Your Money's No Good Here

Gabriel is one week old today. La multi ani! So far, so good. He's active and interested in things like simple black & white images, and he's eating like John Belushi at an all-you-can-eat cocaine and heroin buffet. Io, who has taken to calling herself "the Holstein," can barely keep up. But we're getting at least a few hours of sleep every day and each day that goes by is one day closer to Gabriel sleeping and eating on a normal schedule. With our combined brain power, I expect Gabe to be winning Nobel Prizes in a year or two, unless our combined good looks turn him into a movie star first.

I look like Tom Cruise, you know. From the side.

Is this me? You don't know.

The week has been dominated, not surprisingly, by the new baby, leaving us little time to get much else done. Gagi and I made a second attempt at securing a birth certificate only to be rebuffed yet again by government red tape.

I did, however, have an amazing success negotiating some traveler's checks. I think I wrote before in this blog about how Romania is an all-cash society. Checks simply don't exist here. When it's payday at Tania's work, someone comes by her desk and hands her a wad of bills. When Gagi goes to the government office to collect his pension, they hand him a bunch of cash. Every month when it's time to pay the power bill, a rep from the power company comes around the building and you give him a sack of money. When I was coming out here, Io told me to just bring a ton of cash. But I'm thinking What if I get mugged? What if the house burns down? So I decided to bring half cash, half traveler's checks.

I might as well have brought half cash and half dogshit as far as Romania is concerned. It turns out that traveler's checks are practically non-negotiable here. You'd have more luck spending Monopoly money. I went to three different banks -- banks! -- and all three of them refused to cash my traveler's checks. In America, you can spend traveler's checks at the grocery store. But I finally found a bank that, begrudgingly and with lots of calling the manager and photocopying my passport and glaring at me, agreed to cash some of them.

Here's the thing that's so weird about it: Romania is desperately trying to bring themselves up to the living standards of western Europe, and in particular they are trying to get their tourism industry off the ground. Which you would think wouldn't be that hard, because this country is chock-a-block with gorgeous Renaissance cathedrals, Gothic castles, medieval villages, and beautiful, untouched countryside. But what they don't seem to get is that the reason it's untouched is because it's too difficult for tourists to actually come see the place. Tourists are generally not comfortable carrying around thousands of dollars of cash on their person while in a foreign country. To make this work, you need the infrastructure in place to deal with credit cards, traveler's checks, and the rest of the financial instruments that wealthy western tourists live by. That's my Tip of the Day from me to you, Romania.

Book reviews from March:

Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. Two of my favorite authors taking on the hilarious topic of Armageddon. This is a re-read for me, and I love this book. I particularly like how you can totally tell which aspects of the book were done by Gaiman and which by Pratchett. Heartily recommended.

Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris. A few years ago I dated a girl named Erica. She was a nice person, but something about her set my teeth on edge. I could never really find a good word to express it, and eventually just started saying she was “too McSweeny’s.” McSweeny’s is a publishing house started by A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius author Dave Eggers, which publishes books in the same style as Dave Eggers’ books. These writers are literary essayists and satirists, fancying themselves modern-day Mark Twains and selling their works mostly to the “This American Life” crowd. Erica wrote in her journal every day no matter what. She kept a diary of all the books she had ever read and what she thought of them. Her apartment had one wall that was covered in pinned-up witticisms and droll quotations, many of them from her herself.

For me, this stuff is just painfully self-conscious. Whenever I read it, I can’t help but imagine the author hunched over a typewriter in a garret apartment (it’s always a typewriter, there’s a whole chapter in Me Talk Pretty One Day not about how typewriters are better than computers, but rather how the author loves typewriters and hates computers) pecking away and laughing to himself, thinking “My God, I am so sardonic.” I think the problem lies mostly in the mistaken thought that even ordinary life moments can be made immensely entertaining if related from the author’s own unique perspective, with his inimitable command of language and unmatched eye for the subsurface dry hilarity in the human condition. They can be, David Sedaris. Just not by you.

I realize the irony here, harping on McSweenyism in the midst of my own interminable writing about my life. Hell, I am criticizing a woman for keeping notes about all the books she read during a book review on my blog. I like to think that the sardonicness is now squared, and goes so far that it comes back around to being entertaining again.

