Red Light House

We stayed in a fancy Intercontinental hotel for our one night in Bucharest. It was so fancy that when we got into our room the guy who was carrying our bags showed us around the room when we entered. Oh, this is the closet. Oh, this is the thermostat. Oh, this is the mini-bar. Oh, this is the second mini-bar.

It was so fancy that the television set was on when we came in and it read, “Welcome to the Intercontinental Mr. and Mrs. Riseman.” Thank YOU, Mr. TV-who-doesn’t-know-my-last-name.

It was so fancy that the TV also had the option to set a wake-up call. “Set the time and I will turn on and gently raise the volume until you peacefully awaken.” Our flight to Paris was at 7am so I set the alarm for 4:30am. No fun to wake up that early, but we like to rough it on our vacations.

When the alarm went off in the morning it was less “gently raise the volume” and more “screeching wail of an owl being sodomized”. Sammi was sleeping three feet away from me on the far side of our king bed (her favorite thing about hotel rooms is sleeping far away from me) and she literally leapt over to my side of the bed, clinging on to me in fear and terror, screaming “WHY ARE THEY DOING SUCH TERRIBLE THINGS TO THAT OWL!!!!”

We got up and started packing and showering. It wasn’t until I was in the shower that Sam realized that THE TV CLOCK WAS WRONG AND WE WERE RUNNING AN HOUR LATE! I jumped out of the shower and we finished cramming our things into our bags. Sam was absolutely furious that the frickin’ TV didn’t wake us up at the right time. When we got down to the front desk and checked out we tried to complain to the guy at the front desk, but telling a non-native English speaker at six in the morning that the television didn’t wake you up properly isn’t a very satisfying way to vent your frustrations.

We had arranged for a hotel town car to drive us to the airport (hey, work was paying!) and if the guy was surprised that we were showing up an hour late for our ride he didn’t show it. I reassured myself that with the empty early morning roads and the typical Romanian disdain for traffic laws and human life we’d most likely get to the airport in record time.

Of course our driver happened to be the only person in the entire country who liked to drive at a safe and reasonable speed. He checked his mirrors, used his blinker and generally irritated the hell out of us by safely driving us to the airport.

Vowing never to trust a clock on a TV again, we ran into the airport and sprinted around like idiots until we found the Air France ticket booth. We explained to the nice man behind the glass how our television didn’t wake us up in time but he still wouldn’t let us get on the plane, though we had 5 whole minutes to get through ticketing, security, customs and the terminal. Pretty lame if you ask me. He did say there was another flight at 9am and one at 1pm, and we’d most likely get on one of those. He said we should wait in the cafe near the ticket booth and come back to check on our stand-by status.

The cafe was actually quite pleasant (with free WiFi) and while Sam sent out some final work emails before our French vacation I drank orange juice and tried to get my heart rate down. We wound up getting on the 9am flight (which would have been a much better flight anyway) and made it to Paris with no further incident.

With Sammi working the entire week we were in Romania, the hidden story behind all of our pictures taken in Brasov is that I was walking around by myself taking in the sites and trying not to let the little gypsy children pointing their fingers and laughing get me down. It took me a few days to get into “picture taking mode” as I was very self-conscious about being a tourist…which is ridiculous but don’t you dare not validate my feelings.

The truth is I could be clearly picked out as a tourist by any number of things that weren’t a big Nikon camera hanging from my neck:

1. My age. I was the only person my age walking around. Everyone else was either in school uniforms or old.
2. My hair color. Brasov is a fairly homogeneous place. Most folks have very dark hair, and when women turn 50 they all get their hair dyed red. They probably get their first dye job free and then they’re hooked.
3. My clothes. Typical dress for young men were jeans that either had elaborate bleaching patterns across the legs and/or crotch; metal rivets up and down the leg; small tears running up and down the leg; or any combination of these elements. Shirts were either tight soccer jerseys or tight t-shirts with a frilly designer print on the front. My tastes run more towards Old Navy and less towards Euro-trash.

Regardless, I soon realized I was being silly and came to embrace my otherness and acted the tourist with full aplomb and just hoped I would not get beat up.

Then the weekend finally rolled around, and Sammi finally finished with work, we took a bus trip to Bran Castle. The castle is more commonly known as “Dracula’s Castle” though it seems fairly common knowledge that this is just marketing. There is sort of bazaar at the base of the castle selling vampire t-shirts, souvenirs and a line of clothing geared towards virgins and their appeal to the blood sucking types. Once in the castle itself I saw no references to Dracula…and it seems that Vlad the Impaler may have only spent a night or two in the dungeons.

