Alexander Oscar the Great

Alexander Oscar the Great

conquers Bucharestian Mountain

After playing Saracen for an hour atop the crowded playground "pirate ship" at our favorite afternoon hangout, Giardina Iconoae, our little conqueror grew tired of such small-time acts of intimidation and ran straight up the massive (to him, at least) gravel mountain in the center of the park where he pushed back the hood to his blue and white parka and beat his chest while ROARING loudly enough to awaken all the stray dogs in the vicinity. When I asked him what he was doing, he gave me his "are you stupid?" look, then answered:

"T. Rex, Dada."

A Very Brief Interview with Sophia of the Bacchae

This interview was conducted right after we picked up Sophia from her new school. Her pony tails were sideways, her grey and white uniform was a mess, and she was trying to draw pictures while we pestered her with questions. Known to all her family members and teachers as a kid who VERY much likes to talk, we though it worth recording this rare moment of near-speechlessness from our garrulous daughter.

So, Sophia, how do you like Bucharest?

Good. Because I really like my school…. because we do lots of stuff.

What kinds of things do you see when you walk around in Romania?

Stores on the sidewalks that sell little toys and stuff. And I see lots and lots of lots of houses. And lots of dogs and cats. I like to go on walks to the playground.

What do you miss about Meadville?

Our house and Daphne, Red and Delilah.

What do you like about our new apartment?

My room has a bed, drawers, and cupboards, and even Alexander. And there are animal pictures all over the walls.

What about the elevator?

I like it because I get to press the buttons.

What are your teachers’ names?

I forget. Oh, Miss Stefanie.

And Miss….the other teacher, the one with that long, long, long hair.

And what are the names of the other kids in your class?

I forget. I have friends but I don’t remember their names right now.

What Romanian words do you know?

Bunã=hello
Mulţumesc =thank you

What do you have to say to your family back in the United States.

“I love you.”

No more. Don’t write any more. I don’t want to do any more questions.

“Oh, and I want them to come to Romania.”

No more questions, Dad.

Two Anecdotes Regarding Bucharestian Traffic

Two Anecdotes regarding Bucharestian Traffic

Since we live right in the heart of Bucharest, within walking distance of almost everything, we don’t often have to endure what the majority of commuters put up with when they decide to drive into the city.

When we have to take a taxi, we discover that the taxi drivers are almost always fueled by high doses of caffeine and venomous road rage. They all wear the expressions of people caught in the grips of incurable existential dread. The following anecdotes begin to explain why:

Traffic Anecdote #1

We are leaving Becker Brau, a lovely cavernous old Rathskeller in one of the seedier parts of Bucharest (rather symbolically located behind the gargantuan Palace of the People). They brew their own beer there, which they sell by the METER, made all the more tasty accompanied by the house oom-pah-pah band (with TWO tubas, even). Down the street from Becker Brau, it turns out, is the new Playboy Club, which brings out all the silicon disasters and fancy cars in the city.

Having accepted the generous offer for a ride from a new friend, we weave our way through the Bentleys and Mazeratis toward her poor little station wagon. The street is virtually clear until she actually pulls out when, suddenly and inexplicably, there is a rush of cars coming from both directions, trapping us at a sharp curve for nearly half an hour, vehicles at every diagonal, bumpers kissing, every single driver refusing to move an inch to alleviate the jam. There’s space at the front and back of the pile-up, of course, if someone would just stop pushing ahead for a moment and back up, but that kind of compromise isn’t likely here (everyone goes at high speed into every intersection, regardless of pedestrians and other vehicles, as if life depended upon getting in front of the other cars on the road).

Finally a cop car appears at the top of the hill and within a few minutes (not that the cops have actually directed traffic, or even left their car) we are up over the curb, around the uncooperative taxi that’s blocked our path the whole time, accelerating back into the post-Communist slums of Bucharest.

Traffic Anecdote #2

I’ve just come from the recording studio, where the national television channel has done a “culture” piece on us for their nightly news. Since they were not there when we actually recorded the six hours of art-historical text for the audio guides at the National Museum, they’ve asked that we return to the scene of the crime to “act” as if we were recording….to pose in various guises of pronunciation, editing, and intellectual fervor, to pretend that we are puzzling out the finer points of Broncovan iconography, in short, with our brows furrowed dramatically for the camera.

Leaving the studio and that exercise in publicity, we find ourselves in a traffic jam near Piata Unirii, one of the main squares of the city. Now, you must imagine a very small Romanian car: in the front is a rather intimidating driver and in the passenger seat is the jolly, curly-haired cameraman holding a tv camera the size of a retriever; in the back seat I am sandwiched between the very tall Alex (director of the Friends of the Museum) and Maria (the reporter). Traffic has not so much as budged for at least five minutes. We are all eating bananas, sweating profusely, about to fall into contemplative despair, when on the radio we hear the opening salvos of “YMCA” by the Village People, which just completes the picture somehow. It would be hard to invent such a perfect recipe for the absurd…

Yours in traffic,

Christopher

The Bacchic Bambini: Opening Assault upon Bucharest

The Bacchic Bambini have landed, with alternating bursts of sleepiness and manic playground enthusiasm!