But on to the book. It’s divided into two halves: the first part is about Sedaris’s youth and young adulthood in North Carolina and Manhattan. The second half is about his life as an expatriate in Paris. The first half of the book is excruciatingly McSweeny, made worse by the fact that the author is really a pretty awful person, with a family of mostly awful people, and a bunch of awful person friends. Here a chapter about how funny it was when he spent years on crystal meth and coke; there a chapter about how his mother had to put down her beloved cat after it came down with feline leukemia, and a week afterwards Sedaris and his sister mailed her a fake letter announcing that a cure for feline leukemia had been discovered. None of this stuff is funny or even really that interesting, and Sedaris is no Twain.

The person who bought me the book -- a good friend of mine who is so authentic she’s like the anti-McSweeny -- bought it for me because she thought I would find the expat stuff in the second half of the book relatable and funny, since I was getting ready to head off to Bucharest at the time. And she’s right about that. The back half is really pretty good, because here Sedaris is talking about stuff that is interesting and funny in and of itself: his experiences with culture clash and trying to learn French, and observations about Paris that are interesting to someone with an American perspective. He’s still no Twain, but now his good ear for humor is enough to carry the day.

So, in the end, I recommend half of this book.

The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss. Last year my friend Steve Heller recommended a book called The Name of the Wind. I read it and enjoyed it quite a bit, and then discovered that Steve had recommended me a book that was first in a trilogy with neither of the other two books having been written yet. Bastard! Book 2 was just released, and in an amazing display of futuristic technology I saw a blurb about it on Amazon and two minutes later I was reading the book on Io's Kindle in Bucharest. Wow. The book is a pretty compelling read, even though in the end it doesn't really advance any of the plot threads that were introduced in book 1. Definitely worth reading.

And now, it's on to Week Two of my brand-new life as a father. I haven't totally screwed up Gabriel's life yet. 935 weeks to go.

Forget it, Jake

I imagine that lots of people read this blog and think, "How cool! I think I will go have a baby in Romania!" Let me take this moment to counsel against it. The doctors we dealt with were all excellent. Our primary OB/GYN, in particular, did such an amazing job on the c-section that Io was up walking the next day and out of the hospital in two days. Pretty incredible for what is, any way you slice it (ha ha! C-section humor!), a major surgery.

Half of Io's nursing class showed up for the surgery

But there is a sharp division between the excellent doctors and surgeons, and the staff of nurses and LVNs who run the after-care portion of the experience. Our two days in the Romanian hospital were pretty awful. In their defense, the hospital is terribly understaffed and undersupplied, and there's no real specialization among the nurses. So the person who is taking care of my post-partum wife is also taking care of the person with the broken arm next door and the person with septic ulcers across the hall. Everything is in such short supply that if you have family around, your family better bring you food and water, because the hospital isn't going to -- their food and water are reserved for people who have nobody else to provide it. But regardless of the reasons, from our perspective it's just a total lack of care and attention. I have been in prisons where people are better cared for. That sounds like humorous hyperbole, but in this case it's literally true.

On top of that, the factorylike Romanian medical tradition slammed down in full force, and would not be moved. Babies are kept in a neonatal ward and nobody but the mother is allowed to see them. Every time I walked up there to try and see my son some nurse would catch me and throw me out. Tania couldn't even get onto the floor. We paid extra to put Io in a semi-private room but the nurses didn't really like people visiting there, either. They would let me stay for a bit but then they would come kick me out. I wasn't allowed to go with Io to feedings, bathings, etc, so I spent a lot of time sitting around the hospital hallway playing games on my iPhone.

We were luckier than most, though, because Io knows lots of people at the hospital. At left in this photograph is Flori, our friend and English student. She dropped by Io's room regularly and provided moral support. At right is Eliza, who was our guardian angel. Although she doesn't work in the neonatal ward, she really stepped up and helped all of us deal with the hospital and get into areas that we wouldn't normally be able to go into. I went through lots of doors marked "Access strictly prohibited!" in Eliza's wake. She also videotaped the c-section for us, which is the source of the two photos before this one. I can't thank her enough for everything she did for us.

