Has anyone else noticed that netflix tends to stack positive reviews of a film on the first page? Jen and I recently rented a film called Shortbus, after seeing several positive reviews from both ordinary people and film critics, including 4 star reviews from the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and the L.A. Times. After all the critical raves, you could imagine our surprise when we were assaulted by a truly offensive first scene which features a graphic depiction of a man auto-fellating himself and then blasting off right into his own face. I have to admit that I did not watch the rest of this film- I'm not the Hollywood blockbuster type, I like a good art film as much as the next guy, but really, should 4 star reviews of this film not come with at least some warning? I went back to the Shortbus page on Netflix and started clicking on the customer reviews and realized that if you keep clicking, the majority of reviews of this film are 1 star, yet the majority of the reviews on the first page are 5 stars. Somehow, netflix caculates that the average person rates this film 3.2 stars, but I just don't buy it.
Other films, I've seen recently that I can recommend...
Cautiva (Captive) is a really powerful, accessible movie about a teenage girl in Argentina whose parents were political prisoners during the Dirty War. A judge attempts to remedy a historical injustice, and in the process, the young girl finds out more about her family's past than she wants to know.
http://www.netflix.com/Movie/Cautiva/70063458?trkid=189530&strkid=155191616_0_0
The Illusionist- what happens when a magician makes a fool out of the Crown Prince of the Austro-Hungarian Empire? Bad things, man, bad things. This is an entertaining movie, well worth watching.
http://www.netflix.com/Movie/The_Illusionist/70043951?trkid=189530&strkid=100140536_0_0
Gloomy Sunday- A Hungarian composer writes a song so melancholy that nearly everyone that listens to it wants to kill themselves. What the hell kind of premise is this for a film? Surprisingly though, this is a movie worth watching. Two men manage to share the affections of a stunning woman that is also being pursued by a Nazi. Its better than it sounds.
http://www.netflix.com/Movie/Gloomy_Sunday/60032553?trkid=189530&strkid=393418611_0_0
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Going Down in Flames with Hillary
Being an independent is a lot of fun, because it gives me the right to criticize both the democrats and the republicans, two parties that are utterly beholden to special interests, prone to nominating monstrously bad candidates (see bill clinton, george w. bush, john kerry, etc), and just plain bad at the whole "governance" thing. In presidential election years, I tend to root for candidates from whichever party is out of power, so in 2000, I was so sick of the Clintons, that I hoped a Republican would win- but then watched in horror as Dubya was nominated, and now, I'm so sick of Dubya, that I woudn't mind seeing a Democrat win, but I fear that the democrats are about to make another catastrophic mistake in nominating Hillary Clinton.
Hill supporters claim that brining back the Clintons would mean a return to the good economic times of the 1990's. What's this, you didn't get enough of the Clintons during the eight years they were already in power? So you want to have two families-the Bushes and the Clintons- control the White House from 1988 until 2012 or perhaps 2016? That's 24 to 28 years of two family rule, which wouldn't be unusual in Panama or Lesotho, but in America? Give me a break.
So perhaps nearly three decades of two family rule don't bother you- ok- but what about the woman's personality? The Clintons embody all of the worst stereotypes of both their generation and of politicians in general. They're hypocrites that write preachy books telling us how to raise children (It Takes A Village), how to live (Giving: How each of us can change the world), and even how treat dogs and cats (Dear Socks, Dear Buddy), yet they run scorched-earth campaigns where distorting their opponents records and assasinating their characters are par for the course.
They struggle hard to project we-feel-your-pain authenticity, yet their only real true calling is their unbridled pursuit of power. Many politicians change positions to suit the times, but the Clintons have redefined political expediency. Hillary's a Cubs fan. She's a Yankees fan. She'd root for the Devil himself if he were a swing state voter. Here is a couple that was willing to sell nights in the Lincoln bedroom and pardons to fugitive billionaires, is there any doubt that they would sell their very souls to gain power once again?
Ok, so you may not like her either, and maybe you wouldn't mind some fresh blood, but isn't it time for a woman to be elected president? In this case, no. That is, not unless some other woman runs for president. Our first female president should be someone all women can be proud of- not a charlatan that espouses girl power one moment and then at others tears up for the cameras or hides behind Bill, her new attack dog. In South Carolina, white males voted for Edwards, blacks voted for Obama, and white women voted for Hillary. We're becoming like the Balkans, where elections are often like a national census- everyone just turns out to vote for the person that represents their ethnic group. Its ridiculous people- you shouldn't vote for someone just because they're a woman, or because they're white or black or even because they claim they're a fan of your favorite sports team.
Lastly, Hillary isn't going to win. So if you want to see a democrat in the White House, look elsewhere, because the religious right, and others that hate Hillary are going to turn out in droves to bring her down, should she be the democratic nominee. You might think that Hillary is the best of a weak field of candidates, but, in reality ANYONE would be a better choice. So who should you vote for? Lets save that discussion for another day.
Note: After writing this, I noticed in today's New York Times, that the Clinton's are at it again- conducting shady business deals with foreigners..
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/31/us/politics/31donor.html?scp=1&sq=bill+clinton+almaty&st=nyt
Hill supporters claim that brining back the Clintons would mean a return to the good economic times of the 1990's. What's this, you didn't get enough of the Clintons during the eight years they were already in power? So you want to have two families-the Bushes and the Clintons- control the White House from 1988 until 2012 or perhaps 2016? That's 24 to 28 years of two family rule, which wouldn't be unusual in Panama or Lesotho, but in America? Give me a break.
So perhaps nearly three decades of two family rule don't bother you- ok- but what about the woman's personality? The Clintons embody all of the worst stereotypes of both their generation and of politicians in general. They're hypocrites that write preachy books telling us how to raise children (It Takes A Village), how to live (Giving: How each of us can change the world), and even how treat dogs and cats (Dear Socks, Dear Buddy), yet they run scorched-earth campaigns where distorting their opponents records and assasinating their characters are par for the course.
They struggle hard to project we-feel-your-pain authenticity, yet their only real true calling is their unbridled pursuit of power. Many politicians change positions to suit the times, but the Clintons have redefined political expediency. Hillary's a Cubs fan. She's a Yankees fan. She'd root for the Devil himself if he were a swing state voter. Here is a couple that was willing to sell nights in the Lincoln bedroom and pardons to fugitive billionaires, is there any doubt that they would sell their very souls to gain power once again?
Ok, so you may not like her either, and maybe you wouldn't mind some fresh blood, but isn't it time for a woman to be elected president? In this case, no. That is, not unless some other woman runs for president. Our first female president should be someone all women can be proud of- not a charlatan that espouses girl power one moment and then at others tears up for the cameras or hides behind Bill, her new attack dog. In South Carolina, white males voted for Edwards, blacks voted for Obama, and white women voted for Hillary. We're becoming like the Balkans, where elections are often like a national census- everyone just turns out to vote for the person that represents their ethnic group. Its ridiculous people- you shouldn't vote for someone just because they're a woman, or because they're white or black or even because they claim they're a fan of your favorite sports team.
Lastly, Hillary isn't going to win. So if you want to see a democrat in the White House, look elsewhere, because the religious right, and others that hate Hillary are going to turn out in droves to bring her down, should she be the democratic nominee. You might think that Hillary is the best of a weak field of candidates, but, in reality ANYONE would be a better choice. So who should you vote for? Lets save that discussion for another day.
Note: After writing this, I noticed in today's New York Times, that the Clinton's are at it again- conducting shady business deals with foreigners..
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/31/us/politics/31donor.html?scp=1&sq=bill+clinton+almaty&st=nyt
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Hockey Night in Madison
This weekend, my wife Jen and I went to Madison to watch the Wisconsin Badger hockey team take on the Minnesota Golden Gophers. This being college hockey- I saw no reason to pony up the $15 extra bucks worth of “convenience” charges they hit you with if you want to buy your tickets in advance on the U-Wisconsin website.
Since it was only about 18 degrees last night, I dropped Jen and my four month old son, Leo, off in front of the Kohl Center about 10 minutes prior to the game, and told them to wait inside while I parked. It took me a half-hour to find a spot, as the entire neighborhood was chock full of people and cars. Jen called on the cell to inform me that the game was sold out, but when it comes to getting tickets, I’m an eternal optimist, so I told her not to worry about it, I’d rustle up tickets from a scalper. Meanwhile, the Kohl Center is a 17,000 plus seat arena, so I was still stunned to think that this game could be a sell-out.
I spent the entire first period outside in the cold trying in vain to find tickets. One student from Minnesota gave me one for free, but I couldn’t seem to find a second. Eventually I went inside and Jen tried to encourage me to go alone, but I would have nothing of it- it was the whole family or no one at all. I asked the ticket collectors if they could rustle up another seat for us.
“Did you try the box office?” they asked.
I had to admit I hadn’t, but there were signs on the doors of the arena announcing a sell out. I stopped by the box office, and, again, on each window there was a sign which said, “Tonight’s Game is SOLD OUT!” I almost didn’t walk up to ask, but decided to ask anyways.
“Do you have tickets?” I asked.
“Sure, how many do you need?” the young woman replied.
“You have tickets?” I asked “Why do all the signs say “SOLD OUT?”
“We don’t have seats together, but I have eight or ten single seats.”
So I bought one, and we all headed to the customer relations desk in the arena. I didn’t want us to have to sit in different sections or stand for the whole game, so I pleaded our case to a nice young guy as little Leo- all bulked up in his little snow suit- did his part by smiling and winning over the hearts of everyone in earshot. The young guy found a nice V.I.P. handicapped area for us to sit in that was right above part of the student section and next to the U-Wisconsin band.
The Wisconsin students really no how to support their team- they stand, jump, dance, and gyrate on their feet for the entire game as the band whips everyone into a frenzy. The band- which is so massive it takes up an entire section- even plays in between periods- and the students have various tribal dances for each song they play. The students also have lots of interesting chants- including one that boldly asserts that the opposing goalie-Alex Kangas- is a fan of taking it in the arse. KANGAS LIKES HIS SOD-O-MEE SOD-O-MEE SOD-O-MEE!!
When Wisconsin tied the score at 2 with just under 7 minutes to play the place erupted into pandemonium and little Leo- who had been sleeping peacefully in his mothers sling contraption- was briefly jolted awake by the cacophony of horns, tubas, beating tribal drums and the screams of delight from the delirious fans. The game went into overtime, and the Badgers failed to convert several point blank chances to win it, and the game ended in a tie.
For some strange reason, college hockey doesn’t have the shootout like the pro’s does- and an overtime hockey game with no shootout in this day and age- is a little like a porno scene with no climax- just a bit pointless. With a few minutes left in the game the students started chanting “STAND UP OLD PEOPLE” over and over, louder and louder. I ignored them at first, as my first instinct was to think I’m not old, they’re not talking about me. But then as the rest of the crowd began to rise, and I looked down at my once again slumbering son, I realized- I am old, they are talking about me. So we stood up, and looked on in admiration at the kids in the student section, who were literally dancing in the aisles with every new tune pumped out by the band. And as I thought again about my little family, I realized that I am old, but I’m OK with it, life is good.
Since it was only about 18 degrees last night, I dropped Jen and my four month old son, Leo, off in front of the Kohl Center about 10 minutes prior to the game, and told them to wait inside while I parked. It took me a half-hour to find a spot, as the entire neighborhood was chock full of people and cars. Jen called on the cell to inform me that the game was sold out, but when it comes to getting tickets, I’m an eternal optimist, so I told her not to worry about it, I’d rustle up tickets from a scalper. Meanwhile, the Kohl Center is a 17,000 plus seat arena, so I was still stunned to think that this game could be a sell-out.
I spent the entire first period outside in the cold trying in vain to find tickets. One student from Minnesota gave me one for free, but I couldn’t seem to find a second. Eventually I went inside and Jen tried to encourage me to go alone, but I would have nothing of it- it was the whole family or no one at all. I asked the ticket collectors if they could rustle up another seat for us.
“Did you try the box office?” they asked.
I had to admit I hadn’t, but there were signs on the doors of the arena announcing a sell out. I stopped by the box office, and, again, on each window there was a sign which said, “Tonight’s Game is SOLD OUT!” I almost didn’t walk up to ask, but decided to ask anyways.
“Do you have tickets?” I asked.
“Sure, how many do you need?” the young woman replied.
“You have tickets?” I asked “Why do all the signs say “SOLD OUT?”
“We don’t have seats together, but I have eight or ten single seats.”
So I bought one, and we all headed to the customer relations desk in the arena. I didn’t want us to have to sit in different sections or stand for the whole game, so I pleaded our case to a nice young guy as little Leo- all bulked up in his little snow suit- did his part by smiling and winning over the hearts of everyone in earshot. The young guy found a nice V.I.P. handicapped area for us to sit in that was right above part of the student section and next to the U-Wisconsin band.
The Wisconsin students really no how to support their team- they stand, jump, dance, and gyrate on their feet for the entire game as the band whips everyone into a frenzy. The band- which is so massive it takes up an entire section- even plays in between periods- and the students have various tribal dances for each song they play. The students also have lots of interesting chants- including one that boldly asserts that the opposing goalie-Alex Kangas- is a fan of taking it in the arse. KANGAS LIKES HIS SOD-O-MEE SOD-O-MEE SOD-O-MEE!!
When Wisconsin tied the score at 2 with just under 7 minutes to play the place erupted into pandemonium and little Leo- who had been sleeping peacefully in his mothers sling contraption- was briefly jolted awake by the cacophony of horns, tubas, beating tribal drums and the screams of delight from the delirious fans. The game went into overtime, and the Badgers failed to convert several point blank chances to win it, and the game ended in a tie.
