Goodbye to Bucharest

We have departed. Our Bucharestian adventure has come to a close with big doses of the good and the, well, evil...

The good: with Kerry gone to Serifos, I went to Neptun on the Black Sea with A. and S. They combed the beaches and stormed the pool and we all had a grand time (see the photos above for evidence of that). I was surrounded by wonderful poets and writers from all across Europe, including Orhan Pamuk, who was given a prize by the festival; meanwhile, the kids were basking in the glow of their beloved Andreea, who kept them busy from dawn till dusk most of the days.

The evil: indeed, the final confrontation with Lady Tenescu, our insane landlady, turned out to be a nightmare. She arrived at our negotiations determined not to give us back a cent of our one thousand euro security deposit, arriving with a laundry list of invented reasons we owed her money. I'll spare you the gory details (all absurd, exploitative, and embarrassing for her), except for one: she wanted us to give her 200 euros for the plastic shower curtain we replaced (remember the one covered in mold from an earlier blog?) . Yes, ladies and gentlemen, that's nearly 300 U.S. dollars for a shower curtain made in Eastern Europe! In the end, thanks to the negotiating powers of the Fulbright Commission (e.g. Mihai Moroiu), we got back about a third of our deposit--morally insulting, yes, but that should keep us in tiropita for the next few days at least. And we paid only 75 euros for the shower curtain. With that money, the slum-lord of Lahovari can buy herself twenty rubber shower curtains....ahem...

The night before we left Bucharest, Sophia asked me to take her to the balcony. When we got there I understood why. At the top of her lungs, Piata Lahovari buzzing and lit-up before her, she shouted at the top of her little lungs: "Goodbye, Bucharest, I'll miss you. Pa!."

Perhaps we'll toss off a missive or two from Greece. Stay tuned (and thanks for tuning in these past months).

Christopher (in Athens)

Bucharest Beatitude, 2

Blessed is the nostalgia of those who are leaving. The Greek nostos (the homecoming journey...the journey back...the journey home) combines with algos (pain, grief) to give us nostalgia, the pain of going back, or the pain of going home, which is broadly speaking the pain associated with memory, which there's no doubt one can feel before the memory even becomes memory, before the departure itself, since we can predict what will be painful to miss when it--and we--are no longer there.

Yes, we are officially counting down our last days in Bucharest, taking all the same old lovely walking routes (to market to playground to beer-garden to home) one last time just to wallow in what will soon become our urban nostalgia. And of course we're systematically saying goodbye to the parks: the rowboat lagoons of Cismigiu today, the trampolines of Herestrau tomorrow, and every day from now until departure we'll be kicking back at Icoanei.

Surely S. will have memories of her school, her bus riding and ballet and language classes, since she's old enough for such details to form the kind of narrative required by memory. But I wonder what A. will remember about his two seasons in Romania. Surely we expect that something (and it probably will be a thing...a single image that he'll come back to again and again later in life, not even knowing where to locate it) will become imprinted on his young memory banks: perhaps the smiling face of Andreea, his pal and guardian most mornings. Or maybe the winding pathway through Icoanei Park, which leads into the business of laughter and playground equipment. Or maybe the sound of his sister arriving home (at last) from school.

As for me, here I am with a week to go noticing exquisite houses I've not seen before, even though I've passed them almost every day: a cascade of ivy here, a gorgeous bit of iron-work there. And I’m thinking ahead to the people I will miss—not the ass in the BMW who accelerated in the direction of A’s stroller and the rest of us on the crosswalk yesterday—but the generous and brilliant souls who’ve been kind to my cranky expat self these past months. And I'm thinking ahead to missing the sense of living in a massive city, where the constant is NOISE and mayhem, which means it felt like a miracle today when we turned off Stribei Voda on to an alley leading down toward Cismigiu and noticed how quiet it was for a fully sustained moment, right there in the heart of teeming Bucharest. And I know I'll think fondly of the approach to Icoanei, whose little tree-lined horizon breaks up the landscape of rooftops when approached from any direction....Icoanei, which we've seen in every weather, which has been our daily oasis, our locus amoenus, our blessed refuge.

Sophia gets Photographic

The roving Kindergarten photographer, S., now has her own photo-blog. Check it out at:

http://sophiabakkenpics.blogspot.com/

Vote A.B.

My brother is thinking of running for public office. Here he is testing out one particularly popular local marketing strategy.

Bucharest Diatribe, 1: The Customer is Always Wrong

Bucharest Diatribe, 1: The Customer is Always Wrong....or So Many Good Restaurants, so much Terrible, Terrible Service...or, In the Middle of my Journey Through Life I found myself in a Crappy Restaurant

CURSED ARE THE WAITERS AND WAITRESSES OF BUCHAREST!

Dear Reader,

Before you decide at the outset that what follow are little more than the ornery ramblings of a spoiled, bourgeoisie American, hooked on middle-class materialist concerns and spoiled beyond belief, let me sketch my qualifications for critiquing (as consumer and expert both) the state of restaurant culture in Romania (for it is a "culture," and will only change if customers revolt against it):

I worked a decade in both terrible and excellent restaurants in Houston, New York, and Madison, Wisconsin, employed in almost every capacity: dishwasher, bus boy, prep cook, grill man, bartender, waiter, head waiter, even assistant manager (admittedly, I was the only employee who was more or less sober during the day, qualifying me for a short-lived managerial position at a night club in Houston). Since then, I’ve become a competent cook, not to mention the owner of a wood-burning pizza oven (pertinent to what follows). In short, I know how to make good food, I know how to run a restaurant, and I know something about how to treat the human beings who come to a restaurant hoping to eat.