The castle in its current form is dedicated to the last occupants, Queen Marie and Princess Ileana. All the rooms were furnished and dedicated to sitting, or listening to music, or sitting before going into the dining room, or sitting before going into the children’s play room. There were a lot of sitting rooms is what I’m trying to tell you.

After the bus ride home we had a mad cab ride from the bus terminal back to the hotel to pick up our bags and then another cab ride to the train station to catch the 2pm train to Bucharest. We enjoyed the shocked look on the ticket woman’s face when we got first class tickets (we’re fancy like that), but were disappointed to find that the premium liquor selection under our fine leather train seats was lacking a 21 year old scotch and the personal masseuses had weak hands and were not familiar with the hot rock techniques we’re accustomed to. We suffered through the train ride somehow.

We had been warned that the Bucharest train station was a little overwhelming and we should guard against porters grabbing our bags and be careful about what kind of taxi we take because they’d run the fare up on us. Fortunately I believe we chose the most expensive taxi in Bucharest, which is lucky because a cheaper cab ride would surely have had at least 4 near-death experiences instead of the 3 we had during the 20 minute ride to our hotel. I don’t know who that old lady on crutches was but I’m sure she had it coming.

Our hosts in Romania, Sammi’s coworkers, went above and beyond the call of hospitality in every respect.  From the airport pick-up to taking us out to restaurants most nights to inviting us to their home for dinner…it was amazing to me to receive that kind of attention when you’re someplace for a work trip.  My boss works in Minneapolis and I started feeling bad that maybe I should start doing her laundry when she comes to SF or something.  Probably not.

At the end of the Brasov picture set you can see shots from the dinner.  You can also see the enormous St. Bernard dogs they had…they were friendly, slobbery and took every opportunity to knock you down and drool on you with love.

Sammi’s Flickr site has all the hilarious captions and wittiness you’ve come to expect.

While Sammi had to work from 9am to 6pm each day, I played lonely tourist guy and wandered around historical old-town Brasov, staring at people and buildings and taking random pictures here and there.

There are a few museums and churches to visit in Brasov and I hit a good number of them. I tried to visit no more than one or two a day so I wouldn’t run out of things to do over the week. Two museums, which actually felt like the same one, were in defensive towers on the hillside that rises steeply at the edge of old-town. They’re the Black Tower and the White Tower. The Black Tower had been burned many, many years ago and got its name from the charred appearance, however it has been renovated and cleaned up so it currently is not black at all. The White Tower is bigger, and only slightly whiter than the Black Tower.

Both towers consist of 4 or 5 floors, each floor just a single room, their walls lined with armor, a few swords, spears and wooden chests. Both have old ladies sitting at desks near the entrance who look at you like you’re crazy for coming into their museum and paying them money to get in. Indeed I may have been crazy because I was seriously the only person in both museums. The Black Tower felt especially empty as I had to turn the lights on in each room as I got to the top of the stairs. On one floor I had to fight the absurd urge to steal a small cannon ball that was sitting out in the open. It was just a rusty ball of metal but I was all alone and it was just sitting there and klepto in me cried out, “Steal the metal history ball!”. But it was quite heavy.

Another wealth of Romanian history is in the County Historical Museum, conveniently located in the old Council Square. I spent a good deal of time in the Council Square as all the twisty little medieval roads seemed to end up there one way or another. There were also a lot of benches to sit on, and a fountain. The museum is in a neat old building that has the office of tourism on the bottom floor, and it covers the history of Brasov and Transylvania in general.

I went up to the lady sitting at the desk and said, “Unu adulti, per rog.” (one adult, please)

I got the typical strange stare and, “You want go museum?”

“Da.” I said. And handed her my 4 Lei.

Again I was the only visitor in the museum. I don’t know how they stay in business because there were no other paying customers and they had a huge staff of at least 15 ladies whose only job was to get me out of the museum as quickly as possible. In each room I entered there was a different lady waiting just at the door to tell me which room to go in next. I would be half way through looking at old Romanian bibles or something and a woman would poke her head through the door and say, “You go upstairs now. No pictures.” I started purposefully going as slowly as possible, just because it seemed so painful for these women to watch an ACTUAL PERSON look at the display cases in the museum. I was tempted to go back and view the Romanian coin room a second time or continue trying to translate some gripping information about the boot making guilds in ancient Brasov, but I decided it was time to go.

All the ladies looked visibly relieved when I left the building.