Fortunately Io recovered very well, and we were ready to leave the hospital early. But crazy Romanian red tape conspired to keep us there. You have to register the baby at the hospital before you leave. But the hospital wouldn't accept me as Gabriel's father because our marriage certificate was in English. Despite the fact that Io and I were both there, with our IDs, telling them that the baby was ours, they told us to get the marriage certificate translated, stamped at the hospital, sent to another "sector" to be stamped by the local government in Titan (where Io lives), then returned to the hospital. This process was supposed to take three days. So although there was no medical reason for Io to be at the hospital, and in fact it was hard on the baby and everyone else for her to be there, they wanted to keep her there because of the paperwork. They gave us the distinct impression that they were willing to have Gabriel grow to adulthood right there in the hospital if necessary.

Eventually we busted out through the clever ruse of just leaving the "father" portion blank on the registration. But when we went to get the baby's birth certificate today, we ran into the same problem: they wouldn't put me down as the father until we get our marriage certificate translated -- despite the fact that it has the special stamp from the Hague, and despite the fact that we've actually been married twice, once here in Romania. And what if we weren't married? Who knows. The government office sent us to a notary, and the notary sent us to a translation service, and demanded that we not only translate the marriage certificate, but also my passport. I finally blew up. Translate my passport? Passports are all the same. Gagi just shrugged and said, "It's Romania."

For now, though, mom and baby are home, which is a huge improvement. It's a lot easier for Io to keep fed and hydrated, and everyone is available to help with Gabriel (and everyone can spend time with him). He's happier, we're happier, everybody wins. His first night at home was about what we expected -- lots of waking up for feeding and changing, but since neither of us has a day job we can just nap when he naps and it's all good. Or at least, less bad.

Having Gabriel home is amazingly great, though. We've all gotten to spend lots of time with him and it's been awesome. Which is good because, you know...eighteen more years.

BABALITY

Well, today was a big day.

We woke up bright and early and headed to the hospital. With only 27 hitches we managed to get Io in and had our OB/GYN examine her, and he told us all systems were GO for the c-section today. We got moved from room to room a couple of times, and sometimes Ioana would get whisked away for more exams and I would wait and occasionally nurses would yell at me in incomprehensible Romanian.

And then, all of the sudden and with essentially no warning, it was time for the surgery. Normally in Romania family are not allowed anywhere on the OB/GYN floor. Expectant dads, grandmas, aunts, etc. all have to wait in the stairwell until a nurse comes out and tells them what happened. The people in the photo at left were all waiting to hear news from other birthing rooms.

Luckily, because Io works at the hospital and because our OB/GYN is an awesome and forward-looking guy, we managed to negotiate me a place in the delivery room.

We got taken to another room and the nurses shooed me out while they got Io ready to be moved to the OR. They gave me a sterile smock, mask, hair-cover, and covers for my shoes and banished me to the hallway. I ended up sitting outside the OR while a bunch of nurses cleaned it and prepared it for surgery. This was probably the most nerve-wracking time for me, just sitting there with nothing to do but think of a million things that could go wrong.

The original plan was that I would be right there next to Io holding hands, which would have the added bonus of placing me on the same side of the OR "screen" as her so that I wouldn't see the actual surgery. But at the last minute the OR nurses were basically like "Get out of here" and I ended up watching from an interior doorway. But Io and I could see each other and talk to each other, and to be honest the anesthesiologist was so great that she was probably a better comfort than I would have been anyway. And we were still together and got to experience our magical moment, largely reminiscent of the chest-burster scene from Alien. Gabriel was saucy and complaining right from the get-go, which is great (especially for a c-section baby).

The nurses checked him out and cleaned him up, and then brought him over and let me hold him. I was positive I was going to like drop him or crush him or something, but nothing like that happened. They took him over and showed him to Ioana, and then put him into a little baby-house and took him off for more exams and whatnot.

BABY!

Born 3/22/11

7 pounds, 1 ounce

19 1/2 inches

I went out to the stairwell to tell Tania that everything was good. The doctor finished up the surgery and Io was transferred to the ICU for the first night (routine). We've been in to visit a couple of times, but generally the ICU nurses kick us out after 15 or 20 minutes. Io's taking some painkillers but has been in pretty good shape, considering. Tomorrow she gets some soup and yogurt and transferred out of the ICU, which means hopefully I can spend more time with her, and Gabriel can spend more time with both of us.

