Ramblings

An old woman walked by my cabin in the hallway and motioned for me to follow her down the train. I left my belongings on the seat, hoping that nobody would steal my rucksack. I had nothing of value inside, but the bag itself had garnered me a lot of compliments lately, so I was a bit weary.

This woman was undeniably ancient and Old World, with one of those heavily-lined faces you only see in National Geographic. Probably the type of woman who makes her own shoes and butter and has a pantry stocked full of cabbage. She had on a dark head scarf, and all of her clothes were made out a heavy, coarse fabric that probably could have chaffed all the hair off my body. One of her legs was a good three or four inches shorter than the other, so she had to lurch around with a considerable amount of difficulty. She had an old, knotted-up, crooked, walking stick, like a wizard.

I followed her down the train through what seemed like a hundred cars. She was pretty slow with her bum leg and everything, and it seemed like we were the last ones to leave the train. Once out of the train, she kept leading the way, and we could see the one-room police station about a hundred yards away. It was just a nondescript brick building. A single window was the only access to the inside I could see. There was already a long line formed outside.

Around the police station, for some reason I couldn’t figure out, was a four-foot high ledge that you had to climb over. There were no stairs or anything. I guess this is why old woman wanted me with her. Somebody needed to lift her.

The old woman was hardly frail, though. For an old woman with a stooped back who was less than five feet tall, she was surprisingly heavy. It was like lifting a full keg of beer, and I don’t think I’ve never felt a stronger grip on my arm. This was a sturdy woman.

We waited at the back of the line in the rain, and the old woman kept poking me in the arm and talking to me in Bulgarian or Ukrainian or whatever Slavic language she was speaking. She was quite the chatterbox.

I got to the front of the line after about thirty minutes, where a fat customs officer was seated behind some steel bars with an AK-47 on his desk. He was eating a Snickers bar. He saw me and called over his colleague, who was skinny with a very impressive mustache.

“Do you have any drugs?” The skinny one asked me. I shook my head. “Cocaine? Marijuana?” I shook my head again.

“Any dead bodies? Do you have any prostitutes with you? Are you smuggling people?”

I shook my head again, but I was beginning to wonder about the seriousness of this interrogation.

“Do you have any Kalashnikovs?”

“What’s a Kalashnikov?”

“You know, Russian assault rifle,” he pointed to the desk. The fat one smiled.

“No, I don’t have any weapons.”

“Ok, that’s all very good. Let me see your passport.”

I handed it to him, and he flipped it open and looked at me suspiciously. I got my passport when I was a 17-year-old, and I look young and stupid in the photo. I swear I have this laughable smirk on my face and it annoys me ever time I look at it. Nobody ever thinks it looks like me. It’s actually my second passport. I got my first passport when I was less than a month old. My father’s hands are clearly visible holding up my softball-sized head.

“You’ve been to Korea? As an English teacher?”

“Yes, I lived there for about a year.”

“Is the food any good?”

“Yeah, well,” I said, already beginning to remember all the awful school lunches I choked down that consisted of fish eggs, baby anchovy salad, sour kimchi, and rice balls that tasted like dirt. “Sometimes the food is good.”

He laughed. “It sounds a lot like Romania.”

He finished looking through my passport. “Have you been to Romania before?”

I have learned in my travels to always answer in the affirmative when asked this question. If somebody asks, you’ve been to their country dozens, if not hundreds of times. It really is the easiest way to avoid any potential problems. Although I have no problem lying to people on the street, I still find huge men with badges and un-safetyed Kalashnikovs a little intimidating.

“No,” I said, already regretting it.

He nodded. “See the problem is that you don’t have a Romanian tourist visa in your passport.”

I nodded. I knew where this was going.

“And since you have already technically left Bulgaria,” the Bulgarian custom officers had stamped my passport thirty minutes earlier onboard the train with no questions about what the food was like in Korea of if I was smuggling dead prostitutes out of their country without paying a tariff, “we will have to take you to our other police station and hold you in our custody until you can be deported.”

“There will also be a heavy fine you will have to pay,” he added.

I knew this was a lie. I’d checked the visa requirements with the US State Department and knew that only a valid US passport was needed to enter Romania for 90 days.

“That’s too bad,” I said. “I was really looking forward to visiting your country.”

He shrugged, indifferent. “Rules are rules,” he said.

I needed a new strategy. Bribing someone, as I was about to find out, is surprisingly easy.

“Maybe I can buy a temporary visa from you,” I offered. “And when I get to Bucharest I can visit the embassy and purchase the official visa.”

“This,” he said, stroking the end of his mustache, “is a good solution.” He started fanning himself with my passport. I was still standing outside in the rain.

I got out my wallet and started looking through it. I had a couple of Turkish lira worth maybe $5. A grip of Bulgarian leva, probably worth over $25, but he wouldn’t want that. The only reason I still had it was because I couldn’t find anyone to exchange it, even while in Bulgaria. It would be terrible and embarrassing if he rejected my bribe because it was in an unacceptable currency.

I handed him the last $20 I still had in US currency, all crumpled up and wrinkled and damp from being in my back pocket. Even in winter I have terrible swamp ass. I wished I had an envelope or one of those ridiculous cash bags with a lock on it. He looked at it briefly before tucking it into the front pocket of his shirt, then stamped and handed me back my passport.

“Don’t stay in Bucharest too long,” he said before waving me away. “It’s an awful city.”

