Yaramaz Went Away

Photos from Bucharest

And from Brasov-Bran-Sinaia-Sighisoara

Yesterday both of our horoscopes said that machinery was not in our favour, that anything we try to do involving Things would go awry.  I suppose the false start we had in the cavernous dining hall belonging to the Other Posher Half of the hotel was part of it, if you want to approach it from the aspect that the usual little pizza joint down the street that normally serves a simple but pleasant omeletty/espresso-y free breakfast to the poorer half of the hotel was inexplicably closed and we were rerouted into the ballroom and scowled at and served stale bread, salty eggs and foul nescafe (the machinery in this case would be the espresso maker and possibly any machinery that would allow the pizza joint to be open). We ran out in horror and eventually found ourselves a real coffee far up the main drag a few hours later. Romanians don’t seem to have a need for coffee before 10am, when the cafes start setting up.

We had originally planned to go to Sibiu, but after Thursday’s train trips we thought it would be better if we didn’t tempt fate by attempting another set of three hour rides on questionable slow trains.  We also needed to book our way back to Istanbul somehow, so that was our new daily goal. A train back was out of the question because it takes about 23 hours and nearly killed D. on the way over.  A bus was a somewhat faster option (only 15-19 hours, depending on who you ask) but no company actually left on Saturday, the day we actually wanted to go. In the Troy office, I deciphered the Romanian timetable and realised that they left every single day of the week at 10am– except on Saturdays- and got in at 5am the next day. When I read it, it was 9:55 Friday morning. The next bus was Sunday morning, which would maybe perhaps hopefully get us in to Istanbul just before work, sleepless and travel-stinky. No one in the office spoke English and my Romanian is essentially non existent (except for signs, which are easy because Romanian is a Latin lingo). I randomly asked the young woman and very old man in the barren, stark dark office, “Turkce biliyormusunuz?” in the hopes that I had at least one usable language.  The old man looked up, a bit startled and replied in Turkish that he was in fact one of the drivers. I quizzed him about buses and timetables and options and why oh why were there no Saturday buses (because).  He was sweet and confirmed my suspicions of futility and as we walked out of the office he called out after me that my Turkish was very beautiful.

So no buses, to add to the failed espresso maker.

We went to a few travel agents to ask for other options and they all looked at us in abject horror when we mentioned that we wanted to bus across three countries in 30 degree heat. Several brought up flights as an alternative but they were 200 euros, beyond our capacity. We went to an internet cafe and searched Turkish Airlines and Kayak.com and Sonfiyat.com and finally found a flight on Expedia for only 190 dollars (about 120 euro) on Tarom, the Romanian national airline, for late Sunday afternoon out of Bucharest. All we needed was to go back to our room to get my credit card and  book the flight.

I had forgotten my card back in Istanbul. In my haste to pack, I had left out my frog wallet, which holds all my cards.

I emailed my parents, asking them if they knew my card number and could they email it to me upon waking. I would call late afternoon to check. I called, got the card number, then my phone beeped and stopped. I had used up all my phone credit. Roaming charges had made a 2 minute call cost 30 dollars.

We got the flight, even though I typed my mother’s name out wrong on the online form.

Machines. Sigh.

We are going swimming today.

The cosmos were misaligned yesterday and all went quite oddly, with our roasty toasty morning train to Sighisoara was found to have not only no air conditioning nor even a rough ventilation system, but also all windows in our cubicle and in the immediate hallway were roughly jammed shut with a screw or bit of wood or suchlike shoved into the gaps. The old man opposite me in the 4-person compartment sat sweetly and calmly,  pouring moonshine from a big clear plastic bottle into a little glass bottle every quarter hour or so. He lunched on village cheese and pungent salami and meditated out the window. The two girls in the door side seats just slept and blocked the entrance with their feet and legs.  After three hours of our impromptu sweat lodge we were surely cleansed.