In spite of her jet-lag, Sophia put on a brave face and boarded a bus to her new kindergarten today. She admitted to being nervous, but when her teacher called to check in about her status this morning it was reported that Sophia had demanded a snack ("I'm staaaarving," she told her new teachers), ate it ferociously, and in the process inspired all the other students to also demand snacks. Thus her little mutiny begins...and she is clearly feeling like herself.

Alexander missed out on the playground yesterday, since he completely passed out in his stroller for a good two hours while we navigated the busy streets of Bucharest and the market. He is enjoying bottle upon bottle of pomegranate juice and very strange cartoons broadcast in Romanian (which even the jaded Sophia admits "sound really cool in Romania talk")...

More soon...

The Bacchae in Bucharest

Bakken Goats in Romanian

I have been extremely fortunate to make friends with Ioana Ieronim, a Romanian poet who walked me around Bucharest one day narrating where and how the Revolution of 1989 happened in what is now called Piata Revolutei.

She has also arranged to have me invited to a literary festival on the Black Sea coast in June, where folks like Orhan Pamuk will be hanging out.

Here is one of my poems, "Eclogue 4 (Goat Funeral)," translated by her hand into Romanian. It certainly looks very beautiful, if I'm allowed to say so (and since her last translation project was to update the Romanian translations of Shakespeare, I think she knows what she's doing):


Egloga 4 (Înmormântarea caprei)

Am fugit din tavernă plin de băutură şi gravitate
la râu m-am împiedicat în tufe,
înjurându-i pe toţi, cu tot kitsch-ul lor de bouzouki,
avântul încrezător al gloatei,
m-am trezit abia când păstoriţa Iuliana
aprindea rugul pentru căpriţa născută moartă, bocind
către duhul care-o chemase la el prea curând.
Înţelege că era devreme – iarba
alunecoasă, lemnele ude scoteau fum.
Căprioarele se ascundeau în pădurice.
Ea avea flori de salcâm în cozi
şi i-am văzut pe umăr niţel polen
de când sfâşiase vălul de doliu.
Pe trupul mort erau împletite frunze de măslin,
o grămăjoară de boabe întregi la bot.
Eram ciudaţi la malul râului acolo:
două fiinţe omeneşti prea apropiate de morţi,
morţii încă aşteptând cineva să vorbească,
în jur sălbăticia ne urmărea,
în spatele nostru oraşul stupid adormit.
Eu ce puteam face? Capra murise,
Fata era frumoasă, râul crescuse mult.
Pentru ea s-a înălţat din bârlog
animalul din mine, a scuturat somnul iernatic,
am luat-o în braţe, am aprins focul, am ajutat-o
să ardă – oh zeu fără suflet –micuţa jivină.

Football and Medieval Art… Soccer and Stradivarius

In addition to beginning my courses this week (which mainly involved tiresome speeches on the evils of plagiarism and the spiritual benefits of good attendance), I busied myself with three activities: shopping and cleaning in preparation for the arrival of the rest of the Bacchae; playing soccer (ahem, “football”); and talking into a very expensive microphone.

First, the Low-Ball:

The language of football is the same worldwide, of course, and I didn’t need much Romanian to drag my 40-year-old body out on to the pitch and beg it to cooperate. I’ve been invited to participate in two very different pick-up games here in Bucharest.

The Tuesday night game takes place inside a kind of red and white circus tent that looms over an expensive, state-of-the art artificial grass surface. The participants are comprised mainly of young professionals—businessmen poised to make a killing as Romania’s economy propels itself toward European Union vitality. As a result, most of them stepped off the pitch now and then to answer their cell phones and type things into their new i-phones and Blackberry devices.

The Thursday night game is out in the elements, “under the lights” in a kind of concrete hockey rink in which some rather slimy, battered Astroturf was once glued down. The players are mainly in their twenties, which means they spend as much time sparring verbally as they do actually playing. Since this game doesn’t begin until 8pm at night, the combination of cold air and recent snow-melt makes the turf sloppy and slippery, leading to spectacular spills and joint-wrecking acrobatics, none of which am I much in the shape for performing.

Romanians are not very big on passing….but they all have spectacular dribbling skills and seem determined make the highlight reels with every touch of the ball. The fact that most of them do this on a slippery surface while wearing really bad shoes (imagine very buff men playing soccer in white Keds, those little slipper-like canvas things we associate with ladies in nursing homes….I have to take some photos of this for you), makes for a certain amount of hilarity.

After three weeks of sloth, what a relief it has been to attempt some exercise.

Then, the Highbrow:

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I was asked to record the English-language audio-guide for the National Museum of Art here in Bucharest. In spite of my very rudimentary Romanian pronunciation skills, I was handed about six hours worth of art-historical text which I needed to perform in my best “God-voice” so that wandering pilgrims, tourists, and inquiring minds can stroll past the Medieval masterpieces while being educated about the exhibits. These recordings took place in a state-of-the-art recording studio on the edge of town; a heavy metal band had been laying down tracks before we arrived.