For some strange reason, college hockey doesn’t have the shootout like the pro’s does- and an overtime hockey game with no shootout in this day and age- is a little like a porno scene with no climax- just a bit pointless. With a few minutes left in the game the students started chanting “STAND UP OLD PEOPLE” over and over, louder and louder. I ignored them at first, as my first instinct was to think I’m not old, they’re not talking about me. But then as the rest of the crowd began to rise, and I looked down at my once again slumbering son, I realized- I am old, they are talking about me. So we stood up, and looked on in admiration at the kids in the student section, who were literally dancing in the aisles with every new tune pumped out by the band. And as I thought again about my little family, I realized that I am old, but I’m OK with it, life is good.
Pizza Hut is now an Italian Bistro? WTF?
Has anyone noticed that many Pizza Hut’s now refer to themselves as Italian Bistro’s? If they wanted to go upscale, why not Pizza Hut- Italian Ristorante, or Trattoria? So I guess Pizza Hut is now supposed to make us think of the French and the Italians? What’s next- Wendy’s- the Swedish Taverna, or Arby’s the French Taqueria? If my wife hadn’t been with me when we saw the big Pizza Hut Italian Bistro sign in Madison, Wisconsin, I would love to tell her on Valentine’s Day, “honey, I’m going to take you to this really cute, quaint, little bistro, you’re going to love it” and then just wait to see her face as we pulled up in front of Pizza Hut.
These new “Italian Bistro’s” are apparently so high-brow that they even list wine recommendations below the various pizza’s they offer on their menu’s. (http://www.phswbistro.net/docs/menu.pdf) For the record, the Pizza Hut Bistro recommends that you drink either Folonari Pino Grigio or Folonari Pino Noir (each $3.75 a glass) with all of their pizzas. Ok, so I admit it, I’m not wild about the name Pizza Hut- Italian Bistro, so what would I come up with, if Pizza Hut made me their marketing guru?
Pizza Hut- The Only Sit Down Pizza Joint on This Street of Crappy Chain Stores and Restaurants
Pizza Hut- Come and See What Kind of Weird Shit We Have Jammed Into the Crust This Month
Pizza Hut- Remember When You Used to Like us as a Kid?
Pizza Hut- Ask About our New Tuscan Handjob Salad
These new “Italian Bistro’s” are apparently so high-brow that they even list wine recommendations below the various pizza’s they offer on their menu’s. (http://www.phswbistro.net/docs/menu.pdf) For the record, the Pizza Hut Bistro recommends that you drink either Folonari Pino Grigio or Folonari Pino Noir (each $3.75 a glass) with all of their pizzas. Ok, so I admit it, I’m not wild about the name Pizza Hut- Italian Bistro, so what would I come up with, if Pizza Hut made me their marketing guru?
Pizza Hut- The Only Sit Down Pizza Joint on This Street of Crappy Chain Stores and Restaurants
Pizza Hut- Come and See What Kind of Weird Shit We Have Jammed Into the Crust This Month
Pizza Hut- Remember When You Used to Like us as a Kid?
Pizza Hut- Ask About our New Tuscan Handjob Salad
Friday Night Lights is Crap
Friday Night Lights used to be a pretty good show. Predictable- yes, forumalic- for sure, but entertaining nonethelss. The last few weeks, however, the show has degenerated into a farce with absurdly dull and illogical plot lines and appalingly aggresive product placements that seem to be driving at least one plot line in the show. Product placement is nothing new- but FNL seems to be taking crass commercialism to new lows.
The trend started a few weeks ago with someone on the show saying something like "hey- let's all go to Applebee's." This past friday night, though, FNL took it to whole new level by having someone suggest a trip to Applebee's, and then actually showing them going to Applebee's and ordering their signature "sizzling apple pie." The epdisode actually featured two scene's shot inside an Applebee's! But wait....it gets worse!
Later in the episode the wheelchair bound, ex-football hero Jason Street takes a job as a salesman at Buddy Garrity's Chevy dealership, and, in one absurdly ridiculous scene sells a Chevy Tahoe to an indecisive customer with a passionate and earnest speech about how "life changes so fast- look at me (in the wheelchair), if you want this truck so badly, you deserve it, you're going to buy this car today!"
If all of this weren't bad enough, at the end of the scene Chevy aired a “commercial” that essentially just reminded us of what we had just scene on the program, airing footage of Street selling the Tahoe, with the narrator saying something like, You just watched Jason Street talking about the new Chevy Tahoe, blah, blah, blah.
Obviously advertisers are getting wise to the fact that many of us are Tivo/DVR’ing programs and fast forwarding through commercials, so they’re inserting their products right into the plot lines of shows, and then re-airing the footage during commercial time, so you’ll stop your fast forward when you see the faces of characters from the show in their commercial. Its all very disgusting, and, unfortunately, very American.
What I’d like to know is: did the NBC sales staff actually allow Chevy to script a portion of the actual show? Did they tell NBC to have Street become a car salesman so he could sell the Tahoe? If so, this is a scandal in the magnitude of Watergate, the JFK assassination, and Monica-Gate. Well, ok, maybe I’m overdoing it, but if the networks continue to commercialize their content to a degree where there is no discernable difference between the show and the commercials, who will be around to watch, or will Americans even notice?
The trend started a few weeks ago with someone on the show saying something like "hey- let's all go to Applebee's." This past friday night, though, FNL took it to whole new level by having someone suggest a trip to Applebee's, and then actually showing them going to Applebee's and ordering their signature "sizzling apple pie." The epdisode actually featured two scene's shot inside an Applebee's! But wait....it gets worse!
Later in the episode the wheelchair bound, ex-football hero Jason Street takes a job as a salesman at Buddy Garrity's Chevy dealership, and, in one absurdly ridiculous scene sells a Chevy Tahoe to an indecisive customer with a passionate and earnest speech about how "life changes so fast- look at me (in the wheelchair), if you want this truck so badly, you deserve it, you're going to buy this car today!"
If all of this weren't bad enough, at the end of the scene Chevy aired a “commercial” that essentially just reminded us of what we had just scene on the program, airing footage of Street selling the Tahoe, with the narrator saying something like, You just watched Jason Street talking about the new Chevy Tahoe, blah, blah, blah.
Obviously advertisers are getting wise to the fact that many of us are Tivo/DVR’ing programs and fast forwarding through commercials, so they’re inserting their products right into the plot lines of shows, and then re-airing the footage during commercial time, so you’ll stop your fast forward when you see the faces of characters from the show in their commercial. Its all very disgusting, and, unfortunately, very American.
What I’d like to know is: did the NBC sales staff actually allow Chevy to script a portion of the actual show? Did they tell NBC to have Street become a car salesman so he could sell the Tahoe? If so, this is a scandal in the magnitude of Watergate, the JFK assassination, and Monica-Gate. Well, ok, maybe I’m overdoing it, but if the networks continue to commercialize their content to a degree where there is no discernable difference between the show and the commercials, who will be around to watch, or will Americans even notice?
Friday, January 25, 2008
Tribute to Homer- the World's Greatest Dog
On Sunday, May 13, 2006 our beloved dog Homer died suddenly and unexpectedly while we were entertaining my parents near Lake Balaton in Hungary. Two weeks later and after a complete autopsy, I still only vaguely understand how he died, and I definitely still have not come to accept that our constant companion is now gone. We are told that Homer died because his thymus - a body part that I had never even heard of prior to this nightmare - ruptured suddenly. He went into a state of shock, and in a matter of moments died in our arms in a parking lot outside of the restaurant where we had been having lunch. Our tragedy played out in front of the restaurant staff and other diners - some of whom tried to help us out while others continued to enjoy their meals.
Someone at the restaurant called a vet, but it was futile, he died in a matter of moments. Even though there was no way the vet could have helped, I did not take kindly to the excruciatingly slow pace the vet took in driving into the parking lot, removing his headphones and getting out of his car. This was my boy dying on my lap; could this bastard at least show some urgency?
That Sunday was the one-year anniversary of the day we took Homer home with us from the farm in PA where he was born, and we had just given him a rubber ball on a rope as a little anniversary present. Only minutes before his death, he had been running around and playing with his new ball, looking strong, healthy, and as handsome as ever. We could not believe that just one year ago, to the day, he was sitting on our laps in the car, heading towards his new home with us in DC. We were back in the car together, but this time he was stretched out on our laps, his short but happy life brought to a cruel conclusion after just one short year.
In just one short year, we had had so many cracking good times and had been through so much together. Since Homer’s death, Jen and I have spent every day reminiscing about all the good times we had with him. Homer came into my life just months after I was diagnosed with MS (Multiple Sclerosis), and, though I’m sure the neurologists would say that the horrific fatigue and lack of energy I suffered from improved due to medicine, I would argue that Homer played a role in my improvement as well. Physical well being and mental well-being are closely intertwined. Being around Homer every day made me happy, and happiness certainly contributes to healthiness.
Homer shared all of our highs and lows. I was not home when Jen took her first pregnancy test, so Homer was the first to share Jen’s news that she was pregnant. Since she was excited, he was too. We envisioned our future child growing up with Homer; he would have made a great big brother. He shared in all our news and could read our moods. Every time he heard me celebrating one of my team’s goals or runs, he would come running over and to share in my excitement. If he heard me yell, throw something or argue with Jen, he would always become anxious and come over with a look of concern. He did not like strife.
Tears flowed as we recounted all of his endearing habits. For example, Homer used to scamper into my bathroom whenever he’d hear me brushing my teeth, because he knew that after I brushed, he would get his teeth brushed with the peanut butter flavored dog toothpaste he liked so much. Of course, it was always a test of wills between us, I’d be trying to brush and he’d be trying to eat the toothbrush, but it was always good fun. After Homer’s teeth were brushed, he’d have his final evening walk, after which, he would drag his fluffy bed upstairs in his teeth and proceed to hump it vigorously for 5-10 minutes before sighing deeply and then collapsing in a heap for his deep evening sleep.
Homer would usually spend most of the night on the floor or on his bed, but after I’d return from my very early morning trip to the bathroom, he’d usually wait until I was tucked back into bed and then prop his two huge front paws up on my side of the bed. The bed was somewhat high for him to get up on his own unless he got a good running start. He quickly learned two things - that I’m a light sleeper in the morning, and Jen is not. So, he’d sit there looking at me, as if to say, you gonna hoist my ass up there or not, pops? I’d hoist him up, and he’d usually nestle himself somewhere at the foot of the bed on Jen’s side, which allowed him more space, due to her diminutive size. But after a little while, he’d usually come up near me on my side of the bed and want to sleep up against me, his head down near my armpit. I would tuck my arm around him and grab a handful of the fur on his 21-inch neck. This was him, not so subtlety, letting me know that he was ready for his breakfast, preferably sooner rather than later. He knew better than to bother his mom before 7am on weekdays, and closer to 8am on weekends.
As his trainer said, he had a strong drive for food and a strong drive for play. If I could describe a perfect day from Homer’s perspective, it would include all of the following: being fed copious amounts of food but also serendipitously finding food on the ground or elsewhere; lying on his back in the bed getting his belly rubbed by both Jen and I at the same time; playing with other dogs and people - especially if they would chase him and try to pry one of his toys or a stick from his mouth; and basking in the adulation of anyone and everyone he met on the street.
People often say that people resemble their dogs. In my case, I could have only dreamed for this to be actually true. From the very first day we had Homer, to his very last, he was like a little celebrity, who basked in attention everywhere he went. Just minutes before he died, the waitresses at the restaurant were making a fuss over him and how nagyon szep (very beautiful) he was. He loved people, he loved dogs, he loved every living thing he encountered, and everyone seemed to gravitate to him. Jennifer and I often felt like members of his entourage, as people would rush up to him, as though they had seen a celebrity. When he was a puppy, it was seriously difficult to take him some places. I recall one busy Saturday afternoon when we left the pier area in Old Town Alexandria because we could not walk more than 10 paces at a time before a crowd would form around him. Of course, Homer always had time for his adoring fans. He absolutely basked in the attention, sometimes to a ridiculous degree. There is something just a bit odd when your dog is rollicking around on his back on the sidewalk getting his stomach rubbed by someone he just met. But we usually rolled with it.
Other than his dislike for having his ears cleaned and his phobia of escalators, he was utterly fearless - trips to the doctor, thunder, and fireworks did not scare him in the least. One of his greatest joys, which we only recently discovered due to Hungary’s extremely mild winter, was snow. He saw snow for the first time on a hike in the Sumava forrest in Bohemia and went nuts, rolling around and frolicking on just a small little patch of it, deliriously happy. All I could think of was, I can’t wait till Homer gets to see his first snow storm. Sadly, we will now never get that chance.
Having Homer actually forced us to interact with people, and, in a way, he made us more sociable and nicer people. Well, in truth, Jen has always been nice, but I was never previously known for making small talk with strangers on the street. We knew no one in our Washington neighborhood before we got him, but within a matter of weeks of having him, people who did not even look familiar to me would ask me on the street, “hey where’s Homer?” if I was walking alone. Hungarians adore dogs, and Homer was very well, and favorably, known in our neighborhood. Homer liked to be out in the yard to greet neighbors and neighbor dogs at the gate as they walked by. If he was not in the yard, people would often call out for him at our front gate. No one, save our immediate next-door neighbors, knows my name, but I would say that at least half of the neighborhood knows Homer’s, and amongst dog owners, the figure is close to 100%. I’m supposed to be the diplomat in the family, but the truth is that the United States could not find a better diplomat to represent our country than Homer. I cannot even estimate how many lives Homer touched in his year on this planet. He brought smiles to people’s faces every single day of his life. People would smile at him and then smile at us, and it would make us feel good.
Though I had a great dog growing up, I was only partially responsible for taking care of her, and I did not have her as a puppy, so Homer brought me my first taste of responsibility. I could never imagined how much work training a puppy would be, especially in the small apartment we used to live in, but I soon realized something surprising about myself - I liked the responsibility that came with having someone that was dependent upon me. Homer changed our lives for the better; with him, we were a family, whereas before we were just a couple.
