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abandoned in Bucharest
Saturday, March 31 2018
location: room 311, MS Joy, docked on the Danube River near Giurgiu, Romania
Our boat was docked in Giurgiu, Romania, and the plan was for Gretchen and me to ride one of the excursion buses to the Romanian capital of Bucharest. The road to Bucharest was smooth and straight, but it passed through crumbling villages and occasional tracts of squalor that reminded one of the Third World (which Romania may be considered part of). Some people still relied on horses for transportation and farm labor, and it had nothing to do with religious strictures. Still, there were also scenes of great beauty on the road to Bucharest, such as the vast tracts of rolling treeless plains, bright green with the fresh grass of springtime. But as we neared Bucharest, we'd see the occasional fruits of communist-era urban planning. Most of these took the form of brutalist apartment blocks, the constituent concrete often discolored or delaminating. Unlike brick and masonry, concrete does not age well.
The bus dropped us off in front of the gorgeous CEC 150 Bank and from there we headed east, briefly checking out a gloomy little pocket-sized monestary/church (44.431797N, 26.098855E, it was having services) and continuing to a pedestrian mall called Strada Lipscani. The main thing Gretchen wanted to check out there was big multi-floor bookstore called Cărtureşti Carusel. They had a bathroom, which was nice, and they also had WiFi, though we'd been finding open WiFi networks in random places everywhere we'd gone.
A preliminary errand involved finding a money changer so we could have Romanian currency (the denomination is leu). As walked down side streets (and checked out an indoor fleamarket featuring wind-up acoustic record players, among other things), we noticed piles of melting snow, indicating Bucharest had recently been hit by a snow storm. Yet today was on track to be the warmest so far of this vacation, with highs in the 70s.
Both a scene in a period movie and some sort of advertisement were being independently filmed at different locations on the Bucharest streets. Based on the clothing and a vehicular prop, the period movie seemed set in the 1940s. Perhaps it was about Nicolæ Ceauşescu's rise to power; the man featured in a poster being held by someone in period attire up in a balcony over the scene looked like a young Ceauşescu.
Gretchen had some destinations in mind, the first being some cool bar where one had to enter from the back or the side or something. But we got there and found it closed and under construction. But on Amazei Street, the little Soup Up! restaurant was open. It was staffed by an unusually handsome young man with penetrating blue eyes, English fluency, and actual cheekbones. Of late, at least, the restaurant is entirely vegan, and after trying some samples, we purchased two soups and two non-soups (mine was a pasta with broccoli). I was delighted to find hot pepper flakes to sprinkle on my pasta and into my soup; one can never expect such a condiment in a European restaurant. Our dreamy soup man said he would soon be moving to London to see how things would go for him there, explaining that his plan was to keep moving around while it made sense to do so. It was the same sentiment we'd heard expressed by a waiter at Restaurare, that vegan restaurant in Tulum, Mexico.
From there we walked down a street featuring a lot of graffiti (which seems to be tolerated and celebrated more in Eastern Europe than in the United States). And then, after a fair amount of additional walking, we'd finally made it to a place from which we could clearly see the Palace of the Parliament, an imposing, oversized structure built by Nicolæ Ceauşescu in the 1970s in imitation of buildings in Pyongyang, North Korea (I kid you not). It has a more timeless appearance than something built in the 1980s usually has. This is because it is made of hewn stone and not poured concrete. There was a fair happening at the park just north of the palace, and Gretchen took the opportunity to buy some very sour grapefruit juice.
Our last intended destination in Bucharest was a rooftop bar in Old Town called Upstairs Rooftop. Getting there required climbing up five floors by stairway. Along the way, there were words of encouragement stenciled in English onto the risers of some of the steps. At the top, we found a group of boisterous men wearing kilts and chatting in some mysterious language (that occasionally included passages of English). We'd seen lots of men in kilts back in Budapest, and that turned out to be because Hungary was playing against Scotland in a soccer matchup. Who these kilt-wearers were and why was less clear. We didn't have a lot of time, so Gretchen ordered us both beers, a lager called Ciuc. It was pretty good, similar to a Becks. The view from Upstairs Rooftop isn't all that great despite being so high up, though there is a spectacular copper roof nearby.
Back down on the street, Gretchen needed to piss (and we hadn't found the bathrooms at Upstairs Rooftop). Being somewhat obsessive-compulsive, Gretchen also wanted to leave Romania with as little Romanian currency as possible. So we ducked into a coffee shop and I bought an espresso while Gretchen went to the bathroom. When she came out, she proceeded to buy everything she could with the Romanian currency remaining, including a hard apple cider and a peach-flavored bottle of sweet tea. Then it was off to the place where we'd been dropped off in front of that beautiful bank that had somehow survived Nicolæ Ceauşescu. There it was, our greenish-grey bus, but as we were crossing the street to get to it, it pulled away and disappeared! "Wait, was that our bus?" Gretchen asked. I was pretty sure it was. And if it wasn't our bus, why weren't there any of the people from our boat waiting at the pickup spot? We'd been told that the bus couldn't technically park at the pick-up spot and that we should be on-time for our pickup. But in this case, despite Gretchen's maddening tendency to push each and every limit, we'd only been about ninety seconds late.
