ROMANIA

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In and Out of Romania | Stanciova

IN AND OUT OF ROMANIA
My experience in Romania was quite different from that in other countries -- partly because I was not chasing tubas the entire time and partly because I was in an area quite foreign to tourists. Even the villages in Croatia and Serbia that I visited were filled with visitors from other parts of the country and the world. I decide while in Split, Croatia -- and ancient port town that is ultimately too industrial and touristy for my taste -- that I want to go further east and get out of the populated areas. I find an eco-tourism site, one that puts you in more remote villages and has the locals tote you around. This still seems somewhat fabricated, so I go on the Global Ecovillages web pages to find a listing in Romania. I find Ecotopia, a group of young educated Romanians who opted to live in a small, impoverished village in order to improve the conditions there. I am intrigued. After visiting Budapest (the third time) and Eger (Hungary) in the coming week, I would go to Romania.

The morning I leave Eger is an adventure in itself. After spending all night with some accordion-toting rowdy and drunk high school graduate boys from Slovakia, I crawl out of bed at 5 am, yank the undies, pants and tops I had strung up to dry the day before and slide out the door into a cab. I get to the dingy train station at about 6 am, ready to take the train I had seen on one of the "dilapidated trains that aren't part of Eurorail" web site databases, which I was an expert at navigating by now. The woman behind the counter, large as a piano case and even less pleased to be in the station at 6 am than I, yelled at me in Hungarian when I drew a little diagram of Eger, Timisoara (Romania) and an arrow connecting them. I get yelled at in Hungarian a lot on this trip. I even wrote down the times for the train stops and intermittent destinations, but she was convinced that going from Eger to Timisoara was impossible. I had to go the opposite way -- back to Budapest -- and go to Timisoara from there. Fine, lady. When's that train? 9:30 am. Three and a half hours. It's 60 degrees and nothing is open, so I curl up onto the indoor bench.

The train ride is beautiful -- miles of sunflower fields, just like in Emir Kusturica's film Black Cat White Cat. Then we pass fields that are casualties of the drought and record temperatures. A thin Romanian in his 40s is the only one in my train car with me, and he is explaining the political history, social poverty and recent drought. Finally, we pull into Timisoara, the country's third largest city. I have spent the entire time chatting with a native about the poverty there. I opt for a hotel in the city center rather than the seedy one by the train station, which resembles a horror film cliche. I stay at a Hotel Continental, the only close hotel. It is more than twice what Lonely Planet has mentioned, but my room has a view of the huge moon, and I ate about $20 worth of free breakfast the next morning, so it was okay. There is a McDonalds in Timisoara's lively main square, among other capitalist monstrosities. I meander around for a bit, then park for a 10 cent espresso. The most interesting thing there is a giant outdoor projection of the classical performance taking place inside the main performing arts center, right in the main square. I am reminded of reading about loudspeakers set in Communist cities piping propaganda and "mind-elevating music." I actually saw such speakers in Serbia, I believe.

The next morning I prepare myself for my ride into Stanciova. Option A has three stages. For each stage I have a slip of paper. First, I get a bus to Recas, an outlying town. On this bus I use paper #1: "I am a foreigner who does not speak Romanian. I need to get off the bus at Recas, across from the blue high school. Please tap me when it is time." Then, I get in one of Romania's "informal taxis," which is a guy with a 1980 Nissan ZX or some such contraption who waits until four people want to go in a similar direction. You give him the equivalent of a quarter, hop in, and off you go. From there, I either have to walk the 17 km of hilly gravel roads into Stanciova or wait for a horse cart. The horse cart takes 1.5 hours to go from Recas to Stanciova. Option B is to hail a cab in Timisoara. I opt for B. This also requires a sign, which I print in big letters on paper from the hotel: "Merg la Stanciova, comuna Recas. Pot sa ofer maximum 500,000 lei." I'm going to Stanciova by way of Recas. I can offer at most 500,000 lei. I plaster this to the windows of taxi cabs until one unwitting fellow waves me in. I soon found that this is a very effective way to get around Europe, particularly if you can describe your destination in pictures. The ride is an Indian Jones movie, but thankfully we run into my hosts on the way. If they hadn't been there, I would have been in some trouble, as the road (using the term loosely) into the village looked like a path no nowhere. I gave the poor driver 800,000 lei out of guilt, as it took about an hour to get there and the entire gravel road was one giant speed bump.

