Paging Dr. Acula

In the late morning on October 14th, after a trip to the zoo with the kindergarteners and an interview with a reporter from an environmental education journal, I stood on the platform at the train station to embark on my trip to Bucharest. It wasn't as glamorous as it sounds. For one thing, being interviewed can make you feel a little silly if the reporters watch you sing “I'm a Little Teapot” or if reputed biologists watch you teach a lesson about animals to 4-year-olds with poor English. (Every day can't be taxonomy or conservation; sometimes you just need to talk about Halloween animals.)

Also, it was cold. Shannon and I shivered and groaned as the loudspeaker announced our train would be delayed fifteen minutes, but eventually we arrived at the airport in Berlin and even had enough time for a hot mug of coffee before boarding for Paris. If your geography is as good as mine is, you at least know that Paris is WEST of Germany, and Bucharest is EAST, so why were we flying to Paris? We don't know either, but the university booked it, so we went.

On the flight I experienced similar problems to the time I flew about a year ago, when pressure built up in my ears until I felt like my head was in a fishbowl and didn't normalize for weeks. Fortunately less severe this time, the pressure was high enough in the left ear that I couldn't really hear when we landed in Paris, but I at least managed to release the pressure by yawning for the entire hour and a half layover.

When we landed in Bucharest though, I couldn't get my ear to pop and actually went through the whole conference half deaf. It was late when we landed, and cold. The previous days had been in the high 60's and clear, but a cold front had blown in and when we followed our driver (yes, the conference sent a driver to pick us up—I felt important) into the airport parking lot, the thermometer hovered at just under 40 degrees.

The conference was technically run by an international organization called ISSA, which is apparently a big name in early childhood education. They do important things like “set standards” and “carry out initiatives” and they work to put in place the political and cultural scaffolding to promote quality early education. Offices are located not only in developing countries where education is just becoming a priority, but also in countries we consider 1st world, and yet have large segments of their populations without access to education before kindergarten (yes, America, that's you).

We didn't know what to expect at all. Before this adventure, I'd been warned about a lot of things. I'd been warned about muggers, wild dogs, street urchins, swindlers, and of course, vampires. Our driver presented another view entirely; on our hour-long trip to the hotel he essentially gave us an unsolicited city tour in excellent self-taught English (He used the words “megalomaniac” and “eclectic,” no joke) and pointed out buildings of interest and landmarks. We saw the second-largest building in the world, the Danube river, and an elaborately rebuilt site of a WWII bombing, and heard about Romanians who were leaders in the fields of technology and architecture. We heard nothing about vampires.
He also informed us that the hotel where ISSA had chosen to hold the conference, and where we had booked our room, is the largest hotel in Europe, the RIN Grand. I don't know if they measure this by the number of rooms, or square-footage, or or what, but I was impressed regardless. We also learned that representatives from the U.S. (not including me, since I was technically a representative of Germany), New Zealand, Hungary, Mongolia, Bulgaria, Haiti, Russia, the Netherlands, Finland, Croatia, Ireland, and Bosnia had already arrived. I have to admit this conference was like a pop quiz in geography. Did you know there is a country called Moldova? Can you find it on a map? Also, while you're in the region, try locating Slovakia, Slovenia, and Mongolia. A little after midnight, we received our room key-cards at the reception desk and groggily wandered past a man playing a grand piano for guests sitting on trendy ottomans to find our room. I slept soundly.

To my great pleasure, breakfast was included with our room reservation. The buffet room was huge and elaborately decorated with draping red and gold curtains. I wanted to try traditional Romanian foods, but I couldn't really tell which ones those were. They boast an “international” cuisine, so I could only guess which ones were Romanian for the most part. But the food was delicious and every conceivable breakfast fare was available. In the center of the room was a display of mounds of breakfast rolls, fruit, and pastries, while on the perimeter of the room, hot dishes like eggs, boiled meats, and pancakes were offered alongside salads of many varieties, as well as smoked meats and cheeses. Oh, and if you needed bran flakes, they had those too.

The conference began in a general assembly of about 150 participants, and we felt a little under-dressed and under-age compared to the mature, accomplished educators and politicians in their sharp heels, blazers and skirts. A thin man with a kind face translated all the proceedings into Russian via headsets for those participants who preferred it to English. You probably don't want to hear about the keynotes speakers, or the small group discussion sessions, or the individual papers presented, so I will just say that many of them were fascinating. Some were not. After nine hours, I was exhausted.

Shannon and I debated getting a taxi and going into Bucharest for dinner, but after much deliberation, decided against it. She was tired and opted to rest. The day was cold but clear, so I took a walk. Our driver had mentioned the traffic in Bucharest, and in fact I had noted it was the only negative thing he said about the city. As I walked, I witnessed this drawback firsthand. The road was narrow and backed up beyond the horizon, and the air smelled of exhaust fumes. I'm sure as a direct result of this, the only businesses I passed were auto industry related. You could get your car painted, your tires changed, get a tune up or buy a new car on this strip.