No Plan Survives Contact With The Enemy

Today's Forecast: No Babies

Tomorrow's Forecast: 75% Chance of Babies

The doctor told us he didn't want to deliver Gabriel today because of Io's flu. We're going in to the hospital tomorrow for an evaluation and, probably, c-section. That means I have to memorize an all-new birthday for Gabriel. On the other hand, it means we had an extra day to get stuff ready, which is good because we were a little behind after being sidelined with the flu last week. We headed out to the Source of Everything, the Auchan hipermart, and picked up the last remaining items we need. (Well, all but one, in my mind: Romanians have no concept of the diaper pail. The things simply don't exist here.)

It's still make-your-face-numb cold out here, which is pretty annoying considering it's the last week of March and officially spring. The birds obviously all think its springtime and have returned from whatever warmer pastures they fled to for the winter. I'm sure it will warm up soon. That's what I keep telling myself.

Other than that, though, things are fine. We spent the day packing enough supplies for a five-week trip down the Ganges to get us through Io's two-day stay in a fully staffed hospital. Everything is about as ready as we can make it: supplies laid in, zones for baby sleeping, changing, and bathing all marked out and ready for action. Operation: Baby Nation is all set to be put into motion. We are just short one...crucial...baby.

Following Close Behind: War, Famine, Death

They say that getting sick while in another country is the worst. On the one hand it sucks because most of the remedies and comforts you're used to aren't available, but on top of that, you supposedly get sicker because you're being exposed to germs different than the ones you've been around. I have no idea whether that's true or not, but I can tell you this: the flu I caught here has laid me lower than any illness I can recall. Tania -- or as I like to call her, Patient Zero -- came home from work sick a couple weeks ago. I thought Ioana and I had managed to avoid catching it, but it turns out I was mistaken.

My original plan to just tough it out worked for a couple of days. The in-laws picked up some non-prescription medication for me at a pharmacy (in Romania, everything health-related has to be bought in a pharmacy, even if it's over-the-counter. If you want vitamins you have to buy them at a pharmacy). They're sold in these sealed glass ampules, like something out of a Renaissance-era apothecary. You snap off the neck when you're ready to use them. They would work for a little while but didn't really control the flu. I ended up bedridden with super-high fevers and hallucinating. It was like all the joys of the DTs without having to go through all the tedious and expensive drinking first. Once I was no longer conscious to tell people I just wanted to tough it out like a cowboy, my in-laws called in a doctor.

In Romania, doctors still make house calls. Even I, as ancient as the oaks, do not remember the era of house calls in America. He had a little traveling doctor bag and everything. It was totally awesome and would have made the entire flu worth it, if he had also given me a million dollars. But it at least made the flu suck a little less. He gave me the once-over and then prescribed a regimen of six different medicines (all using Space Age pill technology) plus additional folksy treatments like hot steam inhalation.

The in-laws then went into a full-court press. Say this about Romanians: they can pump out a lot of love.* Gagi went out and bought all the medicines on the list plus a bunch of other stuff besides. Tania took two or three days off of work to stay home and play nurse, making up a medicine schedule and cooking soup, as well as providing hot-water foot treatments, heated salt packs, and I don't remember what all else. In America we would call this a spa treatment and you'd pay a zillion dollars for it. I hope Tania never finds that out. They even replaced the mattress on our hide-a-bed with a way better one.

So after four days I'm out of bed and feeling a lot better, although as you can see in the photo above that hasn't stopped the flow of foot baths and hot lemon-water. Io started coming down with the flu right after I did, but luckily has gotten a milder case, probably because the germs were exhausted from fighting my superpower USA immune system. But now Gagi has come down with it as well, and he seems to have the really bad version.

Will all this stuff end up interfering with our plans for a c-section on Monday? TUNE IN NEXT TIME TO FIND OUT!

* Pumpin' Out A Lotta Love is the name of my Barry White cover band.