Actually, the train out of Stanciova is an equal adventure. With mud-caked shoes, pants, even hands and a seven-day stink going, I board the train to Hungary, planning to stop in the southeastern area (near Romania) supposedly chock full of gypsy goodness. I had to throw my backpack through the window and then hop on I was so late, thanks to a circuitous cab ride. Apparently my way of pronouncing "train station" sounds too much like "take me to the outskirts of town, then yell at me." I felt odd in a train car with a beautiful girl dressed up to meet her boyfriend. I had been wearing the same clothes for six days. Unfortunately, the train I take unhooks into two sections a few miles into Hungary, and the back half, which I am in, takes another route (this happened to me a few times in Europe -- watch it! It is also not written on the train schedules, if you can find one of those at all). Before I know it, we are pulling into Budapest. I already had two stays here under my belt and another one coming (Balkan show), so I decided to take the next train to Gyor, a town in the northeast someone had recommended.

By the time we get close it is dark, and there are not many people on the train. We finally hit a larger destination and I ask the girls in my car if this is Gyor. They dunno. I ask the conductors -- not only do they dunno, they dunno what on earth I am saying to them. I am not about to hop off into the dark, so I sit down. We pass the GYOR sign as well pull out. Doh. I get ready to disembark at the next stop, which turns out to be nothing more than a lamppost screwed into a bench (the two girls I was traveling with are thrown out here amongst much fanfare, as they have no visas and are Australian). I sit down again. Before I know it, we are approaching Vienna, and Aryan boys that must have been named Hans and Heinrich ask to see my passport. So much for Hungary. Things worked out for the best. I am waiting behind a group of Americans at an ATM machine and shout, "I'm so sick of you damn American tourists!" One of them knows the street I grew up on. We spend four hours having coffee and talking about Steinway pianos, then meet up later with one of his friends, a Santa meets P.T. Barnum Swedish billionaire who plays the clarinet. Of course, we exchange music notes.

STANCIOVA
The village itself is browner and poorer than I imagined -- hit hard by the drought. There is a large Serbian population among the 600 or so inhabitants, so there is a Serbian Orthodox church, and many of the rustic village homes have Cyrillic family names tiled into their walls. I stay with Teodora, a young girl with amazing generosity and energy who unfortunately spends most of my time there in a neighboring village. The night before she leaves we go through my new CDs, and because she has no CD player, she sings me the songs on my Maria Tanase (1930s Romanian singer) disc -- curses, love gone wrong, bad dowries that include mosquito-infested pillows. She tells me what they all mean. She says that before modernity encroached upon their traditional ways of life, people often sat around and sang or read or just talked -- something that doesn't happen enough anywhere anymore (in our concurring opinions). After she goes, her mother takes care of me -- literally -- as I get sick within two days, then it rains for five days straight.

Their home is separated into three small structures made of earth and plaster. It stays amazingly cool in the 95 degree heat. One is the main home, with a small bedroom and a main room. Another structure the size of a large pantry is the kitchen and bath area, though the bath is basically a red bucket that you squat over and try not to make a splashy mess. One pot of hot water for two pots well water. When you are done you have to hand the soapy water to the mother because you can't just throw it into the garden where the vegetables grow. Over this structure is a barrell painted black with a hose hanging down that usually serves as the shower. The black paint makes the water in the barrell warm. I think it is empty due to the drought. I imagine the difficulty in showering like this in the snowy winters, which they do, and begin to understand why people in many countries and centuries showered once per month, or even per year. The final structure is a wood slat outhouse, where you sprinkle sawdust to make compost. This is about 30 feet from the main home, so when it pours rain for six days straight and it is not absolutely necessary to use it, there is a small farm stall-like room next to the main house with a few small buckets inside. You do the math.

