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

Confronting Power (and losing), or, Archaic Toilets and Plastic Bags

We’ll call this the week of disconcerting run-ins with the Romanian powers that be. Generally, we Bakkens like to keep a low profile—though this is often difficult as Sophia skips down the street singing “Yankee Doodle” and Alexander tears up the playground with great American bravado. But a few days ago, our Soviet-era toilet pretty much fell apart. The “guts” rusted out and so the odd pulley flusher system went kerplonk. Christopher admirably scoured all the local plumping stores for replacement parts, thinking to save our equally ancient landlady the hassle of repairs. But each dour store clerk shrugged and laughed at us. “No, no,” they each said. “No more.” By this we think they meant: Are you crazy? This rusted out contraption is 30 years old!

So we finally called Lady Tenescu over for a plumbing inspection. Now, she is sweet, but—and we have this on the authority of our wonderful Romanian babysitter Andreea-- Lady Tenescu is at least a little bit “crazy.” (So, too, our cleaning lady, who insists on showing me each room as she cleans, pointing to the dirty rags and gleaming floors. I’ve assumed she’s been asking me, “Good job? Does it look good?” To which I’ve been answering, “Bravo! Multemesc!” But Andreea corrected me: “Oh no,” she said. “She’s saying, ‘Look at how good a job I’ve done for you! It was so dirty and I am the best cleaner there is in all of Bucharest!’”)

But back to Lady Tenescu. When she realized that the toilet wasn’t a simple repair, she called in her plumber who laughed, too, at her and apparently told her the same story: the toilet is outdated, the parts impossible to find. It would require a complete overhaul. He spent the good part of 3 hours camped in our bathroom chipping away at some strange calcified stalactites that were inside the tank—then trudged off to the plumbing store for an entirely new system. What we got: a weird push button system that only works half the time, and now, as the tank refills with water, it sounds as if an industrial sprayer is inside the tank itself. 10 minutes of this racket. But, okay. The toilet flushes again.

When Lady Tenescu came for the rest of the rent money, she insisted that we would have to pay the 100 Euro plumbing repair job since it was under our supervision that it stopped working (“you must have pulled too hard on the flusher,” she insisted, through our babysitter’s expert translations). Apparently this is the custom. Renters pay for everything that stops working—even when it is a 30 year old toilet. Christopher balked. She chattered angrily at him then disappeared into the bathroom. She called him in, fingering the new shower curtain we’d purchased from Ikea to replace the disgusting, mold covered, dirt encrusted curtain that was left-over from the previous occupant. What could Lady Tenescu want? The old curtain back up? Alas, that was long ago tossed in the garbage. So—we don’t know what to expect when we try to get our security deposit back—100 Euros taken for the plumbing? Another 50 for the curtain? Andreea explained, “These old people cling to their things. Even the plastic bags are precious.”

Which brings me to plastic bags. Today, I walked Alexander over to Rainbow Supermarket—for the 56 and 57th bottle of milk for the week, for my own twentieth 2 Liter bottle of Diet Coke (somehow I’m addicted to it here), for Sophia’s “cow pudding,” and for sundry other heavy items. Since it’s a longish walk and I have to hang the plastic bags from the stroller handles, I usually double-bag, and usually without a problem. But today, as I was double-bagging the Diet Coke, a stern woman, backed up by a uniformed security guard, said, “Doamna! No!” They both the proceeded to de-double-bag my groceries to my great, public humiliation. So, it will be many days before I step foot in Rainbow—and now must return to the cramped aisles of the the ever-open, ever-shabby, “NonStop Nic” across the street.

Oh, and now the light in the bathroom refuses to work. As you can imagine, we look forward to the arrival of an electrician with great dread. No wonder it was here in Romania that Eugene Ionescu, great innovator in the Theatre of the Absurd, was born. No wonder he fled to Paris, where everyone knows they have excellent baguettes...and, um, beautiful toilets.

Kerry

Sunday in the Park and at, um, Hard Rock Café?

Sunday has strangely and melancholically become the-day-we-give-in-to-being-homesick. Perhaps it is the lack of our Meadville rituals that we can’t transport here: Huevos a la Mexicana, multiple cappuccinos frothed out from our ridiculously expensive but perfect espresso machine, the CBS Sunday Morning Show, lazing about the attic with the kids while they run around pell-mell in their avalanche of toys. And of course, there is the phone which rings—family and friends calling to catch up, to send love and gossip, or to recount the multi-course dinner held at our house from the night before.