The general rule in the U.S. follows this cliché: “the customer is always right.” What does this mean? Complaints about food that has not been cooked correctly (or even if it has, not to the customer’s liking) are handled graciously.... since one comes to a restaurant EXPECTING to pay for what one wants. And because restaurants want, well, more business than less business, they follow that cliché to an almost irrational degree.

The general rule in Romania follows this standard pattern: “the customer is always wrong.” Case in point: we are at a beer garden on the gorgeous piazza of Brasov, having already spent a lot of money on several rounds of drinks and snacks. I order one more Gosser and when the waiter opens it at the table, we all smell that something is amiss—the beer smells like a week-old camel fart and tastes even less appealing than that. This happens with beer, right? The waiter ignores our disgusted reactions, forcing me to rise from the table to take the beer over to him:

Christopher: “I’m sorry, but this beer is clearly spoiled. Can you replace it?”
Waiter: “How is this my problem? I didn’t make the beer…”
Christopher: “But this is your restaurant and you served me bad beer. Please, taste it.”
Waiter [to my surprise, he does, with a slight grimace]: “Well, this is Austrian beer, and that’s how it is supposed to taste.”
Christopher: “But it tastes NOTHING like any of the other Gossers we’ve been served.”
Waiter: “Sorry, you ordered this beer.”
Christopher: “So do you want to be right or am I right? Charge me for an extra beer if you really think you are right.”
Waiter: [bewildered silence]

In the end, he did bring me a new beer and didn’t charge me for it. What did that take? An argument, complete with passionate gesticulations and angry faces from both parties.

Case in point: two weeks ago, I’m served room-temperature sarmale at La Mama, a usually reliable Romanian “diner” here in Bucharest. Really, the sarmale and accompanying polenta are cold to the touch (!), having been feebly micro waved a few seconds. When I tell the waitress, she looks at me coldly, takes my plate into her hands and says, “but, sir, the plate feels warm underneath.” Perhaps this is true, since microwaves heat ceramic plates before they heat the food slopped upon them. The implication? You are wrong, dear customer, since there’s no way you could be right.

Which bring us to today: the scenario, or, a typical day in our restaurant lives in Bucharest:

I have graded essays all morning in a Bucharest café, drinking very good espresso (which, alas, I had to go to the bar to order, since the waitress ignored me for at least 45 minutes until I did), enjoying the sunshine at my outdoor table. I meet Kerry at 12:30 so we can have a bite of lunch together before picking up Sophia from school a bit later on. Since we’ve got almost two hours, I suggest we try out a little Mexican stand that’s looked mildly appealing to our expat eyes these past months, even if it is a bit of a walk...

First Stop: the Mexican stand looks remarkably like a little outdoor taqueria in the U.S., with a steam table proffering various kinds of braised flesh and bean accoutrements, not to mention rice. There's an actual Mexican man in a sequined white mariachi suit, with matching sombrero, who sits outside this place every day, lending the place a paradoxical mixture of kitsch and authenticity. When we step up to order and find the menu baffling (it lists more Romanian food than Mexican food), I turn to him and make small talk in my entirely passable Spanish, then explain to him that we’d like an order of chicken tacos and a cheese quesadilla. “No problemo,” he assures us, but the employees behind the counter can do nothing but shove refrigerated, pre-made tacos in our direction (am I supposed to microwave these here on the street? eat them cold?) and they refuse to concoct a quesadilla, since it is not listed on the menu. The mariachi-man, though he is the owner, fails to convince his employees to do otherwise, so we give up and stroll on…

Second Stop: a little “Pizzeria Napoli” which has a good-looking wood oven and nice looking pizzas. They have no seating here…you just step up to the counter and order. Some guests eat their pizza right there. I order two little pizzas, worried a little about the time, until she assures me they’ll be ready in “ten minutes.” We wait, and wait. The woman who took our order smiles at me occasionally through the window, acknowledging the fact that we are waiting. Twenty minutes later, when I step from the street up to the counter, I see fifteen pizzas being assembled on the counter. Our two pizzas are only now about to be put in the oven. Rather than expedite orders as they came in, three people have haphazardly assembled fifteen raw pizzas in twenty minutes without putting a single one in the oven. “Only ten more minutes, sir,” she pleads, when she sees that I’ve noticed their incompetence. “I’m sorry,” I tell her, “but we had to leave five minutes ago to pick up my daughter from school.” “Shame on you, sir!,” she hollers at me when I leave without paying.

