I Come to the Land of the Ice and Snow

Well, here we are finally: Romania. Behind the Iron Curtain. I flew in yesterday through a moderate snowstorm, got back to the bloc, and collapsed for a few hours. Romania is a winter wonderland. It's been a long time since I lived in snowy conditions. So far it's fine. The cold doesn't bother me that much even though the lows have been in the teens. It's been snowing off and on ever since I got here and shows no real sign of letting up.

The apartment is kept pretty warm, though, which is a pleasant surprise given how expensive electricity is here. I guess heating oil is cheaper. So far it's been a pretty relaxed couple of days. Coming back to the Romanian diet actually feels sort of homey in a weird way. My Romanian has gotten slightly better since I left, and Tania (Io's mom) has gotten a lot better at English, so communication has generally been fine. Gagi (her stepdad) and I get by mostly through pantomime and our tiny stock of words we know in each others' language. In a typical day, Tania goes to work and Io goes either to class or to work at the hospital, leaving Gagi and I alone. It'll be interesting to see how this communication goes.

Not too much to report from today. We were supposed to run errands during the day but I fell asleep due to jet lag, and we ended up doing abbreviated errands in the evening. We hit Selgros, one of the Romanian Wal-Mart-style hipermarts, where I picked up this saucy hat as well as some winter boots. Gagi's going to lend me a winter coat, and I bought gloves in the Carpathian mountains last time I was here, so I think I'm now set for winter.

Tomorrow the big event is that Tania is making schnitzel for dinner, and apparently I'm supposed to compare it to Io's schnitzel and decide which one is best. Sounds like a no-win scenario to me. So I may be dead before I get a chance to write again. If so, know that I died with a jaunty hat on my head and a belly full of schnitzel. Can anyone really ask for more?

2/3rds of the way there!

England Prevails

So, here we are in Romania.

Wait a minute: THIS isn't Romania! This is LONDON. Yeah, my flight out of Los Angeles left 2 1/2 hours late, which meant no way to make my connection to Bucharest, and the next flight isn't until tomorrow. British Airways and I are no longer BFFs. In their defense, though, they gave me a $9 voucher for dinner at LAX -- enough to cover half the cost of a salad and glass of water, and really anyone who can't get by on half a salad is a wuss. Do you think people ate more than half a salad during the Great Depression? Because I will tell you: no, they did not. They maybe got a third of a salad, and they were happy.

So eventually my flight left and came to London, where I am now stranded overnight. I almost punched out an eight-year-old boy on the plane but held back. Movie reviews from the plane ride:

* Salt: Boy was this bad. This was the second bad Angelina Jolie movie I've seen in the last couple of months. Why are you bad, Angelina? We used to be so good together. You've changed.

* The Social Network: Just as good the second time around. Slightly less good when watched on a small TV in an airplane with an eight-year-old kid who keeps switching your reading light on and off.

* First 30 minutes of The Two Towers: Still great. Why didn't I bring these movies with me? Also: hey Mr. Pilot, you can't circle the airport at least through the Helm's Deep scene?

* Sleeping: Hooray for sleeping seven of the eleven hours of flight time.

After landing I was vigorously interrogated by the UK Border Control agents, even though I didn't punch that kid. The border guy was for some reason super-suspicious, and was all What time did your plane take off? Why are you going to Romania? Why was your flight delayed? I'm like, I don't really know, dude. The plane was delayed because it didn't take off on time. That is the extent of my knowledge. If you really need to know that badly, there is probably someone in this building who knows more about it than I do.

Eventually he let me through, so here I am in London where it's 33 degrees out and I am wearing a t-shirt and cotton pants. I've never been to London other than the airport. It seems very nice except for the way that everyone is always trying to kill you by driving the wrong way down the road. I noticed that gas is $10 a gallon once you do all the complicated math converting liters to gallons and pounds to dollars and petrol to gas, so I guess I would be pretty mad if I were them, too.

The hotel BA is putting me up in is fairly nice. I had a comical John Hughes fish-out-of-water moment when I got here. I asked the hotel guy how to get to my room, and he tells me it's on the first floor and down on the left. So I wander all over the goddamn hotel, carting my luggage behind me, before I realize that in the metric system "first floor" means "second floor." I'm convinced that is some sort of European joke they keep around just to hassle Americans. As soon as I walked off he probably gathered all the hotel staff in the security monitor room and howled with laughter. I don't know why we're bothering with invading second-world nations over oil when there are still assholes who do this walking around. Also: this hotel room charges me 5 pounds per hour for internet access, which is nearly 10 non-metric American dollars. Are we living in the Stone Age? Why not charge me for the electricity and the air while you're at it?