My task, in short, was to try to pronounce names like Constantin Brâncoveanu and Neagoe Basarab, and place names like Târgovişte and Mănăstirea Curtea de Argeş while sounding something like a native speaker. This was much harder than I expected it to be, but as a result I’m now reading street signs with a very different sense of the Romanian language, eager to find my way inside its Latinate grammar and Slavic pronunciations. All the Romanian words seem to have twice as many vowels as consonants; Greek words all seem to have more consonants than vowels….so, being as language-challenged as I am, these adjustments are happening rather slowly.

My payment for this service appears to be in two forms: in football (Alex, the director of the Friends of the National Art Museum is a former pro-soccer player and is the reason I found the Thursday night game) and in free tickets for all museum events. Next week they will “launch” the new audio system in the Medieval gallery with good champagne and the company of dignitaries (and me, hoping I don’t sound like too much of an ass on the recordings). The week after that the Romanian government will open the locks on one of the five Stradivarius violins it owns so that the greatest new Romanian violinist, Alexandru Tomescu (lauded by folks like Yehudi Menuhin), can use it to play a concert for us (Bartok, Sarasate, Rachmaninov, etc.).

Thank god my wife is about to arrive so I have a beautiful, brilliant date to accompany me to these events. I’ll surely feel less like an American hick that way!

Yours, in soccer and Stradivarius,

Christopher

Inscrutable Spray Paintings

Beautiful buildings have their charm, but they must compete with the graffiti artists of Romania. When I tire of gorgeous Nouveau facades and architectural flourishes, I find myself pointing the camera at these strange and hilarious images, many of which are strangely beautiful (or beautifully strange). I'm equally attracted to the ruined Soviet cars, which serve as a kind of ugly punctuation for the sea of brand new Mercedes and Fiats that comprise most of the traffic in Bucharest....but I'll save those for another post.

Christopher

Setting up Camp

Hello Everyone:

Joyfully, I have rented, scoured, and fortified (with pots, pans, IKEA miscellany, and one plant) a well-lit apartment on little Piatza Lahovari, just off very grand Piatza Romana (where Romulus and Remus are suckled by an emaciated she-wolf cast in bronze). If you point your finger right into the heart of the labyrinthine map of Bucharest, that’s where we live.

We have three “bedrooms”, two of which have windowed-in balconies from which I spend too much time sipping coffee and watching the action on the street below (mainly just pedestrians trying to negotiate traffic and icy sidewalks), a large kitchen, and a sitting room complete with nearly comfortable wicker furniture and a television that plays CNN. Lahovari square is home to one excellent restaurant with a wood-burning pizza oven (yes, I admit that I walk by now and then to press my face up against the plate glass just to admire their massive oven), one 19th century mini-palace with an impossibly elegant wine garden out back, and a series of little shops, including a garish red and white SEX SHOP. In fact, to find our apartment, I tell people to “come to Lahovari square and follow the arrow to the entrance to SEX SHOP….then buzz apartment 50.” We’re hard to miss.

Within easy striking distance (i.e. five minutes by foot) is the disheveled building where I teach (for an hour and a half twice a week) and where Sophia will board her mini-bus with all the other uniformed kindergarteners to depart for school each morning. In addition to doing “ballet” for gym class, her kindergarten offers the choice of three extra language classes: Turkish, Arabic, and Romanian. I think she’s going to have a blast.

Heading in the opposite direction is the Amzei market, with both indoor and outdoor vendors selling a wide variety of vegetables and fruits, not to mention a thousand unidentifiable pickled products, many of which look very delicious.

In short, the circumference of my daily rounds is limited to a space about the size of our block in Meadville, which is that way it happens in big cities. Beyond that, of course, there’s a zillion museums, concert halls, and old neighborhoods to explore in every direcftion. I’ll attend a concert of Schubert leider next week for eight dollars, for instance, and I’m going to hear an Israeli poet read her poems in Romanian tomorrow night. Tomorrow I volunteered to serve as the "voice" of the National Museum of Art; they are recording an English language head-set tour, and I'll be reading the six hours of text that tourists will listen to as they gaze upon the art. I’m even playing soccer inside a weird dome lined with Astroturf.

Needless to say, none of it seems quite complete without Kerry, Sophia and Alexander here. It has taken me the better part of three weeks to find us housing and to work out the kinks of daily existence, however, so they’ll be arriving just in time to participate in the fascinations of Bucharest without having to endure the frustrations and bewilderment that even the veteran inhabitants seem to find annoying.

My classes begin this week. Evidently the students follow two educational philosophies: rampant plagiarism and virtual non-attendance. I’m hoping to terrify them away from the former and cure them of the latter with my irresistible Yankee charms.

Once the rest of the Bacchae arrive, we'll update the blog with more details about our new existence here. We'll take accurate dictations from Sophia and Alexander, too, so they can report their impressions in their own words.

Love, from the Sex Shop,


Christopher