Here in our Sex Shop apartment, the kids wake up ridiculously early each Sunday because of all the traffic noise—car alarms, horns, sirens, weird screaming matches between the glue-sniffing vagabonds on the street below. We stare at our kitchen—no tortillas, only stale bread, and more importantly, no home canned salsa. We manage to supply the kids with pancakes from scratch, then try to entertain them with crayons and the menagerie of very small action figures they hauled overseas. But soon feeling apartment-claustrophobic, we stumble out into the mean streets of Bucharest for an excursion to the park. (“Shall we?” Christopher and I say to each other. This is said with a note of resigned desperation, as we often feel thoroughly fatigued by the multiple, daily trips a day we make to Bucharest’s playgrounds in an attempt to help our kids burn off their endless, insane energy.)

This past Sunday, we hopped the subway and got off at Herestrau Park—an enormous, weirdly formal, but certainly beautiful park filled with elegant beds of tulips, a long line of peasant caryatids (plucked from the farms of Transylvania in Romanian peasant dress instead of the chiton-wearing babes of the Acropolis) serving as a gateway into the park, and a weird sculpture garden consisting entirely of five-foot “Heads” (truly, heads only….of famous and/or obscure Balkan politicians) arranged in a circle. Famous heads, granted, but it seemed more like a scene out of some acid-trip John the Baptist dreamscape. The heads stare dispassionately, impassively at each other—despite looking as if they’ve just been decapitated and are now being served up on a cobblestone platter.

So we strolled and stopped off at playgrounds with suspect (hazardous and rusty) equipment, and Sophia jumped on a trampoline while Alexander pitched a tantrum because he was too young to bounce on a trampoline. And then we watched as the hilarious and charming stray dogs of Herestrau drank from the opulent fountains, unperturbed by the rollerblading kids and unstable rollerblading adults. And then suddenly everyone was STARVING—so we searched the park and came across countless Mici Stands selling platters of little grilled meatballs/sausages, white rolls, and a slather of mustard all for about 3 bucks. But I am tired, so tired, of the meatballs. So we trudged on—kids whining, Momma whining, Daddy whining. And as we exited the other end of the park, what did we find?

Sadly and gloriously? Hard Rock Café. We'd never thought to step foot in one, ever. But the place took Visa. We pigged out. They had a kid’s menu. Nachos and hotdogs and pulled pork sandwiches and hamburgers and fries. It tasted so perfectly, blandly, necessarily filling and tasty and, yes, American. And even better? A highchair (the first I’ve seen) to keep Alexander tame for an hour. Better than that? A beautiful Disneyfied princess who painted the kids faces (Sophia became a glittery Princess Kitty, Alexander became a hilarious, full-on Spiderman) and a clown who made balloon animals to order.....basically free babysitting while Christopher and I swooned over the platters of food and guzzled our Carlsberg (which is, truly, cheaper than water here!).

Kerry

Return to Brasov

Having been invited to give a reading and a lecture at the University of Transylvania, I got another chance to attempt to find Brasov, which I missed completely the last time around.

Technically, we visited Brasov back in early March, even spent the night in one its better hotels, but we never really found Brasov. We got some bad directions, walked the wrong way (away from the center, not towards it), took a taxi into the “center” after much frustration, then stumbled into the first authentic-looking restaurant we could find to appease our starving kids. Previous blog entries detail those mis-adventures. The next day we pulled out for Sighisoara, wondering what all the hype was about…

Suffice it to say, this time around I actually located the real center of Brasov and spent a good amount of time wandering in it. Brasov, as it turns out, is the Siena of Romania: adjacent to the gigantic “Black Church,” haunting and beautiful, is a giant “campo”-like space humming with pigeon and human life. On every side of this huge square are Saxonesque buildings of every shape, each painted a different bright color. From there, numerous narrow alleys radiate outward, each one offering a bevy of attractive cafes, archways, and secret little restaurants.

Above all this, as if rising out of the buildings themselves, is Mount Tampa, a wall of impenetrable foliage whose rounded heights are always disappearing into the Carpathian mist. It is one of the most pristine and charming city centers I’ve ever seen, and certainly the loveliest in Romania (though I’m told that Timisoara will give Brasov a run for its picturesque money).