But England seemed nice for all of that. I wish I could have checked out London more, but I was in a hotel right near the airport, at night, with essentially no clothes, and a flight to catch early the next morning. So I contented myself with watching some BBC and then going to bed. Hail Britannica!

Day 20: The Mall

Day 20:

This is our last day. Day 21 involves getting up at 4:30 a.m. to catch a flight back to Los Angeles. The plan for the day was to head downtown again, this time for some shopping and a movie.

Em put on her trademark skeptical expression, Io put on her Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and off we went.

I stopped in at the merdenele place for one last pastry, and then it was off to the tram stop. We headed downtown and checked out the mall.

I hadn't ever been there and didn't even know Bucharest had a mall. I probably should have taken pictures. It looks a lot like malls in LA, and everything there was super-expensive by Romanian standards -- "American prices," as Io put it. For example, a movie is I think 27 lei (about $8.50), which isn't a lot for a movie (particularly one in 3D) but is a lot compared to what other stuff in Bucharest costs. Like, that fresh-from-the-oven big pastry, which would be probably $2.50 in the US, was 40 cents. I'm not sure how that works; in a country where you can buy most stuff for 50% of what it costs in the US or less, how does a movie industry sustain itself charging 27 lei for a ticket? John Keynes would probably know.

Chris Pulliam: Io insisted I post this photo to show you Romania

has bowling, so you and Julie will come visit

So we did that stuff, and then went and saw "Despicable Me" in 3D (which is the only way to see it, let me tell you), did some grocery shopping at the grocery store that was bizarrely in the basement of the Romanian mall, and headed home.

Ta da. That's it. The next day I was up early and onto a plane for Los Angeles. Three weeks in Romania. It was pretty great: Crazy Wedding Week, and then Awesome Tour Of The Countryside Honeymoon Week, and then a relaxing week to round things out before I headed back home.

Big thanks to the Romanian in-laws for putting me up and for moving out while I was there, and to the godparents for all their work and kindness. I'll be back in January to actually live there for six months, and if there's one thing I learned while there it's that I need to learn to speak better Romanian.

Until then, this is Vampire Hunter Ryan Williams, signing off. The blog will start up again in January when I'm back behind the Iron Curtain. See you all then!

Day 19: Downtown again

Day 19:

You can't take cameras into the US Embassy, so I left mine at home. That means no photographs today. It was a day of errands and such in downtown Bucharest. At this point, I affected an attitude of blase world-weariness: yes, onto the 311 bus, I'm quite familiar with it; of course we go to Piata Unirii, haven't you ever been to downtown Bucharest before? No, you put your ticket in the machine like so, and then click it like this.

We walked around parts of downtown and found a climbing gym and a sporting-goods store for Em. Then we went to the embassy for me and Io -- I have some 401k documents that need her notarized signature, and this is the only place we could find in Bucharest with an American notary. The people at the embassy were surprisingly super-nice and quite efficient. We ran into another American / Romanian couple who were getting married, although in their case because the Romanian was just some regular dude off the street and not a Fulbright scholar they were allowed to just go right to America. Awesome.

We continued on and visited a Romanian bookstore that had some English-language books. It was pretty funny -- just an unlabeled corner in the back of the store ("How would you know this is the English section?" I asked Io. "Because the book titles are in English."). They had this crazy hodgepodge of books -- you'd go down the shelves and it's like Pet Sematary, The Seven Habits of Very Effective People, Pride & Prejudice, Twilight: New Dawn, 500 Crossword Puzzles, etc.

After that it was time for late lunch on the go. Io and Em were going into some grocery store to buy fruit, but I was having none of that. I swore that I wasn't going to eat any American food while I was here, but there was a McDonald's right there and nothing else really to eat, so what are you gonna do? Besides, the menu was all written in Romanian, so maybe that counts as Romanian food anyway.

It's funny, because we've been to several restaurants all around Romania, and in I would say 2/3 of them the menu is subtitled in another language, usually English or German. So I'm usually fine. Even a Romanian/German menu is okay because I read enough of each language to puzzle it out. McDonald's, amusingly, is entirely in Romanian, although many of the sandwiches have no real translation so are easy to spot. When I saw it was available, though, I had to get a Royale with Cheese.

Days 17-18: Even Yet More Laziness

Days 17-18:

(Sorry for the late update. Blogger -- have I mentioned it sucks? -- has had a non-working update function the past couple of days, at least from Romania)

We haven't done much. I've been making a conscious effort to just sort of relax and enjoy hanging out with Io before it's time to go back to the US. Yesterday we went to the Auchan and then off to visit the godparents.