I did not blend in. Even in Magdeburg I stick out a little, but here my coat was obviously too long, my shoes were for running—where were my little heeled boots and tight leather jacket, the passersby seemed to wonder. Feral dogs jogged along the street and sat at the bus stops as though they were citizens like everyone else. When the sun started going down I turned around and walked back to the hotel, having never really reached anything beyond the vehicle repair shops and deserted-looking alleys. No one tried to mug me.

When I returned to the RIN Grand, Shannon and I had dinner at the Chinese restaurant in the hotel. (There are four restaurants in the hotel, but none of them are Romanian) I had fantastic hot sour soup and spring rolls, and ordered a drink I had never heard of, just for kicks. It was orange soda. Shannon ordered hot chocolate that turned out to be just that—chocolate that had been melted into a mug with sprinkles on top. We had no Romanian money so I payed with my card, but then realized it's not possible to tip a waiter using a card in Romania, so feeling a little foolish, I batted my eyelashes nicely at the young man serving us and asked if he could take euros. No problem.

Not yet recovered from a long day of traveling followed by another long day of sitting through seminars, we went to bed early after watching a little Animal Planet (I hadn't seen Animal Planet for 13 months). The next morning we repeated our routine, first attempting to look as professional as possible and then heading to the restaurant for a big breakfast before sitting through a morning of presentations. Both conference days we were provided with a lunch buffet and this meal actually did contain what I'm pretty sure were Romanian dishes, among other international foods. I think the pork broth soup, cabbage wrapped dumplings, chicken bits wrapped in sesame seeds, and some of the salads were traditional Romanian style. The also served spinach lasagna, stuffed peppers, Mediterranean vegetables, broiled salmon and rosemary potatoes. If there was any space left, you could also choose from several different types of layered cakes, each covered in shredded chocolate or topped with berry cream.

As these events tend to do, the conference seminars and speakers ran long and both days we finished later than the itinerary had scheduled. Perhaps it was partly a product of culture, since so many of the participants were very un-German in their regard for time. Again, by the end of the day, I felt like I'd been hit by a bus and dragged a few miles (or kilometers). And again we debated taking a taxi into Bucharest for dinner. But the prospect of changing our money, figuring out how to take a cab, then finding a restaurant and figuring out how to take a cab back was too daunting for our fatigued state. We should have been adventurous and tried, I know. Instead, we took a walk in the opposite direction from where I'd gone the previous day.

It was cold and icy rain drenched the city. As expected, countries still recovering from decades of communism and still dealing with poverty don't have a lot of money to spend on sidewalks. Darting around cars parked on the side of the road and trying to avoid being splashed with dirty water from the tires of the passing cars, we did our best to see the city. Where there was pavement, it was uneven and rainwater pooled everywhere. We waded through Bucharest. The feral dogs all wore patient expressions.

Despite our efforts we saw little of interest, mostly more auto shops, plus some warehouses, bike retailers, and abandoned buildings. The buildings were built in the communist style and seemed untouched since then; they looked gray, dirty and sad. The Romanian countryside is reportedly quite beautiful, with inhabitants living essentially as they did in the 19th century. But when we looked out toward the horizon, all we could see were more and more tall, gray rectangular buildings.

We also found a shopping center (this actually did not take any effort to find, we could see it from the window in our hotel room) and went in partially to escape the cold and partially out of curiosity. It was a mall, on a smaller scale than one would generally find in the U.S., but consisting of all the proper components. There were shoe stores, clothing stores, an electronics store, cell phone kiosks, and a food court. We looked again for Romanian food but found only an Italian restaurant, a burger place called “Spring Time” (why?) and a “Royal Chicken” that sold pizza (and I assume, chicken, though this was not pictured prominently and I cannot read Romanian) and had a big painting of a rooster in a crown.

There was also a supermarket where we decided to grab a quick snack in lieu of eating dinner, as we were both still full from partaking in the lunch buffet earlier. The supermarket seemed very American as well; everything from laundry detergent to fresh fish was available in one place. I recognized some brands from Germany, but the only ones I knew from America were the types of candy they sold, like Twix and Snickers. I'm sure Coke was there somewhere, but we were in a bit of a hurry by this time.

On this particular evening ISSA was throwing itself a big 10th anniversary party at the hotel, and we were expected to attend. So I settled on some crackers with powdered cheese and what turned out to be a very sticky-yet-crumbly granola bar. All of the check-out lines were long. I chose the shortest one, but it soon became clear that we were waiting for a price check on chicken breast and the stock-boy was taking his time finding it.

