This is the third in a continuing series of (highly unofficial) trip reports. I work for an Agency of the U.S. Government; part of my job is international trade promotion-related activities in support of small business. (But I'm not going to write too much about that here; I don't think descriptions of the difference between B-O-T and B-O-O business plans and the advantages of off balance sheet financing, for instance, make for very scintillating reading.) My job takes me to Eastern Europe once in a while, but arcane Government rules and regulations about travel expense repayment make it difficult for me to call home with any hope of getting reimbursed. It costs a lot to call North America from Europe, especially from hotels, and I just couldn't afford the cost of all those daily phone calls. Instead, I decided to send out a postcard every day, one that was a stand-alone essay, a chapter of an overall larger diary of that trip that would give the reader a flavor of just what Eastern Europe is all about. So once again there was the challenge: be interesting, be entertaining, and above all, be brief! Talk about pressure! Most every day I was able to find one or two things interesting enough to build a mini-essay around, even if on many evenings, after a long day, composing an essay wasn't something that I looked forward to.
After reading through this new assembled collection of cards, I've once again added some commentary between the postcards for continuity and transition, and to describe some other things there just wasn't enough room to do on the confines of a postcard. And once again, I hope you enjoy reading about my adventures and misadventures as much as I enjoyed being there.
I'm not all that superstitious, so it didn't bother me that I was traveling
on Friday the thirteenth. But maybe it should have. The previous morning I
must have been in a daze (this trip came together with a rush at the very
last minute, as usual) and I left home without my Government ID badge. I
stopped by my office, luggage in tow, to take care of a few last bits of
business, but not having my ID meant that I had to bring everything in
through the x-ray machine. As you might expect, the building security
guards wanted to check out the largest, heaviest bag, and I had to mostly
unpack it right then and there -- it was kind of embarrassing to be there
amid stacks of clothes with people coming into the building gawking at it
all. At any rate, the guards were satisfied when the mysterious x-ray
shadow turned out to be a box of books. I was starting to be afraid they
were going to demand a strip search!
There are, of course, lots of other wonderful buildings in the city.
Some of them are on the castle hill across the river from Old Town, the most
impressive being the Gothic cathedral St. Vitus. Besides the Týn church,
the other tourist-collecting site in the Old Town Square is the famous
Astronomical Clock. It is so popular with tourists, in fact, that you can't
use the place as a meeting spot -- you'd never be able to locate the person
you're planning to meet, a point that was made by a friend I met up with the
following evening.
I should mention a little more about the walking tours. It turns out
that they are all English-language, an indication of the large number of
Anglophones who visit Prague (in fact, there are about 30,000 Americans who
live in Prague). There were only six others on the tour -- two young ladies
from South Africa, a couple from England, and another couple whose accent
sounded Scandinavian. The tour was informative as well as visual -- I not
only saw the house where Kafka was born and the theater where some of Czech
president Vaclav Havel's plays were performed, I learned that Prague has a
miniature version of the Eiffel Tower, but it was constructed on a hill such
that the top of both it and its big brother in Paris are each the same
altitude above sea level. Jana, the young lady who was our tour guide, also
took pains to show sites important in recent Czech history, such as the spot
where Russian tanks rolled in during the Prague Spring of 1968 and the
building that had been the headquarters of the communist secret police.
Many people, including a fellow playwright friend of Havel's, had been taken
in there and had not come out alive. It was a sobering reminder that as
little as a decade ago, I not only would not be taking that walking tour, I
would not have been allowed into the country.
One thing that doesn't seem to have much of a language barrier is music
-- Mozart pretty much sounds the same no matter where it's being performed.
The only language barrier is just that -- determining where it's being
performed. On Saturday, I'd headed out for what I'd expected would be a
concert by a string quartet only to discover I was attending a performance
by a wind ensemble. It's just an indication of the large number of musical
events each evening in Prague. On my way back from the Castle tour, I even
ran across a musical event that was happening during the afternoon -- on the
pedestrian-only old Charles Bridge, the J.K. Novak Band was playing New
Orleans jazz, complete with Czech-language lyrics. They are very good (I
have both of their CDs), but don't look for them to be touring the United
States any time soon. They don't even play clubs in Prague. I was
surprised to find out that the Charles Bridge is the only place they
perform.
