Blasting through Bucharest

Bucharest is almost like an Eastern European New York.  Everything is big (partly as a holdover from the communist era and partly because of the commercial influx that occurred as soon as that era ended) and busy, but in the end it feels a bit lacking.  Having said that, it contained one of the most surprising and wonderful museums I have come across the entire time I have been in Europe.  Spirituality and tradition clash with modernity and commercialization, creating a strange buzz that I could never quite put my finger on.

But it all started with me at the train station, bag(s) in hand, at 5:30 in the morning.

DAY ONE

Having done the run back to the train only to discover it had already departed and deciding a scarf probably wasn’t such a terrible thing to lose I started to look around the station.  I was specifically looking for a left luggage booth, which I had previously researched and knew existed.

Bucharest Gare di Nord is kind of a giant T-shape, with the tracks trailing from the top of the T.  I walked down each of the three arms with no luck before finding an unassuming little window, behind which were rows and rows of bags.  So that was a start.  The next thing to do was get the attention of the woman behind the closed window of the (24 hour) left luggage booth.

She acknowledged me, continued fiddling with random bits of paper for a bit and came to the window.  Luckily I had had some leftover Bulgarian lev after Sofia, and had exchanged it for Romanian lei while still there.  This meant that not only could I leave my luggage, but I could also pick up a nice hot chocolate from the automatic vending machine for 1 lei (25c).

It’s probably worth mentioning that Romanian currency, while very nice to look at (it’s plastic, thank God) is completely impractical.  They have notes for: 1, 5, 10, 50, 100 and 500 lei as well as coins for the expected denominations for their cents, called ‘bani’.

You’ve probably worked out by now that bani are pretty much completely useless (the 50 bani piece is worth maybe 0,10 euro) but you still end up seeing prices with decimals, usually in supermarkets, and end up with pocketfuls of practically worthless change.

Most of the time you use the 1 lei note, but this seems to be in ridiculously short supply, especially considering that you can have a wallet stuffed full of 1s one second and have them gone in a flash.  I had pockets full of 100s, which is almost like a 20 euro note except it makes you feel much richer.  Unfortunately no-one would accept them because they didn’t want to give me change.  Bah.

It was obviously pretty dark, and nothing was open, but I had gotten it into my head to spend the morning walking to the old town in order to see the Jewish Museum before heading to the hostel (obviously you can’t rock up at the hostel at 6am).  I thought I’d grab some breakfast and had found (online) a little chocolate café.  I felt like treating myself a bit.

You’re probably wondering: Why the Jewish Museum?  There’s a very simple answer.  It was Monday, and for some reason all the museums in Bucharest are closed on Monday (and most are also closed on Tuesday, making my 2 day stay very well timed).  The only one that is open all week is the Jewish Museum.

The first thing I was greeted by was a long street full of stray dogs.  I had read a rabies warning for Romania (there hasn’t been a reported case of rabies for some time, but they don’t think it is 100% stamped out) so stayed clear.  Except the dogs were too curious and friendly and actually came up to say hi.  At least they weren’t like the Bulgarian dogs had been.

The second thing I was greeted by was a chorus of cawing from a bunch of birds that sounded like crows but had grey patches and were smaller than crows.  They filled the trees in an eerie silhouette.  I was reminded that Romania was the home of Dracula.  Then I passed a cheesy ‘Café Dracula’ and was reminded that all that meant was tacky tourist traps.

When I got to the place I wanted to have breakfast it was closed.  I walked through the old town a little, killing some time until it was to open at 8am.  Bucharest’s old town doesn’t feel terribly old, nor does it make up for that fact with charm as with Plovdiv.  It’s basically just a mess of churches interspersed through streets full of pubs, clubs and kebab shops (complete with money exchange counter!)  It’s the only old town I have ever seen with a strip club or a sex shop. 

8am came and passed and still my breakfast spot didn’t open.  At about 8:30am I gave up and went to some awful takeaway coffee place to grab a croissant and a coffee.  What I most needed was a piss, so I took my coffee (in its cardboard cup) and croissant upstairs, where there was more seating and some toilets.

