La Jolla, March 2009
Dear Family and Friends,
I have not been traveling since December but thought that you might be interested in parts of my travel blog emails from some time ago.
Bucharest has changed so much since 2003. Hotel prices have tripled and the cost of daily drivers more than doubled. But the legacy of the past still remains.
Wishing you safe travels.
Sue
Bucharest, May 2003
Dear Family and Friends:
It’s two weeks since I arrived in Bucharest but the first evening of no work and no group dinners. I am here with a large group—24 specialists in various kinds of banking, finance and macroeconomics. My area, corporate governance, is allocated 4.7 percent of the total report. After two weeks, I am to write a page and a half. I calculate that the cost of preparing such reports comes in at $9,400 a page, although my fellow economists don’t look at it that way. Tonight I have a free evening and a chance to do as I wish and so I will write to you and my friends.
I have found Romania to be a very beautiful country. I arrived late on a Saturday afternoon and spent the next day wandering through the old city. The most beautiful buildings were those of the country’s central bank, and of the state savings bank. I spent the day wandering through meandering streets, watching the stray dogs search for food in the garbage not yet picked up by the garbage trucks and wondering if the children without shoes were much happier. In many ways, Bucharest is a prosperous city. My hotel, the Hilton Athenee Palace, with its marble floor in the lobby and Back Street Boys music in the outside bar could be anywhere. But a full dinner with wine and a 20 percent tip comes to only $10 and the cash machines will only deliver $150 at a time. The average income is $95 a month or just over $3 a day. Magnificent 19th century homes with five bedrooms in leafy districts sell for just $200,000.
One afternoon I asked my driver to take me through Banesea, an area north of the center. I was told by the local representative of a local bank that I should go to Banesea if I wanted to understand Romanians. What I found was a lot of new housing hidden behind walls that made it impossible to see inside. It was not much different from a comparable area in Bratislava. “Black money,” was the comment from Davor, my 50-something driver who spoke English only using nouns. In three days of driving me from meeting to meeting, Davor had never expressed a subjective comment. But he knew well where we were and sensed the reason why I wanted to see it. Knowing I liked tennis and sports, Davor then showed me the best part of the area—a public tennis club in the center of a forest. The signs on the wall said that it was the place where the Romanian senior tournament was played. Of course, I inquired as to the prices and availability of tennis pros. $7 an hour for a court and double that if you want to play with a hitting pro. But it was, as Davor explained, black money that had been earned outside of the law.
This is the land of Ile Nastase and so I asked about tennis. Initially I was told that the courts of the central bank had been his club and then this version of the history was discounted as unreliable. One of my colleagues (from the group of 24+) plays in a competitive league and so I convinced her to look for tennis courts where we could play.
We found something the first Saturday. It was the Diplomatic Club, the facility built by King Carol, the king Romanians seems to like the most. King Carol’s club had lovely clay courts. My colleague, Zusana, chatted up the grounds-keeper, who turned out to be the brother of the local tennis pro. Zusana needed a racquet and so Dragos, the tennis pro, showed up 15 minutes after our inquiry. Dragos decided that we needed help, which was true. Zusana was incredibly inconsistent although a better natural athlete than me. Dragos played with us, uninvited for two hours, before finally we decided to quit in the 90 degree heat. We agreed to come again the next day.
It was even better. After two hours (in the 90 degree heat), I sat on the bench and asked Dragos his story.
Dragos is a very handsome man with sad eyes, in his early 50s, I would guess. I asked about Nastase. Nastase was the son of a tennis grounds-keeper also. But two divorces had divided his estate and he had little left. The current business leaders, by contrast, are not such a good tennis players but are good politicians. Dragos explained that to be permitted to travel abroad before 1989 meant that you had agreed to spy for the local spy service, Securitat. Securitat must have been very bad. It’s unusual that ten years after the change in regime people still talk about the work of the internal intelligence services. Dragos explained that Nastase had spied for Romania but nothing seemed to have come from his insights. By contrast, the current leaders are smart. With their connections, they have created powerful business groups. And as one of my colleagues explained, one among them discovered Boris Becker before Becker won Wimbledon as just as a teenager.