Everything in Romania takes longer than things do in LA. It's interesting and I'm sure has something larger to say about the different lifestyles in both countries, but I'm too lazy to figure out what. But getting to the godparents was about a 45-minute trip that combined a walk, a long bus ride, and then another walk. Once we got there, Order of Business Number One was that Ovi wanted to take me for a motorcycle ride. A friend of his has a bike, and Ovi loves bikes and knows that I love bikes, so we'd been planning this for a while.

So Ovi and I walked over to the friend's place, then had to go up to the friend's apartment to get the battery for the bike. It had no gas, so we walked to a gas station, got gas, and walked back. At this point it's about two hours since I left the house. In LA, if I went to visit a friend, at T +2 hours we would have finished two sets of tennis and be eating lunch by now, or whatever. There are actually advantages and disadvantages to each. My Type A personality tends to automatically prefer the LA lifestyle, but there's something to be said for the slower lifestyle as well. You see more of what's going on around you, and somehow when everything moves slower everything seems, I dunno, less stressed. Although maybe that's more just because I'm on vacation.

Anyway, so Ovi took me to see this bike. It was made by a Russian company called Ural, and Ovi told me the bike was an "improved" version of the BMW boxer design (same as my current bike at home). So we get to the place, and there's a dramatic unveiling:

I felt like Luke Skywalker in Star Wars.

"What a piece of junk!"

But the bike is actually a pretty cool example of old, hard-as-nails bike design. My R1150RT at home is all computers and slick lines and fly-by-wire. The Ural is a stripped-down, severe form of motorcycle: an engine block, two big cylinders, a utilitarian electrical system, and just enough frame to hold it together. It doesn't even have an electric starter. You can look at it and see exactly where each component is and what it does. "The front brake is -- nonexist," Ovi told me. Good to know. I notice the side of the gas tank is not just dented and scraped, but has been patched. Like, an oval of metal has literally been welded into the skin of the tank.

Unfortunately, although my mom will not think so, we couldn't get the bike started. The gas tank was rusted out and the fuel line, which runs right along the outside of the bike where anything in the world could sever it and lead to a catastrophic fire, wasn't getting any gas. So we had to abandon the motorcycle ride (although Ovi assures me the bike will be fixed by the time I'm back here next year).

Today, we've done basically nothing at all. Em and I went for a run, Io made us all delicious lamb stew and mamaliga, and went for a walk. Tomorrow it's off to downtown Bucharest for various errands.

Probably doesn't mean what I think

Day 16: Yet More Laziness

Day 16:

After the frenetic activity of our whirlwind tour of Romania and then the baptism / wedding checkup / house party, we felt entitled to a day of rest. We spent the morning mostly just hanging around the house doing nothing.

Ioana made delicious chicken in white wine for lunch, and I made wedge-cut fries Romanian style with paprika. Romanians love them some paprika, especially on potatoes, and I have to admit that they are onto something here. I don't know how expensive paprika is in America but I'm going to start using it more regularly.

Eventually Em convinced me that we should go out for a run. In the past weeks...okay, months...actually, going on a year...I've fallen out of my regular-5Ks running routine and gotten a bit, shall we say, more lax. So a run sounded like a good idea. We ran I would guess 1.75 miles or so around the streets of Titan (the neighborhood Ioana's family lives in). Em came back glowing and full of energy. I was sweating like I'd just been through a Romanian wedding. But exercise is good. Right? I hope so, because it sort of sucks to do.

After running, I felt like it was time for some donuts. I hadn't had Sassy Donuts since that day in the park. Io assured me she knew of a donut place that was a 20-minute walk away, which in my mind totally cancels out the fact that I'm eating donuts. So off we went.

Twenty minutes later, we arrived to find that these were (a) Furious Donuts, not the Sassy Donuts I craved; and (2) the place only had four lonely, stale donuts left, all of them with sour-cherry filling that I hate. Io bought one for herself, but I was having none of that.

Io convinced me that we should walk even farther from home because maybe there'd be Sassy Donuts somewhere else. We went on a long walking tour of Titan and eventually ended up at a local park. I was ready to go home, but Io said I should have faith and see if we could find some in the park. "Sure," I said. "Maybe my new God will bring forth Sassy Donuts." After all, I had renounced the Pope, hadn't I? Seems like maybe I'm owed a little something.

So we headed down there, which turned out to be a very happening place. Lots of people out on a Sunday afternoon, lots of stalls selling all sorts of stuff. There were some delicious treats -- some Hungarians were selling home-made candy (we bought some), and there were a couple of stalls selling delicious kolac. This is the stuff I previously called Turkish conac. The correct word is kolac, and it turns out Io was saying Kurdish, not Turkish, so Vlad Tepes is off the hook for killing the kolac makers. Saddam Hussein, you are now on my shit list.