Mike told us that all the tales from the tour had their bases in actual
historical events. The story about the Skeleton, for instance, mostly took
place at the entrance to Karlov University on Zelezna Street. The head of
the University's Medical College (or whatever its equivalent was way back
then) admired the doorman who presided over the huge wooden-framed entrance
to the college -- not for his appearance but for his size! The doorman, who
was very tall, would make a fine specimen for dissection after he was dead,
and the academian got the doorman to agree to this during one of the
doorman's many drunken binges. It wasn't long after that when the doorman,
in yet another alcoholic haze, misjudged the location of the college's
entranceway and charged headlong into one of the very immovable wooden
pillars that formed the doorway -- he was dead almost instantly. And not
too long after that, his corpse was being happily dissembled on the autopsy
table until all that remained was the skeleton, which was relegated to a
corner of the room where it remained for decades. All of this was
supposedly true; it was the retelling of the tale, time after time, that
added embellishment after embellishment until the conclusion became as
follows: And then, one cold and rainy night (like that evening was, in
fact!) the skeleton began to move -- very slowly, at first, and then more
coordinated until it left the building out into the street. Whenever it
perceived a passer-by, it emerged from the shadows and, with a voice like
the wind, asked for donations of money -- it needed the cash to pay for a
formal burial, which would at last free the doorman's soul. Mike told it
better than this, of course, and I'm paraphrasing it all as best as I can
remember. But, you know, I've probably just added my own round of
embellishments to the story. Gosh, maybe I've contributed my part to the
legendry of the city!
Even though the concert had been promoted all over the city (you couldn't
miss the people in period costumes handing out information flyers), the
turnout was only a few hundred. Most of us who did show up had purchased
the least expensive tickets available, so it must have been a strange sight
to the performers to see a nearly empty lower level and a crowd of people
packed into the back balcony. The reason for this, of course, was the price
structure of the tickets, which was more in line of what you'd expect for
Washington, D.C., not Prague. As a result, the concert was solely a tourist
event -- it was unaffordable for the locals. It must be kind of a cruel
irony for the residents of Prague, to live in a city renown for its music
and musical history and not being able to afford to see any of it.
The snow and the hotel were only two of the slightly surreal events of
the day. The third was my presentation at the small energy-related
technical conference here (the reason I was there at all, in fact). I
hadn't offered to do a presentation as much as was volunteered to do one by
one of the organizers (a friend to whom I owed a favor). My chosen topic,
commercial use of energy technologies in Slovakia and ways of finding the
project developer & necessary investment money, wasn't really much in line
with the theme of the conference, coal chemistry & science and development
of new coal-based technologies. Knowing this going in, I began my talk
mentioning that I was going to make the presentation interactive, more of a
discussion than a speech actually, and I was going to get some interesting
questions from the audience if it killed me to do it (well...not exactly
those words, but you get the idea). It didn't work. Every time I left it
open for some audience comments ("...and perhaps one of you would have a
comment on that?") all I got was an amphitheater of expressionless faces and
dead silence, even after the translation. It was one of the most
humiliating professional experiences I've ever had, and when it was over, I
slunk off stage to a smattering of applause. Even that didn't help -- I'm
not sure if they were finally giving me some sympathetic support, or else
feeling relieved that I left before the guy with the hook showed up.
Preov was mostly a positive experience (except for my electric razor dying, but that's another story). Both business meetings I had there led to the discovery of project opportunities (worth an cumulative US$43 million), which I took back to the States to promote to private sector project developers there. Trade promotion is actually quite interesting, and even fun to do -- you get to meet a lot of people, and it helps if you have a sense of adventure about it all. This trip was my longest ever, and the only real downside about it was that my luggage was very heavy. Wherever I go, I want to make sure the people I meet remember me, so I do things like bringing business cards translated into the local language (Slovak in this case) and taking lots of giveaways. One of the most effective giveaways has been the "Photographic Tour of the Smithsonian Institute" book (I pay for these out of my own pocket, by the way), and I usually present a copy to the managers of the companies I visit, especially if there's a business opportunity there. A four-week trip means lots of books (I'm not sure I'm physically able to do a five-week trip). But after Presov, I could feel the load start to get lighter. Either that, or all the lifting was having a healthful effect on me!
