In touch with the youth
We ate a dinner on a terraza. I ate sausage and bean stew, my sister ordered the schnitzel. This was the best meal we’d eaten in Europe.
Across from us five American retirees were celebrating the first day of their five-day tour. It was the first time any of them had visited Eastern Europe. They were fifty years older than me. I felt like I was retired, even though I’d re-enter the workforce in a few months. Economy permitting.
Outside the restaurant a gypsy asked for money. I reached into my pocket and handed her a coin. As I placed it into her hand I realized that it was a US nickel. I felt bad that I’d given her the wrong currency. I also felt bad that I called her a gypsy in this blog post. Gypsies are a derogatory name for Roma. But if I had called her a “Roma” it probably would have been confusing for you the reader because I am in “Romania” and you might have thought I was talking about a “Romanian.” I hope you don’t feel like I’ve gyp’d you. (Gyp’d is also a very insensitive phrase to be using.)
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We returned to our dorm room to find that a graffiti artist was tagging the word “Traveller” over my sister’s bed. This was sanctioned by the hostel. My sister offered gummy worms to the artist and his friends. They in turn invited us out to experience authentic Romanian youth culture.
We followed closely behind the girl with bleached bangs and a shaved head. As I was swigging on my Ciuc, I asked the girl if it was okay to drink beers in the street. She said “no, especially not with all these cops guarding the French Embassy.” I hid my bottle in my back pocket.
I was drunk enough to immediately bring up politics. I asked the girl with the punk rock haircut if Greek-style anti-austerity protests were happening here.
She said “we have revolution, but it is in ourselves, not in public.”
I said “that reminds me of how in the United States people want to change things, but don’t feel comfortable going out and doing it.”
She said “Don’t compare America to Romania!”
I instantly apologized. I felt like a dick for making such a comparison a block from Revolution Square. Only twenty years ago this very spot was the site of the bloody protest that ended the regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu.
The mood was lightened when someone started playing a game of tag. The no-tag-backs rule seems to apply in Bucharest. I was tagged many times. Occasionally it seemed that the no-tag-back rule was not observed. Twenty years after the fall of communism, it appears that some corruption still exists.
I asked the locals if they were comfortable with their country’s recent arrival to the European Union. They said “we were raised by communists who only knew communism.” Global capitalism is something only the youngest punk rocksters are being born into.
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We walked into the newly revitalized old Lipscani, the hub of trade during the Middle Ages. The streets are being paved with cobble stones to affect an aura of antiquity, and to bring more Western European tourists to the city center.
We entered their friends ramshackle bar with a 14 lei bottle of wine. We sat upstairs and were handed two glasses for five people. The other glasses were for “paying customers.”
A group of guys brought some oddly shaped poker chips and asked if I wanted to play. The buy-in was 5 lei, the cost of a bottle of soda. I don’t normally play games of chance, but this seemed like a good way to make friends.
The girl with the punk rock haircut kept looking at me and shaking her head. “You’re wasting you’re money!”
2 liter bottles of beer were being purchased down the block and passed around the barroom table. The game had slowly dwindled from six players to two. We had consolidated the wealth of the table into two huge stacks. The game was getting tense. They stopped letting me deal. I was content with no longer pretending that I knew how to shuffle.
The stereo played Everlast and Better than Ezra, recorded from radio broadcasts. I heard Jed the Fish from The World Famous KROQ’s introduce “Smell’s Like Teen Spirit.”
As the battle for poker supremacy reached a stand-still, we played our cards open-handed. Eventually we decided on a tie. Without consulting anyone Darius reached into the money pot, ran down stairs and brought back 4 beers. We split them with the group. Sharing beers with new friends was better than winning.
A blonde girl told me that I looked familiar. I asked if she thought I looked like Zach Galifianakis or Seth Rogen. She said that I looked like Mr. Video. Who’s Mr. Video, a television host or something? No, he’s our high school teacher.
A guy in the corner was wearing a confederate flag t-shirt, which is probably the insensitive equivalent of me wearing a Soviet flag t-shirt. Everybody else was wearing striped t-shirts that made them look like sailors.
As the bar let out they took us towards the water. We drank more liters beside the canal in Cişmigiu Park. I became too drunk to remember what happened, but I suspect that I was very loud. Because I remember that they told security guards not to worry, I wasn’t from there.
As we walked home we stopped for shoarma. That’s the local spelling of shawarma. I demanded food the proprietor didn’t have. Eventually we settled on a chicken, mayonnaise, and pickle sandwich.
I remembered that last week in Dalston, I’d also been a drunken asshole. I’d demanded that the employee at Perfect Fried Chicken reveal his true identity as a Californian. I could tell that accent from anywhere. He finally said “I’m not from California, I’m from Pakistan, here’s your cole slaw.”
We wandered home. I peed on a bush in front of the Gucci store. When we got back we fell asleep in a different room to avoid the fumes from the recent graffiti job above my sister’s bead.
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1 year ago • 8 notes