Third Stop: now very hungry, Kerry goes off to fetch Sophia and I take the now sleeping Alexander to a nearby pizzeria on Dorobantiler where we’ve had one decent pizza a few weeks earlier. I order two simple pizzas and even watch them being assembled (rather well, it appears) and even fed into the oven. My hopes have been raised! By the time Kerry and Sophia arrive, our pizzas are delivered to the table. They are completely charred: the little bit of proscuitto on each piece is utterly blackened and the mushrooms are curled into little charcoals. But we decide to try it anyway. To our surprise, the dough on the bottom hasn’t even been cooked, so we have been served burned ingredients on top of raw pizza dough. Since I own a pizza oven I know this is a sign the oven was turned on just to cook our pizzas, which means the floor was improperly primed and the top heat was too intense. This is the most basic rule of managing a pizza oven. And yet the place has five other tables, so it’s not as if they opened just for us.

We each finish our pieces, thinking how much we’ve been through to get lunch, thinking we might as well just tough it out. But it becomes impossible to go any further and I am provoked to take the pizzas back (needless to say, there is no sign of our waitress, no attempt to see if what we were served was to our liking).

Me: “These pizzas are unacceptable, burned on top, raw on the bottom,” I show her and her two managers. They nod, apparently in agreement.

“Do you want a new pizza?” she asks.
“Of course,” I say, “we are hungry.”

“Ok, sir,” she replies, “but we will need to charge you for the pieces of this pizza you already ate.”

“You want to charge me for undercooked, disgusting pizza?,” I retort.

“You did eat it,” she says smugly.

“Well, wouldn’t you try food served to you in a restaurant before sending it back? This is the restaurant’s problem, not mine. Please don’t punish me for that.”

“Actually, sir, it’s nobody’s fault,” she replies with complete seriousness, “We don’t get much business this time of day, so the oven isn’t as hot as it should be.”

Which means: the customer must share all faults with the kitchen. Bad food is a shared responsibility, not something that can be blamed on the oaf who can’t cook a pizza or the waitress who serves an undercooked pie or the restaurant who hires such uncivilized morons.

We storm out, refusing to pay for anything but the Stella Artois and the orange juice, complaining our way down the street toward home.

All this activity prompted Sophia to ask one of her usually profound, basic questions: "Daddy, this is a pizza parlor, why don't they know how to make pizza?" Granted, she has been spoiled by our kitchen...

Waiters and waitresses in Romania are almost categorically unfriendly, surly, idiotic, inefficient, and often down-right asinine. They worry about meticulously pouring out every beverage you order for you (as if this is the essence of French style), but have no concept of timing (so everyone’s entrée arrives simultaneously, for example) or graciousness. One becomes hesitant to ask for anything, since every request is met with a scowl. Touring Romania with my family was embarrassing (until we reminded ourselves that we were not responsible for the incompetence of the Romanian restaurants to which we delivered them) and frustrating since, as my brother puts it, "if only they knew we were the best tippers in the world!"

Waiters are paid a set wage in Romania and in general Romanians don't tip; considering the service, that's no wonder. This creates a vicious cycle of apathy and dread on the part of waiters and reciprocal dread on the part of patrons.

There are exceptions to all this badness. There’s our man, Dan, the elegant and sublime maitre d. at French Bakery, who has his place marked out among the sacred pantheon of waiters. And there was the pretty blonde waitress who smiled at us and served us efficiently at Bistro del Arte in Brasov two weeks ago. There are a few others here and there. No doubt we're not the ONLY people handing out substantial tips to these professionals.

Beyond the two of them, there’s an unsmiling horde of nasties who deserve some special torture in one of Dante’s Infernal circles. What was it he did to those who treat guests with disrespect?

Crankily, hungrily yours,

C

Bucharest Beatitude, 1

Blessed are the walks to Cambridge School, up Dorobantiler Avenue, where our dear little S. must be delivered each weekday morning. These are the occasions for the most remarkable encounters, sparking in S. the most remarkable bits of verbal flourish and humane curiosity. After all, she is fresh into her day, which means only several hundred sentences into her day (she wakes up talking and does not cease until she sleeps at night), her intellectual engine firing already at a pace that’s hard to match.

…from the mundane:

Why is the sidewalk so hard?

Why is that woman wearing red shoes?
Why are there so many holes in the ground?
Why do people like to write all over the sides of buildings?

to the profound:

Why is that man begging?

Where does that dog sleep at night?

Can dead people really live on clouds?
Why are there pictures of God on that house?

Certainly our walks to school through the leafy provinces of Pennsylvania are lovely too, not to mention utterly safe. But the urban landscape, even so early in the morning, has myriad distractions and details to stir a million questions in any self-respecting inquisitive girl. Blessed, then, is the mayhem and crud and tree-lined chaos of the Bucharestian street, beautiful in its offerings of human and animal business.

S. grips my hand tightly while we cross the perilous intersection at Dacia, then lets go entirely to run ahead (only a few steps, since she knows people DRIVE on the sidewalks here, which even she finds outrageous), her grey skirt and bedraggled white dress-shirt flapping in time to the flopping of her pony tails, her black “dragon” Chuck Taylor high-tops (she eschews the dress shoes that the other kids wear) scuffing along the sidewalks, all the while improvising questions and little goofy songs, until I swear she almost levitates.