All my joy at rambling about in this evocative and delightful place was heightened that much more by the brilliant students and professors who attended my reading and lecture, peppering me with perfectly delicious questions, exhibiting a largeness of spirit and curiosity that it was impossible not to love.

Ah, Brasov, city of long sighs and excellent coffee…. it’s good to have found where you were hiding all along, even in a steady drizzle!

I write these rhapsodic notes aboard the train back to Bucharest. For twenty minutes, we have been steadily rising into the curves of a spooky mountain pass. The rivers are gushing after two days of rain and…surprise, surprise…out of the low-hanging clouds huge, swollen snow-flakes are suddenly falling.

Photos above of the alpine approach to Brasov, and of the city itself...

Wish you were here,

Christopher

Ode to Cismigiu

When I first arrived in Bucharest, the gigantic Cismigiu park was a source of anxiety: it was there, in that grey, nasty, polluted, mud-hole that the glue-sniffers and pan-handlers haunted the shadows. The place has become progressively more hospitable, as we've noticed during occasional visits these past two months. Then, suddenly, today the place became nothing short of miraculous: flowers have exploded everywhere; green spaces have taken over where before everything was the color of muck; children run in circles around old people; the old people sit in groups talking about young people; strange dogs wander about looking important; and even the giant concrete pools (which I didn't believe would ever be full of water) are suddenly lakes...upon which couples in rowboats paddle beneath haughty willow trees... upon which swans glide about doing their swany things. To enter Cismigiu, in short, is to leave Bucharest behind and enter a vegetative dream.

C

SEX SHOP, or, It Was Bound To Happen

Though we live on Piata Lahovari, on Strada George Enescu, the easiest way to guide taxi drivers and friends to our apartment is to simply say, "Next to Sex Shop." There are a variety of Sex Shops across Bucharest: "Amsterdam Sex Shop," the redundant "Sexy Sex Shop," and our very own Plain Jane, "Sex Shop" which is usually guarded (fronted) by a friendly, rather upstanding chap who often tossles our kids' hair. (Though there is his counterpart who often sets up drinking camp beside Sex Shop's doors--a grizzled, irritable, glue-sniffing, and dwarfish guy, likely a junkie. Generally harmless, but he often tries to scam a beer or some Lei out of us.)

Thus far we've managed to keep Sophia's interests firmly on the ever-changing billboard outside our apartment's gates (one week an add for Nivea, the next week, a strange suspended orange and red faux-bubbles-ball ad for Orange Fanta). And we also kept her convinced that the way to recognize home was to look for the giant green "Plus" sign of the pharmacy located on the other side of our building.

Alas, Sophia, now the adept and sophisticated reader, sounded out the Red Neon "Sex Shop" the other day and identifies home as "Sex Shop." Granted, she has been imitating her father as he hails and instructs taxis. "Ta-xi!" she barks, hand raised in the air. And when we tumble into the cab, she says with equal authority, "Sex Shop!" When we were in Maramures last weekend, she asked (in her cranky moments), "can't we just go home to SEX SHOP?"

But today, as we we passed Sex Shop's door, usually firmly closed, she discovered it had been left ajar. Sex Shop has thus far remained a mysterious structure--its window's blacked out in red paint and covered over in black grates, the door always, always closed. But now, ajar. And over my shrill demands that she "Step Away From the Door!" (or because of them) she peeked and then stepped inside.

"It's a toy store, Momma!" she exclaimed in wondrous delight. On the wall? All the expected magazines and adult toys unwrapped and on display.

"No, honey," I said. "That's a toy store for grown-ups."

"No, Mommy," Sophia corrected. "See? There's a toy car on the wall."

I couldn't imagine what she was mis-seeing or perhaps really seeing--some sort of miniaturized, motorized four-wheeled gadget?

Thankfully, Sex Shop's guardian, who was laughing, gently shooed her away and pointed to the sign on the door: "No one under 18.: (in Romanian but still understandable). That seemed to help me tug Sophia along and through the gate of our apartment. But then, smart kid that she is, she turned to me and said, "But Momma, I can't wait eighteen years in Romania to go back inside! Can't we go in now?"

The Pastry Windows of Bucharest, or, Where I Spend a Whole Lot of Lei

As we’ve walked around the mad streets of Bucharest, dodging cars parked on the sidewalks, the piles of poop and their attendant shaggy, dreadlocked dogs, and driven through and through and through the more remote, muddy, rural countryside of central and northern Romanian, we have made sure to stop off at the scores of pastry stands and pastry windows (literally! windows that slide open and dispense pastries by the warm bagful) along the way.