Slovakia's mountains are one of its two most prominent features that I
keep telling people about. The other is all the castles. There are nearly
200 of them, in a country about the size of New Jersey -- so many that
you'll see at least one of them on almost any highway trip you make in the
country. The largest castle of them all is Spiský Hrad, which was
featured in the movie Dragonheart. It's what's known as a "fallen castle,"
meaning that it's mostly a ruin. But that doesn't prevent it from being an
impressive sight, on a rocky hilltop only about one kilometer from one of
the major east-west highways in Slovakia. We drove past it on the way from
Presov to Tatranská Lomnica; all the snow may have obscured the mountains,
but it made the castle appear even more spectacular. It's no surprise that
a Hollywood film production came all the way here to take advantage of
it.
It was probably for the best that we didn't get up to the top of the
rock; there's no telling how cold and windy it might have been up there.
At any rate, I hadn't even brought the right clothes for those conditions;
I had packed for "November" and what I'd gotten was "January." Nevertheless,
it was a little disappointing not to be able to see the High Tatras from
close-up -- they really are magnificent in winter. Back in the early
spring of 1995, my first time there, the weather did allow a hike upslope
to the lodge next to a high mountain lake, and the reward was unexpected and
superb mountain vistas every so often when we'd break out of the woods into
a clearing. One other thing I remember about that hike was how deep the
snow was for late March; if you left the trail it was, in places, up to
your hips. The combination of snow that deep and the end of winter produced
another unexpected sight, though I heard it before I saw it. We had paused
to admire one of those vistas and had turned back to the trail when there
was what sounded like a freight train. It was an avalanche (a small one),
coming down the face of the mountain across the valley from us. Before we
began the hike, we'd seen the sign warning us that the lower trail was
closed. Now we knew why!
I've not yet mentioned a local "hot topic" related to the High Tatras --
Slovakia's bid for the 2006 Winter Olympics. The headquarters city for the
Games would be Poprad, about 12 km south (and a few hundred meters lower)
than Tatranská Lomnica, but all the alpine events would be in the
High Tatras. Tatranská Lomnica would certainly be a popular place
for visitors to stay; there are about a dozen small and medium sized hotels
situated around a village green (though for the Olympics I guess it would
be more of a "village white"), and I can imagine that during the Games the
town would be a non-stop party. If Slovakia was awarded the 2006 Games, it
would bring some changes to the area, though, and that's where the controversy
is. A bobsled and luge run would have to be constructed somewhere in the
mountains. Developers would want to reconstruct hotels, or build new ones.
Many of the roads, adequate now, might need "improvements." Not everyone
wants all these changes and all the redevelopment just for a circus that
would last only 16 days. The High Tatras are an environmentally sensitive
area, and have been preserved as a national park. The Slovakians opposed to
the Olympics bid want them to stay that way.
It turns out that a "Penzion" is about the same thing as a Bed &
Breakfast, except that the Penzion provides dinner as well as breakfast in
the cost of the room. There were several Penzions in Habovka, heaven knows
why (unless it's the hot springs, but that was 15 km away). I was told the
cost of this Penzion was a bit high by Slovakian standards -- 700 Sk per
day. That didn't seem so much to me, and I was right -- when I converted
it to U.S. dollars it worked out to not quite US$21 per day. For
everything -- room, dinner, and breakfast (and the food was good!).
I had to do the calculation twice before I could believe it. The surreal
event of the day wasn't the hot springs amid all the snow -- it was this
mind-boggling bit of information! Who says there are no bargains
anymore?
This was my second trip to Zilina (actually my third if you count one
other time, in 1996, when I was there for a grand total of three hours).
It's a nice place to visit, with several large town squares and one
smallish manor house type of castle. By the time we had settled into our
hotel, it was almost 7pm and most everything was closed except the Tesco
store. On the way there to buy some postcards, I walked through the Old
Town Square just at the moment when the clocks were chiming seven times at
the top of the hour. There's one clock, on what looks to be the town hall
building, that does more than that, though. There are 14 different bells
on the facade of the building, kind of an industrial-strength handbell
choir, and the ensemble is programmed to play a tune after chiming out the
hour of day. I didn't recognize the one that rang out, though I expect
that it plays holiday tunes during Christmas season. Earlier in the day
I'd noticed that it had been a whole week since the Prague Mozart concert,
and much as I'd like to, there was no telling when I'd be able to attend
another musical event. Well, my wish was fulfilled, but in a way different
than I had expected!