Beware of the Leopard

One last week of winter. The last one, right? Spring flowers are coming up and I'm told that warmer weather is just around the corner. For now, though, we're still snowbound and it's still soup weather. Luckily, Tania is a master of soups. Pictured at right is a delicious tangy tomato broth soup that she made from scratch. Nobody in America makes soup from scratch anymore. This soup also had some bready things whose name I forget (grishka?), sort of like Romanian matzoh balls. It was sooo tasty. I realized as I was eating it that I don't eat any tangy foods here. It's all savory stuff, meats and breads and cheeses mostly. Even when we get pizza, the sauce here tends to be spicy-sweet, but not tangy the way American tomato sauce is.

We are getting perilously close to B-Day, and Io had her final pre-delivery doctor's appointment. Next time we see the doctor it'll be in the hospital. Their conversations are all in Romanian, much too fast and complicated for me to follow, so I just sit there in the office and try to look serious. At one point, the doctor wrote Io a prescription and put it on the desk. They kept chattering and I kept trying to appear interested and involved rather than like a piece of furniture. I picked up the prescription to give it a read, and immediately realized that not only was it in Romanian (of course), it's mostly medical abbreviations and is in a doctor's handwriting. But I frowned at it professionally anyway as if I were considering its contents and then put it back down.

"I concur, doctor."

We had two glorious days of sunshine and slight warming (mid-40's) before it clouded up and cooled down again. Io and I took advantage of one of them and headed out on the town.

A little window shopping, a movie, and a walk around downtown Bucharest. At right is the old palace of the king, which is now the Romanian National Art Museum.

We did some errands and tried to figure out what I need to do extend my visa, which is only good for 90 days. The typical thing tourists do is they just go to Bulgaria and then come back over the border again. But it's illegal to do it that way. The tourist visas are good for 90 days in a six-month period, you aren't supposed to get them back-to-back.

But everyone says that the border guards never check the dates on your prior visas, so that's the easiest way to extend your stay. The U.S. Embassy tells you not to do this, though, because it's against the law. I don't want any problems when I come back here in 2012 (if that's necessary), so I figured I should straighten it out legitimately.

We went to the immigration office in Bucharest and asked them what the procedures were. The immigration official laughed and said "Just go to Bulgaria." We were like, No, you're not supposed to do that, and he gave us the look you used to give the kid in school who reminded the teacher that he hadn't collected yesterday's homework. "Oh," the look said. "Americans." It turns out that the process for legitimately updating your visa is ludicrously complex, including getting a declaration from Tania saying she owns her house and I'm allowed to live here, getting my marriage certificate translated into Romanian even though we already had it stamped by an international apostille under the Hague Convention to which Romania is a signatory, bringing in my passport and Ioana's national ID card, and showing proof of health insurance that I don't have.

I hear Bulgaria is lovely this time of year.

For the rest of our walk we headed off the major boulevards and down some of the smaller side-streets in Bucharest. This city is pretty crazy. It is filled with charming old buildings that have been left vacant and are now falling apart. The picture at left is a typical Bucharest side-street. If they fixed all those places up and restored them, this place could be like another Prague. "The Paris of the East" would be back. But there's just no money anywhere right now, and young people are leaving in droves. It's really too bad.

The Romanian Atheneum, the national concert hall

So we continued on our walking tour, passing more of this great architecture, until we eventually made it to the big park in the middle of Bucharest. We took a short walk through there, and saw the first of the Spring flowers coming up. Snowdrops are everywhere now, and other wildflowers are beginning to bloom as well. It's still very cold, but I guess they know something I don't.

E.g., hat fashions

We stopped for coffee at a little hookah- and cigar-smoking cafe, and I had the most awesome thing. I wanted hot chocolate, and what I got was something called "thick chocolate," which is basically like a chocolate mousse heated up until it's liquid. You can't really drink it (it's mostly heavy cream), so you eat it with a little teaspoon. So good.

We caught a movie (Inception, still good) and then headed back. I think we were out for something like six or eight hours. All in all, a lovely day on the town. Maybe our last one as a family of two. Crazy!

So now we are hunkering down, waiting for Spring and it's harbinger, Gabriel.

Yipe.

I Put On My Robe And Wizard Hat

And now it's time for more Pointless Discursions About Romania. Today's topic: Superstition. Romania is a country pervaded by superstition. That probably makes sense given their history of vampirism and lycanthropy, but even so it's strange for an overseas visitor.