There were a few people already up there, so I took a small table against the wall, trying to avoid any attention.  My fingers were numb from the cold outside, so as I went to put my coffee down – whoosh.  Out of my clutches it fell.  Onto the floor.  It exploded, splashing coffee in a pool under the table.

I really didn’t want to have to go downstairs to explain to them that I had spilled coffee everywhere, but equally I didn’t want to leave the mess (particularly since there were a bunch of people who had seen me spill it).  So I went to the toilet, grabbed some (bright pink) toilet paper and mopped up the coffee with it.  Good as new!

That incident left me with a breakfast of half a small coffee and a ham and cheese croissant, which actually mostly ended up on the table anyway because it was ridiculously flaky.  By the time it had finished shedding itself it was about half the size.

I headed out, not too impressed with how I had been faring so far and hoping to redeem myself with a quality cultural experience in a museum.

Passing each church, I began to notice that the locals, passing the church, would make the sign of the cross until they had gone past.  This wasn’t just old people – I saw a young twenty-something couple walk past an alley that had a church at the end of it and make the sign until the church was out of sight.  I don’t think they were terribly impressed with some foreigner pulling his camera out and filming away at their sacred sites.

To get to the Jewish Museum, my instructions (professionally recorded within my notepad the previous evening) instructed me to search behind the shopping centre.  Well, I found the shopping centre.  It was kind of big, glass and ugly.  The whole square, in which the shopping centre took centre stage, was like an ode to capitalism, with a giant spinning Pepsi can on top of a building beside a Coca Cola billboard.

Every brand you could imagine was somehow represented.  Down an immense boulevard leading away from the shopping mall was the Parliamentary Palace, another enormous (I am really struggling to find an adequate way to communicate the size of this building), ugly building, this time in the communist style.  So you can walk down the street from a communist chapel to a capitalist one.

I have to admit, my instructions were severely lacking.  There wasn’t really a behind to the shopping mall – it didn’t have any true shape or form.  I basically just walked around it until I reached an area with lots of banks, which I assumed was the Jewish Quarter.  I know that probably sounds a bit racist, but screw you because I was right.

A little bit of walking through the Jewish Quarter took me to a 100-year-old Orthodox church, which was a bit out of place, I thought, but was just around the corner from a synagogue.  At least it looked a bit like a synagogue, because that’s what it used to be.

I walked around the building, searching for the entrance, and came across a sign reading: Muzeul.  Great!  It’s the museum!  I’ve found it!

There was a man at the gate, and I went up and asked him in slow, methodical English about the museum.

“You want to go in?  I take you.”

He waved me in, past a cage full of barking stray dogs, to the entrance to the synagogue.  He opened the door and shouted in Romanian.  A man wearing one of those flat Jewish hat things came out to greet me and show me in.  He was not an English speaker.

“Français?” he asked me.

“Uh… oui.  Un peu.”

He then proceeded to tell me that the museum used to be a synagogue but was decommissioned during the Holocaust and ended up becoming a museum dedicated to the Holocaust in Romania.  It would cost me five lei.

This kind of didn’t sound like the museum I was looking for, but I was here now and didn’t want to seem like I was wasting the dude’s time, so I went in.

I was given some details on the history of the synagogue, but it was in French, and when I say “un peu” I bloody well mean “un peu”.  Something happened related to one of the chandeliers some time in the 20^th century, and that’s pretty much all I can tell you for sure.

Luckily the actual displays contained English.  Unfortunately the actual displays were just photocopies of documents in Romanian pinned to boards around the room with a key explaining their significance.  It was a little disappointing to have a multiple-page document in Romanian that is simply described as, “Police report detailing the events surrounding the assassination of ten jews,” or similar.

It didn’t take too long to see everything (basically each board contains stuff relating to some aspect of the holocaust, arranged fairly chronologically).  It was quite disappointing to go from Bulgaria, with the humanitarian stance of its people saving so many, to Romania where the persecution of the Jews was approached with great verve.