After the meeting, on the drive from Zilina to Bratislava, we had stopped
for lunch just across the river from the city of Trencin. I'd been through
there before -- the central part of the city is dominated by a large castle
fortress situated imposingly on a bluff high above the river. It turned out
that one of my Slovak hosts had gone to high school in Trencin, back in the
late 1950s and early 1960s when the country was firmly in the control of
hard-line communists. I asked him what it was like back then, and the one
thing he most remembered was the incident involving three older high school
boys. One night, either as a prank or in an act of defiance, they snuck
onto the grounds of the local communist party headquarters and removed a
large red star that was attached to the building, in the process of doing so
breaking it. They were caught, of course, and the punishment was severe.
They were sentenced to death and were executed. The remainder of our trip
to Bratislava was mostly quiet and subdued. Sometimes it's easy to overlook
that, although Slovakia is now an open and free society, many people gave up
a lot to make it that way.
The other business meeting of the day was in Levice, and it was hosted by
the mayor of the city. I found it interesting that even though he was up
for re-election in just a few weeks, his main interest was the welfare of
his city rather than his own personal standing. And he wasn't accompanied
by the usual group of handlers and sycophants you see with U.S. politicians;
it was just himself and two people from the city heat supply company.
Apparently they do things refreshingly different in Slovakia. Anyway, I
don't often get to meet politicians on my business trips -- it's happened
only twice before (ignore what I claimed in the previous Postcard Diary).
The first time was under similar circumstances, though the U.S. business
delegation was a bit bigger -- ten people (myself included) instead of just
one (myself). That one happened out in the middle of Siberia, in 1994, in
the former "secret city" of Krasnoyarsk-26 (like this time, that meeting was
hosted in the town hall by the city's mayor). The other time was in a
perhaps equally unlikely place, a trade show in Delhi, India, in 1995. A
group of people huddled around a tall stately-looking person cruised by the
exhibit booth I was babysitting, and the tall guy turned out to be (then)
Massachusetts governor William Weld. He came over and we talked for about
a minute; I even have a photo as proof. (He needed to find some hangers-on
who knew more about how to use a camera, though.)
Bratislava didn't look to have changed all that much since the previous
time I was there, about eight months earlier. There was still reconstruction
of some of the older buildings going on (the Hotel Carleton will be fabulous
when its re-hab is finally finished), but the Old Town seemed mostly
revitalized -- there's now plenty of night life, and musical events such as
chamber music concerts are fairly common. This is in great contrast to the
first time I was there, in March 1995; back then the Old Town consisted
mostly of abandoned buildings with broken or missing windows and crumbling
masonry. Hardly anyone went there during the day, while at night you didn't
feel completely safe there. The turnaround began a couple of years ago when
the city finally decided to rid itself of the problem the same way Slovakia
is divesting itself of state-owned enterprises -- the buildings are being
privatized. They were sold, I think, for one Slovak Koruna each to
businesses wanting them for their Bratislava headquarters operations (and
there were a lot of them). Part of the agreement was that the purchasers
were responsible for the necessary improvements before these historic old
buildings would be habitable. I'd been following the reconstruction of one
of them; it wasn't a particularly notable building and I have no idea what
its history is. But I noticed it way back in 1995 when it was just a shell;
in my mind's eye I could picture what it would look like (and perhaps what
it once did look like) in better times. During my trip to Bratislava eight
months ago I saw that the re-hab of the building had started; now it's
finished. The change from when I first saw it is amazing (even if the
lower part of it is now a bank); it's as if the building had located an
architectural fountain of youth. It made me feel vicariously satisfied,
and perhaps even a bit younger myself.