I had been to Sighisoara nine years ago, with Pieter in winter. We were snowed in for two weeks, with the trains on strike and the roads closed to buses. The town was empty. As it was over the Christmas week, unbeknownst to us, all shops and cafes were shut in the town and we lived on our pansyon breakfast of hunk of sausage, hunk of cheese, boiled egg and shot of homemade vodka. The windows in our room upstairs had an inch of ice on the insides. Money was still counted in the millions and a beer, if available, was maybe 50 cents. We played Monopoly in German and walked a lot and helped the family decorate their Christmas tree with Elvis’ Greatest Hits playing. I remember being lifted up to put the star on top as In the Ghetto played and the father sang along.  That was in 1999. Yesterday Sighisoara was roasting hot and teeming with tourists and souvenir stands and the church was covered in scaffording and Vlad the Impaler’s birthplace now had a terrace restaurant upstairs and an ice cream cafe out front. We had soup and salad up on the terrace and were welcomed by three minstrels in medieval costume, asking if we were English? Deutsch? Francais? I replied that we were Turkish, hoping that would deter any need to be serenaded or spoken to, but the main medieval dude pulled it off with a hearty “Sighisoara ya hos geldiniz!” and a strum of the lute and a wave.

Aside from a brilliant veggie soup, Sighisoara was a bit underwhelming- perhaps the heat, perhaps the crowds. Either way, we walked around the fortified walls of the town and checked out the tower and eventually just trudged back to the train station for our ride back to Brasov. We sat at the tracks for an hour or so, as we were early and the train was late. We finally found our train- a regular light and airy open plan one without compartments and blessed with windows that opened. We sat and opened our windows and read. A family came and sat on the other side of the aisle and  the father and daughter played with their mobile phones and  the women chatted, baby on lap. It was hot. There was cheesy 80s music piped in. Countryside rolled by. After an hour or so, one of the women came over, reached over our heads and started to pull our window up. We said no, it’s hot. She glared and sat back down again. Then the man started glaring at D.’s open toes and making very obvious motions indicating how repulsive they were (they were fine). Then the woman actually snuck up behind us, like in a bad cartoon where Elmer Fudd turns to the camera and says “Be vewwwy vewwy quiet!”, and tried to pull up our window again. Need I mention that it’s in the mid 30s celcius with no shade or vent system? Or that we sat down there first and that the rest of the car was windowless and had many vacant seats for them? She indicated that the very swaddled baby was freezing to death and that our half-down window was the cause. Everyone rose from their seats and much shouting and wrestling for control of our window knob ensued. Before I smacked the screaming woman with my very heavy book, D suggested we just move. So we moved to the end of the car, at the back, surrounded by no one and blessed with a window that opened. After a while that car too filled, including a half dozen young guys who were right behind me and getting very creepy and stary and gestury, so D. recommended we move again.  We did, back to the other end of the carriage surrounded by old fishermen and their rods and heated arguments. The piped in usic kept playing My Heart Will Go On.

I can’t say it was my favourite journey at all.

This morning at breakfast, they served nescafe instead of the usual Illy. My stars are definitely in the wrong.

I think I am slowly becoming almost rested. The twitching is abating and my mental slide show is slowing to just a few dozen random images and thoughts per minute (untimed but estimated). We have been napping in the afternoons up in our third floor attic-ceiling’d room, with the wide open double windows and wardrobe-deep door. I am reading House of Leaves, wherein a man’s house is bigger inside than outside and keeps sprouting new hallways and doors and rooms and unfathomable staircases all within the impossible limits of the house’s original dimensions, which don’t change. As we walked up the main drag this morning to the internet cafe, my brain saw things that weren’t there yesterday or the day before and I imagined these newly sprung cafes and cigarette stands to be just the beginning, and that tomorrow there will be new side alleys and entranceways leading down to bottomless hundred meter wide staircases tucked neatly between the Vodafone outlet and the vanilla creme pastry kiosk.

We went to Bran yesterday by rattletrap bus, roasty hot inside and capable of speeds similar to a trotting cow or perhaps Lola doing her morning hall laps. We stopped at every village and idled. It was standing room only at times, which made the sauna atmosphere even more drippy and dizzy than just the idling in sunlight for ages. Bran is cooler and greener and has that doofus castle they say may possibly have been the model for Dracula’s but which has no spooky ambiance to speak of and I spent most of my time in there taking forbidden photos of the very cool decorated ceramic corner heaters in various royal bedchambers.  We had soup and salad for lunch- two things Romania has flawlessly produced at every turn- and found the bus back, which was modern and cool and had only a few standing.  D. befriended an american couple who were doing their tour of eastern Europe after studying in Spain and before heading back to Oklahoma. We ended up drinking beer with them back in Brasov, which was a lovely break from our solitude, joined by their CouchSurfing bed host Jason, a Peace Corps guy with a lot to say.