Not knowing what else to do, we waited for a few minutes hoping that the bus would circle around and come back to pick up any stragglers (which, in this case, was just us). But the bus never returned. We were stranded in Bucharest, about 40 miles from the Danube and the MS Joy.
After a little squabbling about what action to take, it was decided that I should wait in front of the bank in case the bus returned (unlikely) while Gretchen would go find some WiFi access so she could contact Dirk, the tour director (we had no cellphone service in Europe, but we could send instant messages if we could get internet access).
At least the weather was nice, though I felt miserable as I sat there on the curb waiting, with no idea how long Gretchen would take to perform whatever magic she needed to perform. Anxiety was worsening my acid reflux, and I could even imagine vomiting. The sun was going down, providing larger and larger patches of shade for me to retreat into as a couple gardeners toiled beyond a fence behind me.
More time passed, and I wondered what I'd do if Gretchen had walked in front a cement truck and been flattened. Nobody would know where I was to contact me. I half heartedly tried to find a WiFi hotspot and even ventured some distance towards Strada Lipscani, but immediately retreated back to where Gretchen would go to find me.
Mercifully, Gretchen finally reappeared seeming flustered but relieved. She'd returned to that coffee shop where I'd gotten that espresso and we'd used the bathroom and explained the situation to the guy working there. She also managed to contact Dirk on the MS Joy. The coffee shop guy recommended his friend who drives something of a gypsy cab, and that was soon dispatched to our pickup spot. Meanwhile Dirk had contacted out bus and told them to coordinate with our cab driver so we could catch up to them. What disaster, but at least we wouldn't be sleeping tonight on a cot in the (presumably still unstaffed) American embassy.
Our cab driver could speak almost no English, but somehow he got across the idea that we would be meeting up with our bus somewhere. Occasionally he'd do his best to point something out, such as a university or a green energy business. He also felt it important that we know that the government in Romania is completely corrupt. Though we were driving past the many artifacts of Romania's rich history of corruption, in this case he was referring to the present government. Every now and then the driver would take a call on his phone, presumably coordinating with the driver for our wayward tour bus. Though a Romance language, Romanian was proving completely impenetrable, though it was clear that its word for "yes" was "da," perhaps a borrowing from a Slavic language (although there are other theories). It was common for our driver to say "da" many times in a row for emphasis, which is easier in English with the word "yeah" than the word "yes."
Gretchen asked me what I would've done in this situation had she not been around. "I would've returned to the bus five minutes early, and it wouldn't've happened," I replied. I then went on to explain that when the shit goes down, I'm perfectly willing to solicit help from strangers, uncomfortable as it makes me. If one drives marginal cars (as I've done for much of my adult life), one gets used to asking for jump starts and even knocking on doors.
Bucharest is a terribly-designed city, and it took a good 20 minutes to catch up to our bus, which we found pulled over on the side somewhere in the city's outskirts. It was difficult to tell what our cab driver was charging us for our ride, but Gretchen gave him $20 in American currency. When we got on our bus, we were met with the sort of chill one would expect from a German-heavy group who had been pulled over on the side of the road with nothing to do for a half hour all because of a tardy American couple.
Our bus would be meeting the MS Joy further down the Danube at Oltenița. The road there passed through villages that looked a bit more prosperous than the ones we'd seen on the road from Giurgiu. There were still the occasional horse-drawn wagon, piles of trash stirred into the soil, and wild dogs looking for food in agricultural fields. Aside from them, the only wildlife in evidence was magpies and crows.
Back on the boat, I wasn't really in the mood to sit through a whole elaborate dinner in the main dining room, especially with all the stank-eye Germans miffed about our tardiness earlier today. So we dined in Arthurs. The options there are fewer, but the turnaround is faster. I ordered the "chili con carne," which was way too tomatoey and vinegary for my tastes.
Back in our room, Gretchen and I watched the 2016 Ghostbusters remake featuring all-women ghostbusting. I was only awake for the first forty minutes or so, before the diphenhydramine I'd taken kicked had a chance to kick in. That part was often hilarious. [Later Gretchen would tell me that the rest of the movie, with all its tedious action scenes and special effects, wasn't so great.]
Concrete ages poorly in Romania.
Gretchen waits in line, with the Palace of the Parliament in the background.
Me with Gretchen at Upstairs Rooftop.
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