{"id":92,"date":"2017-11-04T11:35:24","date_gmt":"2017-11-04T11:35:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/apresmidi.net\/eee2017\/log\/?p=92"},"modified":"2017-11-04T11:35:24","modified_gmt":"2017-11-04T11:35:24","slug":"meanwhile-in-romania","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/apresmidi.net\/eee2017\/log\/2017\/11\/04\/meanwhile-in-romania\/","title":{"rendered":"Meanwhile, in Romania…"},"content":{"rendered":"

Friday, I flew to Romania. \u00a0Well, not quite.<\/em><\/p>\n

You would think by now, I know how to schedule connections — loosely — but somehow I talked myself into allowing only an hour and five minutes to go from the Air Berlin flight to Vienna, to an Austrian Air flight to Bucharest. \u00a0The Air Berlin flight was on time, and I would have made it, except that in Berlin, the check-in lady said that my 11-kilo carry-on luggage was too far over the limit of 8 kilos, and would have to be checked. \u00a0I never understand what they are driving at. \u00a0Does luggage in the hold have less mass than luggage in the overhead rack, and thereby lower the takeoff weight? \u00a0I should have argued, should have put everything that would fit into my vest pockets (I have done this before on British Midlands) because things carried on your person count no more than atmospheric helium. \u00a0But I was being naive and not considering that an hour later, when I got to the end of the flight, it would be half again as long before my suitcase trundled around on the carousel, and by that time, boarding to the flight to Romania had closed.<\/em><\/p>\n

I lingered in the airport a while, texting with Dave and talking to various Austrian Airlines and Tourist people. \u00a0They would not give me credit for the flight not taken, and they wouldn’t give any discounts on the remaining flights that day. \u00a0Proceeding to Bucharest any time before Saturday afternoon would have been around 350 Euros, but going on Saturday night about half that, and Dave found a hotel for 51 euros, so the cheapest recovery was to spend the night in Vienna and go to the Natural History Museum in the morning and everything in Romania gets pushed a day into the future. \u00a0Two days, since my friend in Budapest insists I stay with his family two nights because he is planning a barbecue and inviting his parents.<\/em><\/p>\n

So I chose Vienna. \u00a0The only other good thing about the airport was a little baby who was full-on break-dancing. \u00a0Shoulder spinning and all that. \u00a0I mean baby, too, when he was done, he crawled back to his mama on hands and knees. \u00a0He was white, if that’s part of the story.<\/em><\/p>\n

I took the OBB to the “Urban Resort”. \u00a0That hotel is a ways from downtown, near the Palace of Sch\u00f6nbrunn, but easily reachable using the same train ticket on the tram that takes you on the airport train to Vienna Mitte. \u00a0It’s also a block from a perfect little homely restaurant where the menu is written by hand and translated by the waitress because you probably couldn’t read her handwriting anyway. \u00a0I had schnitzel soup, which is like wonton soup except you started with a long wonton and then sliced it. \u00a0Some reviewers call it Duke’s Inn and some call it Herzog’s Wirtshaus but it has a good reputation. \u00a0Most of the customers seemed to be from the neighborhood.<\/em><\/p>\n

In the morning I went to visit the Venus of Willendorf. \u00a0She lives in a darkened, downlit, room with a couple of other paleolithic period pieces. \u00a0The room is in the center of one of the world’s great natural history museums. \u00a0You need days to even glance into all the rooms, but I only had a few hours. \u00a0The ground floor is a massive collection of rocks, displayed mostly on rows on shelves but a few of the major ones free standing or in glass cases on the walls. \u00a0I like the videos of the breakup of Gondwanaland and Laurasia, and the continents that preceded them and followed them. \u00a0It’s hard to imagine the amount of data that has been gathered over the centuries, to deduce this comprehensible model, sorting out “the leaves of a library that has been repeatedly looted and burnt,” as H.G. Wells put it.<\/em><\/p>\n

The dinosaurs in the dinosaur room are now animatronic. \u00a0The Venus of Willendorf has a pixellated head, in the modern style. \u00a0Nobody cares about genitals any more but they do pay obeisance to an antique vision of privacy, violated from every angle a thousand times a minute. \u00a0The moderns would also think she could stand to lose some weight, but such voluptuousness was quite a luxury where she was brought up.<\/em><\/p>\n

The interpretations of ancient artifacts always educates you as to your own times. \u00a0When I was visiting Natural History Museums as a child, the collections of broken tools that seem to gather around sites of human habitation (such as your garage) were described as being, of course, gifts to the gods; today they are known to be storage areas for recycling.<\/em><\/p>\n

Nobody in museums says the obvious about the function of human images such as Venus, even though the art world is starting to cotton to it. \u00a0We had seen a big room of teenage drawings of Evgenij Kozlov, in the Venezia Biennale of 2013, which were all of naked women doing things to him and he was pretty frank, in the museum cards, about what he used the drawing process for.<\/em><\/p>\n

Or maybe Venus has a knit cap that she has pulled down over her head for a bank job. \u00a0In some Mad Max future that explanation will make the most sense. \u00a0Anyway, I went back to the airport and got on a TAROM plane to Bucharest.<\/em><\/p>\n

My friend Bogdan was at the airport. \u00a0<\/em>Also at the airport, was a white van that said, “Nanoindentation scratch and tribology testers”. (<\/em>That’s English, I think.)<\/em><\/p>\n

Dave and I had met Bogdan during the series of turn-of-the-century parties that Justin and Spitkiss organized. \u00a0He was one of the first to give up on the American Empire as being no place to build a future. \u00a0Eventually, they almost all left, to Germany, Colombia, Romania…even Justin has permanent residency in Sweden now, though his stuff is at our house. \u00a0This is what the Americans wanted, right? \u00a0Doctors, lawyers, engineers, all working for other people?<\/em><\/p>\n