In the last presidential election, the losing candidate publicly accused the winner of casting a curse on him before a crucial debate. A recent proposal to tax Romanian witches failed to pass when lawmakers were intimidated by the witches casting hexes on them. I am constantly running afoul of Romanian superstitions. You can't take the trash out after sundown because you'll "throw out your luck." You can't give someone an even-numbered bunch of flowers because it will kill them. Your pregnant wife can't take something she didn't pay for or the baby will have birthmarks. And so on.

But then you think about America, and how we're always trying to get schools to teach children that humans were created by a magic invisible man who lives in the sky, and suddenly it doesn't seem so weird, does it? Romania's president may wear purple on Thursdays to ward off the Evil Eye, but President Reagan made crucial decisions for the United States based on astrology. The moral here is that we are all of us one beautiful people, in the sense that we are all idiots.

Not that America is alone in the magical-sky-man thing. Romania is super-religious. The last time we went to Ioana's ultrasound doctor, I counted seven religious icons on her walls (and it's not like this is a church-supported hospital, it's just a regular medical clinic). Romanian Orthodoxy is the state-sponsored religion, and there are churches every few blocks. Which is kind of inconvenient for religious Romanians, because tradition demands that you make the Sign of the Cross whenever you pass a church. That probably worked fine when everyone lived in a village with one church, but doesn't scale up very well to modern-day Bucharest with its busy streets. After months of careful observation, here are the rules regarding crossing yourself while riding the bus:

1. If the church is on your side of the bus, you have to cross, even though you pass a church every 30 seconds. If it's on the other side of the bus, you can skip it if you want to.

2. If you pretend you didn't see the church you don't have to cross.

3. Although a full cross is preferred, if you just vibrate your hand up and down in front of your chest like you have a palsy, that still counts.

4. If you start crossing and then the bus stops for traffic in front of the church, you are totally screwed. You have to keep crossing until the bus moves on. Smart crossers don't start crossing until the bus is already passing the church. Get a clue.

Will You Still Feed Me

I swore to myself that I wouldn't start any more blog entries with pictures of snow outside the bloc windows. I would like to note, though, that it dropped another inch or so of snow last night, despite the fact that it is March. Io says this is what Romanians call "the lamb's snow," the last gasp of winter before it warms up. I hope so.

Gagi's birthday was this week, so we had a couple of people over during the week to celebrate on the actual day, along with traditional Romanian mici and UFO pork chops. The dinner was lovely but the Romanian was flying much, much too fast for me to keep up with so I retired early. But it seemed like everyone else had a good time.

La multi ani!

Other than that, it's just been a regular week of being cooped up inside, running errands, and teaching ESL classes. Io is now three weeks away from her due date, which my friend Ben (who just had his first child a few months ago) says puts us officially in the "danger zone." What he doesn't realize, though, is that I have spent my life driving on the highway to the danger zone.

With warmer weather on the way and only a handful of weeks left before the baby's born, my guess is that we're going to be pretty busy now. There's stuff to get ready for the baby, and there are a bunch of people we've been meaning to go visit but just haven't gotten around to, and this is our last chance before everything goes all crazy.

Some of them are folks I'll be meeting for the first time, which is always interesting. People usually have questions about America, and somewhere in there it usually comes up that I'm a criminal prosecutor. In the States, most people hear that and think, "Well that's pretty cool," figuring that my life is basically like an episode of Law & Order every day, except that I'm way better looking than that prosecutor guy. All of which is true.

In Romania, though, things are a little different. This is a country that has not had good experiences with government and its arms of enforcement. In America being part of law enforcement means you wear the white cowboy hat and spend your time cleaning up the streets and whatever. In Romania it's more associated with late-night knocks on the door and paranoia.

Even today, twenty years after the revolution, you're talking about a law enforcement community that has to put up big posters at the police stations saying they totally aren't taking bribes any more. So telling people you're a criminal prosecutor here doesn't have quite the same cachet. On the other hand, maybe they assume that if they cross me they'll wake up in Guantanamo with a car battery hooked up to their genitals, so it probably all evens out.