First and always and everywhere is the chain Fornetti; in Bucharest, there’s a Fornetti window (sometimes two) on every block and people lined for the mass-produced Merdenele, Streudel, or slabs of pizza topped with ketchup. Christopher swears by their chicken liver stuffed pastry—something about the earthy saltiness and bizarre composition (a pastry stuffed with mashed innards?) speaks to him. I, however, view Fornetti as the Dominos of Sweets. Every last streudel or merdenele is uniform and greasy, baked off site, and reheated in a stainless steel oven. Of course, back in the States if a Fornetti opened up at Chestnut and Arch in Meadville, I’d be smacking my lips over a Merdenele cu Branza every day. But here? When you can find little pastry stands that bake their goods in wood burning ovens?

My favorite: Patisserie Dacia. This stand, like all true specialists, only sells 4 items: pretzels with poppy seeds and salt; strange, sugared, foot-shaped donuts; Merdenele (pastries filled with a feta-like cheese); and the blessed Streudel cu Mere (see our previous blog on the subject). No matter the time of day, there is always a line snaked down the block, people clutching their lei and salivating. I can’t walk by this stand without eating one, or two, of the just-fired-in-the-oven, half a foot long streudels—cinnamon apple goo drips from the ends of fire-charred rolled up pastry, confectioner’s sugar dusts my mouth and hands and sweater. Small-scale out-and-out gluttony (streudel inhaled right there on the sidewalk) now seems like a necessary Rite of Spring in Bucharest. The pretzels cost .6 lei (20 cents) and the streudel? 2 lei (75cents).

Yesterday, I branched out and tried a new pastry window and something called Tragon: a triangular shaped, still-warm, flaky pastry filled with drippy sweet cheese and raisins and dunked in confectioner’s sugar. I tried to parcel out my bites—nibble here, nibble there, which nibble to save for last? Yes, of yes, one with the cheese. Or one with the raisins. Or maybe just the pastry. Of course, I still had to adjust my walk away from Patisserie Dacia as I felt pulled by the yodel of the streudel….

Every now and then, Christopher and I stop at the local hotdog-wrapped-in-pastry stand that also sells a divine cross between sour cherry pie/tart/coffee cake. The bottom of this tart (Prajiture cu visine) is a dense sweet cheese custard which is topped by sour cherries and preserves. We usually fight for the last crumb of this—and don’t have to decency or patience to carry it home and eat it properly with our café lattes. Instead, once again, we piggishly inhale it on the sidewalk corner, oblivious to the car exhaust, the dog poop, and the hundreds of harried pedestrians.

The most charming window of all is up by Sophia’s school. The same cheerful woman greets us through the open window, her head topped by a hairnet and white cap, her body tied up, hygienically, in an spanking white apron. “Hello!” she says, smiling. She is the exact vision of an Eastern European Pastry Mama you might expect—sturdy forearms, perfectly applied red lipstick, hair bunned and netted, the expectant helpful expression on her face. Yet she speaks elegant English, which makes her especially qualified to help us choose between the Sweet Cheese Merdenele and the Feta Merdenele and the Merdenele cu Cascaval (a vaguely sour white cheese). She sells, by the kilogram, finger-sized puff pastries filled with cheese, sausage, or mushrooms. Here, too, are S-shaped pastry-cookies smeared in raspberry jam which Alexander attacks with great, heathenish pleasure.

Sophia, on the other hand, is obsessed with all things Covrigi (pretzels). There are specific stands that only sell pretzels and one happens to be on the walk to her school. So most days she gets a pretzel to and fro. The covrigi (like hot pretzels in the States only smaller and baked longer) are dipped half-way in either: salt, sesame seeds, poppy seeds, or onion crisps. Sophia has made a recent discovery of a circular pretzel that is pretty close to a sesame bagel—only it is softer and about the size of a life preserver. Little S is also a fan of the mammoth Pig-in-a-Blanket, and eats it sans ketchup or mustard, on her walk back from school. (A strange custom: “lunch” at Sophia’s school is called “breakfast”—so she is only too happy with the breakfast-pretzel-breakfast-pretzel/hotdog-snack-dinner-dessert daily schedule.)

