--Monday, 12 April 99--
At last the sun shines. Saturday was gray with periods of light rain and Sunday was grayer still with periods of heavy rain. Saturday I spent at the office reading, conferring with our best translator and recovering from jet lag. The weather turned icky at night so I stayed in (after having an early dinner at da Vinci's of beef in green pepper sauce) and continued reading Black Lamb and Gray Falcon, probably the finest and most insightful travelogue ever written. It is based on a tour of Yugoslavia that the author, Rebecca West took in the late 1930s and includes extensive historical narrative going back to the Roman emperors. In addition it is superbly written, for Rebecca West is a great prose stylist. Here is but one partial quote: ". . . portraits of these unhappy people, preserved in tragedy like flies in amber."

Jim and Rita told me that my favorite restaurant, Cafe de Paris, has been closed six months. It had GREAT food, modest prices, wonderful service and was 1 1/2 blocks from the office. They say that most of the staff now work at a restaurant called Dom but it much further away from the office, in the Aviatorilor district. Still, I will have to check it out.


--Wednesday, 14 April 99--
Today began the first of the trips that I would be taking around Romania, this one to Constanta on the Black Sea coast. The train from Bucharest to Constanta runs across the plain of the Danube. For kilometer after kilometer, as far as the eye can see, the flat, brown land is cut up into giant plots crossed here and there by wind brakes of tall trees running in long lines and crisscrossed by high tension towers. From the train window, the high tension towers looked like a widely-dispersed army of erector-set giants frozen in the plain but linked to each other by long sagging cables. I thought of a still image of the 1950's movie, "War of the Worlds".

Here and there the white washed buildings of a village back up against the tracks. Here and there a lazy cow sat and chewed its cud, the odd farmer took a hoe to a small plot, and a horse stood idly by, waiting for an assignment from its owner. Once in a while the trackside was edged with vegetation and some combination of trees and bushes blocked the view.

The travelers in our train compartment consisted of two middle-aged ladies who chatted quietly and a Romanian guy who said that he lived in England now and was back on a trip. He recognized me as an American and said that he wanted my opinion about the bombing of Yugoslavia and then went on and on, giving me his opinions without the opportunity to for me to give mine. That was fine with me. When I did get a word in edgewise and asked about the Kosovars, he said simple that "they are not as nice as they seem." I wasn't sure what to make of this and remained silent while he talked and talked.

About an hour from Constanta, the grade of the tracks rose slowly and I could see the wide expanse of the first channel of the mighty Danube. In the mountains of South Germany rises this longest of European rivers; on its way to the Black Sea, it passes through Vienna and Budapest -- to name but some of the many cities and towns along its banks. Here, the land is flat and the current slow. This suggested wide flooding to me, but of a general, slow-moving kind, that deposits rich bottom soil that makes for good farming.

Five minutes later we passed beside an elegant trestle bridge built in 1926 and now unused. We passed over the river on a new bridge and entered Constanta County. Here there are steep banks rising 15 meters (50 feet) above the river -- the main channel. Almost immediately I could see four incomplete nuclear power plants and one completed one. In an effort to find the funds to complete the plants -- or at least some of them -- the government has sold the power to the Republic of Moldova. But can Moldova afford to pay?

The train moved on and the view quickly returned to its agricultural roots: cows, donkeys, goats, farm plots and billboards advertising cigarettes. All around us were the sights of farming in Eastern Europe: A horse-drawn cart cantering along a road lined with small trees, all the same height, the base of each painted white to the height of a meter; most trees had not budded yet but seemed pregnant with life, even from a distance. Vineyards, lines of poplars, a sea gull flying by; a mix of bare, budded, and fully leafed trees; low lying pieces of land with pooled water and reeds from last year, now tan with spikes of dryness; children playing soccer in a school yard; flocks of sheep with full coats.

On the train rushed, across the Dobrogea, the part of Romania taken from Bulgaria after WW I as a punishment for Bulgaria choosing the wrong side in that conflict.

On the right hand side of the train is the "Canalul Mortilor" which connects the Black Sea and the Danube. Since the Danube runs N-S for a great distance before it turns East again to head for the Black Sea, the canal can cut off days of sailing time.

We arrived on time at 5:30 PM and took a cab to the Palace Hotel. Not long afterwards we had dinner with staff and a city official. Afterwards, the official and I went out for a beer and he insisted on showing me back to the hotel (wisely, since I could tell from the walk back that I would have chosen the wrong way) where police were standing around the entrance as if awaiting a summons to enter.

Constanta, founded in 700 BC which is early even by American standards, is the major seaport for Romania. The County Council President, Mr. Dutu, claims it is the second largest by area in Europe and from what I could see, he is probably right.

The cranes of Constanta Harbor.

I went to the hotel restaurant to buy a beer. The person in charge was a fierce faced woman who told a man to get me my beer. It cost seven thousand lei and I gave him a ten thousand note. He gave me three thousand (20 cents) in change and I tried to give it to him as a tip. The fierce faced lady took the three one thousand lei notes out of his hand and gave me two and him one of them. She did this with an air of definitiveness that could not be denied so I meekly went to my room.

Joe