C

Driver Magic

Around their grandmother, Karen, a.k.a. "Yia Yia," our kids are the frequent recipients of "magic" (anything from little toys, to items of clothing, to the occasional bit of candy). After three days of driving jam-packed rental cars around the unreasonable highways of Transylvania, it was decided that my brother Aaron and I deserved some "driver magic" to compensate for our road-weariness and to speed our safe return from Sighisora to Bucharest yesterday. The magic we received from Heidi and her fiance Kyle? Fancy Szeckler-style hats that every farmer and shepherd from Miclosoara to Biertan props upon their sweaty craniums. These are part Fedora, part straw cap, part elfen sombrero. Which means we ended up taking to the highway looking like a weird blend of the Blues Brothers and Romanian peasants. That didn't stop the other drivers on the road from attempting to pass us on hairpin turns and nearly run us off the road now and then. But we escorted the whole gang safely back into Bucharest, our fancy Romanian helmets intact.

Farmhouse Fit for a Prince

As it turns out, just last week Prince Charles himself was mucking around the estate of Count K. in the Hungarian/Romanian village of Miclosoara, where we hung our hats last night. Ever since we arrived in Romania, the Bacchae have been looking hard for the kind of agritourism gigs that are easy to find in places like Italy and France (and more recently Greece): sustainable, more or less working "farms" where guests can experience traditional culture as it was (or as it still is) by living and eating with a host family. This kind of tourism, oddly enough, doesn't require huge amounts of money or fancy accoutrements to pull off--in fact, all that's needed is for a "local" to take a leap of faith and believe that wandering strangers might want a glimpse into their lives, as they live it, rather than the imitation, kitsch, over-priced comforts that pass for tourism almost everywhere. I'm willing to give up scalding hot water and satellite television for a stroll through a Transylvanian meadow any day. And so at last, that's what we found (even if the English royalty had discovered it before us): a very beautiful side of Romania that had seemed impossible to access. We were greeted with tiny cordials of palinca (plum brandy) infused with caraway, which made it rather exotic and soft upon the tongue (it is usually very much like fire-water), then shown our rooms, some of us in a guest house (once a stable, now decorated tastefully and comfortably) and some in the farmhouse proper. After the kids rolled up their pantlegs and ran around barefoot chasing the chickens for an hour or so (freed from the confines of the car at last!), we strolled down through town, across a few meandering streams, up to the top of one of the preternaturally green hillsides that streak past our speeding rental car all day. From there we posed for some "Sound of Music" family shots and admired the fecund corrugations of our Saxon Land environs. Parched from our little exercise, we retired for beverages upon rough hewn benches and tables back at the farm...even tossed down a few hands of sheepshead (the Bakken/Seibel family card game, which Kerry has now picked up) along with some smoked local cheese and slightly sparkling white wine. Dinner was served downstairs in the Count's gorgeous wine-cellar. The culinary offerings were not exactly overwhelming, but the atmosphere (with "Medieval" music piped in, candlelight, and a sweet musty dampness emanating from the old casks) made it delightful nonetheless. We stepped from that lovely dungeon only to find a full moon hovering over the orchard, wrapped in a skein of ominous clouds, leaving us all thankful that tidy bundles of garlic had been nailed over the entryways to our sleeping quarters...thankful too that Count Kalnoky was watching over us rather than the other famous Transylvanian Count...

C

Transylvania, the Spring Version

During our drive through the Prahova Valley north from Bucharest to Brasov this past March, everything seemed one of two colors: grey or more grey. Mud was everywhere. The famous Carpathian mists hung about the valleys and hillsides mournfully. The inhabitants seemed categorically depressed, as if they all knew winter would never end. By contrast, what produndity in the lanscape of Transylvania in the spring! At least eight colors of green comprise the lushness of every hillside. Up around the ski resort town Predeal, the Carpathians begin making their own weather and we were treated to a perfectly spooky bit of fog and rain, just as we made our approach to Peles Castle, which caught the occasional blast of sunshine. Finished only about a century ago on behalf of the Saxon kings of Romania, the castle was tastefully opulent and gorgeously tucked into one of the slopes behind the village of Sinai. Even our kids were impressed (what's not to like about rooms full or armor and Medieval weapons?), mouths agape the whole time while we took in the rooms full of Murano glass, Klimt friezes, and Moorish finery. We decompressed yesterday afternoon with big Austrian beers in the sun-flooded central square of Brasov (my love affair with this fair city continues), girthing up for another round of castle touring tomorrow at Bran. Then into the hinterlands of Transylvania for a night in a traditional village house. We'll let you know how that turns out, provided we survive the horse-cart ride through the mountains! Enjoying this dose of shameless tourism? Yes, indeed!

C & All

Porcine Interlude

For your salivary pleasure, Ladies and Gentlemen, a panorama of pork!

Cheeseheads, Movie Stars, and Diamonds

The Wisconsin invasion of Bucharest has begun. My family arrived from the U.S. a few days ago and that's given us the opportunity to go from lonely expats to expert tour guides here in our adopted city. The first night started off with a bang: we made reservations for my sister's 30th birthday and Mother's Day at French Bakery, a groovy little neighborhood spot. Josh Hartnett and Ryan Gosling and their Hollywood entourage had a huge table there, but that didn't much interest us (though it is a little surreal to be surrounded by American actors in the middle of Eastern Europe) since before we'd even hit the first appetizers, Heidi's boyfriend Kyle had dropped to his knees and proposed to Heidi. Yes, she said "yes," giving us plenty to celebrate in the coming months. Horray!

After roaming about here in the city for some time, we'll head off for a weekend in Transylvania, which you'll read about soon enough if you tune in here again.