Like anyone that really loves their dog, we considered Homer to be a part of our family. Whenever Jen and I would give each other a hug or kiss, he would scurry over, jump up on us, and insist on getting in on the action. We loved Homer so much, we took him everywhere with us; he never saw the inside of a kennel. In just one year, Homer traveled more than most Americans do in a lifetime. He lived in Washington DC and Budapest, traveled to Virginia, Ohio, New York, West Virginia, Maryland, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maine, Quebec, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Slovakia, Germany, Czech Republic and all over Hungary. But it wasn’t just the trips and special occasions that we will remember - it’s the fact that he made our boring every day routine infinitely more bright, happy and tolerable.
Homer had more nicknames than all the WWF wrestlers combined. There was Home, Homie, Homes, Homer Lee, Homer Lee Booty, Homercito, Osito Cheese, Pockets, Peanut Butter Boy, Maharaja, Maharishi, Handsome Homer (often times abbreviated HH) and many more that I can’t remember at the moment. We also used to call him the “best dog in the world,” and he was.
Homer loved us as much as we loved him. He was gentle, playful, loyal and, above all, fun. He did not walk; he swaggered, with his whole body kind of gyrating back and forth like a slinky. When he was particularly happy, his tail would wag so mightily that his whole body would sway violently along with it. He was also incredibly adaptable - he was happy to be wherever we were. He liked to stay in hotels and he never once caused any damage. We babied him and protected him as if he was our child. One time in Rock Creek Park in Washington, a dog that was off leash viciously attacked him, and I came close to throttling the dog’s absent minded owner. Homer and I had a ritual in greeting each other when I came home. He would go berserk and I’d get down on the floor and join him, often rolling around with him and playing rough, even if I was in a business suit. Even when I’d come home from work stressed out and with a headache, it did not matter, my boy would always be there with a toy in his mouth, thrilled to see me. How could you not love someone that would get so deliriously happy to see you? His favorite words in life were “breakfast”, “dinner”, and “Dad/Mom’s home.”
There were only a few occasions when Homer was unhappy with me, and they all involved him getting his ears cleaned. The first time it happened, he held a grudge against me for hours, and would not- gasp- accept treats from me. He just kind of glared at me like, dude, stay the hell away from me! I was crushed, but we eventually found a better way to clean his ears and there was never a glitch in our relationship again.
So, you get the point. We loved this dog; too much probably. Now we find ourselves lost and grieving, feeling incomplete and not understanding how or why this could happen. We see homeless people on the street with dogs that barely get fed, who live for years and years, and our dog, who lived like a Prince, dies at age 1, on the one year anniversary of us having him? How can that be? We are filled with grief, and there really are no answers. Losing a great dog is always hard, but at such a young age, the tragedy stings harder and is impossible to swallow. Homer was full of life and energy up until moments before he died.
I would trade all of the material possessions we have in the world to have our Homer back, but tragically, there is no way to make that kind of trade. Happiness can be an elusive concept for many people. Its not easy to define what would make you happy in life- is it your career, is it money, free time, your family? Would a million dollars make you happy? I don’t know- but I know that Homer made happiness a very tangible and real concept for us. We were happier when he was there with us- front paws perched up on the bed looking up at us, sitting by the kitchen counter trying to look pitiful, waiting gleefully for me by the door with a toy in his mouth- and he was always with us, so we were usually happy. There was always something really comforting in just having him around.
If there is only one tiny nugget that consoles me, it is knowing that dogs - unlike humans - live life without regrets. Homer did exactly what he wanted nearly every waking moment of his short life, and he was hardly ever alone. Knowing the way he used to greet us after only a short time away from home, I can only hope and pray that we can meet again in the afterlife, because I would truly love to see the kind of greeting that he has in store for us. God bless Homer, as I used to sing to him many times in happier days, he’s the Best Dog in the World.
Note: If you enjoyed reading this, you would honor Homer by forwarding this message, particularly to any friends, relatives, co-workers, etc, who love dogs, and especially to those that have lost dogs. As we grieve for our lost boy, it would comfort us to know that we are not the only ones that loved our dog(s) this much.
Someone at the restaurant called a vet, but it was futile, he died in a matter of moments. Even though there was no way the vet could have helped, I did not take kindly to the excruciatingly slow pace the vet took in driving into the parking lot, removing his headphones and getting out of his car. This was my boy dying on my lap; could this bastard at least show some urgency?
That Sunday was the one-year anniversary of the day we took Homer home with us from the farm in PA where he was born, and we had just given him a rubber ball on a rope as a little anniversary present. Only minutes before his death, he had been running around and playing with his new ball, looking strong, healthy, and as handsome as ever. We could not believe that just one year ago, to the day, he was sitting on our laps in the car, heading towards his new home with us in DC. We were back in the car together, but this time he was stretched out on our laps, his short but happy life brought to a cruel conclusion after just one short year.
In just one short year, we had had so many cracking good times and had been through so much together. Since Homer’s death, Jen and I have spent every day reminiscing about all the good times we had with him. Homer came into my life just months after I was diagnosed with MS (Multiple Sclerosis), and, though I’m sure the neurologists would say that the horrific fatigue and lack of energy I suffered from improved due to medicine, I would argue that Homer played a role in my improvement as well. Physical well being and mental well-being are closely intertwined. Being around Homer every day made me happy, and happiness certainly contributes to healthiness.
Homer shared all of our highs and lows. I was not home when Jen took her first pregnancy test, so Homer was the first to share Jen’s news that she was pregnant. Since she was excited, he was too. We envisioned our future child growing up with Homer; he would have made a great big brother. He shared in all our news and could read our moods. Every time he heard me celebrating one of my team’s goals or runs, he would come running over and to share in my excitement. If he heard me yell, throw something or argue with Jen, he would always become anxious and come over with a look of concern. He did not like strife.
Tears flowed as we recounted all of his endearing habits. For example, Homer used to scamper into my bathroom whenever he’d hear me brushing my teeth, because he knew that after I brushed, he would get his teeth brushed with the peanut butter flavored dog toothpaste he liked so much. Of course, it was always a test of wills between us, I’d be trying to brush and he’d be trying to eat the toothbrush, but it was always good fun. After Homer’s teeth were brushed, he’d have his final evening walk, after which, he would drag his fluffy bed upstairs in his teeth and proceed to hump it vigorously for 5-10 minutes before sighing deeply and then collapsing in a heap for his deep evening sleep.
Homer would usually spend most of the night on the floor or on his bed, but after I’d return from my very early morning trip to the bathroom, he’d usually wait until I was tucked back into bed and then prop his two huge front paws up on my side of the bed. The bed was somewhat high for him to get up on his own unless he got a good running start. He quickly learned two things - that I’m a light sleeper in the morning, and Jen is not. So, he’d sit there looking at me, as if to say, you gonna hoist my ass up there or not, pops? I’d hoist him up, and he’d usually nestle himself somewhere at the foot of the bed on Jen’s side, which allowed him more space, due to her diminutive size. But after a little while, he’d usually come up near me on my side of the bed and want to sleep up against me, his head down near my armpit. I would tuck my arm around him and grab a handful of the fur on his 21-inch neck. This was him, not so subtlety, letting me know that he was ready for his breakfast, preferably sooner rather than later. He knew better than to bother his mom before 7am on weekdays, and closer to 8am on weekends.
As his trainer said, he had a strong drive for food and a strong drive for play. If I could describe a perfect day from Homer’s perspective, it would include all of the following: being fed copious amounts of food but also serendipitously finding food on the ground or elsewhere; lying on his back in the bed getting his belly rubbed by both Jen and I at the same time; playing with other dogs and people - especially if they would chase him and try to pry one of his toys or a stick from his mouth; and basking in the adulation of anyone and everyone he met on the street.
People often say that people resemble their dogs. In my case, I could have only dreamed for this to be actually true. From the very first day we had Homer, to his very last, he was like a little celebrity, who basked in attention everywhere he went. Just minutes before he died, the waitresses at the restaurant were making a fuss over him and how nagyon szep (very beautiful) he was. He loved people, he loved dogs, he loved every living thing he encountered, and everyone seemed to gravitate to him. Jennifer and I often felt like members of his entourage, as people would rush up to him, as though they had seen a celebrity. When he was a puppy, it was seriously difficult to take him some places. I recall one busy Saturday afternoon when we left the pier area in Old Town Alexandria because we could not walk more than 10 paces at a time before a crowd would form around him. Of course, Homer always had time for his adoring fans. He absolutely basked in the attention, sometimes to a ridiculous degree. There is something just a bit odd when your dog is rollicking around on his back on the sidewalk getting his stomach rubbed by someone he just met. But we usually rolled with it.
Other than his dislike for having his ears cleaned and his phobia of escalators, he was utterly fearless - trips to the doctor, thunder, and fireworks did not scare him in the least. One of his greatest joys, which we only recently discovered due to Hungary’s extremely mild winter, was snow. He saw snow for the first time on a hike in the Sumava forrest in Bohemia and went nuts, rolling around and frolicking on just a small little patch of it, deliriously happy. All I could think of was, I can’t wait till Homer gets to see his first snow storm. Sadly, we will now never get that chance.
Having Homer actually forced us to interact with people, and, in a way, he made us more sociable and nicer people. Well, in truth, Jen has always been nice, but I was never previously known for making small talk with strangers on the street. We knew no one in our Washington neighborhood before we got him, but within a matter of weeks of having him, people who did not even look familiar to me would ask me on the street, “hey where’s Homer?” if I was walking alone. Hungarians adore dogs, and Homer was very well, and favorably, known in our neighborhood. Homer liked to be out in the yard to greet neighbors and neighbor dogs at the gate as they walked by. If he was not in the yard, people would often call out for him at our front gate. No one, save our immediate next-door neighbors, knows my name, but I would say that at least half of the neighborhood knows Homer’s, and amongst dog owners, the figure is close to 100%. I’m supposed to be the diplomat in the family, but the truth is that the United States could not find a better diplomat to represent our country than Homer. I cannot even estimate how many lives Homer touched in his year on this planet. He brought smiles to people’s faces every single day of his life. People would smile at him and then smile at us, and it would make us feel good.
Though I had a great dog growing up, I was only partially responsible for taking care of her, and I did not have her as a puppy, so Homer brought me my first taste of responsibility. I could never imagined how much work training a puppy would be, especially in the small apartment we used to live in, but I soon realized something surprising about myself - I liked the responsibility that came with having someone that was dependent upon me. Homer changed our lives for the better; with him, we were a family, whereas before we were just a couple.
Like anyone that really loves their dog, we considered Homer to be a part of our family. Whenever Jen and I would give each other a hug or kiss, he would scurry over, jump up on us, and insist on getting in on the action. We loved Homer so much, we took him everywhere with us; he never saw the inside of a kennel. In just one year, Homer traveled more than most Americans do in a lifetime. He lived in Washington DC and Budapest, traveled to Virginia, Ohio, New York, West Virginia, Maryland, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maine, Quebec, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Slovakia, Germany, Czech Republic and all over Hungary. But it wasn’t just the trips and special occasions that we will remember - it’s the fact that he made our boring every day routine infinitely more bright, happy and tolerable.
Homer had more nicknames than all the WWF wrestlers combined. There was Home, Homie, Homes, Homer Lee, Homer Lee Booty, Homercito, Osito Cheese, Pockets, Peanut Butter Boy, Maharaja, Maharishi, Handsome Homer (often times abbreviated HH) and many more that I can’t remember at the moment. We also used to call him the “best dog in the world,” and he was.
Homer loved us as much as we loved him. He was gentle, playful, loyal and, above all, fun. He did not walk; he swaggered, with his whole body kind of gyrating back and forth like a slinky. When he was particularly happy, his tail would wag so mightily that his whole body would sway violently along with it. He was also incredibly adaptable - he was happy to be wherever we were. He liked to stay in hotels and he never once caused any damage. We babied him and protected him as if he was our child. One time in Rock Creek Park in Washington, a dog that was off leash viciously attacked him, and I came close to throttling the dog’s absent minded owner. Homer and I had a ritual in greeting each other when I came home. He would go berserk and I’d get down on the floor and join him, often rolling around with him and playing rough, even if I was in a business suit. Even when I’d come home from work stressed out and with a headache, it did not matter, my boy would always be there with a toy in his mouth, thrilled to see me. How could you not love someone that would get so deliriously happy to see you? His favorite words in life were “breakfast”, “dinner”, and “Dad/Mom’s home.”
There were only a few occasions when Homer was unhappy with me, and they all involved him getting his ears cleaned. The first time it happened, he held a grudge against me for hours, and would not- gasp- accept treats from me. He just kind of glared at me like, dude, stay the hell away from me! I was crushed, but we eventually found a better way to clean his ears and there was never a glitch in our relationship again.
So, you get the point. We loved this dog; too much probably. Now we find ourselves lost and grieving, feeling incomplete and not understanding how or why this could happen. We see homeless people on the street with dogs that barely get fed, who live for years and years, and our dog, who lived like a Prince, dies at age 1, on the one year anniversary of us having him? How can that be? We are filled with grief, and there really are no answers. Losing a great dog is always hard, but at such a young age, the tragedy stings harder and is impossible to swallow. Homer was full of life and energy up until moments before he died.
I would trade all of the material possessions we have in the world to have our Homer back, but tragically, there is no way to make that kind of trade. Happiness can be an elusive concept for many people. Its not easy to define what would make you happy in life- is it your career, is it money, free time, your family? Would a million dollars make you happy? I don’t know- but I know that Homer made happiness a very tangible and real concept for us. We were happier when he was there with us- front paws perched up on the bed looking up at us, sitting by the kitchen counter trying to look pitiful, waiting gleefully for me by the door with a toy in his mouth- and he was always with us, so we were usually happy. There was always something really comforting in just having him around.