On our trip to Maramures we tried one of the many versions of Placinta—deep fried and folded over calzone-style and stuffed with jam, onion and potato, or cheese. We also had some of the best Papanasi:homemade donuts coated in cherry or apricot preserves and slathered with sour cream. Also served hot.

And though this doesn’t qualify as a pastry “window,” we’ve discovered a Lebanese sweet shop that sells splendid baklava and coconut squares and a yellow lemon sponge cake topped with pistachios. Oh yes—Christopher is also a fan of their lamb pies. But the pleasures of Bucharest’s Middle Eastern offerings are for another posting.

Kerry

Sophia's Global Gregariousness

Little Alexander Oscar is still young enough to just kick back in his stroller looking adorable to earn baby-noises and googly glances, not to mention kisses and free candy from random pedestrians and grandmothers across Europe.

Sophia, on the other hand, must work her charismatic magic. And work her magic she does, receiving generous hand-outs from nearly every shop-owner she encounters after just a few coy phrases in English, a well-placed word or two of Romanian, and her sneaky little smile.

Pictured above are a few of her international friends, from the Amalfi Coast, to the Hungarian border towns of Romania, to the mean streets of Bucharest.

She reserves some extra special magic for the ever-charming Marius, the not very intimidating security guard at Sophia's school, who is a source of endless fascination and hilarity to her.

C

Eligible Daughter: Good Pans, Excellent Buckets, Nice Jugs!

Among the more hilarious things we saw while driving around Maramures: trees, bushes and even hand-made tree-like racks festooned with bright pots and pans and buckets. Was this a peasant method for drying dishes? Who would use so many pots and pans for a single meal? Was this a kind of Easter tree?

The mystery was solved by our friend Lia, who explained that in the villages of Maramures families announce that they have a daughter they are hoping to marry off by decorating their trees with pots and pans: the nicer the pans and the fuller the tree, the bigger the dame's dowry (so a giant redwood covered all over with All-Clad would advertise the ultimate babe, I guess!). These are matrimonial, culinary billboards, in essence.

Along the same lines, the front room of many houses is dedicated entirely to the display of a girl's dowry, all of it (chests, carpets, doilies, implements, china, etc.) arranged strategically to attract the eyes of inquiring local hunks.

La,

C

Peasants: the beautiful and the awful

Peasant culture? Well, yes, as Kerry describes below, the region of Maramures offered some fascinating glimpses of how life was lived in the northern Balkans for hundred of years: each house has its own well for water (with, yes, the old winch and pulley and bucket system), its own stable, its own congregation of busy yard beasts. And everyone seems to be making something out of wood: elaborately beautiful wooden gateways mark the entrance to most family dwellings. Some of these places look entirely gorgeous, demonstrative in their illustrations of agrarian pride--they are tidy, carefully groomed, myriad-flowered visions of simple living inhabited by cheerful, robust looking folks. Often, I felt like I'd stepped into the world of Brueghel. In contrast, I also saw some of the most profound, heart-breaking scenes: houses built out of scraps, built next to rivers of garbage and sewage and chemical run-off (even our two year old son remarked "oh, yuck" when we walked him down to the "river" bank), inhabited by people who look as utterly defeated as their surroundings. In short, there was no question of romaticizing this area. The quaint and the kitsch are juxtaposed everywhere with the pitiful and the awful. It's not as if I arrived in Romania with some idealized version of peasant life tucked inside my American consciousness. Having spent time on my grandfather's dairy farm in Wisconsin as a kid I know first hand that a farmer's life is as much hell as it is agrarian heaven. But I felt moments of actual shock driving through the Romanian countryside, which led me to certain questions: What was it like here under Ceauşescu? Was it exactly the same, minus the satellite dishes and conspicuous cars? Was there any bread? Was there any corn for the mamaliga? Was I really seeing the IMPROVED version of rural conditions, the result of two decades of capitalism? Such questions were all the more poignant when, always unexpectedly, against this backdrop of peasant poverty and/or prosperity would rise one of the brand new, often quite garish concrete and re-bar houses, opulent compared to the surrounding huts, as if bizarrely relocated from some version of the Romanian suburbs.

Go to Maramures, I say! You would have to be dead not to be moved by a place as enticing, fascinating, and off-putting as this.

Christopher

[P.S. Double click on any of the photographs to expand them to full screen]