(I interrupt this blog to reveal the fact that I am on a night train heading for Budapest and a woman that I am sharing the couchette with is having phone sex via Skype.  She’s trying to be subtle about it, but I just quite clearly heard, “I would come and make love to you right now if you were alone,” from the guy she was skyping with.  She immediately turned the volume down.)

Leaving the museum I accidentally stumbled across the shopping centre, the position of which confirmed that the museum I had just visited was, indeed, the Jewish Museum.  And it hadn’t had a toilet, which was problematic since I needed one (I feel like this is starting to become an increasingly more common problem as I enter the colder regions) so I went into the shopping centre to find the toilet.  There was one.  It was in the loading dock.  FFS.

By this time it was late enough that it wouldn’t be too inappropriate to go to the hostel, so I went back to the train station to pick up my bags and happened to go past a Holocaust memorial.  It was basically a giant concrete block, but I walked around it a bit and gave it an amount of consideration appropriate to a memorial.

While at the station collecting my bags I had the bright idea to book my train tickets for the next few days – first to Brasov, then to Budapest.  Like in Sofia, there was a separate booth for international and eurail ticket sales, though this time it was in a much more obvious position – right beside the entrance (see Bulgaria?  That’s where you should put a service that will be primarily used by tourists who can’t speak the native language!)

As in Bulgaria, Romanian public transport ticket staff basically treat you as though you are wasting their valuable thumb-twiddling time.  You can walk up to their desk, they will acknowledge you and then go back to what they were doing (i.e. staring at their desk) until such a time as they feel like talking to you.  Stock up on patience.  Fortunately, though it takes some time, they actually get you what you are after eventually.

Luggage claim, other than the typical slow staff, was straightforward, as was finding the hostel.  I stayed in a place called Puzzle Hostel, which was a house a little to the north of the city centre.  To get by foot from the station you have to pass an intersection that has been dug up at some point, and the road is mud (though people still drive on it!)  It was a bit of a grubby neighbourhood, though I didn’t feel unsafe.

I think the hostel is staffed by a middle-aged American and a Romanian hunchback.  To be honest it was difficult to figure out who was and wasn’t staff because there were a bunch of students who lived there too (though not as paying guests of the hostel) and they hung out in the reception office watching the Romanian 24/7 news channel.  The place was clean though.

I went out to get some dinner and exchange some euros.  I had read that it was better to do this at the banks in Romania, but my experience with bank exchange (Switzerland) vs currency exchange offices (Bulgaria) had made me prefer the offices as both cheaper and easier than the banks.  I shopped around a bit and decided to risk it for a decent rate.  I worked out exactly how much RON I should receive, etc etc, before going up to the desk, and received exactly the amount that I expected to be given.  To be honest I was a bit disappointed that there wasn’t even an attempt at a scam for me to thwart.

For dinner I had a kebab.  It was a lot tastier than I was expecting, and it was certainly big.  I struggle with eating in places where I don’t have company because I feel ridiculous going into a restaurant alone, and if I’m only staying in a place overnight there’s no point going to the supermarket and cooking anything so I tend to default to fast food.  Luckily it’s cheap in eastern Europe.

There was a girl sitting on the front porch smoking when I returned to the hostel.  I smiled and said hi to her.  She looked like a deer caught in the headlights, which confused me a bit.  Turned out she was actually a gypsy (or vagrant) who I had assumed was a guest (mainly because there had been a pink towel in my dorm room, though that turned out to belong to the American).

The only other people staying at that time were a French man and a Turkish guy.  We didn’t talk much, tiredly watching some stupid show about extreme waterslides before I went to bed.

DAY TWO

The hostel had advertised a free breakfast, but it took me a while before I figured out that this consisted of the collection of odds and ends sitting to the side of the kitchen table.  I spent quite a bit of time hesitating over taking the food, but in the end I concluded (correctly, as far as I know) that the only reason there could be a cereal packet and a bottle of milk sitting on the table was if it was the free, included breakfast.

After checking out my plan for the day was to visit the Museum of the Romanian Peasant, pretty much the only place open that day.  It wasn’t far from the hostel, either.