Actually, I did more on that Saturday than just wander around. My
Slovak hosts had provided a concert ticket for the evening, for a
performance by the Slovak National Philharmonic Orchestra. Or so they had
thought. Instead, it turned out to be a benefit concert for Slovakia's
equivalent to the United Way, complete with children's choirs, a popular
(from the way he was greeted, at least) local opera tenor, and even a
Celine Dion knockoff. (As well as long, interminable Slovak-language
interviews of local notables, in between the music, who were no doubt
getting their 15 minutes of fame.) It was all being recorded for later
broadcast on one of Slovakia's two state-owned television networks, and
there's where the problem was for me. I was already more than a bit
disappointed that the show wasn't at all what I'd been told it would be,
and then I found that the presence of all the television cameras required
that the audience be kept bathed in very bright, hot lights throughout the
event. It was unpleasant, and the only thing that prevented me from walking
out after about the first ten minutes was that I'd been accompanied by one
of my Slovak hosts, and I didn't want to cause any embarrassment. But
there's more -- after I returned to my room in the Penzion, I turned on the
radio and was greeted by an excellent BBC radio adaptation of the Charles
Dickens novel Hard Times (one of the voice actors was Tom Baker). So
maybe it all worked out in the end -- I'd expected a memorable performance
that evening, and I got it. Just not in the way I'd imagined.
Some of the things you don't need a guide to see in Bratislava's
Old Town are the amusing life-size metal sculptures of caracturized people,
placed here and there to lighten your day as you pass by them. There's "The
Commodore" (my name for him), for instance, who is leaning against the back
of one of the park benches in Old Town Square, propping himself up with his
elbows. Just down one of the nearby streets is "Mr. Top Hat" (based on an
actual resident of Bratislava), who beckons with outstretched arm, top hat
in hand, at the building where his real self once resided. And there's "The
Miner," emerging from underground through an actual manhole in one of Old
Town's pedestrian-only streets. Peter showed me where two others were, in
a pedestrian arcade -- a young lady leaning against a (very real) tree in a
café area of the arcade and a worried businessman looking with alarm at
his wristwatch, near the entrance to a bank. I look forward to seeing these
everytime I'm in the city (even more so, now that I know there's five of
them instead of just three); they're stress-relievers that always bring a
smile, especially on days where not much positive has happened. They're
popular with residents of the city, too, especially the ones under age
five. But I've no idea who should be congratulated for these combinations
of art and humor; none of them have any identification whatsoever.
I should mention that there are some mighty fine beers in Eastern Europe.
The one probably most familiar to North Americans is Pilsner Urquell, which
comes from the western part of the Czech Republic. As the name indicates,
it's a moderately light pilsner type of beer, and the description "pilsner"
even derives from the city where it's brewed (Plzen). All the good Slovak
beers are similar in taste to Pilsner Urquell, and at least two of them,
Zlaty Bazant and Topvar, are better. My hosts were way too kind to me; I
was originally going to limit myself to just two or three small ("maly")
beers for the evening, but as time wound on, I noticed there always seemed
to be a large full glass of the golden stuff sitting in front of me -- it
was like magic! One other thing that happened as the night went on (and
after our translator went home) was that the language barrier started to
drop, especially for me -- the more I drank, the easier it was to pick up
on a few Slovak words and phrases. By the time the evening came to a close,
we were all half-looped and understanding each other perfectly. Or so it
seemed, anyway. Maybe I've discovered a new method of learning
languages!
The train ride from Bratislava to Katowice took about five hours, during
which I saw the ground get whiter and whiter with snow the farther north I
went. Most of the ride was through the eastern part of the Czech Republic,
but even before we'd left Slovakia the most memorable moment of the entire
trip occurred -- in this land of castles, I got to be a knight in shining
armor. Just as the train was leaving Bratislava, I noticed an elderly lady
standing in the aisle of the rail car I was in, tearfully talking to one of
the conductors who was shaking his head at her. There was obviously some
kind of problem, but I didn't discover what it was until I spotted her
ticket and saw she'd only purchased a fare to the first stop, at the
Czech-Slovak border. She obviously needed to go farther than that (to
Breclav, it turned out, the next stop after that) but didn't have enough
money for the conductor to do an upgrade. I'd been unable to spend all of
my Slovak money the night before (nobody would let me buy anything), so I
gave her 150 koruna (not really all that much, about US$5) which solved the
problem. She was so grateful that she forced me to share her lunch with her
(roasted chicken breast, pretty good) and she was all smiles after that. I
wonder if I should add a new title to my business card -- "good samaritan."