If there is only one tiny nugget that consoles me, it is knowing that dogs - unlike humans - live life without regrets. Homer did exactly what he wanted nearly every waking moment of his short life, and he was hardly ever alone. Knowing the way he used to greet us after only a short time away from home, I can only hope and pray that we can meet again in the afterlife, because I would truly love to see the kind of greeting that he has in store for us. God bless Homer, as I used to sing to him many times in happier days, he’s the Best Dog in the World.
Note: If you enjoyed reading this, you would honor Homer by forwarding this message, particularly to any friends, relatives, co-workers, etc, who love dogs, and especially to those that have lost dogs. As we grieve for our lost boy, it would comfort us to know that we are not the only ones that loved our dog(s) this much.
American Men on the Loose in Transylvania
Male friendship during college and into your post-collegiate single guy hitting the bar scene years is a relatively simple concept. A guy in his “independent” years can just call up one of his mates and, on the spur of the moment and with nary a check of a calendar or blackberry, agree to meet up or even commit to a road trip. As you grow older and take on more responsibility- a better job, a wife, and/or kids being the likeliest suspects- the idea of friendship changes. You lose touch with some friends and spend less time with even your good friends as demands on your time bore in on you from all angles like a fleet of pac-men making their way around a game board. Often times, activities are built around couples’s nights out, or involve work related functions. Spouses are often leery of “guys’ night out” and its often not worth the trade off’s and bargaining most men needed to engage in to even secure quality time with one’s guy friends.
So it was with some degree of surprise and a great measure of delight when my friend Ian called me one day in February from his office in St. Louis and announced his intention to come visit me in Hungary.
“I was thinking about coming out next year,” he said.
My wife, Jennifer, and me had recently lived in Macedonia for two years, working at the American Embassy in Skopje, and half of our friends had claimed that they were going to visit us, but none of them actually did. When we received an assignment in Budapest, even more claimed they would come see us, and given the fact that Budapest is much more squarely ensconced in the realm of tourism possibilities for Americans, we wondered if any would actually turn up this time.
“Next year is too late,” I told him, why don’t you come this spring?”
Ian is married, has three children under the age of five, and has a job in the world of advertising which affords him both a lot of responsibility and stress. I almost felt bad putting him on the spot, but, to my surprise, the prospect of an escape from his busy job appealed to him.
“I could try to come next month,” he offered, and within a week his trip was booked.
In the weeks leading up to Ian’s visit, we spoke several times and tried to decide on some kind of itinerary. Each time he called, I sort of half expected him to bail out on the trip- I suppose I was still surprised that he was “allowed” to travel. Ian is fortunate to have a fabulous, and exceedingly understanding wife, Katie, who is not the sort of clingy spouse that men hate for their friends to marry, for fear they will never see their friend again. No Katie is nothing like that, but, still, she was going to let Ian, who only has a few weeks of vacation per year, to travel alone to Europe for nine days while she stayed at home with three young kids? It did seem too good to be true, but Ian was deadly serious about making the voyage, and he didn’t want the usual Rick Steve’s tour either.
“I was thinking we should go to Romania,” he suggested, about as casually as one might suggest going down to the local shopping center to buy a can of Pringles. I’d been to Romania ten years before and was intrigued by what I’d seen and experienced, but Ian had never been to most of the other more celebrated countries of the region- Austria, the Czech Republic, and Germany to name a few.
“Why Romania?” I asked.
“Why not? I’d kind of like to go some place real, a bit off the beaten track, and I feel like I could go to Prague or Vienna with Katie, but when else would I get the chance to see Romania and the Carpathian mountains?”
Ian and I tentatively agreed to spend a few days in Budapest and four or five days in Romania, but I thought that Ian was a bit ambitious in hoping to visit most of Transylvania and Budapest in a single week. I had never driven in Romania, but I had a feeling that the distances on the map were not indicative of how long it would actually take to cover ground in Transylvania.
After a busy weekend in Budapest, Ian and I set off for Romania on a cool but sunny Monday morning in March.
“I cannot believe that its Monday morning, and instead of being on my way to work in St. Louis, I’m here driving through Budapest on my way to Transylvania, I like it!” Ian exclaimed.
We felt an exhilarating sense of freedom and excitement to have five days with no work, and no responsibility. We had no hotel reservations, and only a vague idea of what we planned to see and do.
I remember wondering aloud, “ how often in life do you have a week like this? I mean it’s a shame that there is so much routine and so few adventures like this one is going to be!”
Our excitement though, was quickly dampened by the wretched stop and go traffic that made our escape from my home in a residential part of Buda, on the west bank of the Danube, to the outer fringes of the other side of Budapest a slow and maddening crawl. An hour into the trip, we were still in the Pest suburbs and my driving ankle was already sore from stopping so frequently. Surprisingly, suburban Budapest is just as plagued by soulless office parks, strip malls and big box retailers as any of the blandest suburbs in the States. We had heard that we could make it to Cluj-Napoca in western Transylvania in 4-5 hours, but as we creeped along the one lane road eastwards behind slow moving trucks and a variety of slow older cars and impatient, reckless faster moving cars weaving in and out, I just hoped we could make it to Cluj before sundown.
As we neared the Romanian border, each settlement seemed to be progressively more run down.
“I just can’t believe how these houses have no setback from the road!” Ian said. “You step outside your front door and your feet could get mowed over by oncoming traffic! Where are the kids supposed to play?”
It was a good question- the busy motorway seemed to blow right through the hearts of what had previously been sleepy villages. It was also a thought that I’m sure would not have occurred to Ian before he became a dad.
“It’s amazing how your perspective changes once you have kids,” Ian said, as we rolled on slowly towards the border area. “ I get so angry when cars come flying down our street when my kids are out playing, sometimes I scream at them, ‘slow down you dumb ass!’ but I don’t know if it does any good. If I lived here I think I’d go nuts!”
As we neared the border, we saw a few very haggard looking prostitutes working the side of the road.
“Can’t believe there out on a Monday afternoon, business must be good,” Ian said.
Two married American men in a Toyota with diplomatic plates slowing down to get a better look at roadside prostitutes near the Romania border on a Monday afternoon. Good times.
Romania had just joined the European Union (EU) less than three months before our visit (whereas the elite Brussels gang deemed Hungary worthy back in 2004) and it was still a matter of speculation whether hordes of Romanians would vote with their feet and move to more prosperous countries in the E.U. Some critics who feared allowing Romania and Bulgaria into the EU club feared that public benefits seeking Romas or gypsies would flood into wealthier countries and immediately go on the dole. We could see that Romania had many of the same major European chains lining its streets that one sees in Hungary and points westward, but there was no denying that not everyone was thriving in the post-EU Romania. The road from the border to Oradea was lined with an impossibly contrasting mixture of traffic- loads of old Dacia’s leftover from the communist era shared the road with both supped up Mercedes and BMW’s piloted by kamikaze suicide drivers and farmers with horse drawn carts. An American motorist can experience more brushes with death in a single hour on a two-lane road in Romania, or even Hungary for that matter, than in a lifetime of drag racing in the States.
The heavy commercial and private traffic indicated a certain level of prosperity- with gas prices averaging around the equivalent of $5 per gallon- but the signs of jaw dropping rural poverty where also plain for anyone to see. We would drive through a shabby looking village and then notice a cluster of shacks where Roma children would be playing amidst muck and filth. The Roma have long lived in segregated neighborhoods on the outskirts of villages all over Eastern Europe, but the depths of the poverty could not help but bring down our mood. Meanwhile, Ian and I were listening to podcasts on the car stereo, including several episodes of Cubscast. It was just a few weeks before the start of the baseball season, and yet it seemed absurdly incongruous to be listening to three men stressing over such mundane issues as who would be the Cubs fifth starter and whether the Cubs would resign Carlos Zambrano as we passed through villages where people seemed to be struggling just to survive. Life is definitely good when the struggles of your sports team are the most pressing item on your life’s agenda.
“I do find it comforting to listen to others who waste even more time stressing over the Cubs than I do,” Ian said.
The road leading into Oradea, the first major town we came across in Romania, was lined with the same kind of dilapidated, soul crushing Soviet era apartment blocks one sees all over the former Soviet Union and eastern block countries. Each one had its own horrifying characteristics, but the common threads were filthy exteriors, cheap looking construction, and boxy concrete balconies. After having lived in Macedonia and Hungary, the so called “commie cubes” didn’t faze me too much, but Ian’s mood suffered a bit.
“These things are brutal! I just cannot imagine how depressing it would be to live in one of these boxes.”
The center of Oradea looked more promising, but the streets were clogged with mid-day traffic, and even the attractive, colorful baroque buildings all seemed to be in need of a coat of paint. Neither Ian nor I had any idea what the exchange rate was- and we both were carrying only Hungarian forints, which, despite the large number of ethnic Hungarians in the area, were essentially useless. After scooping out the leu/dollar exchange rate, we grabbed a small pile of colorful leu’s from an ATM. I was immediately struck by memories of my first visit to Romania in 1997. I was on an extended solo trip through Europe and on my first day, in a picturesque town called Sighisoara, was awarded two or three humungous piles of currency in exchange for one $100 traveler’s check. I remember walking out of the bank with my pockets literally bursting with money. Romania was so cheap at that time that I could hardly spend all of the local currency I had. Meals in half way decent restaurants were $1-2, train rides were usually $2-3, and a bed in someone’s house cost $5. We soon realized that Romania was still cheap, but prices had risen dramatically in the last decade.
After living in Hungary for several months, I could understand a fair bit of Hungarian, but neither Ian nor I knew a word of Romanian between us. Oradea had been part of the Kingdom of Hungary until the conclusion of World War 1, when Hungary lost a massive chunk of its territory, and as recently as the 1960’s, there were more ethnic Hungarians than Romanians in Oradea, yet I did not hear a single Hungarian conversation during our time in Oradea. According to Wikipedia, Oradea has at various times been known as both the “City of Yesterday” and the “City of Tomorrow”. The streets were full of people of all ages- most of them appeared not to be unemployed malingerers- and many of the shops and restaurants were new looking, though I don’t know if I would say that Oradea is a city of the future. It looked like its best days were clearly behind it, but the place was atmospheric and it did have potential.
Ian and I asked a few passersby on the street for a lunch place recommendation and were lucky to find English speakers who seemed to agree that we should hit a garish looking Italian restaurant on a side street near the center. It turned out to be the place for Oradea’s movers and shakers, even though that club might be regrettably small, the place was busy on a rainy Monday afternoon. The place was decked out mafia style, lots of mirror, marbles and pillars. Stunning raven haired beauties accompanied cell phone clutching boyfriends, and the menu was not translated into English, cementing my impression that the place catered to wealthy locals instead of foreigners.
On our way out of town, I took a photo of a gypsy man hollering at his recalcitrant son and was rewarded with another photo opp that I couldn’t pass up: the man flipping me off, with Oradea’s grandest cathedral as the backdrop. We briefly considered staying the night in Oradea but decided to press on to Cluj, and it was a good thing we did, because we had a lot of ground to cover and the road to Cluj turned out to pass through less overtly dire poverty, but was clogged with slow moving traffic.
It was dark by the time we reached Cluj-Napoca, a big city once known as the Hungarian capital of Transylvania. We stopped in at a shady looking hotel that was conveniently located right on one of the town’s main squares. A short young man in a vest showed us a cold, depressing room that was outfitted with what looked like prison furniture. We had read in out guidebook that there was an “erotic” show in the hotel’s basement.
“What time does the erotic show start?” I asked.
The young man appeared confused so I re-phrased the question speaking more slowly.
“What time do the girls start dancing?”
He still looked puzzled.
“We read in the guidebook that there is some kind of show in the basement.”
“No, no,” he said, “that was long time ago, we don’t have girls here any more.”
The second place we visited was in a residential neighborhood and seemed even lonelier. The front desk clerk seemed to be engaged in conversation with a cook and a maid when we walked in. The lobby was cold, dark and sparsely furnished. The place was completely bereft of customers, and the room we saw was filled with cheesy plush lazy boy type recliners and ashtrays. Improbably, the desk man told us he wanted 80 euros for the room. Ian wasn’t convinced we’d find anything better but I thought we could do better, so off we went, as the night grew darker.
We finally landed at a surprisingly posh and trendy looking boutique hotel in a residential area near the center, which vaguely claimed to offer some kind of business solutions and consulting, in addition to nice, modern rooms. Our arrival caused the pretty young clerk who checked us in to take a break from her schoolbooks to answer our litany of questions.
“Where can we find the boyhood home of Gheorghe Muresan?” Ian asked.
“What?” she asked, clearly not bargaining for the degree of difficulty the conversation had veered into.
“You know the basketball player, I think he’s from Cluj, Gheorghe Muresan!”
She eventually registered that we were talking about the bizarre looking, 7 foot 7 Romanian giant, who is believed to be the tallest man ever to play- though not well- in the NBA- though she had no idea where to find Muresan’s boyhood home.
“I think he lives in New Jersey,” she said.
Although we had read that Cluj was a happening university town with 70,000 students and a thriving club scene, we did not expect much on a Monday night. The first bar we hit was a stylish place that would not have looked out of place in Berlin or New York. It was about nine o’clock and the place had a smattering of customers.
“What time do you close?” I asked the barkeep.
“Six,” he said.
“Six?” we repeated incredulously, “as in six in the morning?”
He nodded his head.
“And does it get busy on a Monday?”
”It is getting busy all of the days,” he remarked.
After our round of drinks, we headed outside looking for a good place to go.
“Its Monday night and I’m on a pub crawl in Romania, I like it!” Ian said.