C

The Stray Dogs of Bucharest

While previous posts might suggest that what we miss most about home is the bourgeois comfort and largesse of our American kitchen (those gleaming racks of immaculate All Clad pans and the hundred gadgets that clog our hundred cabinets), the truth is, what we miss most about home is the quiet, but utterly faithful presence of our remaining dog, Daphne, and our affectionate calico cat, Delilah. Granted, we get weekly updates on the state of their appetites and bowels, their state of animal happiness in the American springtime, which makes leaving them behind more acceptable. But the feeling that we’ve left two family members behind (since that is, in the end, how we think of our beasts) is irrepressible at times.

With regards to Delilah, we have every faith that she is just fine without our presence: except for around feeding time (when we are indeed the center of her universe), we typically feel a little superfluous around our haughty, independent little cat. But Daphne, like most canines, makes it her life’s business to melt into the emotional lives of her human companions, utterly dependent and needy, trapped within the domesticated halls of our big house, sprawling about on the Turkish rugs.

Knowing this, imagine how utterly defeated, selfish, and also very inspired we feel while studying the thousands of stray dogs populating our neighborhood. We are frequently astonished at their ingenuity and endurance, their ability to adapt to a world we find nearly impossible to navigate ourselves. To our surprise, it’s rare to see a dog here that looks under-fed. They drink from the public fountains. They hang out next to the beer gardens and meatball stands for tidbits to drop beneath tables. They cross the streets on crosswalks at the correctly appointed time, when the human herd crosses (I have yet to see one come close to being hit by a car...though I've seen enough looking hobbled to know that it probably happens a lot). If there’s a patch of green grass on a boulevard, it’s not unusual to see a few dogs romping there, oblivious to the hum of urban activity around them. And they sleep everywhere, just underfoot most of the time, tucked in next to the ATM machine in the sun, or under the bench of a bus-stop, or in the expensive landscaping of Belle Époque mansions. They set up camp within the blossoming precints of the botanical gardens and the city parks. They are resilient and hilarious, and often heart-breaking. Only one in twenty wears the yellow “tag” in its ear, indicating that it's been properly vaccinated and sterilized, that it has official permission to survive.

Undoubtedly, behind the scenes and the cover of dark, along back alleys and in vacant lots, their lives are violent and awful. Yesterday we approached what we thought was a gorgeous black and brown mutt sleeping in the sun. “Oh look,” one of us said, “that dog is dreaming of chasing rabbits.” When we got closer, however, we saw that the dog’s eyes were wide open, that he was having a seizure right there on the sidewalk. What could be done for such a dog? Hope is about all we could offer. And, to our great relief, about three hours later we saw the same dog frisking about behind an apartment complex in the neighborhood, bright-eyed, tail high in the air, exploring a garden with his spotted nose.

It's said that the population of strays in Bucharest is a hangover from the Communist period here. When Ceascescu "nationalized" housing (kicking families out of their homes and apartments only to relocate other families, and often several at a time, into those homes....so there were twelve people now living where there had been four), the canine "comrades" were not part of the plan... so family pets were simply set loose upon the streets to fend for themselves. Several generations later, these diasporic dogs are still looking for homes; lucky for them, the new capitalist era comes with certain benefits. Now the locals have enough food and money of their own to afford a bag of dog food now and then for the "neighborhood dogs" (it's not uncommon to see bowls of clean water and kibble set out by some samaritan in the local parks). They are ignored, but not entirely unnoticed.

Case in point: just as I am writing this, sitting here in a blast of sunshine in a sidewalk café on Dorobantiler Blvd., a bedraggled blonde retriever pup—no more than six months old, her fur slightly dread-locked with tar, her yellow coat streaked with street dirt, has plopped down right in the middle of the sidewalk. Pedestrians must walk around her to make progress down the street. She is staring intently across the boulevard and two lanes of clogged traffic at, yes, another dog. I see her sniff the air to try to catch a whiff: friend or canine foe? Then, two old ladies step down from the curb to cross the street with their canes, parting traffic in their wake. The puppy jumps up clumsily to join them at their heels, using their slow pace to make a safe crossing, looking warily from side-to-side at the multi-colored bumpers and massive tires that loom about her, off to some adventure in the secret world of the Bucharestian dog.

C

(P.S. Double-click on any of the photos to see these impressive curs up close)

Adventures in Our Post-Communist Kitchen

in our little kitchen, we have exactly:

