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.
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