We came across a group of young women who looked like they would probably speak English and asked them to recommend a place for a drink. They sent us to another very stylish basement place that was decked out with beautiful furniture and played lounge music. Ian and I were chatting about our respective lives in St. Louis and Budapest, and I was taking mental notes on everything he said about handling kids, as my wife Jennifer was pregnant with what would be our first child. Suddenly a young woman came over to the booth and, before I knew what was happening, kissed us both on both cheeks, greeting us as though we were long lost friends. It took me a moment to register that it was one of the young ladies who had just minutes before recommended the place to us. They had told us that they were headed some place else, but apparently they had a change of heart.
The most outgoing of the group, named Adriana, wanted to know why we were in Cluj. We struggled to communicate above the ever-loudening din of the music something about always wanting to visit Transylvania, but I think the girls thought we were eccentric at best. Why were two thirty-something married American men in a club surrounded by Romanian students on a Monday night? We actually had no perverse intentions, other than to see what Cluj nightlife had to offer.
“In America hardly anyone goes out clubbing on Monday nights, we’re surprised by the crowds!” I said.
Adriana looked puzzled.
“I would think in the States you could party every night- people have more money than here, so I would think you could go out every night!” she said.
“Well, we could go out every night, but we just don’t. I mean…”
I stammered and struggled to find a way to explain that family obligations, work, and the demands of keeping up with all that’s on the two hundred plus channels of cable TV that most Americans have, keeps one from cutting loose too often. I could tell, though, that that kind of person that is out partying on a Monday in Romania, probably couldn’t relate much to the lifestyle of the typical American thirty something male. We offered to buy the girls drinks, but they weren’t ready for them. I looked around and noticed that quite a few young people weren’t drinking- apparently one was free to just hang out and not patronize the club unless they wanted to.
I ended up chatting with Adriana’s quieter friend, Dianna, who studied engineering and wore librarian glasses. Her family lived in a rural area an hour south of Cluj and she was expected to return home to help out every weekend, so the early week was her best time to party and dance.
“Are you planning to leave Romania after you finish your studies?” I asked.
“A lot of my friends are already leaving, especially the guys from my village who didn’t go to college, but I want to stay in Romania, if I can find a good job. Everyone is hoping things will get better now that we are in the EU, I don’t think it’s the time to leave.”
In the light of day, Cluj was an impressive place that was clearly in transition. Sidewalks were being torn up, students and beefy gangsters in sweat suits hung out in trendy looking café’s, and it probably won’t be long before Cluj is covered in one of Rick Steves Back Door to Europe guidebooks. Yet just outside of town, the older generation that still made its living off of the earth could be seen plying their trade with ancient looking farming instruments and horse drawn carts.
We left Cluj feeling hung over and exhausted, but determined to spend some time based in Sibiu in the heart of the Carpathian Mountains before we had to return to Budapest. Ian and I had stayed out until 3 or 4 in the morning- no mean feet for a Monday night- mostly just because we were so stunned that no one else seemed to be going home and we felt that we had to witness first hand what has to be one of the liveliest cities in Europe on a Monday. Numerous bars were still packed and going strong when we finally called it quits several hours past our bedtime.
I never would have believed that Sibiu could possibly be sold out on a Tuesday night in March, but we could barely find a room anywhere in what appeared to be a fabulously restored medieval old town. Trying to penetrate the inner core of streets in the old town in a car seemed fantastically complicated so we ditched the car and wandered around on foot looking for a place to sleep. The first few places we tried were all full, but we finally got the last bed in a motel-like place on the outskirts of town. The only problem was figuring out how to drive the car to the hotel. On foot, it would have been no sweat, but trying to navigate a car took every ounce of our collective sanity. We stayed in Sibiu two nights, but never figured out how to get the car to the hotel without having to go against the grain down a one way street adjacent to the hotel.
Sibiu is a strikingly beautiful town that is set right nearby incredible Alpine scenery. As a European cultural capital in 2007, much of the town’s historic center had just gotten an impressive face lift. The towns streets were a pedestrians dream, and all radiated out from a colossal square that was dotted with handsome and colorful buildings. There were quite a few tourists in Sibiu, yet the place closed down early unlike Cluj, which was fine with us. Each night we strolled around for hours and ended up at the only place that seemed to be 24/7, a little street side kiosk that sold cold drinks and phone cards.
The kiosk was staffed by an enterprising young college student named Elena, who sat bundled up in the cold, working the overnight shift several nights per week. We asked her why, if she were a student, she was working the overnight shift at an outdoor kiosk.
“I work here at night because I’m saving up to buy a computer,” she told us.
“So you work here all night- but when do you sleep?” I asked.
“I go straight from here to class in the morning, and then, if I can, I try to sleep after classes, if I don’t have too much work to do,” she said.
Ian and I were taken aback. In our culture, if you want something, you just go out and buy it. Even people who have no money are often undeterred. The idea of taking an overnight shift job in order to buy something is almost an unheard of concept in 21st Century America, and that really is a shame.
We admired her work ethic and pledged to return the following evening with a small contribution toward her computer purchase, but, alas, Elena had the night off. We thought about leaving the cash with the older woman who was on duty but thought better of it. The woman spoke some English, but we didn’t want her to get the wrong idea about why two American guys were leaving cash for her colleague. Elena probably has her computer by now, and that makes her a perfect metaphor for the country- a place that is making progress but having to work damn hard to get there.
So it was with some degree of surprise and a great measure of delight when my friend Ian called me one day in February from his office in St. Louis and announced his intention to come visit me in Hungary.
“I was thinking about coming out next year,” he said.
My wife, Jennifer, and me had recently lived in Macedonia for two years, working at the American Embassy in Skopje, and half of our friends had claimed that they were going to visit us, but none of them actually did. When we received an assignment in Budapest, even more claimed they would come see us, and given the fact that Budapest is much more squarely ensconced in the realm of tourism possibilities for Americans, we wondered if any would actually turn up this time.
“Next year is too late,” I told him, why don’t you come this spring?”
Ian is married, has three children under the age of five, and has a job in the world of advertising which affords him both a lot of responsibility and stress. I almost felt bad putting him on the spot, but, to my surprise, the prospect of an escape from his busy job appealed to him.
“I could try to come next month,” he offered, and within a week his trip was booked.
In the weeks leading up to Ian’s visit, we spoke several times and tried to decide on some kind of itinerary. Each time he called, I sort of half expected him to bail out on the trip- I suppose I was still surprised that he was “allowed” to travel. Ian is fortunate to have a fabulous, and exceedingly understanding wife, Katie, who is not the sort of clingy spouse that men hate for their friends to marry, for fear they will never see their friend again. No Katie is nothing like that, but, still, she was going to let Ian, who only has a few weeks of vacation per year, to travel alone to Europe for nine days while she stayed at home with three young kids? It did seem too good to be true, but Ian was deadly serious about making the voyage, and he didn’t want the usual Rick Steve’s tour either.
“I was thinking we should go to Romania,” he suggested, about as casually as one might suggest going down to the local shopping center to buy a can of Pringles. I’d been to Romania ten years before and was intrigued by what I’d seen and experienced, but Ian had never been to most of the other more celebrated countries of the region- Austria, the Czech Republic, and Germany to name a few.
“Why Romania?” I asked.
“Why not? I’d kind of like to go some place real, a bit off the beaten track, and I feel like I could go to Prague or Vienna with Katie, but when else would I get the chance to see Romania and the Carpathian mountains?”
Ian and I tentatively agreed to spend a few days in Budapest and four or five days in Romania, but I thought that Ian was a bit ambitious in hoping to visit most of Transylvania and Budapest in a single week. I had never driven in Romania, but I had a feeling that the distances on the map were not indicative of how long it would actually take to cover ground in Transylvania.
After a busy weekend in Budapest, Ian and I set off for Romania on a cool but sunny Monday morning in March.
“I cannot believe that its Monday morning, and instead of being on my way to work in St. Louis, I’m here driving through Budapest on my way to Transylvania, I like it!” Ian exclaimed.
We felt an exhilarating sense of freedom and excitement to have five days with no work, and no responsibility. We had no hotel reservations, and only a vague idea of what we planned to see and do.
I remember wondering aloud, “ how often in life do you have a week like this? I mean it’s a shame that there is so much routine and so few adventures like this one is going to be!”
Our excitement though, was quickly dampened by the wretched stop and go traffic that made our escape from my home in a residential part of Buda, on the west bank of the Danube, to the outer fringes of the other side of Budapest a slow and maddening crawl. An hour into the trip, we were still in the Pest suburbs and my driving ankle was already sore from stopping so frequently. Surprisingly, suburban Budapest is just as plagued by soulless office parks, strip malls and big box retailers as any of the blandest suburbs in the States. We had heard that we could make it to Cluj-Napoca in western Transylvania in 4-5 hours, but as we creeped along the one lane road eastwards behind slow moving trucks and a variety of slow older cars and impatient, reckless faster moving cars weaving in and out, I just hoped we could make it to Cluj before sundown.
As we neared the Romanian border, each settlement seemed to be progressively more run down.
“I just can’t believe how these houses have no setback from the road!” Ian said. “You step outside your front door and your feet could get mowed over by oncoming traffic! Where are the kids supposed to play?”
It was a good question- the busy motorway seemed to blow right through the hearts of what had previously been sleepy villages. It was also a thought that I’m sure would not have occurred to Ian before he became a dad.
“It’s amazing how your perspective changes once you have kids,” Ian said, as we rolled on slowly towards the border area. “ I get so angry when cars come flying down our street when my kids are out playing, sometimes I scream at them, ‘slow down you dumb ass!’ but I don’t know if it does any good. If I lived here I think I’d go nuts!”
As we neared the border, we saw a few very haggard looking prostitutes working the side of the road.
“Can’t believe there out on a Monday afternoon, business must be good,” Ian said.
Two married American men in a Toyota with diplomatic plates slowing down to get a better look at roadside prostitutes near the Romania border on a Monday afternoon. Good times.
Romania had just joined the European Union (EU) less than three months before our visit (whereas the elite Brussels gang deemed Hungary worthy back in 2004) and it was still a matter of speculation whether hordes of Romanians would vote with their feet and move to more prosperous countries in the E.U. Some critics who feared allowing Romania and Bulgaria into the EU club feared that public benefits seeking Romas or gypsies would flood into wealthier countries and immediately go on the dole. We could see that Romania had many of the same major European chains lining its streets that one sees in Hungary and points westward, but there was no denying that not everyone was thriving in the post-EU Romania. The road from the border to Oradea was lined with an impossibly contrasting mixture of traffic- loads of old Dacia’s leftover from the communist era shared the road with both supped up Mercedes and BMW’s piloted by kamikaze suicide drivers and farmers with horse drawn carts. An American motorist can experience more brushes with death in a single hour on a two-lane road in Romania, or even Hungary for that matter, than in a lifetime of drag racing in the States.
The heavy commercial and private traffic indicated a certain level of prosperity- with gas prices averaging around the equivalent of $5 per gallon- but the signs of jaw dropping rural poverty where also plain for anyone to see. We would drive through a shabby looking village and then notice a cluster of shacks where Roma children would be playing amidst muck and filth. The Roma have long lived in segregated neighborhoods on the outskirts of villages all over Eastern Europe, but the depths of the poverty could not help but bring down our mood. Meanwhile, Ian and I were listening to podcasts on the car stereo, including several episodes of Cubscast. It was just a few weeks before the start of the baseball season, and yet it seemed absurdly incongruous to be listening to three men stressing over such mundane issues as who would be the Cubs fifth starter and whether the Cubs would resign Carlos Zambrano as we passed through villages where people seemed to be struggling just to survive. Life is definitely good when the struggles of your sports team are the most pressing item on your life’s agenda.
“I do find it comforting to listen to others who waste even more time stressing over the Cubs than I do,” Ian said.
The road leading into Oradea, the first major town we came across in Romania, was lined with the same kind of dilapidated, soul crushing Soviet era apartment blocks one sees all over the former Soviet Union and eastern block countries. Each one had its own horrifying characteristics, but the common threads were filthy exteriors, cheap looking construction, and boxy concrete balconies. After having lived in Macedonia and Hungary, the so called “commie cubes” didn’t faze me too much, but Ian’s mood suffered a bit.
“These things are brutal! I just cannot imagine how depressing it would be to live in one of these boxes.”
The center of Oradea looked more promising, but the streets were clogged with mid-day traffic, and even the attractive, colorful baroque buildings all seemed to be in need of a coat of paint. Neither Ian nor I had any idea what the exchange rate was- and we both were carrying only Hungarian forints, which, despite the large number of ethnic Hungarians in the area, were essentially useless. After scooping out the leu/dollar exchange rate, we grabbed a small pile of colorful leu’s from an ATM. I was immediately struck by memories of my first visit to Romania in 1997. I was on an extended solo trip through Europe and on my first day, in a picturesque town called Sighisoara, was awarded two or three humungous piles of currency in exchange for one $100 traveler’s check. I remember walking out of the bank with my pockets literally bursting with money. Romania was so cheap at that time that I could hardly spend all of the local currency I had. Meals in half way decent restaurants were $1-2, train rides were usually $2-3, and a bed in someone’s house cost $5. We soon realized that Romania was still cheap, but prices had risen dramatically in the last decade.
After living in Hungary for several months, I could understand a fair bit of Hungarian, but neither Ian nor I knew a word of Romanian between us. Oradea had been part of the Kingdom of Hungary until the conclusion of World War 1, when Hungary lost a massive chunk of its territory, and as recently as the 1960’s, there were more ethnic Hungarians than Romanians in Oradea, yet I did not hear a single Hungarian conversation during our time in Oradea. According to Wikipedia, Oradea has at various times been known as both the “City of Yesterday” and the “City of Tomorrow”. The streets were full of people of all ages- most of them appeared not to be unemployed malingerers- and many of the shops and restaurants were new looking, though I don’t know if I would say that Oradea is a city of the future. It looked like its best days were clearly behind it, but the place was atmospheric and it did have potential.