-1 usable "Dutch Oven" braising pot, of inferior quality
-1 unusable "Dutch Oven": the cheap faux-ceramic finish became, well, unfinished after the first attempt to put good color on some chicken about to be braised—hence, this pot is a “way station” for cooling soups, leftovers, and draining spinach. We are terrified of eating the paint chips, lead chips, enamel chips, metal chips that flake off with each cleaning...of coming back to the USA with liver and brain cell damage. Of not making it back into the USA at all, because our bodies won’t pass the security check points but instead, will vibrate, setting off the magnetized sensors.
-1 pasta pot.
-1 small non-stick frying pan (brought from the local "Quality Market" at home, and the only piece of equipment that is fully functional).
-1 little blue vessel used to boil water for coffee and tea, steam peas and broccoli, and melt butter and chocolate for the half-baked (literally) attempts at brownie baking.
-1 small sieve (overflow pasta inevitably tumbles out into the sink)
-4 plates, 4 sets of silverware, washed 20 times a day. Alexander likes to run around the house playing a game he’s invented: EEE! Knight! The spoons are his swords which he then hides under his mattress, in the spooky back cupboard, or behind the meant-to-be-diaphanous-but-are actually-gray-and-filthy curtains.
-A stack of plastic cups we inherited from a former Fulbrighter (some of which, coincidentally, have University of Wisconisin logos).
-A very dull butcher knife.
-A bendable serrated bread knife.
-A 12 inch x 5 inch cutting board that is already splitting in half.
-A cheese grater that does not work except to accidentally grate knuckles and thumbs.
-We’ve gone through 2 vegetable peelers—both broke on first use. So—the dull butcher knife it is.

What we don’t have?
-Measuring spoons or a cup. (All recipes are approximations which explains why my brownies won’t rise or rise too high.)
-A temperature gauge for the oven. Two settings: on "FULL BLAST" or "NOT REALLY". (Which explains why my brownies are either charred or goopey).
-Water hot enough to wash the dishes and pots and pans clean.
-Counterspace. There is a two foot workspace on which all prep work must be done. The other possibility? A precariously balanced counter-ish wedge (deceptive as it is made from the same “laminate board” as the counter) that sits on top of the radiator.

What to do? Invest in stupidly over-priced "real" furnishings, or rough it? Eat in restaurants for every meal...or attempt to be our Bakken kitchen-centered selves? The answers are pretty self-evident.

Yesterday was a particularly frustrating, perfectly ordinary day for cooking in the Bakken kitchen. I used the usable pot to attempt to make Lemon Shortbread bars. Try zesting a lemon with the dull edge of a knife. And baking shortbread cookies in a pot rather than a sheet pan or even a baking dish. Of course, without any real measuring implements, it was mostly guess work (far too much lemon topping—so the shortbread was more curd than cookie). But this also meant that as soon as possible, when the bars were just cool enough, I had to chop them out of the pot (yes, they candy-fied) so we could then transfer the Vegetable soup to that pot to reheat. Forgetting, of course, that we were also going to make Baked Ziti (with the remnants of a very passable Bolognese Sauce scraped together by trips to 4 separate supermarkets and the local Halal butcher). Which meant transferring the soup from that pot to the unusable pot. Forgetting that we had to heat up the soup for the kids—which I dumped into the pasta pot. Forgetting that we had to boil water for the pasta for the ziti. So transferring it back to the usable pot for another turnaround (feed kiddos quick!) then putting the soup back into the unusable pot. Post-ziti noodle boil, transferring the soup back to the soup pot so we could heat it up for ourselves for a first course.

Today; the leftover Baked Ziti is in the fridge in the usable pot. But I am going to make Hershey’s Cocoa Perfectly Chocolate Cake (or attempt to) which means….and then, post-cake bake, needing to use the usable pot to sauté spinach which means trying to lift the cake out of the usable pot and transfer it to…what? A puzzle once again. It's a wonder we haven't give up completely and just moved into McDonalds down the street.

Thank god, of course, we haven't. Christopher does manage to produce between eight and twenty respectable cappucinos a day (old espresso boiler, plus whisk, plus elbow grease) in that space. Alexander is robust and healthy as ever. And Sophia BEGGED for MORE SPINACH today, the kind of sign something good is happening in the kitchen in spite of all the arcane pot gymnastics.

Kerry

Some Things Along Strada C. Rosetti

Some Things Along Strada C. Rosetti


Far too quiet last night out on the street.
Dreams of police. Today we hog four chairs
in a café off Revolution Square,
where solitude and expensive coffee
agitate our collective memory.

The man in the blue bathrobe, he is ours,
blabbering, twisted like an ampersand
on his perch between bank and bar: one hand
on his cane, the other held out for beer.
He hasn’t had a shave in nineteen years.

We claim the palaces and museums,
the royal portraits on the Atheneum,
but blame the stray dogs and immigrant scum
on the old regime, whose blank bravado
still hardens all the faces in the Metro.

This week the diplomats and presidents
will affirm Europe’s doctrine in the East;
the yellow stars of the Union will increase
another star or two, new flags to cover
the old murals, the sickles and hammers.

Still, some things along Strada C. Rosetti
blur more than they clarify: budding trees
compete with wide Ottoman balconies
for the right to make shade. Light, meanwhile,
stagnates in a satellite dish. All style

is sacrificed to communication,
all music to the traffic’s cloying hiss.
The beautiful civil servant knows this,
since she works with facts, and yet her high heels
and headphones imply there’s something she feels

we all feel—we want to hear ourselves think,
we want to rise above the uniform
sidewalk blocks. The old cobblestones were torn
up years ago, along with the mansions
and monasteries. The old city was done

being old, we were informed. Not that we asked.
Those who were shot have had twenty years
to make peace with the silence they silenced here,
the dictator’s noise muffled with a noose,
his concrete horizon left to remind us

what it takes to scare the mind out of a man.
We want to see ourselves too. The police
block every street today, but they are our police.
Neither gypsy dogs nor glue-sniffing teens
can take that from us. We know it means

something now to sit and read a book,
to read something true. Yes, we want to be
seen, but don’t want to be watched—this, the relief
of a generation who couldn’t say, but knew
the National Library belonged to them too.