We are going to Sinaia.

We are in Brasov, in the middle of Romania, nestled into a hotel that is really two hotels, with one hotel’s hallway blending into the other and both price sheets hanging up at the reception. We are in the cheap hotel, though judging by the fancyness of our doorknobs and hall chandeliers, that extra hundred lei the other half pays only goes toward a ratty room television and the possibility of both toilet and shower in the rooms. We have a loo, which is fine for me, and a huge deep window with a huge deep windowsill and a double set of windowpanes that can be opened wide to a view of tree covered mountains and calm, old red tiled rooves (roofs?). Our doorway is as deep as a wardrobe, painted white, with panels. You could sleep in it.

We have been walking until our feet blistered since Saturday evening when we pulled into Bucharest after 22 hours on the train. That was a hot train, with no dining car or passing gypsy selling water or dry sandwiches. We were used to trains in Turkey and knew we would be on our own so packed a cooler full of fruit and bags of bread and tuna and bottles of water and books and lounged and slept and opened and closed our compartment door to a bevy of border patrol gentlemen, filling our passports with increasingly generic entry and exit stamps. My last Romania stamp from a decade ago took up a whole page and was in three languages and was gleefully archaic. This one was just the usual little rectangle with a train on it and the country’s initials within the EU ring of stars. Meh.

Bucharest was restful and hot and empty. We walked all the distances we had been directed to go by taxi and circumnavigated Ceaucescu’s palace (it’s very big) and found crumbling backstreets populated by wedding dress shops and old man beer gardens full of kittens and had the best veggie soups ever from big round bowls and salads full of sharp sheepy cheeses and tomatoes that don’t taste like EU tomatoes (yet). We stayed in a pansyon nearish the train station, run by a Canadian woman married to a Romanian, in a lovely little house with brutally narrow steep and winding staircase which lends easily to face first tumbles down three flights. She told us that in the past few years, since the EU showed its face, all the pickpockets and street hustlers have moved on to the greener pastures of Milan and Madrid, leaving Bucharest’s streets quite safe and hassle free. It was light, bright, and there were lovely old buildings with medieval turrets and ornately arched windows tucked amongst more butt ugly modern slabs.

We took the train Sunday to Brasov, buying a Rapide ticket, the second fastest and second most expensive of the four option (InterCity being fastest and modernest and expensivest, then Rapide, then Accelerat (fast but in scary crappy train) then Personel- the one every one warned us to avoid because not only does in come housed in the decrepit old cars I remembered from my first visit, it also stops at every station along the way. )  We were running late, with minutes to find our track and train, and only saw one Brasov on the departures board and so ran to it and jumped on and only realised as we were pulling away that we were sitting in a rattly old Personel train, with our Rapide tickets hot in our hands. It was a lovely 5 hour three hour journey though, with no regrets because instead of having to sit face forward in an air condioned modern train, we had a million year old compartment with windows that pull down open and a hallway full of open windows to stand at and watch the countryside and mountains slowly pass by. 

We are going to Bran today to be stupid tourists at the not actually real Dracula’s Castle. I promised Larry a Dracula souvenir, in thanks for the donuts he brought in last week (my first donuts since 2004).

We have a very funky  new teacher starting next week, half-time. Why half time? Because, while she is here during her Primary School’s summer holidays, she is working on an experimental film relating to all the contradictions and contrasts in Turkish modern society and researching and preparing for a conference on Turkish Cinema where she will be presenting a paper.  All this before heading back to California in September to teach her grade 5s. 

*moment where my Extraverted Intuition goes into overload and my Introverted Feeling implodes*

When we have these marvellously creative and ambitious teachers streaming through with their side projects and vibrant lives and foci (focuses?), I feel overwhelmed by my scatteredness, my manic yet pointless brain which sees to many possibilities and yet is unable to narrow anything down to a usable scale,  my restlessness that doesn’t allow me time to focus on anything long enough to follow through with it.  These days my brain feels like one of those experimental films from the late 60s, just an endless stream of random images and words, ping ping ping.  Where is my conference on Turkish cinema? Where is my documentary film?  