The plural of the Romanian unit of currency is called the Lei, prounounced like the Hawaiian flower necklace, but much more useful and much less likely to have bees attack your face. In singular it might be called the Lau? I’m too lazy to look it up to remember, I never heard anyone say it.

Prices of things were usually written either as “18 Lei” or “18 RON”. Do not make the mistake of actually saying “Eighteen ron” because that makes people look at you strangely as if you said “Eighteen Used” for 18 USD (United States Dollars) or “Eighteen lobes” for 18 lbs (pounds) if you’re talking about how much your Romanian lunch of stuffed cabbage and polenta weighs. They’re metric over there anyway so that would be doubly wrong.

The most generous conversion rate was about 2.3 RON to 1 USD. This isn’t nearly as good as it was even a year ago (thanks gub’ment!) but it still meant that Brasov felt pretty cheap. If the mini-bar in our hotel room was any indicator, both a beer and a bottle of water cost $2, wine and Red Bull were more like $5 or $6 but I already have wings so I didn’t need to worry about that.

Basically, though we were staying in the most touristy and probably most  expensive part of Brasov it never felt like we were getting gouged with tourist prices. Luxury and imported goods seemed like they were the same prices as everywhere else, but all I really cared about was food, drink and entrance fees to museums. There were good pizza stands selling slices for 4 lei, soft-serve ice cream vendors selling cones for 1 lei and huge restaurant lunches with beer for 22 lei. Plus they don’t really tip over there, though I sometimes like to leave a tip anyway to help perpetuate the image of Americans as rich and stupid.

I don’t mean to harp on the financials of our fabulous European adventure, but the cost of living in Romania was always a good thing to think about later on in the trip when we were in Paris paying $50 for two coffees and a grilled cheese sandwich with an egg on top of it. I’m kidding, but only a little.

The flight from JFK to Bucharest went by in a drug induced slumber…which is the only way to fly to Bucharest in my book. I had been calling my Kaiser office all the previous week trying to get a prescription for Ambien, but the bastards would just not get back to me. So I started emailing and calling friends, sweating and pleading like a junkie looking for his junk. Gimme some sleep aids, pleeeeeeeese man?! Luckily, 2 million mile frequent flier Hammy came through in the clutch…sweet relief was ours.

Sammi was going to Romania for work, her company has an office in Brasov, Romania. I was going because she told me about a restaurant in Brasov that served bear meat. We were met at the Bucharest airport by one of her coworkers, Tibi, and he drove us the 3 or so hours to Brasov. Half of the drive was through flat farmland with more horse-drawn carts than tractors. There were frequent small towns along the road and the street was lined with vegetable stands with red onions seeming to be the most abundant crop at that time. There were also lots of carts with big jugs of drinks, perhaps their local version of grappa called tsuica…though that’s just a guess.

Soon we were driving up into the Carpathian mountains, the towns got prettier with commerce and tourism more apparent. Sammi continued sleeping during the entire drive. Tibi was driving with an extremely heavy foot, but his car was a brand new diesel Mercedes so I felt very comfortable and safe. Another guy from Sammi’s San Francisco office had traveled with us and was sitting in the front seat. Conversation was sparse as we travelers were tired and Tibi may have been a little hung over from the wild night he said he spent in Bucharest the night before.

The Carpathian mountains are beautiful and the drive was quite scenic. When we finally got through the mountains we were officially in Transylvania. Once in Brasov I saw a town divided into three distinct parts. The outskirts of town hosted many huge retail centers, European versions of Home Depot and other super-store type places. A little further in we drove by huge, ugly concrete apartment buildings that looked like pure communist block architecture. The we turned a corner, went through a round-about and we were in the old medieval part of Brasov.

We twisted around the narrow streets, the beautiful old buildings piled up on top of each other. When we got to our hotel there was some minor drama when it became clear that they had no idea we were coming and never got our reservation for the rooms. While we shook our tired fists and vowed revenge on our travel agent the guy behind the front desk was unconcerned and said we could stay for 3 nights. We could find rooms at another hotel after that.

Sam and I got a key to the only room with room for two which turned out to be the pent-house suite on the top floor. Not too shabby! It was a huge room with arched ceilings, split into a kitchen, living room and bedroom. It was about the same size, if not larger than our old apartment. I was very happy.

We rested for an hour or so, then Tibi came back and picked us up for dinner. We met up with Tibi’s girlfriend Simona and ate at a place called Keller’s Steak House (the only steak house in Brasov, it claimed). There was no bear on the menu, but my lamb was serviceable.