There are five real newspapers to read now
and a sign across the street can advertise
LEGAL TRANSLATIONS, but it’s still not wise
to have speech handled by professionals.
Better now to just shut up, pay the bill,

join the amateur rabble on the street,
or claim our place along the balustrade.
Just outside, the uniformed riot squad
is shoring up its bulletproof phalanx.
The anarchists will refuse to break ranks,

will affirm their faith in all disorder.
Yes, we’ve had disorder here. On this square
in fact, here on display, the souvenir
of a body politic that has a soul:
our library, still pocked with bullet holes.


Bucharest, 2008

[A poem written on the eve of the NATO Summit here last month.]

Christopher Bakken

Oswiecim/ Auschwitz

On Monday, we left the kids with Klara, a confident, blithe, blonde actress/babysitter, and sped off into Poland’s lush countryside in our tiny rental car headed for Auschwitz. Spring had arrived in Krakow, so all the fields were green, all the trees in bloom, and all the red and yellow tulips were arranged in careful color bursts along fence lines and flowerbeds.

The irony was not lost on us—the contrast between our existence and what we were seeing and doing in our time here (wandering the Krakow cafes in search of our third and fourth cappuccinos of the day, chasing our kids who were chasing the pigeons on the piazzas, collapsing for late afternoon naps on the giant European king-size bed, complaining about the lukewarm water, reveling in the spectacular Polish and Italian food served up in fancy restaurants) and what all those hundreds of thousands of people imprisoned or ‘exterminated’ in Auschwitz did not, could not ever see or ever do. More disconcerting? The skies were brilliant blue, the sun shining. A day when nothing awful could happen. A day that felt oddly innocent. That contrast kept us primarily silent on our drive to the death camp.

Then: outside Auschwitz’s gate, “Snack Stands” with people buying hotdogs, enormous bags of Cheetos, Snickers bars, then walking through the gates, junk food in hand. An internet café. And an espresso bar and picnic tables. It all felt grotesque. But of course, this is the Way We Live Now.

We expected Auschwitz to be larger—an endless monolith. Instead, it was a tidy, orderly place—25 barracks, one after another, row after row. How could all those people who died here have lived here? Of course, the prisoners who came through here didn’t last long—4 months was the average life expectancy at Auschwitz in the early stages of Hitler’s Final Solution. And they slept 2 to 5 in a bed. Later, of course, there was no life expectancy at all.

Walking through the camp was exhausting, brutalizing, as it should be: the relentlessness of the violence that occurred there—and the life that was exterminated there—and knowing we were walking the same grounds, standing inside the same buildings, inside the gas chamber even, as the prisoners who died or survived the camps. But also where the Nazi soldiers and commandants once stood and opened up the cans of Cyclone B or pulled the triggers at the execution wall. The exhibits in the prisoners’ “barracks” were wretched. An entire room filled with shoes: woven sandals, wooden clogs, serviceable heels, tired slippers, wing tips. Another room filled with suitcases carefully labeled with names and addresses by the long-dead hands. Another filled with coils of women’s hair removed after they were gassed or shot—and used to make Nazi textiles. Another filled with prosthetic legs and hands and back braces. Thousands of spectacles. Thousands of cooking pots. Thousands of combs and hairbrushes. One porcelain doll, her face broken, her wedge of cheek lying beside her.

And after each exhibit: walking back into that blessed sunshine and into the jaunty trills of blackbirds and swallows. Realizing that Auschwitz, too, lived under that sun, with those birds, even then. Shouldn’t the earth have gone dark during those years? Shouldn’t the birds have flown away?

By the end of our 3 hours, we were flattened, and yet, felt absolutely certain that it was indeed important….essential that we had come—that we had walked through that place. And thankful we had not dared to bring our children here. Sophia would have been wrecked by it—as we were.

On the drive home, we stopped for lunch. Tired, heads aching, hearts aching, wiped out by the morning, we were somehow empty and thus ravenous and so we stopped at this tiny “bar”—one of the lovely kitchens that serve cheap, “Grandma” food. We had pickled herring on pickled onions, a mustardy coleslaw, beef goulash soup, and cheese and meat pierogies. We were hungry and hated our hunger after that morning, which called even the most basic human necessities into question.

When we returned back to our apartment, the kids were delirious. Klara had them running laps in the park outside, digging up worms, eating Happy Meals, playing with their plastic junk-toys that came with Happy Meals. Sophia and Alexander’s joy, their profound happiness, was wonderfully ordinary and prosaic. When they ran up to us babbling about their day, hugging our knees, showing off the new cache of “dragon nuts” they’d collected? What an innocent, necessary refuge from that morning’s horrors. What a privilege.

Kerry

Sophia Talks Ontology with The Poet

We have just returned from glorious Krakow, a city of poets. The place is unreasonably beautiful, the population unceasingly literary (the face of Czeslaw Milosz is visible upon posters hanging in the front windows of bookshops; the local playshop is performing something written by or related to Zbiegniew Herbert).

