2012 Travels: Iași
It never ceases to amaze me the creative ways for a bus driver to turn a 150km ride into a five hour extravaganza. On our way to Iași, a small city in Romania, we first went out of our way to a weirdo rural border crossing, but that was just the tip of the iceberg. The driver spent twenty minutes at a gas station filling up, and then stopped again two hours later for more gas. No worries, right? I mean, gives us a chance to pee and all that. The gas station only had one toilet, so there was a long line. Eventually, my turn came and all was good. Then I hear the horn. Whatever, there were several people who still had to go in line behind me. The driver wouldn’t just leave with us all in line at the toilet, right?
I get out of the bathroom and they’re all gone. The line was gone. The bus was almost gone…I ran. The driver couldn’t wait for us to take care of business. But at least I got to go, and was a relief. Next stop was the same. Right before the border, he stopped at a roadside toilet. Good news for all! Except he cut it short again. Argh. Then there was the border. Most countries have “exit customs”. I could do without this. They took forever, herded us from one room to the next, and searched through our bags. We were pretty keen to get moving, and get the other side dealt with.
No such luck. We stopped about five feet from the border guard building at the duty free. For thirty minutes. Half an hour of my life waiting for some guy to figure out which smokes he wants to buy. Folks, a pack of cigarettes in this part of the world costs $1. Liquor is just as cheap. Is there even a point to duty free? Is there thirty minutes’ worth of a point to duty free? They rushed everybody past the toilets for this?
Romania is in the EU, but not in the gong show of a customs union they call the Schengen Zone. Don’t get me started on Schengen, which makes it impossible for a foreigner to spend six months bumming around Europe as a youth like my dad did. Anyway, Romania is part of the EU so we figured they’d be practicing at being bad-ass border guards. They actually weren’t, but of course they needed to check our bags. This guy didn’t speak English, but for some reason he wanted to get some information out of us anyway. He’s Romanian, so trying to use Russian on him wasn’t going to fly…that part of the world is in the rear view mirror.
He wants to parlais the francais. I did not know this about Romania, but a lot of them learn French as a second language. If they don’t speak English, you can try French, and will probably have good luck! This made it easier. My French sucks and I way to self-conscious to use it with actual francophones, but with other French-as-a-second-language speakers I feel better about it. I guess they like it because Romanian is a Romance language, so learning French is easier than learning Germanic or Slavic languages. In fact, this helps us as well. While many Romanian words are different and unrecognizable, many are roughly the same as French, or Spanish or even Italian. For example, we were watching Dexter on the local TV station, and it had Romanian in subtitles. So a character says “escuchame” and this translates into Romanian as ‘ascucha-ma”. It’s actually neat to see how many words are recognizable when you see them written out.
The first stop was Iași, a university town that seems to have a pleasant enough quality of life but not the European old town thing. The bus dropped us off in Iași, but only technically. We were in the country one minute and on a sidewalk at the edge of town with our bags the next. And without any local money. Ugh. So a long walk to the nearest bank machine was in order before we could do anything.
The reason for stopping in Iași is basically because Sunshine’s great-grandmother had come from there. So this was all about genealogical research. The city records didn’t get us very far, and the records office was crowded full of people doing some sort of paperwork. They weren’t as joyful as the marriage license crowd (we lived above the marriage registrar a couple of weeks ago in Sevastopol) but in any case this wasn’t really a good time to start pestering the staff with random questions about people who left 100 years ago.
So we headed for the local Jewish cemetery to see what we could find out. Sunshine’s contact in the town had told us to ask the nice lady at the cemetery to help us find the right graves. We walked out there — a bit of an epic haul — and were greeted by a pack of wild dogs, all barking. Most were inside the cemetery, behind the bars, but two were outside and a stick was required to scare them off. Then the old lady came out of the cemetery, grumbled something that didn’t sound like “Hi, how can I help you?” and slammed the door shut, locking the chain and walking into the building.
Ok, then.
With not much else left to do there, since we weren’t going to deal with a pack of frothing wild dogs anyway, we admitted defeat, laughed at the good joke Sunshine’s ancestors played on her and went back home.
The next day, we stocked up on garlic and boarded the train for Transylvania.