We wandered around the park for a while, which was nice, but no Sassy Donuts. We had given up and were heading to the metro to catch the subway home when suddenly I heard the sweet voices of angels. The heavens parted, light beamed down, a burning bush started making frantic gestures towards a nearby stall, and a flock of geese flew overhead in the shape of a donut honking out the Ave Maria. I figured this was all a big coincidence, but as I walked up the stairs I saw...

SASSY DONUT!!!

So this story has a happy ending. I ordered my donuts (I have become a total expert at ordering donuts in Romanian), thanked whatever God the Eastern Orthodox worship, and had ten minutes of bliss as we headed back to the metro for home. Hooray!

This is way better than being Catholic

Days 14-15: The Honeymoon is Over

Day 14:

Last day of our honeymoon trip. The schedule is wake up, go climb 1,500 steps to Poienari Fortress, and then head back to Bucharest with a couple quick sightseeing stops on the way.

It's hard to see the fort in that picture, but if you look at the building at ground level with the conical roof, the fortress is pretty much directly above that. It's probably only visible in the big version of the photo on Picasa (linked here)

Getting up there requires climbing 1,500 stone steps up the wooded mountainside. It's a very pretty walk, but it's 1,500 stairs.

That's a lot of stairs. If I were doing the Navy SEAL Workout every day like my friend Saeed, maybe I could do it no problem. But when we came to this sign along the way I was about ready to kill someone. By the time I hit the 2/3 mark I was seriously considering just taking over the fortress when I got to the top and ruling Wallachia as a bandit lord.

Eventually, though, we reached the top of the hill and had the fortress in sight. The original tower was built in I think the 13th century. In Vlad Tepes' time, the surrounding wall and outbuildings were constructed to help hold off the Turks. Legend has it that one Easter morning, Vlad had his troops surround the Easter feast of a noble family that he found out had tried to poison him. The guards seized the nobles and brought them out here, and forced them to work on the construction of the fortress in their finery until all their clothes were destroyed. I assume after that he had them all impaled, although the legend doesn't actually say.

The fortress itself was smallish but really cool from a historical perspective.

After that it was off to Biserica Domneasca, a 14th-century chruch in Curtea de Arges. There's a whole legend about this church that Ioana told me, but I wasn't listening very well. Something about the builder being forced to kill his pregnant wife and then jumping off the roof and creating a saltwater well where he landed, or something like that.

But the inside of the church was amazing, every square inch was covered in paintings (many of them restored originals from the 14th century). I didn't take any photos (expensive), but Emma did, so maybe I'll get some pictures up soon.

After that, it was back into the Dacia for one last leg back to Bucharest. We got home around 6pm. Goodbye, honeymoon. It was great! Write to me, Mrs. Waffles!

Day 15;

I gave the camera a rest today, so no photos. We went down to the village house in the morning for two different church ceremonies. First off, the priest has to do a one-week checkup on your marriage, make sure nobody has killed anyone or anything like that. Then we did the baptism conversion, which ended up being a much longer and more complicated process than I realized. The priest himself had never done one (not a lot of Roman Catholics in Romania) and had to go digging through the archives to find the correct procedure. But we eventually got it handled, and he asked me if I renounced my loyalty to the Pope, which is like asking me whether I renounce my loyalty to the Tooth Fairy, so I told him "Sure." He anointed me with oil, which I think is olive oil, so I smelled like bruschetta all day and was craving Italian.

Instead we went back to the village house for yet another party, although much smaller this time. We had mici and mutton skewers and basically just hung out all day in the yard. One of the attendees had brought her six-year-old son. He had never met anyone who didn't speak Romanian before, and he couldn't get it through his head that I couldn't understand him. He would ask me something, and I would tell him (in Romanian) that I don't speak Romanian, I'm American, I only speak English, and he would just cock his head to the side like "What the hell is this guy talking about?" and ask me the same thing again. I would try a different tack with "I don't understand" and then the kid would just yell his question at the top of his lungs, apparently having decided I must be hard of hearing. I eventually tracked down Ioana and tried to have her explain it for me, but he still couldn't get his head around the idea that I was a grownup and could talk but couldn't speak Romanian. He understood the concept of speaking English (his English teacher spoke English), but not the idea that I didn't also speak Romanian. He kept asking Ioana why I was using all small words, and I think after a while he just decided I was retarded.

Eventually we just played soccer together, which worked out fine because I know how to count in Romanian and he knows how to count in English, so once I learned the Romanian for "What's the score?" we were all good.