Ian and I asked a few passersby on the street for a lunch place recommendation and were lucky to find English speakers who seemed to agree that we should hit a garish looking Italian restaurant on a side street near the center. It turned out to be the place for Oradea’s movers and shakers, even though that club might be regrettably small, the place was busy on a rainy Monday afternoon. The place was decked out mafia style, lots of mirror, marbles and pillars. Stunning raven haired beauties accompanied cell phone clutching boyfriends, and the menu was not translated into English, cementing my impression that the place catered to wealthy locals instead of foreigners.
On our way out of town, I took a photo of a gypsy man hollering at his recalcitrant son and was rewarded with another photo opp that I couldn’t pass up: the man flipping me off, with Oradea’s grandest cathedral as the backdrop. We briefly considered staying the night in Oradea but decided to press on to Cluj, and it was a good thing we did, because we had a lot of ground to cover and the road to Cluj turned out to pass through less overtly dire poverty, but was clogged with slow moving traffic.
It was dark by the time we reached Cluj-Napoca, a big city once known as the Hungarian capital of Transylvania. We stopped in at a shady looking hotel that was conveniently located right on one of the town’s main squares. A short young man in a vest showed us a cold, depressing room that was outfitted with what looked like prison furniture. We had read in out guidebook that there was an “erotic” show in the hotel’s basement.
“What time does the erotic show start?” I asked.
The young man appeared confused so I re-phrased the question speaking more slowly.
“What time do the girls start dancing?”
He still looked puzzled.
“We read in the guidebook that there is some kind of show in the basement.”
“No, no,” he said, “that was long time ago, we don’t have girls here any more.”
The second place we visited was in a residential neighborhood and seemed even lonelier. The front desk clerk seemed to be engaged in conversation with a cook and a maid when we walked in. The lobby was cold, dark and sparsely furnished. The place was completely bereft of customers, and the room we saw was filled with cheesy plush lazy boy type recliners and ashtrays. Improbably, the desk man told us he wanted 80 euros for the room. Ian wasn’t convinced we’d find anything better but I thought we could do better, so off we went, as the night grew darker.
We finally landed at a surprisingly posh and trendy looking boutique hotel in a residential area near the center, which vaguely claimed to offer some kind of business solutions and consulting, in addition to nice, modern rooms. Our arrival caused the pretty young clerk who checked us in to take a break from her schoolbooks to answer our litany of questions.
“Where can we find the boyhood home of Gheorghe Muresan?” Ian asked.
“What?” she asked, clearly not bargaining for the degree of difficulty the conversation had veered into.
“You know the basketball player, I think he’s from Cluj, Gheorghe Muresan!”
She eventually registered that we were talking about the bizarre looking, 7 foot 7 Romanian giant, who is believed to be the tallest man ever to play- though not well- in the NBA- though she had no idea where to find Muresan’s boyhood home.
“I think he lives in New Jersey,” she said.
Although we had read that Cluj was a happening university town with 70,000 students and a thriving club scene, we did not expect much on a Monday night. The first bar we hit was a stylish place that would not have looked out of place in Berlin or New York. It was about nine o’clock and the place had a smattering of customers.
“What time do you close?” I asked the barkeep.
“Six,” he said.
“Six?” we repeated incredulously, “as in six in the morning?”
He nodded his head.
“And does it get busy on a Monday?”
”It is getting busy all of the days,” he remarked.
After our round of drinks, we headed outside looking for a good place to go.
“Its Monday night and I’m on a pub crawl in Romania, I like it!” Ian said.
We came across a group of young women who looked like they would probably speak English and asked them to recommend a place for a drink. They sent us to another very stylish basement place that was decked out with beautiful furniture and played lounge music. Ian and I were chatting about our respective lives in St. Louis and Budapest, and I was taking mental notes on everything he said about handling kids, as my wife Jennifer was pregnant with what would be our first child. Suddenly a young woman came over to the booth and, before I knew what was happening, kissed us both on both cheeks, greeting us as though we were long lost friends. It took me a moment to register that it was one of the young ladies who had just minutes before recommended the place to us. They had told us that they were headed some place else, but apparently they had a change of heart.
The most outgoing of the group, named Adriana, wanted to know why we were in Cluj. We struggled to communicate above the ever-loudening din of the music something about always wanting to visit Transylvania, but I think the girls thought we were eccentric at best. Why were two thirty-something married American men in a club surrounded by Romanian students on a Monday night? We actually had no perverse intentions, other than to see what Cluj nightlife had to offer.
“In America hardly anyone goes out clubbing on Monday nights, we’re surprised by the crowds!” I said.
Adriana looked puzzled.
“I would think in the States you could party every night- people have more money than here, so I would think you could go out every night!” she said.
“Well, we could go out every night, but we just don’t. I mean…”
I stammered and struggled to find a way to explain that family obligations, work, and the demands of keeping up with all that’s on the two hundred plus channels of cable TV that most Americans have, keeps one from cutting loose too often. I could tell, though, that that kind of person that is out partying on a Monday in Romania, probably couldn’t relate much to the lifestyle of the typical American thirty something male. We offered to buy the girls drinks, but they weren’t ready for them. I looked around and noticed that quite a few young people weren’t drinking- apparently one was free to just hang out and not patronize the club unless they wanted to.
I ended up chatting with Adriana’s quieter friend, Dianna, who studied engineering and wore librarian glasses. Her family lived in a rural area an hour south of Cluj and she was expected to return home to help out every weekend, so the early week was her best time to party and dance.
“Are you planning to leave Romania after you finish your studies?” I asked.
“A lot of my friends are already leaving, especially the guys from my village who didn’t go to college, but I want to stay in Romania, if I can find a good job. Everyone is hoping things will get better now that we are in the EU, I don’t think it’s the time to leave.”
In the light of day, Cluj was an impressive place that was clearly in transition. Sidewalks were being torn up, students and beefy gangsters in sweat suits hung out in trendy looking café’s, and it probably won’t be long before Cluj is covered in one of Rick Steves Back Door to Europe guidebooks. Yet just outside of town, the older generation that still made its living off of the earth could be seen plying their trade with ancient looking farming instruments and horse drawn carts.
We left Cluj feeling hung over and exhausted, but determined to spend some time based in Sibiu in the heart of the Carpathian Mountains before we had to return to Budapest. Ian and I had stayed out until 3 or 4 in the morning- no mean feet for a Monday night- mostly just because we were so stunned that no one else seemed to be going home and we felt that we had to witness first hand what has to be one of the liveliest cities in Europe on a Monday. Numerous bars were still packed and going strong when we finally called it quits several hours past our bedtime.
I never would have believed that Sibiu could possibly be sold out on a Tuesday night in March, but we could barely find a room anywhere in what appeared to be a fabulously restored medieval old town. Trying to penetrate the inner core of streets in the old town in a car seemed fantastically complicated so we ditched the car and wandered around on foot looking for a place to sleep. The first few places we tried were all full, but we finally got the last bed in a motel-like place on the outskirts of town. The only problem was figuring out how to drive the car to the hotel. On foot, it would have been no sweat, but trying to navigate a car took every ounce of our collective sanity. We stayed in Sibiu two nights, but never figured out how to get the car to the hotel without having to go against the grain down a one way street adjacent to the hotel.
Sibiu is a strikingly beautiful town that is set right nearby incredible Alpine scenery. As a European cultural capital in 2007, much of the town’s historic center had just gotten an impressive face lift. The towns streets were a pedestrians dream, and all radiated out from a colossal square that was dotted with handsome and colorful buildings. There were quite a few tourists in Sibiu, yet the place closed down early unlike Cluj, which was fine with us. Each night we strolled around for hours and ended up at the only place that seemed to be 24/7, a little street side kiosk that sold cold drinks and phone cards.
The kiosk was staffed by an enterprising young college student named Elena, who sat bundled up in the cold, working the overnight shift several nights per week. We asked her why, if she were a student, she was working the overnight shift at an outdoor kiosk.
“I work here at night because I’m saving up to buy a computer,” she told us.
“So you work here all night- but when do you sleep?” I asked.
“I go straight from here to class in the morning, and then, if I can, I try to sleep after classes, if I don’t have too much work to do,” she said.
Ian and I were taken aback. In our culture, if you want something, you just go out and buy it. Even people who have no money are often undeterred. The idea of taking an overnight shift job in order to buy something is almost an unheard of concept in 21st Century America, and that really is a shame.
We admired her work ethic and pledged to return the following evening with a small contribution toward her computer purchase, but, alas, Elena had the night off. We thought about leaving the cash with the older woman who was on duty but thought better of it. The woman spoke some English, but we didn’t want her to get the wrong idea about why two American guys were leaving cash for her colleague. Elena probably has her computer by now, and that makes her a perfect metaphor for the country- a place that is making progress but having to work damn hard to get there.
Gangi, Sicily
To the outside world, Gangi is an obscure hill town tucked away in a remote part of interior Sicily's Nebrodi mountains, but in my family, Gangi is our Jerusalem, our Mecca, our Athens. My grandfather, Carmelo Seminara was born in Gangi and lived there until immigrating to the U.S. in the early part of the 20th century. My dad, Carmen, used to talk about Gangi so much during my childhood, that by the time I visited Gangi myself for the first time, I felt like I already knew the place. Italian hill-towns are a well known commodity in traveler's circles, but Gangi is not on the tourist map, and thus, one can visit today a town that really has not changed much since when my grandfather lived there almost a century ago. Old Gangi looks like a town built by people just a bit tired of being constantly invaded. The road that leads up into the ancient center is so steep and intimidating that only those who have either lived in the town, raced the LeMans course before, or who have a death wish should consider driving up into the center. Want to walk up? Better have a damn good pair of shoes, strong calves and a clean pair of lungs. You don't need a map- just keep going up, up, up until you reach the town's heart, the Piazza del Popolo, or collapse in exhaustion trying.
The modern traveler cannot help but notice what isn't in the old town of Gangi- no restaraunts, no internet cafe's, art galleries, hotels, wine shops, tourist information offices, souvenir stands, or any other business that caters to those that don't live in the immediate area. What Gangi does have is a maze of ancient streets and narrow dwellings populated by people that all know each other and still by there bread, milk and veggies from men who drive by in trucks and hawk their wares by broadcasting over makeshift bullhorns attached to the tops of their trucks. Life in ancient Gangi revolves around the picture perfect Piazza del Popolo, which features a remarkable church that contains a few dozens mummified priests in its basement and an attractive town hall building with a clock tower. In the corner of the piazza sits the Seminara Bar, which is owned by Pino and Mimma Seminara, wonderful people who make what may be the world's most perfect homemade gelato in the world, right in the small back room of the bar. The Seminara's are not relatives of ours- in Gangi there are a few hundred Seminara's- but they treated my wife and I like members of the family from the first time we walked in the door and introduced ourselves.
Gangi's streets were definitely not made for cars. The first time I tried to drive up the center, I made it about half way and then chicken out. The streets are fantastically steep and narrow that even when you have the road to yourself, a simple trip is harrowing. But then when a car tries to come at you going in the opposite direction, either you or he needs to back up and come to some kind of agreement regarding how the situation will proceed. Its not for the faint of heart, and if there are pedestrians near you and the car you are dueling with, they know to hop up on someone's stoop- because the roads definitely aren't wide enough for two cars and pedestrians. Driving is scary, but trying to parallel park is death defying.
The weather can change very fast in Gangi, and at night, Gangi can be a very mysterious place. Fog often rolls into the upper town and enshrouds the whole place in a haze of mist so dense that you may not be able to find your car or the place you are staying in. To really appreciate Gangi, you need to stay up in the old town overnight, and that means asking around for a room or apartment to rent. At night, you can trek up and down the quiet, ancient streets amongst medieval churches and old stone dwellings or you can make the passegiata along the town's corso, nodding to the old men who sit in one part of the square and grinning at the teenagers who play with their cell phones and kiss their boyfriends with gusto.
During our stay in Gangi, we got to know Pino and Mimma Seminara, owners of the Seminara Bar, and their children, Santo and Marianna. They wanted to take us on a tour of the town and since I only understand a bit of Italian, I asked Santo and Marianna, who were 18, and 21, respectively if they had any friends that could translate for us. A long discussion ensued, and they concluded that they did not know anyone who could speak English. I was a bit astonished by this. Gangi is not a big place, but it’s a fair size town, and the Seminara’s seemed to know everyone. Marianna, it turns out, actually did know some English, and she was studying Arabic at university in Palermo. Each weekend she commuted back to Gangi to be with her family. Marianna was, like many Italian teenagers, very close to her parents. She thought nothing of affectionately embracing her dad in public, even in front of her friends, in a way that most American teenagers would find appalling. Though I loved being in Gangi, I could imagine how it would seem dull and provincial to an 18 year old. But when I asked Marianna if she planned to move out after her studies were completed, she insisted that she never wanted to leave Gangi. When my grandfather, Carmelo, was a bit older than her he came to an entirely different conclusion about Gangi, and eventually made his way to the States after working briefly at a hotel in Palermo and then as a cook for the exiled Duke of O’rleans on an estate not far from Palermo.
On our last afternoon in Gangi, Pino’s sister, also named Mimma, and Marianna took us to Gangi’s cemetery, which is perched on the side of a hill and affords a nice view of the surrounding valley, which is green and lush in the spring time. Mimma’s father had died only months before, and she broke down in tears as we passed his grave. She was about 40 and had never married. She lived with her mother, who was a remarkably handsome woman in her 70s, with a kind, welcoming face. Mimma pulled herself together and after some fruitless searching for the graves of my great-grandparents, we headed into a small, little office where a young man, who appeared to be some kind of care-taker, sat listening to a soccer game on the radio. Marianna informed me that they were just about to close, but said we could look through their record books if we wanted to. I did not know what year my great grandparents died, so the search was a bit of an exercise in futility, but being able to pore over the massive, dusty books with their fancy handwritten records , was nonetheless quite interesting. There are a lot of Seminara’s buried in Gangi. Carmelo Seminara was born in 1880 in Gangi, so his parents probably died sometime in the early 20th century, although we don’t know for certain.