The reason I was in Eastern Europe, my trade promotion initiative, was also
designed to be kind of a "good samaritan" activity -- to bring investment
help to companies that really need it. Now I can say that the initiative
works, even at a much smaller and more personal level.
In traveling through Eastern Europe by car, one of the things you'll
notice fairly quickly is the large number of beautiful churches and
cathedrals in the region. Even relatively small towns have them, and many
of these places of worship date back to before the time when the United
States was an independent nation. All these churches are still in very
active use, and not just on weekends. Almost every evening during the week
there are services held, and if you drive through one of these small towns
just as the service is letting out it's an instant traffic jam, as the
narrow streets are filled with vehicles, bicycles, and people on foot. As
we passed by Czestachowa, the spire of one of the largest cathedrals in
Poland was visible off in the distance -- the home of the most sacred
religious icon in the country. It's called the "Black Madonna," and it's a
painting depicting Madonna and Child that dates back centuries, now darkened
by age (hence its name). It's not kept on constant display like works of
old masters at an art museum; instead, it's shown to gatherings of religious
pilgrims two or three times a day. I was present (unobtrusively) at one of
these unveilings, back on my first trip to Poland, in 1992. I'm not a
particularly religious person, but even so it was a moving experience.
There was a sudden hush that spread across the room and all the people,
hundreds of them, fell to their knees. Tears came to their eyes. The most
interesting aspect of the whole experience was that almost all of the people
present were very youthful, of college age or even younger. Throughout its
history, Poland has had to endure some hard times, not the least of which
was 40+ years of communism which had ended only three years prior to my
first trip there. The conviction of faith, and the painting that is its
manifestation (especially with the youth), must be a powerful force,
indeed.
Besides being a city of light, Warsaw was also a city of cold. It was
more frigid in Warsaw (minus 11 degrees C) than even in the High Tatras of
Slovakia -- so not-nice out on the streets that it prevented me from
venturing very far on foot from the hotel. Desperate times called for
desperate measures, so I bought a knit hat and a woolen scarf from a street
vendor (for a total cost of about US$8). Those street vendors must be made
from some tough stuff to be out there all day. And there were dozens
of them, each with their own sidewalk tables and bins. Private enterprise is
alive and well in Poland, even in the least hospitable of conditions.
Part of the reason there was a problem at all was the difficulty I'd been
having staying in touch with the outside world. An e-mail message warning
about the situation had been sent to me a few days earlier, but by the time
I'd found a way to access my office e-mail account it was almost too late to
do anything about it. What saved me was the existence of so-called
"internet cafés" that now exist in some of the cities in Eastern Europe.
Earlier in the trip, I'd found them in Prague and Bratislava, but it took
some effort to dig out the location of one of them in Warsaw. Turns out it
was only two blocks from the hotel I was in, and I'd walked past it at least
twice without noticing it. To find it, you had to go into a foreboding
little courtyard area and look for a hand-painted sign you could easily
mistake for graffiti. The arrow next to the sign pointed down a flight of
crumbling concrete stairs into the cellar area of one of the courtyard
buildings, but when you got there, all there was to see was an empty
dank-smelling area, the only occupant being an old lady feeding meat scraps
to a couple of stray cats. But wait! Just beyond her was this door
(without any sign), and when you opened it, voilà! -- the public access
internet provider. I'm apparently not the only one who had trouble locating
the place; there was only one other customer there the whole hour I was
online reading my e-mail, and he was playing some kind of online computer
adventure game. But as far as I was concerned, just getting to the place
seemed like it was part of a computer adventure game. Only this time,
instead of rescuing some digitized lady in distress, I rescued the remainder
of my business trip!
We didn't stay in Gdansk all that long -- just a couple of hours to look
around the city and then it was back to the train station to catch the
"local" to Wejherovo (22 stops in 44 kilometers!) where we were met at the
station and brought to NordCon. Earlier, I'd been told about NordCon by the
friend who was with me, and I'd expressed an interest in attending. It's a
science fiction convention, informally organized with discussion events with
various writers and editors, some strange contests and competitions that I
still haven't figured out yet, and a free-for-all party area with lots of
loud music that went on well into the early morning hours. I was the only
person there who didn't speak Polish, but that didn't prevent me from
talking with people. As I expected, once everyone realized I was from the
United States, they came up to me to try out their English on me; it was
truly a rewarding experience to be there. For me, NordCon was as much a
cultural event as all the concerts and tours of Prague earlier in the trip.