There is a cadre of people you really owe something to. \u00a0Family, and a few people you have decided are like family. \u00a0And just beyond that curtilage lie all these people who are really interesting, but you are not able to do a lot of good for them in life, beyond wish them the best, and keep in touch so that they can tell you of their accomplishments, and those of their kids, and dogs, and the autonomous procedures they have specified so that they may write themselves.<\/em><\/p>\n

Such is my regard for the people I met fifteen years ago at Justin’s parties at our house, who have scattered to Romania, Germany, Colombia…I always feel a bit like a fifth wheel when I visit but they are so entertaining.<\/em><\/p>\n

Bogdan and I talked until about two in the morning and then continued on Sunday. \u00a0His parents came for the barbecue on Sunday afternoon. \u00a0We didn’t talk so late on Sunday night because he and Lumi have work in the morning. But they need to get used to irregular sleep hours, because a baby will join their household shortly.<\/em><\/p>\n

On Monday morning, as I was preparing to go to Gara de Nord for a train to Iasi, a deus ex machina descended in the form of a WhatsApp conversation that revealed that Stef was in Bucharest and heading home to Iasi that minute. So instead of going to the train station, I took a taxi to the parking lot of the Metro Voluntari station and got in Stef’s car and he drove 6 hours to Iasi, and we talked the whole way.<\/em><\/p>\n

I can’t possibly reproduce these conversations. \u00a0If there is anything we said that needs to be made public, they will post them on their facebook pages. \u00a0I know it is the fashion to rate your friends as if they were restaurants and describe them to the public, but we are not that far from the era of death squads and I’m not sure I want to give Richard Spencer or the Iron Guards any easy information.<\/em><\/p>\n

Iasi is in the grip of a baby boom. \u00a0Everybody that grew up together there — Andrei, Radu, Butza, Stef — is about to become a dad. \u00a0They don’t go out to clubs as a way of entertaining now, since their wives aren’t drinking, and in the case of Andrei, there is already a tiny feisty baby in the house to be more entertaining than anything that happens in college town brew pubs. \u00a0I stayed in Iasi until Thursday night. \u00a0The downside of this uplifting visit, is that I didn’t get to see my friends in Craiova. \u00a0Next time. \u00a0Having lost two days already — one in Vienna, and the plan to stay one night at Bogdan’s was dumb to begin with — I see these guys once every two years at most, really it should be more than brunch.<\/em><\/p>\n

Nothing terribly eventful happened. \u00a0Iasi is the Real Romania. \u00a0I tagged along to a car dealership where Stef had something done to his car. \u00a0It was flashy. \u00a0There is a restaurant upstairs. \u00a0We went to see the house he is having built in a new suburb. \u00a0Everything is brick. \u00a0No earthquakes there. \u00a0We spent an hour at a tax office where Roxana had to file a form stating that she wasn’t a bad person. \u00a0One day we had Papanaci at Restaurant Oscar for dessert. Never order that with less than three people. \u00a0It’s like a gulab jamun without kewra syrup but replaced with one cowful of cream and a bale of sugar just because.<\/em><\/p>\n

Stef got approached by a policeman in a park one afternoon, who explained that even though they knew that all the No Dogs Allowed signs were gone from the park, he was still supposed to know not to take his dog there. \u00a0There’s a reason why the best cynical authors hail from Eastern Europe.<\/em><\/p>\n

I wrote some post cards. \u00a0Fanel took me around town one afternoon, including a market underneath a bridge where grape growers were selling large numbers of grapes to home wine makers. \u00a0It is still the case that most of the wine I drink in Romania comes from two liter coke bottles, although Bogdan did buy some bottles at a shop, before the barbecue. \u00a0He and his parents aren’t pregnant, after all. \u00a0All shopping trips in Romania are conducted the way civilized people shop: one store, one product. \u00a0Supermarkets are barbarian. \u00a0My favorite store in Bucharest was the bakery. \u00a0No name, a line out the door. \u00a0Fantastic breads. \u00a0I got a pretzel for a leu, about a quarter, US. \u00a0I had been feeling like a pretzel since the airport in Vienna, except I could not justify paying 3 euros 50 for it. \u00a0I have ongoing discussions about this with people who think I should be rich enough to not worry about paying 4 dollars US for a pretzel. \u00a0I don’t see it this way. \u00a0Selling food for that much money is a sin, and using your wealth to participate in sin is like buying an indulgence. \u00a0It was 500 years ago this Halloween, that it was most forcefully pointed out, how wrong this is.<\/em><\/p>\n

Thursday night, I got on a train to Budapest. \u00a0Everyone is helpful in these projects. \u00a0It was uneventful, unlike some of the other travel connections this trip. \u00a0The train change in Deva, a small Transylvanian town, was gray. \u00a0Much time to look at concrete disintegrate.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Friday, I flew to Romania. \u00a0Well, not quite. You would think by now, I know how to schedule connections — loosely — but somehow I talked myself into allowing only an hour and five minutes to go from the Air Berlin flight to Vienna, to an Austrian Air flight to Bucharest. \u00a0The Air Berlin flight … Continue reading Meanwhile, in Romania…<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/apresmidi.net\/eee2017\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/apresmidi.net\/eee2017\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/apresmidi.net\/eee2017\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apresmidi.net\/eee2017\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apresmidi.net\/eee2017\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=92"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/apresmidi.net\/eee2017\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":93,"href":"https:\/\/apresmidi.net\/eee2017\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92\/revisions\/93"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/apresmidi.net\/eee2017\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=92"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apresmidi.net\/eee2017\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=92"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apresmidi.net\/eee2017\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=92"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}