I walked down the immense main street (damn it was big) to the museum.  They offered an audioguide, which I decided to do since entrance was something like 50c and that left me with plenty of cash leftover for a bit of a splurge.  I didn’t pay to take video, though, since that would’ve cost somewhere in the vicinity of 100 euro, which is just stupid (the price to take photos was thirty times the entrance price – what the hell?)

I went into the museum not really knowing what to expect.  I had heard it was good, but really – a museum about the life of peasants?  I had seen the Mycanean Gold treasures, I had visited the Vatican Museums – what could this one have that trumped all that?

Well, trump it did, not so much for having any particularly brilliant exhibits or being especially informative but for the way it was presented.  I need to mention that the audioguide was an essential part of the experience, since without context you could conceivably walk through the entire museum thinking it was just a dingy, poorly-put-together mess.

With the audioguide, however, everything is clearly explained.  Not so much what each item is, but what it is doing there and why it is presented in such a way.  The guide encourages you to explore the museum for yourself, questions more than it answers, and only provides enough information to set you on the path to seeing the clever patterns integrated throughout all the exhibits.

The museum is a spiritual experience, far more so than the Vatican museum (though the Vatican’s spirituality was tainted by its commercial emphasis), and the displays are designed in such a way as to communicate the piousness and faith of the Romanian peasants.  This more simple expression of belief feels a lot more real and legitimate than any of the richly decorated churches or monasteries I have seen before.

The museum is divided into two floors, and each floor into a ‘left’ and ‘right’ side.  The floor plan requires you to double back on yourself, returning to a central area when you want to visit a new area.  The curators have incorporated this concept of backtracking into the museum experience, encouraging you to have a second look at different rooms in order to gain a deeper understanding of their relevance.

Maybe I should expand upon the ‘spiritual experience’ the museum offers.  To start with, displays are incorporated into the building in an attempt to provide a holistic view of them – that is, provide context for their presence.  The argument is that by having exhibits behind static glass cases, divorced from their original context, you are only able to grasp the object itself, which is only a small fraction of the importance of the object.  The walls of the museum were therefore painted with faded colours to mimic the small churches attended by peasants, exhibits were spread around the room with no description or explanation, requiring the attendee to consider the object and try to understand it themselves.

These exhibits included a cross tree (a tree that you put a cross on when you do something naughty, and sometimes the trunk grows around the crosses to make them part of the tree), a ramp discussing peasant food that represented the peasant diet as a reflection of the Christian birth-marriage-death-afterlife cycle, and a complete peasant’s house.  There was a room hidden behind a secret (sort of) door that reflected on the passage of time, with clothing and such left to decay (turning the ‘preservation’ part of museum curatorship on its head).

So… not so much information about peasant life (though that was part of it) but more of an art installation.  It ended up being my favourite museum so far.

I had planned to go to the Caru cu Bere beer hall for a nice, meaty lunch, but the museum took a lot longer than I had expected so I had to make a dash for the train station at that point.  I went to pick my bags up from the hostel and was given a tiny clay plate with the name of the hostel on it for some reason.  Not entirely sure what the point of that was… but ok.

Finding my train was easy and I was soon in my carriage, which was shared with some lovely (snort) Israeli guys, a nice (legitimately) young Romanian guy and an older Romanian woman who looked a bit out of her depth with the rowdy Israelis, but she didn’t have to put up with them long since she got out at the very next stop.

The Israelis were on their way to Brasov as well, though they were heading there for skiing.  They’d been to Romania before, but were only on a one-week trip this time around.  They actually seemed pretty jaded about Romanians (though liked Romania itself) and were weirdly excited to come across another tourist.

The local guy lived in Bucharest (apparently that’s where work is at the moment) and was a bit shy to start with, but soon got involved in telling us his thoughts about the country (jaded, as per usual with locals talking about their home country).  That is the one good thing about boisterous groups of people – they suck you into the conversation.

Anyway, the train trip was pretty uneventful other than that (I’m finding Eastern Europe to be a LOT more reliable in terms of trains than Western Europe…) and I was in Brasov on time, ready to walk to my next hostel.  Which is an experience that will be communicated when this story is

TO BE CONTINUED