Just a different sort of culture!
The train ride back to Warsaw was almost a mini-convention in itself.
There was another science fiction fan sharing the compartment with me and
my friend, and also one of Poland's better-known science fiction writers
(Konrad Lewandowski) and his young daughter. I never did learn much about
what Mr. Lewandowski had written (although I did find out he was an engineer
by academic training -- same as me -- and was working as a journalist); his
little girl, though, entertained us all with some of her pencil drawings.
I had no trouble recognizing the lakefront vista of the hotel where NordCon
had been held and the stylized zodiac figures from the ceiling of the train
station in Gdynia. She has a real talent for art, even at age 6. If she
stays with it, there's no telling how good she can get by the time she's
finished schooling. We may have discovered the next Michael Whelan!
All those government "palaces" in Bucharest are probably the most visible
evidence of why Ceaucescu was taken down in 1989 -- Romania had been going
down the tubes economically for many years, and here he was spending large
amounts of money on all these huge monuments to himself, as if he was an
emperor. When it all finally boiled over, it's no wonder he was taken out
and shot. At any rate, all these large and pretentious buildings (with the
broad avenues that go with them) do set Bucharest apart from other Eastern
Europe cities. But the culture and even the language are very different,
too. Romanian is not a slavic-family language like Polish, Czech, and
Slovak -- not even close. It's actually a "romance" language, very similar,
actually, to Latin (I've been told that Romanian is the language that Latin
has evolved into). The Romanian culture (at first glance, anyway) seems to
be somewhat derived from the French -- French used to be Romania's language
of business (it's being supplanted by English), and many of the restaurants
and bistros have a pseudo-French cuisine. There's even an Arc de Triumph in
Bucharest; it's in the middle of a traffic circle on the way from the
airport to the city center. About the only thing that seems to be missing
here is a month-long bicycle race!
One source of constant amazement for me all during this trip was the
weather -- not because of all the snow and cold where I was, but all the
news reports about the heat wave that North America was experiencing. It
was as if winter had begun a month early in Eastern Europe and summer had
never ended in the United States. And yet, I kind of enjoyed experiencing
a real winter again. I now live in Maryland, which is too far south and too
close to the ocean to get very much snow during the winter, but I grew up
in far northern New York State, in one of the so-called "snow belt" regions
where it wasn't unusual to have "White Thanksgivings" or even a "White
Halloween." It's been a long time, but I can still remember (with a bit of
nostalgia) all the days when school was cancelled due to a blizzard blowing
in off the lake, and thise clear crisp mornings when the outside temperature
was minus 30 degrees C. Well, maybe nostalgia isn't quite the right word to
describe it!
Maybe part of the reason I wasn't spending very much money in Romania was
because of the money itself. There are just too many zeroes on all the
banknotes (the exchange rate is now more than 10,000 Lei to the U.S. dollar)
which made it easy to get a distorted idea of what was expensive and what
wasn't. Anyway, I saw there was a symphony performance that last evening
in Bucharest, and it looked like an opportunity to use up most of my
remaining Lei. Or so I thought. When I arrived at the symphony hall, I
was surprised to find that there wasn't a box office there. I tried to
explain to the person at the door that I needed to purchase a ticket for
the performance, but he had even less English than I had Romanian, and
pointed me toward the coat check area. I thought I was doing a little
better with the lady there, especially when she motioned me toward a
staircase up to the next level, but when I got to the top, a door opened
into the back of the concert hall. One last try, with the lady usher there:
"Excuse me, I need to purchase ticket for this performance. Can you help?"
She pointed me toward a vacant seat at the back of the hall. At that point,
I gave in, realizing that it was my karma not to be able to spend any money
in Romania. The concert was a good one, though, with performances of the
"Tragic Overture" by Brahms, a melodic violin concerto by Wieniawski, and
Robert Schumann's Symphony No. 2. It was a very fine (if somewhat surreal)
end to my short stay in Romania.