That said, The Poet for us is Adam Zagajewski, who along with his exquisite wife Maya, made the city accessible to our crazy band of Bakken gypsies (infamous across the Balkans, and now along the Baltic, for our ruthless sacking of cities): finding us a spacious apartment and introducing us to the mushrooms of Poland (who knew the Italian porcini, for which I have enormous expectations, have now been unseated by their wild Polish cousins Boletus edulis, the "borowik"?).

We had told Sophia and Alexander that the legend of Krakow's founding involved dragons, or the slaying of dragons, and that they might reasonably expect to find dragon eggs...or even "real" dragons in Poland. Indeed, after about ten minutes of investigation in the city park across from our apartment they returned with grubby handfuls of "dragon nuts" (walnuts that were probably scattered for the benefit of the local squirrels), which they presented to The Poet with great pride.

From the park, we began a leisurely stroll through the old city toward Castle Wawel, where Adam and Maya told us we would see an actual fire-breathing dragon. With her pockets stuffed with dragon nuts, her excitement growing at every step, the mind of Sophia began whirling with expectations and questions:

Sophia: "Do dragons really eat people?"

Dad: "I don't really know, but I suppose they might if you steal their dragon nuts."

Sophia: "Will the Krakow dragon eat us."

Dad: "I hope not."

Then a pregnant pause.

Sophia: "Are dragons real, Daddy."

Dad: "I don't know, Sophia, what do you think?"

This answer did not satisfy her, so she put it to The Poet:

Sophia: "Are dragons real, Adam?

Adam: [without missing a beat]: "Well, Sophia, that depends on how you define the nature of reality."

Not much for philosophical ambiguity, Sophia replied with a vaguely satisfied "hmmm," then remained speechless for at least two minutes (which is, we all know, almost unheard of....).

Christopher

Cranky Day

So Momma Bakken’s day began splendidly. The skies were blue. It was 80 degrees outside. We had our much-needed and beloved babysitter, Andreea, here to watch both Bakken bambini as it is the custom, in Romania, to give kids 2 weeks off from school for Orthodox Easter. Christopher, alas, headed to the National Library to grade a sackful of papers written mostly by students who are wonderful and appear frequently in his class, but also by students who almost never appear, yet are registered and wind up getting grades—he is encouraged to pass such students even though, say, they are studying abroad in Sweden for the semester.

So. Momma can’t complain. I head out, stopping off at a new pastry window I’ve been eyeing the past few weeks. Pastries I’ve never seen nor tried before. Breakfast? A Strudel cu Cascaval. Strudel with the Sour-ish cheese. I thought it would be spectacular. But then I felt like Jig in Hemingway’s short story, “Hills Like White Elephants”—it tasted just plain ordinary and not worth my wait. What does Jig say? “Everything tastes like licorice. Especially all the things you’ve waited so long for. Like absinthe.” Or something along those lines. Or there’s the other line: “”That’s all we do, isn’t it? Look at things and try new drinks?” That’s what I felt like post-Strudel cu Cascaval. Blah. Tired of pastries. Nothing sublime there—just toasted dough folded around mealy cheese. (Granted this is on the heels of yet another pastry disappointment yesterday—mass-produced Strudel cu Spinaci). Alas. Maybe I’ll just go back to my morning dose of Muesli—or what we fondly refer to as Horsefeed cu Raisins.

Despite the downturn in my-life-as-pastry-taster, I continued on my walk up to Herastrau Park. My goal? To walk to around lake. I set off, removed my Ipod and listened to the birds and the weed whackers and the tennis ball thwackers. And walked. What looked like an easy 30 minute circumnavigation quickly became an hour and a half as the lake kept pocketing out. And I kept walking (at one point, over a train trestle). How many kilometers? All I knew was that I had to get back home as Christopher and Andreea had an “appointment” with our Landlady T. (some fence-mending with Andreea’s interpretive help)—so I needed to remove Bakken Bambini from the apartment towards donuts or sundaes.

The result: things were smoothed out with Lady T. (though she is still irked by our shower curtain removal), and we hiked over with her to the Internet Billing office (to make sure we will cancel our contract and she won’t be billed), then had some mediocre pizza at an outdoor ristorante. How did this day end? Ah. We have felt surely we might, at the end of our Bucharest stay, receive some small portion of our apartment deposit back from Lady T.--minus the ancient toilet repairs, the shower curtain, and Alexander’s washable (but not entirely washable, apparently) magic-markering of his bedroom wall. A few of our hundred Euros might be ours again?

As Christopher blew off some steam drinking an ouzo and playing some much-need online poker (though not for real money), and Momma pre-cleaned the kids’ room in anticipation of our batty cleaning lady’s arrival tomorrow, we heard: CRASH! Alexander knocked the TV over. Cracked, dented, but miraculously it still works. Honestly. Christopher is, as we speak, watching Liverpool vs. Chelsea Champions League Soccer. Clear picture. I knew there was a reason I was going to Medjugorje in October. To thank the Blessed Lady who will perhaps intervene with our more cantankerous Lady T.

Krrrrry

Another gorgeous day at Herestrau Park

80 degrees and sunny in Bucharest today. Alexander entertained a large crowd of pedestrians while doing his ecstatic, hilarious Zorbatic dance to the lively beats of a Transylvanian bouzouki-band.

Such sublimity inspires, what else(?), gratuitous snapshots of our sublime bambini.

C & K