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