I’m afraid I wasn’t terribly good company at dinner, all I could think about was sleep. Once back at the hotel that’s exactly what I did. Oh man it was good to sleep.

Our flight out of SFO left early, early in the morning and I felt almost 100% after my brush with the evils of food poisoning. I didn’t know how long it would be before Sammi would let me cook for her again, but we all make mistakes, right?

The first leg of our trip to Romania was to New York’s JFK airport. Sammi had the window, I sat in the middle and on my other side was an impossibly old, improbably tiny Indian woman in a pink sari. She had a number of flash cards she would show the flight attendants when she needed a water or to ask where the bathrooms were.

Though she was old enough to have babysat the Wright brothers she wasn’t familiar with the finer points of air travel. After watching her try to jam the buckle of her seatbelt together backwards I gently touched her shoulder and indicated that I would help her out. She let me buckle her up and then went into a glassy, 1000 yard stare into the back of the seat in front of her. This trance lasted until we reached cruising altitude and she wanted to put her tray table down. I watched her old, gnarled fingers slip futilely over the catch for the table and again I lightly touched her shoulder and then twisted the little lever and set her tray table down. She never looked at me or acknowledged me in any way.
I turned away from her and closed my eyes. I smiled a little thinking about all the good karma coming my way for helping out the little old lady. You’re a good guy, Collin. You don’t need any thanks, helpfulness is it’s own reward. Way to go, Collin!

*THWACK!*

I whipped around to see what had just hit me on my shoulder. The little old Indian lady was holding a bottle of water out towards me. I twisted off the cap and with a grunt she took it back and brought the bottle up towards her desert of a face. Jeez, I was starting to feel a little used.

The rest of flight passed with no more contact, and once off the flight I recounted the above events to Sammi, who had been sleeping during the entire flight.

“Well it’s a good thing you were there.” She said.

“I know,” I said, “Can you imagine if she was sitting next to someone as old as she is? They would have just been whacking each other on the shoulders handing the bottle of water back and forth.”

Three days before Sammi and I left for Romania she was feeling a little under the weather. Being the hell of a guy I am I decided to make some nice soup to put the strength back into her tired bones. Being the frugal gourmet I am I also decided to use the roasted sweet potatoes and squash we had left over from the week before (or was it two weeks? No matter) to make squash soup. I put the vegetables into the food processor and blended the hell out them, then heated it up with chicken stock. I also found some dried mushrooms in the pantry and reconstituted them with warm water, then threw those in as well. It was a class act all the way.

Sammi sat down to this nourishing meal, had about three spoonfuls and realized that:
1. The soup is too sweet for her slightly sick palette, she prefers saltier soups. And
2. The mushrooms are gritty…perhaps even dirty.

I, having the palette of a dead horse, thought the soup was awesome and helped myself to two large bowls. Sam left hers mostly uneaten.

All was well until a few hours later when I laid down to go to bed and realized my stomach was starting to hurt. It gave a massive lurch and I bolted to the bathroom where I painfully emptied the contents of my stomach. Only, my body realized that this wasn’t nearly enough retribution for the foul stew of Satan I put into it and I spent the rest of the night alternating between cold sweats, vomiting, hot sweats, and more vomiting. And repeat.

Sammi got up several times to make sure I was still breathing. During a brief respite from bathroom visits I checked online to see what the symptoms of food poisoning are (cramps, vomiting, sweating.  Check, check, aaaaaand check), also I checked out what mushroom poisoning does as well…it’s a little scarier with dementia and kidney failure as well as the vomiting and so forth. I kept telling myself that I’d just suffer through it and I’d be okay in the morning. I didn’t need to go to no stinking hospital! But then I thought maybe that was just my mushroom poisoned dementia talking and I’d better get myself to the emergency room quick before I had to live on a dialysis machine for the rest of my life. I made the mistake of leaving the web page on the computer for Sammi to see, which didn’t make her rest any easier.

Finally around 5am I went a full half hour without a trip to the bathroom and decided I could safely go to bed. I woke up around 1pm, drank about 3 gallons of water, and then wrote into work to let them know that I wouldn’t be coming in.

Needless to say the prospect of a long international flight was not looking like fun.

My favorite country-rock-bluegrass-psychedelic band The Gourds have posted their entire new album on their website for our intense listening pleasure.  It’s a self-consciously ballad heavy collection, which is fine with me as I think Kevin Russel has one of the finest, most expressive voices in country music so his slow songs go down like candy.  I could listen to “How Do You Shine”, “Promenade” and “Steeple Full of Swallows” over and over again.  In fact I have been.