The town had not one shower, no running water, sparse electricity, one telephone and one main building for school. There was, however, internet service there. The people I stayed with ran this school and organized ways to help the town. Their current goals were to put in a tile shower and to improve the school situation. When they did not teach it, it didn't exist. Teodora, the girl I had communicated with over e-mail, had recently gotten the cheese lady to put tile into the small room where she makes the cheese for sanitary reasons. Visiting her home is one of the highlights. I wish I had gotten a picture, but I am shy and it probably would not have captured it. Her home is across the village, and Teodora and I visit her late at night. We walk through her gate into a small open courtyard. The village is lit by a massive full moon, which shines through the trees and trellaces of grape vines that surround the courtyard and hang over my head. A small room to the right opens and I see large blocks of freshly made cheese hanging from strings. In front of me, horses eat from a tipped cart of hay and geese run in front of them to a stable at the left. As most of the people in town have never seen a foreigner, the woman looks at me strangely as she gives us our cheese, plus two chunks to eat on the way home.

I must say the food I have here is some of the best I have ever eaten. Trellaces between the two adjacent homes where I spend my time (the other houses a young family) are covered with grape vines that the mother turns into fresh juice. She also makes eggplant spread, rice with milk and cherry preserves, tomatoes grilled on the ground outside, pasta with walnuts and cocoa (amazing!), boiled fruit compote drink (one teaspoon of sugar per cup of boiled fruit), tea from picked flowers (yellow ones called "sunatoare," which I haven't had anyone translate yet), and we get homemade cheese and bread from the locals. They salt, freeze, pickle and slow cool (i.e., wrap hot tomato sauce jars in clothes to let it cool slowly. It keeps it from going bad) many things here, as winters are harsh and there is not much opportunity to get into town -- even in nice weather it is a 1.5 hour trip.

One of the late nights I am there the group goes to make plum brandy, a staple all over the Balkans. The Slavs call it slivocice (SHLEE-voh-veet-say) and would put it in their cereal if it didn't make the corn flakes soggy. I awoke early the next morning to a stench so bad I was sure I would be ill if I inhaled. Not nauseus ill, like typhus ill. I was sure it was a pile of dead horses, but alas it was fermentation gone wild. No wonder that stuff puts a fire in your belly. Other villagers have geese and sheep, which are collected by a shepherd in the morning and returned to the owners in the afternoon. Horsecarts come and go during the day, and old women in scarves spend hours chattering on uneven benches in front of their homes. I'm sure they will collapse, but they never do. I am addicted to these vanilla wafers and go often to the only market  -- a small room that opens when the family feels like it, though you can always just knock. Pigs wander through the dirt street, and I record them with my mini-disc player. Then the geese. Then the bees, then Cindy the neighbor's cat. I miss music and decide to go back to Budapest.

The school bus comes once a week when school is not in session to pick up the villagers and take them into Recas for their shopping. I also went in once to visit Timisoara's folklore museum and got a private tour. The morning I leave, however, is the first day of school. This bleak Monday the bus is packed with dirt-caked school children in holey clothes and an even more dirt-caked Kristin, filthy from the mud streets and lack of showering. I look down at my shoes and feel quite at home. As I had experienced earlier, none of the local adults want to sit next to me -- they are suspicious or shy -- so I sit with an empty seat next to me on this crammed bus, feeling a bit silly. Finally, the town drunk takes the seat. I know he is the town drunk, because he was pointed out to me a few mornings. The tiny bar in the village opens from 9 to 10 each morning to satisfy the drunkards, then closes till evening. The bar is by the school and telephone, so there he sits with his cohorts, downing red wine in a plastic cup. In any case, here he sits, next to me now. His bulbous fingers are calloused and reddish brown, and they play with a button on his weathered blue coat jacket, then fold themselves on the seat in front of us. He pulls out a wallet, then a white business card. I am intrigued. He turns to me, this drunk, and says in amazing English, "I can't wait to get out of this dump." He tells me his plans for the future, to come to California. Okay, I think. The business card he hands me is his relatives'. They live in Laguna Niguel, only minutes from my folks. It's a weird world.

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