania to be added to the short-list of initial entrants from Central and Eastern Europe into the European Union.

I inquired into the above and some knowledgeable locals tell me that before WW2 (the big one), French was indeed the preferred language of the upper classes (only). The wealthy looked to France and Paris for fashion and style. French is relatively easy for a Romanian to learn and France and its language were very popular here.

After the war, the second language became Russian for obvious reasons. In (I think) 1956 Russian was no longer required in universities and English swiftly became the language of choice.

More About Food: I usually pick up a filled croissant on the way to work. The pastries here are completely first class but they show a broader range than you would find in an ordinary French Patisserie for the Turkish influence is evident in the layered cakes(?) that have creamy fillings and other goodies in them but are sold as single servings. These can be found all over the region that the Turks ruled for hundreds of years.

The Coffee: Since I don't drink the coffee here I asked some Romanians that I work with "What kind of coffee is popular here?" and they stared at me since they don't think of their coffee in terms of popularity. After some discussion they told me that Romanians like strong coffee in smaller cups that Americans use but the Romanian version is not as strong and in a larger cup than the Turks (and Greeks) like. Then I said, "Is French coffee popular here?" and they stared at me with non comprehension never having heard of such a thing. "cafe au lait," I said. They shook their heads no and said, "Yes. With children. That is how you serve it to them."

International Cuisines in Bucharest: There are some Turkish restaurants but apparently not many. There are a number of Lebanese/Syrian restaurants and the food is worth a visit, a few Chinese restaurants but Judy didn't like any that she had been to and some pretty good Italian and French restaurants. I will probably gradually sample all of the above and let you know how good they are.

I found a new restaurant near the office today. I am not sure how to describe the cuisine since the menu was in Romanian only and I had to guess that Gordon [sic] Bleu Pui was Chicken Cordon Bleu, which it was, which I ordered and which was good. The waiter hinted that I might want to order something else and he pointed at a list of kartofel which I decided must be potatoes (since Kartofeln is potato in German) but I couldn't get any of the other words that distinguished one kind from the other. So I said "French Fries?" and he nodded.

By the way, I am told it is nearly impossible to get a baked potato here. People have given detailed descriptions of how to prepare them and the Romanians can't believe that anyone would do that to a nice potato. Maybe this incomprehension is related to the relative absence of dairy products.

Also on the menu was "Gordon Bleu Porc." Since my Chicken Cordon Bleu was stuffed with cheese and ham, I decided to forego this double pork treat -- at least for now.

On the way back from the restaurant, I passed a small butcher shop today which proudly announced on a sign outside the door that it "specialized" in "porc." You can go hog wild in this country.

Joe