The man behind me asked me a question. Feeling like a complete idiot because I was unable even to say “no Romanian,” I just said, “I'm so sorry.”
The man smiled and said, “Ah, you wait here?” in English. “You can go where the sign is, for not so many things.” I realized he was directing me to the ten items or less lane, but the line there was even longer. I couldn't tell from the sign whether it was an option for me to go to the other lane, or a requirement.
“Do I have to go there?” I asked the man.
“It's your time,” he said amiably. I thought maybe he just wanted to be one spot closer to check-out, and pondered this for a moment, when another clerk came and opened the adjacent register. She beckoned the man and his family over to her, and he motioned me along too. I tried to get in line behind him, but he insisted I go first. His wife and son waved, I assume because they did not know any English. I thanked the man several times while the cashier proceeded to ignore us for a full minute and a half. When I had paid and was hurrying away, I turned and said, “have a good night!” “You're welcome!” he called back. Food is cheap in Romania, or at least it can be. I bought my snack for the evening as well as a snack for the plane the next day for under a euro.

I changed out of my wet clothes and tried to spruce myself up a bit, but had not been expecting anything fancy, least of all anything called a gala, and therefore did not have proper gala attire to change into. I simply threw on slacks and a sweater and nibbled a few cheese crackers before we went down to the party. I realized immediately that for some of these educators, policy-makers, and social workers, this was a big deal. There were flowy evening gowns, elaborately sequined shawls, and and spikey heels. I noticed a few other representatives remained in their blazers, and some had even dressed down and put on jeans, so I decided to forget that I might be under-dressed for the occasion.

I got a glass of red wine from the bar and we sat at a table where we were quickly overrun by a group of women from Kyrgyzstan who gave us a bar of chocolate in a pretty blue and gold wrapper. The DJ played music from many different countries, with an emphasis on eastern European ones, since we were, after all, in Romania. The representatives from the various countries were invited to teach us traditional dances, which a few did, but mostly the dance floor looked just as any American dance floor would look at such an event.

It wasn't really Shannon's type of party, so she went back to the room after about an hour, but I stayed and attempted to mingle, though with the loud music and thick accents, I spent a lot of time just looking approachable and watching the dancing. When I spoke with the other participants, I also always had to explain that despite the name-tag proclaiming “GERMANY,” I was actually from the U.S. I learned to dance an Irish reel with a Dutch woman as my partner and chatted with Americans from an ISSA office in Washington D.C. before finishing my wine and finally returning to the room and flopping into bed.

The morning sessions were not as well attended as the previous two days, which can be attributed either to many participants leaving early due to traveling long distances, or perhaps to many participants consuming alcohol at the gala the night before. In any case, we attended a symposium called “celebrating teachers” which was about how to raise the status of teachers so they would be respected by communities and parents as professionals, rather than constantly blamed for the systems' failures. It's true that while no one ever really says “you're doing it wrong,” teachers are constantly required to take classes, and do “professional development” projects, as though what they are already doing is lacking.

Afterward we checked out and attempted to leave for the airport, but encountered a snag. The company hired to do all the driving had scheduled our car to leave at 1:30, despite an estimated hour-long drive to the airport, when our flight was scheduled to leave at 3:15. This was not acceptable. Our ride from the airport had been so successful, with our incredibly knowledgeable and lingually talented driver, so it was distressing to discover half an hour before WE thought we needed to depart, that there was a problem. We argued, but were North American about it and it didn't get us anywhere. The concierge, when questioned about taxi fares, said the fee was 18 lei, the equivalent of about 4 euros.

Many of the photos I took in Bucharest were snapped from the backseat of a taxi as we blasted through the city. I'm fairly certain this driver made creative use of open areas that were not meant to be roads. By the time we reached the airport, both Shannon and I felt nauseous. We handed over our 18 lei, only to be informed that we had misheard and owed him 80 lei. Again we bickered but got nowhere, and we needed to check in for our flight, so we paid him what was actually 20 euros—not 4.

The rest of the journey home was uneventful, just as one hopes such journeys will be. We stopped over in Paris again, landed in Berlin and took the bus to the train station. On the bus, a very small child sitting across the aisle looked like I felt. He was trying to sit up in his seat, but was so tired his eyes were rolling back into his head and he was tipping over, only to jolt himself awake a moment later. Eventually he fell right off his seat and into my arms (I had quick reflexes since I'd already been watching him doze).

Back in Magdeburg it was a little warmer than when we left and I still had a Sunday to recover from the excitement of my trip. I can't use any of the cliché phrases like “home sweet home” or “home is where the heart is” to describe how I felt coming into my apartment that night, because I've realized my heart really is in the Northwest. But it was good to be back.