As we said goodbye to the Seminara’s and to Gangi, I had the feeling that we were no doubt seen as visitors from a far-away place, but I did feel as though we weren’t just outsiders passing through the place, but rather, descendants of Gangitani’s returning home to see the place. I didn’t just want to return to Gangi for a visit, I wanted to learn Italian and to come back and stay in the place for awhile, try to get a feel for what life was like in this remote part of Sicily. Some day, I might achieve that goal, but Carmelo made a choice a bit more than a hundred years ago, and the result of that decision to leave Gangi, is that we could never really fit in there, no matter how long we stayed or how much Italian we learned. Gangi- like many hill-towns all over rural Italy- is a place that does not embrace change or outsiders. Perhaps, this what was precisely what Carmelo didn’t like about the place, but Gangi’s stubborn refusal to change was what
The modern traveler cannot help but notice what isn't in the old town of Gangi- no restaraunts, no internet cafe's, art galleries, hotels, wine shops, tourist information offices, souvenir stands, or any other business that caters to those that don't live in the immediate area. What Gangi does have is a maze of ancient streets and narrow dwellings populated by people that all know each other and still by there bread, milk and veggies from men who drive by in trucks and hawk their wares by broadcasting over makeshift bullhorns attached to the tops of their trucks. Life in ancient Gangi revolves around the picture perfect Piazza del Popolo, which features a remarkable church that contains a few dozens mummified priests in its basement and an attractive town hall building with a clock tower. In the corner of the piazza sits the Seminara Bar, which is owned by Pino and Mimma Seminara, wonderful people who make what may be the world's most perfect homemade gelato in the world, right in the small back room of the bar. The Seminara's are not relatives of ours- in Gangi there are a few hundred Seminara's- but they treated my wife and I like members of the family from the first time we walked in the door and introduced ourselves.
Gangi's streets were definitely not made for cars. The first time I tried to drive up the center, I made it about half way and then chicken out. The streets are fantastically steep and narrow that even when you have the road to yourself, a simple trip is harrowing. But then when a car tries to come at you going in the opposite direction, either you or he needs to back up and come to some kind of agreement regarding how the situation will proceed. Its not for the faint of heart, and if there are pedestrians near you and the car you are dueling with, they know to hop up on someone's stoop- because the roads definitely aren't wide enough for two cars and pedestrians. Driving is scary, but trying to parallel park is death defying.
The weather can change very fast in Gangi, and at night, Gangi can be a very mysterious place. Fog often rolls into the upper town and enshrouds the whole place in a haze of mist so dense that you may not be able to find your car or the place you are staying in. To really appreciate Gangi, you need to stay up in the old town overnight, and that means asking around for a room or apartment to rent. At night, you can trek up and down the quiet, ancient streets amongst medieval churches and old stone dwellings or you can make the passegiata along the town's corso, nodding to the old men who sit in one part of the square and grinning at the teenagers who play with their cell phones and kiss their boyfriends with gusto.
During our stay in Gangi, we got to know Pino and Mimma Seminara, owners of the Seminara Bar, and their children, Santo and Marianna. They wanted to take us on a tour of the town and since I only understand a bit of Italian, I asked Santo and Marianna, who were 18, and 21, respectively if they had any friends that could translate for us. A long discussion ensued, and they concluded that they did not know anyone who could speak English. I was a bit astonished by this. Gangi is not a big place, but it’s a fair size town, and the Seminara’s seemed to know everyone. Marianna, it turns out, actually did know some English, and she was studying Arabic at university in Palermo. Each weekend she commuted back to Gangi to be with her family. Marianna was, like many Italian teenagers, very close to her parents. She thought nothing of affectionately embracing her dad in public, even in front of her friends, in a way that most American teenagers would find appalling. Though I loved being in Gangi, I could imagine how it would seem dull and provincial to an 18 year old. But when I asked Marianna if she planned to move out after her studies were completed, she insisted that she never wanted to leave Gangi. When my grandfather, Carmelo, was a bit older than her he came to an entirely different conclusion about Gangi, and eventually made his way to the States after working briefly at a hotel in Palermo and then as a cook for the exiled Duke of O’rleans on an estate not far from Palermo.
On our last afternoon in Gangi, Pino’s sister, also named Mimma, and Marianna took us to Gangi’s cemetery, which is perched on the side of a hill and affords a nice view of the surrounding valley, which is green and lush in the spring time. Mimma’s father had died only months before, and she broke down in tears as we passed his grave. She was about 40 and had never married. She lived with her mother, who was a remarkably handsome woman in her 70s, with a kind, welcoming face. Mimma pulled herself together and after some fruitless searching for the graves of my great-grandparents, we headed into a small, little office where a young man, who appeared to be some kind of care-taker, sat listening to a soccer game on the radio. Marianna informed me that they were just about to close, but said we could look through their record books if we wanted to. I did not know what year my great grandparents died, so the search was a bit of an exercise in futility, but being able to pore over the massive, dusty books with their fancy handwritten records , was nonetheless quite interesting. There are a lot of Seminara’s buried in Gangi. Carmelo Seminara was born in 1880 in Gangi, so his parents probably died sometime in the early 20th century, although we don’t know for certain.
As we said goodbye to the Seminara’s and to Gangi, I had the feeling that we were no doubt seen as visitors from a far-away place, but I did feel as though we weren’t just outsiders passing through the place, but rather, descendants of Gangitani’s returning home to see the place. I didn’t just want to return to Gangi for a visit, I wanted to learn Italian and to come back and stay in the place for awhile, try to get a feel for what life was like in this remote part of Sicily. Some day, I might achieve that goal, but Carmelo made a choice a bit more than a hundred years ago, and the result of that decision to leave Gangi, is that we could never really fit in there, no matter how long we stayed or how much Italian we learned. Gangi- like many hill-towns all over rural Italy- is a place that does not embrace change or outsiders. Perhaps, this what was precisely what Carmelo didn’t like about the place, but Gangi’s stubborn refusal to change was what
Breakdowns but No TakeDowns Down in Bulgaria and Greece
Part One
It’s my parent’s first trip to the Balkans, and I am behind the wheel, with both my wife and mother in the backseat barking driving instructions at me as we twist and turn our way towards Bulgaria’s capital. Slow down! Watch this guy, he’s not stopping for you! What does that sign say!
Yet as we thundered down a rare straightaway only miles after crossing from Macedonia into Bulgaria, the backseat drivers, bless them, were strangely quiet. Out of nowhere I saw a huge mound of dirt and rocks laying smack across the entire width of the two-lane road and tried to slam on the brakes, to no avail. The car went flying, literally soaring, Dukes of Hazards Style across the mound. We slammed down hard front first, after being momentarily airborne and everyone’s eyeglasses were jarred off of their heads. All that was missing from the scene was Cooter’s narration. Now I don’t know what them folks got themselves into this time, do you?
The road, as it turns out, had come to an end with no warning. Mind you, this was not some secondary road we were on, but the main road linking two major world capitals, Skopje and Sofia. Ok, so two capitals, at least. We were OK, but the car was making odd noises, and both my mom and wife could not resist taking jabs at my navigational and driving skills. Weren’t you paying attention?
Frightening noises made more frightening by my utter lack of automotive knowledge groaned louder and louder as we puttered in the opposite direction in search of a through road. After several minutes we coasted into a gas station, which was oddly staffed entirely with cute teenage girls as pump attendants. They seemed to think it hilarious that oil was leaking profusely from what I later learned was the transmission fluid pan. Or was it the fact that we were driving a battered ’94 Altima with bald tires and diplomatic plates issued in Macedonia that amused them? Or was it my rudimentary Macedonian language skills? The girls, in their smart one-piece gas station jump suit attendant outfits, pointed us towards another garage up the street, and as we pulled away, two of them had to bury their faces in their hands so as not to keel over from all the laughing and revelry.
By this time, the car had lost too much fluid and refused to allow me to steer it. Luckily the road was straight and we coasted into what seemed to be a deserted mechanic’s garage. A few young people sat huddled around a space heater in a freezing cold café attached to the quiet garage. The café was empty and the group seemed to view our entrance into their lives as a momentary interruption into their quiet, gray day. Lacking any Bulgarian language skills I pointed to the car, which was perched at their entrance and said, PROBLEM. They summoned a young man with blackened mechanics hands from the back.
The young man looked at the car and began asking us questions in Bulgarian, as we stood around looking concerned and cold. Ah, a great moment in the annals of Bulgarian holidaymaking! I tried telling the young man that we didn’t understand him in Macedonian, which Bulgarians claim is essentially a bastardized version of Bulgarian, but Macedonians claim is completely different. He was unfazed though and continued querying me in his native tongue. I had been working at the American Embassy in Skopje, and had been trained in Albanian for six months prior to arriving at my post. My father, who never quite grasped the fact that I’d learned the minority language in Macedonia which is not at all similar to the Cyrillic tongue that Slav Macedonians speak, said to me, only half kidding, “you can’t speak his language? Ah shit, you’re no good!”
After a lengthy game of pointing, gesturing and mutual incomprehension the young man seemed to be saying that the entrance of the garage was around back. Once we had pushed the car around back, another short swarthy man came around and starting poking at the undersides of our leaking car. He looked like the young man’s boss.
“PRO- BLEM”, he said.
To which, I wittily retorted, “GOLEM (Big) PRO BLEM?” Hoping against hope he’d say it wasn’t.
He shook his head yes, but said no, in that funny and counterintuitive way Bulgarians are famous for. We repaired to the icy cold café and my father, whose hearing leaves something to be desired, shouted at the lackadaisical youths huddling around the space heater.
“COFFFFEEEEE???”
He scared the hell out of them, but one of the youths managed to pry himself off of the space heater and got busy.
“This is the best 25 cent cup of coffee in Bulgaria!” my dad claimed excitedly.
As we sat in the empty café looking out onto a tableau of heavy gray skies I silently assessed our situation. We are stuck in a small town, the name of which I do not know, in the Bulgarian countryside. Our car has some unknown malady. None of us know a thing about cars. None of us can speak a word of Bulgarian. We are Americans. Our car has diplomatic plates. We appear to be rich, though we are driving an old battered vehicle. The temperature is below freezing, yet we are all dressed in spring windbreakers since the weather in Macedonia had been considerably balmier. My dad is shouting questions in english at the monolingual staff in his friendly, gregarious way trying to befriend them, but quite possibly also making them angry. Our coffee tastes like gravely mud. We are on vacation. It’s Saturday morning. These men, with their dirty hands and jumpsuits are going to rape us. I can’t afford this. Will they demand my first-born child? My wife? Quarts of my blood?
We ascertained, our more accurately, they ascertained that the pan which holds the transmission fluid had been sliced open in the accident. The swarthy man and his apprentice were welding and pounding it back together with a hammer. In the States, most mechanics would have told you that they had to order the part, which would take 4 weeks, and would gladly charge you $83 for that hour of “labor”. But this plucky crew was actually fixing the damn thing. But would we make it to Sofia?
After a little more than two hours of merciless hammering and welding the man in jumpsuits proclaimed the car done. I followed them to front desk to pay them, butterflies in my stomach. Here it comes, I thought. The elder statesman punched the figure 67 onto a calculator and turned it around for my dad and I to see. He looked at us, as if to determine if we found the figure acceptable. 67, 67 what? Gold bouillon coins? Heads of cattle? Virgins to be sacrificed at the Temple of Bulgarian Mechanics?
This prince of a man broke the suspense by saying “LEVA.” Leva is the Bulgarian currency, which we did not possess nor really know the exact exchange rate of. As if reading my mind, he then did some calculation and came up with the price of 30 euros. This low price was made doubly incredible by the fact that we had seen them put in 4 or 5 containers of transmission fluid, which cost about 3 euros each, by themselves.
My father leaped across the counter and embraced the man, completely ignoring social and cultural etiquette and the fact that the man was wearing a filthy jumpsuit.
“You must be the most honest mechanic in Bulgaria,” he bellowed at the stunned man.
I moved to quickly pay him and escape before he changed his mind.
As we hopped into our car, which started and seemed to work just fine, we were all giddy with excitement as though we’d all dodged some kind of bullet.
“Boy if I were him I would have charged you enough to retire on!” my dad commented.
And he was right. Here we were a bunch of rubes who knew nothing about cars, couldn’t speak the language. You would think a mechanic in a small town in Bulgaria would really try to feast on an American diplomat, who had the misfortune to break down in the vicinity. These men worked hard in a freezing cold garage. Came home at night, stinking and dirty, with probably not too many leva’s to show for their toil. I probably would have shafted me too, if I had been them.
We barely used the car after arriving in Sofia and the weekend passed without further vehicular incident. On Monday morning I went out to dust snow off the car, and prepare it for the trip back home to Skopje, via the Rila Monastery. Much to my dismay, we had two flat tires.
An extraordinarily nice young man from the hotel we were staying in, named Goce, immediately went out into the freezing cold and began putting our spare on one of the flats, despite the fact that we weren’t even parked in the hotel parking lot. We had all gone out to a flea market and bought hats and gloves for a buck apiece, but I was still freezing cold in my windbreaker. The hats and gloves were a godsend, but they made us all look a bit odd. My dad looked like an escaped mental patient with his huge maroon knockoff Addidas ski hat that was two sizes too big for his head. We had been given wide births on the streets and casinos of Sofia. But I was still COLD!