When I turned around I realized how big this rail yard actually was. There were hundreds of trains everywhere and they all looked exactly the same, all brown and rusty. I was completely surrounded by a maze of old, decaying metal. I should have paid more attention to where my train was. The only person around was the old woman down the way a bit, unable to navigate her way down the four-foot drop that I helped her climb up earlier. I suppose a rail yard in Romania would be one of the least handicap-friendly places imaginable. I walked over to her, and offered to help her, and she kind of jumped and fell into my arms. She was a lot heavier coming down than she was going up.

The old woman remembered the way back to the train, and I went back to my cabin and fell asleep. A few hours later I arrived in Bucharest, got some Romanian cash from an ATM, and unsuccessfully tried to exchange my Bulgarian leva into something more useful.

“What is this?” asked the woman behind the impenetrable wall of bullet-proof glass when I handed her the rest of the Bulgarian leva I had in my wallet.

“It’s Bulgarian money,” I told her. She scoffed at me, shaking her head as she handed it back to me through the slot.

Bucharest at midnight is eerie and frightening. Everything looks old, water is constantly dripping on you from somewhere, and there are narrow alleys everywhere where somebody could easily hide before stabbing you in the kidney. But, the city is scary not for the reasons you might probably expect—gypsies, vampires—but because there are bands of marauding, stray dogs everywhere you look. And, really, I do mean everywhere. I’d never seen so many skinny, mange-covered animals before. Official estimates place the number of stray dogs in the city in the hundreds of thousands, and supposedly the Romanian government rounded up 50,000 of these dogs and had them shot, but it hardly made a dent in the total population. During the day they aren’t so bad because they are dispersed by people and cars, but at night they group together into packs of dozens.

I got a little worried after being stalked by an ever growing pack of dogs—what had started off as five outside the train station had grown to over thirty in about fifteen minutes, and they became bolder as their numbers increased. I was being hunted for my meat. I hailed a cab. The last thing anybody wants is to be eaten alive, I’ve always thought. In the front seat of the cab were two brothers, Lucian and Marku. I asked them to take me to the nearest hostel.

They said they knew a place that was nearby, clean and cheap with a good atmosphere. I asked them both how they liked Bucharest.

The both groaned in unison at my question. Lucian, the driver, continued. “This is a pretty bad town. Only government workers. If you can, I suggest you leave tomorrow morning. Tonight would probably be better,” he said, even though it was already past midnight. “Go to Brasov or Sibiu or Sighisoara or Cluj-Napoca. You’ll have much more fun in those cities.”

“What do you say in America?” Marku asked me. “Dump? This place is a dump? Is that correct?”

After about ten minutes we arrived at a multi-story house. It had a nice front yard with benches and a medium-sized garden, and a large multi-lingual sign on the front wall indicating it as a hostel. The light was on and it seemed pretty good.

I asked how much the cab fare was, and they responded with a price that was, literally, in the tens of thousands of Romanian lei.

This really wasn’t much of a surprise. Inflation and exchange rates in Eastern Europe will really mess with your sense of value. Besides, it was about what my guidebook said it would be, and they even had a meter. I’d certainly taken rides that were far less trustworthy.

I paid the bill with a very fat stack of bills and went inside. The clerk said there were plenty of beds available, and that he would give me the off-season rate. It was March in Romania, after all. People weren’t exactly clamoring to this city to risk a rabies infection. He said it would probably snow within the next few days.

I asked how much the room was per night, and he responded with a price that was significantly below the price of the ten-minute cab ride. I told the clerk this and he just shrugged.

“You just got ripped off,” he told me with complete indifference. “It’s been happening all the time lately, even more than usual. You really have to watch yourself in this country.”

He explained the situation to me, which, believe me, is much more confusing when you’re in a country whose currency you’ve never seen before. The Romanian government was in the middle of a currency reform. The “new” leu, which is what you would generally receive from an ATM, was being printed with the last four zeros removed. One “new” Romanian leu was equal to 10,000 “old” Romanian lei, and both versions of their currency were still in circulation, and merchants would quote both prices. I’d noticed that the amount of cash I’d received from the ATM wasn’t equal to how much I had requested on the screen, but who was I going to complain to about a possible bank error at midnight on a Wednesday morning at a train station in Bucharest?

This is why I will never be an economist.

The price the cab drivers asked for was actually a fair price—“They must have liked you,” explained the clerk—they had just asked for it in old lei, and I had paid for it mostly with new lei. Lucian and Marku had failed to correct my mistake.

This could be very bad. Did I really pay 10,000 times the actual fare of the cab? This was possibly the biggest rip off ever. I was getting fleeced left and right in this country, had almost been eaten alive, and I’d only been here a few hours.

“Don’t feel bad about it. Even a lot of Romanians don’t understand what’s going on,” the clerk told me. “Besides, he’s a cab driver in Bucharest. This isn’t exactly the best town in the world. It’s guaranteed he hates his life.”

I was beginning to notice a trend about what Romanians thought about their capital city, and understand why. This was like being at a party where everybody was depressed.

I got the current exchange rate from the clerk, checked my receipts and what I had left in my wallet. I’d paid about $30 for a cab ride that actually cost less than fifty cents. Stupid and overprice for sure, but much better than I originally thought. Besides, worse things could have happened. If Lucian and Marku hadn’t showed up, I probably would have been torn apart, slowly digested, and turned into a legion of dog turds over the next couple of days. I guess they saved my life, and I suppose that’s worth $29.50, or about 854,910 old lei, depending on the exchange rate.

“Oh, one more thing,” the clerk said before I started heading off to my bed. “You shouldn’t stay out this late. Last week a Japanese tourist was eaten.”

But, no, really, Bucharest is great…47,303 out of 100,000.