Dragos told me how he had tried different professions. He had been a poet, a singer (with a national reputation) and then his brother (the grounds-keeper) started to play tennis. Dragos learned how to play tennis from a book (much like Dad) and then started to challenge his brother (unlike Dad). After four years, he beat his brother, Dragos told me. And then Dragos became the tennis pro of the Diplomat Club, a club for ambassadors and their kids, with Securitat microphones hidden in the trees overlooking the courts. Such was life in Romania before the Revolution. My colleague Zusana gave Dragos $20 for playing with us.
That was the week before most of our group arrived. (I had arrived early to try to get my part of the work done before the chaos of a large group descended.) So the second week-end was much more touristy than the first. The head of our group, Juan, is Costa Rican and as he keeps telling is, is just a poor boy from Costa Rica. I decided to question Juan on this today over lunch. “So you know about milking cows and how to time the harvest season?” I asked trying to think of some questions relevant to farming. Juan went on to tell us about his rodeo days, where he rode angry bulls on a dare. “Were you ever injured?” I asked wondering if Juan was just teasing a group of economists. It turned out that the bull had left his permanent signature on Juan’s forehead, as he showed us, and explained the need for rodeo-riders to follow the rhythm (and centrifugal force) of a bull rocking in a circle.
Last week-end Juan wanted to show us the story of Dracula. It turns out that Dracula’s castle has long since been destroyed, as my San Diego-based Romanian facialist has explained to me many times when I visited my parents in La Jolla. Juan managed to get me out of bed at 7 am on a Sunday morning to visit Dracula castles. We left at 8:30, four minivans in a convoy heading north. We stopped in a town called Sinaia named after, you guessed it, Mount Sinai. I thought that we were planning a mountain hike and had worn khaki shorts despite the 60 degree forecast for the mountains. There I was in a Mount Sinai monastery on a Sunday morning in Romania. I thought my little shorts inappropriate and instead decided to walk around the church’s grounds. I had watched as my driver crossed himself three or four times every time we came within five miles of a church and I realized that some in Romania follow the church very closely. “I am praying,” the driver explained as he crossed himself, first on his forehead then his chest, then on his right chest and then left. 6 Soon it was time for some castles. King Carol had built the castle near Sinaia and President Caucescau had renovated it. It was perhaps a good thing that Caucescau had never visited. The castle was made of wood and would have been susceptible to fire. We were obliged to weak wool socks over our shoes. I had unwisely chosen the socks for very big shoes—I didn’t realize that different sizes were available. My socks kept falling off and I was afraid that the guards would be mad at me. As it turned out, I raised the ire of the guards still further.
Most of the castle consisted of rooms showing the swords and shields of various armies. Only the smoking room looked comfortable. It was filled with Turkish-type rugs on the floor, the walls and the ceiling. It was the only room for which I wanted a photo. Although cameras were prohibited, I had kept my little digital Canon in my pocket and then sneaked a photo. “Hide it, hide it,” whispered my fellow visitors, who until then had not spoken to me. “Poches, poches,” said the guards referring, I assumed, to the fact that I had put my little camera in my pockets (along with my cellular telephone and wallet). I suppose that with the interest in encouraging tourism, the museum guards are not permitted to do body-searches of tourists. As it turned out, the photo was heavily underexposed even with the flash of my camera. But still I will put the photo on the Bucharest page of my travels so that you can see my efforts. Needless to say, I could not venture a second photo.
It was lovely day of walking up mountains, through city center squares and finally, at four in the afternoon, a traditional central European lunch that takes you well into the evening.
The driver of my minivan was a trainer in his former life and had once been an athlete. These were useful skills as we raced back to Bucharest to meet Juan’s return time of 9 pm. George was following the lead driver, Dorin, with his radar-detecting machine. George and Dorin had been together for ten years and Dad didn’t want to get too far behind. But passing cars on the right at 140 kilometers per hour with a meter to spare could only make this 50-year old woman feel a little nervous in the front seat. But George and Dorin got us back safely to Bucharest at our luxurious Hilton Palace, ready for yet another adventure.
Sue
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