Sometimes I really annoy myself.

Going to Romania tonight for a week. Taking the train tonight at ten, booked three beds in a three bed couchette to avoid people we don’t know. I bought a cooler and some plastic ice blocks and will grab some cheese and hummus and cherries and tuna and chocolate and bread and water and wine later. For now I am stuck in my hot hot office, working on timetables, trying to feel calm (which I don’t today- I feel inwardly manic, though I know outwardly I look chilled out, apparently).  

So much to do.

Steph’s ‘I’ve got you in my radar’: 4 points
My ‘Touch base’: 3 points

Today has been a very random, non sequitor day, sweaty and dreamy, with random web searches for chocolate covered bacon and treasure hunting and very little work actually to be done. I’ve decided that my latest cunning plan for happiness is to open a funky cupcake café or anarchic donut café somewhere in a Spanish speaking country, something along these lines, but with lots of very good coffees and books and wall art.  I feel suddenly very inspired, though I can do nothing about it as I’m stuck at work til 9pm then will go home to a house with an oven that barely works. But it’s an idea! I like getting ideas.  I’m bursting. Sigh.

 Every few weeks, Steph and I introduce a new challenge into our day to make our jobs more intellectually/absurdly interesting than they really are. The last challenge involved a stack of mini flashcards for Elementary students with small-talk responses printed on them.  Every time we had a discussion with someone, we had to pull a card off the deck and use the phrase somehow in a relevant way (‘Oh no!’ ‘I think so too’ ‘Are you sure?’ ‘Sorry?’ ‘Of course’ etc). We had to go through our stack by the end of the day or else lose the challenge.  Today we are working our way through a list of appalling business jargon  and my task is to incorporate ‘touch base’ into as many conversations as possible, and Steph’s is to use ‘I’ve got you on my radar’.  There is a checklist for both on my corkboard.

On a side note, according to the linked article above, ‘brainstorming’ is no longer acceptable in many office places now because it has discriminatory allusions to fits, apparently. The new suggested term is ‘idea showering’. One colleague here suggested ‘notion orgy’ and D. suggest ‘Ménage a Concept’.

It’s sunny today. I stopped at Kahve Dunyas on my way to work and bought a couple of their liquid brownies and cappuccinos to take back to the fishbowl office for us. I’m still having flashbacks but my mood has lifted somewhat. 

It’s so humid out that my sunglasses fog up in the metro.

Today the air is two-tone grey and heavy, a follow-up to yesterday’s sudden downpour which was so heavy and so sudden that thought the sky had fallen (or at least our upstair neighbour’s balcony or an unhappy roof jumper with 3 storey ambitions).  It was refreshing and cooling yesterday, and we sat out on the balcony, me with my feet up on the railings, soaking their dry crackiness. We’d already had a day of cleaning the flat Saturday, so emotional lightness and clarity was possible, and we had picked up our train ticket to Romania that morning (150ytl one way for a couchette! Eeek! Western prices intrude on my delusions of Living in Developing Countries) so relief at having accomplished an awkward and out-of-our-way task was achieved, so the rain was just a welcomed addition to the other small details put in place to make my thin veneer of sanity shine.  We ordered Chinese and read books and bought loose and flowy trousers at HomeMade Man Shop and on Sunday I made chickpea curry and tandoori chicken with lava and we watched Pi and searched for music we wanted to hear and slept early to the roar of Turkey Outside, after it won the quarter finals or something akin to that. We had to sleep with the balcony door mostly shut to muffle the firecrackers and fireworks and fired blanks and mob howls in the surrounding neighbourhood.  

Technically it was a pretty good weekend.  I still feel stangely sad and melancholy, slipping in and out of multisensory flashbacks that make my tummy rise and my breath catch briefly. I’m not sure what’s wrong.  I’ve been floating in and out of daydreams from all over my past, things my everpresent fog hasnt seen in years. The fog is still there but random images and memories poke their heads out unexpectedly then retreat.  When we were watching Pi, the music and imagery and pace of it pulled me into my early London years, which were quite manic and soundtracked by drum and bass and movement and noise and crowds.

It’s odd.

Looking forward to our trip. Leaving friday night after work.