Andrei and Radu live in Iasi. They go to University there --- actually I think Radu has got out already --- and have a party pad which never stops.

I took the train to Iasi to see Radu and Andrei Hritcu, who once lived in Cupertino. This is Radu. I got this picture off gay.com. Hi Radu, write to me sometime, how's things?

A traditional Dutch breakfast in Iasi ...

... and a wooden shoe. Does Iasi have Solvang as a sister city?

Propping up a tree.

Andrei had my camera most of the time I was in Iasi. This is a picture of me and Radu therefore.

Here are the things you can't do in Iasi.

Here is a billboard you can't put in America.

These Atlantes wouldn't fly either unless on a theater in the 1930's, which in any case by now would be torn down to become a condominium or perhaps a Barnes and Noble atrocity or maybe Ebenezer's Storefront Baptist Church.

Touring

I think this might have been art ...

... or taxidermy.

Definitely art.

As noted, it is a tourist attraction if it has scaffolding.

Andrei took this picture looking down into the bar of a restaurant we were in.

Radu again. My friend Rick and I were having an argument or discussion about how well Radu was endowed. Rick didn't think there was anything special. I could go either way. Radu carries himself before the camera with assurance, but he sometimes lacks that deep, unassailable self-confidence which men with exceedingly large penises have.

Andrei.

Restaurant decor. I often try to reason by analogy, what an artifact like this must represent to Andrei (age 20) compared to me (age 53). It is true that the generational difference between us is foreshortened, owing to Romania's enforced technological and cultural retardation during the Communist era. Both of us, for example, remember that as very small children, we got to watch only a small number of TV stations that broadcast for limited hours each day and mostly showed boring propaganda, even though for me that was 1956 and for him it was 1989. But what of this old phonograph with its glorious brass horn? There was a more modest example in the house I grew up in, on the shelf of a bedroom closet. There was a manual coffee grinder up there, too, which I would really like to know what happened to because it would be useful when the power goes out up here. Anyway, doing the math, as an adult, when decades don't seem incomprehensibly long — centuries are getting to feel like you could hold them in two hands, for that matter — I am sure my mother regarded this as demonstrably out of date junk — like you would think of a PowerPC — as opposed to any kind of collectible, a word which was not used during the 1950's. You have to watch anachronistic words. I cringed when Larry McMurtry let one of the ranch hands in "Brokeback Mountain" use the phrase "bottom line". That is so not a cowboy word, unless it refers to some part of a show animal that the Wall Street folk were appropriating ironically, like "withers" or "steroids". If they could have thought in terms of the "bottom line" they could have moved to Denver and been done with it. So, yeah, Victrolas. Maybe they were using it in Iasi in 1980.

Apartment decor.

Andrei took lots of photos of his cat ...

... and other white haired critters.

Stef.

Mihaela.

Andrei.

Andrei at his computer. People look entirely different when they are watching their computers than when they are watching TV. Their arms are extended.

Their arms are not extended. Romanian TV in 2005 offers all the usual choices. Dubbed cop shows. MTV. You could probably watch the Army-McCarthy hearings if you knew where to tune it. I don't suppose America feels any more foreign to Mihaela than it does to me. It is ubiquitous and it is fictional and it wears into your brain without ever feeling real.

This is what happens in Mac OS X if you inadvertently rename your system folder to "System Folder" like it used to be called in OS 9. A kernel panic. When I found out what happened, I felt about the same way I used to feel about JCL errors: not threatened, self-esteem wise. Wings-Stay-On-Wings-Fall-Off. Whoever let this through at Apple is a total moron and so are all the testers and design reviewers and Steve Jobs. Speaking of linguistic anachronism: JCL stopped being used about the time self-esteem became popular.

Stef. There can be no question about his manhood. Look at that unassailably goofy smile. He hasn't heard the words "Is that all I get?" since the third grade.

Andrei. We were in a Nautical Themed coffee house. "Does your mother still hang out at dockside bars?"

Cat and sheets.

Sergei is the name of the cat.

Andrei.

Closer.

You can't believe how many pictures he took of Sorina.

At Mario's.

Wine Stewards are not supposed to look at the bottle as if they were reading a decal that said "This End Up."

Cabbage has litmus in it and if you acidify it it turns pink.

Stef.

Brown is the color of flavor.

I suppose Andrei took this picture, I don't know what he did to induce that grimace...

... or this one.

My expressions are always well modulated or inhibited.

Andrei and Stef. I wonder why boys stop putting each other in headlocks as they get older?

I shall have to ask what the portent of that t shirt is

Back at the Dutch breakfast place on the morning I left.

It's hard to take a picture of Andrei with his eyes fully open. Here he looks like a lounge singer. But he is just pretending, Radu is the one who really acts like this. Andrei is so loyal and so faithful, you would expect him to lay siege to Tyre for Sorina rather than to befriend any further parties on Radu's orange sheets. Actually the Eastern Church were largely on the other side of that one — well, Lucky Pierre.

Waving goodbye as I set off on a fairly ill-planned trip back to California.

On to Ukraine, Poland and Slovakia