In less than an hour, Goce had the spare on one flat, and the other jacked up. He, my dad and I piled into a tiny, battered old taxi with the two flat tires hanging out of the absurdly inadequate little trunk. There was something wrong with the drivers seat and it literally hung down onto the back seat and in my dad’s lap. My dad tried pushing the driver up off his lap to no avail. The spectacle of my dad trying to push the man back into the front seat allowed me to see the hilarity of our situation: we were out on this crazy Monday morning errand on the snowy streets of Sofia-heading off to another Bulgarian garage on our weekend getaway. HA!
The driver- who did all of the lifting of the tires in and out of his taxi-wanted about a buck for the ride to the garage, and also insisted on sticking around until the tires were fixed. The little garage was busy, but the mechanics dropped everything to deal with our bum tires. As they dipped the first one into a huge vat of awful, sludgy, icy cold water, my dad remarked, presciently, “Godammit, I’m glad I don’t have to dip my hand in that cold, dirty water!”
As we waited for the mechanic’s verdict, we sat in a tiny little makeshift café attached to the garage, watching people with dull, blank expressions drink ebony black coffee from small white plastic cups. I felt certain that the man would tell us we needed new tires. I was wrong. They patched them up, charged us 7 Euros, and we were back in the battered taxi, with the driver on lap this time, heading back to the Hotel Meg.
“Bulgaria is alright!” my dad proclaimed, and I laughed.
“No seriously,” he continued, “you can get things fixed here, this place is wonderful!”
But it wasn’t just the cheap car repairs, coffee, and counterfeit sportswear that made us feel good about Bulgaria, it was also the fact that we had traveled back in time and lived in a place where things weren’t disposable, and spent a weekend in one of the few remaining parts of Europe where fleecing the tourist had not yet reached the level of an art form.
Part Two
Two weekends after our multiple breakdown weekend in Bulgaria, my wife and I were cruising around the beautiful interior of the Greek Cyclades island of Naxos on a rented moped. It was our second day on the rented bike, and my initial apprehension to the idea had given way to comfort and enjoyment behind the wheel. However the stars were not aligned properly as we came around one sharp turn, and slid across some water, tumbling off the bikes and down onto the road. Thankfully, I wasn’t driving fast, so we weren’t seriously hurt. The fall did, however, manage to put holes right through my sweater and thick jacket, and also rendered the bike inoperable.
We were a few kilometers outside a small village, so we just coasted back there, feeling a strange sense of deja vous. My wife, Jen and I squabbled a bit about who would call the rent a moped guy back in Naxos town. I lost the “discussion” and grudgingly trudged up to use the phone at the village’s only taverna. Another accident, and another man in a jumpsuit on the other end of the line. This time, one who spoke English. A Greek one, who was probably more accustomed to soaking tourists than his Bulgarian counterparts.
“If I come to pick you up, it will cost 2 euros per kilometer, just for the transportation fee,” he told me. I felt as though the bullets we’d dodged in Bulgaria were coming back, via some JFK-esque magic bullet theory.
Being the cheapskate I am, I relayed the news to my wife, and suggested that we might save money, and try to just coast all the way back to town, some 15 kilometers.
“Are you crazy! Tell him to bring his damn truck!” my wife barked.
“Fine,” you talk to him, I whined, handing the phone over to her, unable to speak any verbal assent to this creep’s insidious plan to charge us through the nose.
This Terrible Man ™ told Jen he’d be there in an hour or two, which I took to mean 2 or 3. I assessed the damage to the bike, while we waited. My professional analysis was that the mirror was cracked and that otherwise the thing was just plain broken. The contract we’d signed, and given our credit card to back up, stated that we were responsible for any damage done to the bike. We pondered aloud, over a beer in the taverna, how much our little Italian little piece of junk could be worth. A moment for the annals of Greek holidaymaking.
As we waited for the TM to arrive, I tried to clean up and dress wounds on my knee and elbow. I was not too badly hurt, but was walking with a very noticeable limp, which I did not want the moped guy to see, as I was trying to play down the seriousness of the accident at all costs.
The Terrible Man ™ arrived sooner than we had bargained for, and I was in fact, wandering around the pretty stone village taking photos when he arrived. Jen was not so amused when I returned, even though I had caused the two only a momentary delay. But this might be a good time to mention that my wonderful, loving wife had the good sense not to blame me for the accident. If there was one thing we could agree on, it was that the bike that was at fault, not me. Whew.
As soon as we got inside the TM’s old jalopy, he asked not of our physical or mental well being, but instead only commented that, “you are a very bad driver, I was surprised when you brought back the moped yesterday that you had not gotten into an accident.”
I diplomatically resisted the urge to throttle the little creep. After all, we still had the matter of the repairs to haggle over. For the rest of the ride back to his office, an unpleasant silence hung over the car as we zigged and zagged around the island’s beautiful circumference.
Back at Command Central, I was happy to see that there were some customers waiting to rent bikes. I felt as though, in a pinch, if all else went wrong, I could cause a scene, that would, if nothing else, cause the rest of the customers to probably go ahead and rent from the TM anyways. For a few minutes the TM and I held court on some of the great issues of the day, namely, who was to pay for the repairs to the bike, the owner, or the renter. The TM instructed us to come back later in the day, after he had time to assess the damage to the bike, and gauge exactly how much he’d need to charge us in order to retire in comfort.
Jen and I foolishly, shrugged off our wounds and took a long hike outside of town. Partly because we wanted the exercise, but mostly, because, having already spent money to rent a moped for the day, we could not stomach the idea of paying for other modes of transport. By day’s end, my knee was throbbing, and I was hobbling around Naxos town’s mercilessly steep, hilly streets like an old, wounded combat veteran of some old war, kids know nothing about these days. I could not bear the thought of allowing the TM to see me hobble into his little shop, only to be assessed with some astronomical and quite arbitrary repair bill.
I thought about dispatching my chief emissary, and Special Liaison to Greek Moped Rental Guys (SLGMRG), Jen, to tangle with the TM, but thought better of it, figuring that the sexist creep would probably see that as a sign of weakness and/or acquiescence. I was dismayed to see no one else in his petty little shop, which at this time was now filled with what I considered to be his defective mopeds. If things got ugly, there was no one to make a scene in front of. And I was ready; I had mentally prepared myself to battle with this TM, and his dreadful Spartan mentality.
Blessedly though, this clash did not materialize as the TM, proved himself to be not so terrible, charging us only 30 euros, 15 for the broken mirror and 15 for the tow into town. Still, I did not act too grateful for fear that he would have the pleasure of thinking he had done me some kind of favor. I just limped out of the shop, wallet and pride still marginally intact.
It’s my parent’s first trip to the Balkans, and I am behind the wheel, with both my wife and mother in the backseat barking driving instructions at me as we twist and turn our way towards Bulgaria’s capital. Slow down! Watch this guy, he’s not stopping for you! What does that sign say!
Yet as we thundered down a rare straightaway only miles after crossing from Macedonia into Bulgaria, the backseat drivers, bless them, were strangely quiet. Out of nowhere I saw a huge mound of dirt and rocks laying smack across the entire width of the two-lane road and tried to slam on the brakes, to no avail. The car went flying, literally soaring, Dukes of Hazards Style across the mound. We slammed down hard front first, after being momentarily airborne and everyone’s eyeglasses were jarred off of their heads. All that was missing from the scene was Cooter’s narration. Now I don’t know what them folks got themselves into this time, do you?
The road, as it turns out, had come to an end with no warning. Mind you, this was not some secondary road we were on, but the main road linking two major world capitals, Skopje and Sofia. Ok, so two capitals, at least. We were OK, but the car was making odd noises, and both my mom and wife could not resist taking jabs at my navigational and driving skills. Weren’t you paying attention?
Frightening noises made more frightening by my utter lack of automotive knowledge groaned louder and louder as we puttered in the opposite direction in search of a through road. After several minutes we coasted into a gas station, which was oddly staffed entirely with cute teenage girls as pump attendants. They seemed to think it hilarious that oil was leaking profusely from what I later learned was the transmission fluid pan. Or was it the fact that we were driving a battered ’94 Altima with bald tires and diplomatic plates issued in Macedonia that amused them? Or was it my rudimentary Macedonian language skills? The girls, in their smart one-piece gas station jump suit attendant outfits, pointed us towards another garage up the street, and as we pulled away, two of them had to bury their faces in their hands so as not to keel over from all the laughing and revelry.
By this time, the car had lost too much fluid and refused to allow me to steer it. Luckily the road was straight and we coasted into what seemed to be a deserted mechanic’s garage. A few young people sat huddled around a space heater in a freezing cold café attached to the quiet garage. The café was empty and the group seemed to view our entrance into their lives as a momentary interruption into their quiet, gray day. Lacking any Bulgarian language skills I pointed to the car, which was perched at their entrance and said, PROBLEM. They summoned a young man with blackened mechanics hands from the back.
The young man looked at the car and began asking us questions in Bulgarian, as we stood around looking concerned and cold. Ah, a great moment in the annals of Bulgarian holidaymaking! I tried telling the young man that we didn’t understand him in Macedonian, which Bulgarians claim is essentially a bastardized version of Bulgarian, but Macedonians claim is completely different. He was unfazed though and continued querying me in his native tongue. I had been working at the American Embassy in Skopje, and had been trained in Albanian for six months prior to arriving at my post. My father, who never quite grasped the fact that I’d learned the minority language in Macedonia which is not at all similar to the Cyrillic tongue that Slav Macedonians speak, said to me, only half kidding, “you can’t speak his language? Ah shit, you’re no good!”
After a lengthy game of pointing, gesturing and mutual incomprehension the young man seemed to be saying that the entrance of the garage was around back. Once we had pushed the car around back, another short swarthy man came around and starting poking at the undersides of our leaking car. He looked like the young man’s boss.
“PRO- BLEM”, he said.
To which, I wittily retorted, “GOLEM (Big) PRO BLEM?” Hoping against hope he’d say it wasn’t.
He shook his head yes, but said no, in that funny and counterintuitive way Bulgarians are famous for. We repaired to the icy cold café and my father, whose hearing leaves something to be desired, shouted at the lackadaisical youths huddling around the space heater.
“COFFFFEEEEE???”
He scared the hell out of them, but one of the youths managed to pry himself off of the space heater and got busy.
“This is the best 25 cent cup of coffee in Bulgaria!” my dad claimed excitedly.
As we sat in the empty café looking out onto a tableau of heavy gray skies I silently assessed our situation. We are stuck in a small town, the name of which I do not know, in the Bulgarian countryside. Our car has some unknown malady. None of us know a thing about cars. None of us can speak a word of Bulgarian. We are Americans. Our car has diplomatic plates. We appear to be rich, though we are driving an old battered vehicle. The temperature is below freezing, yet we are all dressed in spring windbreakers since the weather in Macedonia had been considerably balmier. My dad is shouting questions in english at the monolingual staff in his friendly, gregarious way trying to befriend them, but quite possibly also making them angry. Our coffee tastes like gravely mud. We are on vacation. It’s Saturday morning. These men, with their dirty hands and jumpsuits are going to rape us. I can’t afford this. Will they demand my first-born child? My wife? Quarts of my blood?
We ascertained, our more accurately, they ascertained that the pan which holds the transmission fluid had been sliced open in the accident. The swarthy man and his apprentice were welding and pounding it back together with a hammer. In the States, most mechanics would have told you that they had to order the part, which would take 4 weeks, and would gladly charge you $83 for that hour of “labor”. But this plucky crew was actually fixing the damn thing. But would we make it to Sofia?
After a little more than two hours of merciless hammering and welding the man in jumpsuits proclaimed the car done. I followed them to front desk to pay them, butterflies in my stomach. Here it comes, I thought. The elder statesman punched the figure 67 onto a calculator and turned it around for my dad and I to see. He looked at us, as if to determine if we found the figure acceptable. 67, 67 what? Gold bouillon coins? Heads of cattle? Virgins to be sacrificed at the Temple of Bulgarian Mechanics?
This prince of a man broke the suspense by saying “LEVA.” Leva is the Bulgarian currency, which we did not possess nor really know the exact exchange rate of. As if reading my mind, he then did some calculation and came up with the price of 30 euros. This low price was made doubly incredible by the fact that we had seen them put in 4 or 5 containers of transmission fluid, which cost about 3 euros each, by themselves.
My father leaped across the counter and embraced the man, completely ignoring social and cultural etiquette and the fact that the man was wearing a filthy jumpsuit.
“You must be the most honest mechanic in Bulgaria,” he bellowed at the stunned man.
I moved to quickly pay him and escape before he changed his mind.
As we hopped into our car, which started and seemed to work just fine, we were all giddy with excitement as though we’d all dodged some kind of bullet.
“Boy if I were him I would have charged you enough to retire on!” my dad commented.
And he was right. Here we were a bunch of rubes who knew nothing about cars, couldn’t speak the language. You would think a mechanic in a small town in Bulgaria would really try to feast on an American diplomat, who had the misfortune to break down in the vicinity. These men worked hard in a freezing cold garage. Came home at night, stinking and dirty, with probably not too many leva’s to show for their toil. I probably would have shafted me too, if I had been them.
We barely used the car after arriving in Sofia and the weekend passed without further vehicular incident. On Monday morning I went out to dust snow off the car, and prepare it for the trip back home to Skopje, via the Rila Monastery. Much to my dismay, we had two flat tires.
An extraordinarily nice young man from the hotel we were staying in, named Goce, immediately went out into the freezing cold and began putting our spare on one of the flats, despite the fact that we weren’t even parked in the hotel parking lot. We had all gone out to a flea market and bought hats and gloves for a buck apiece, but I was still freezing cold in my windbreaker. The hats and gloves were a godsend, but they made us all look a bit odd. My dad looked like an escaped mental patient with his huge maroon knockoff Addidas ski hat that was two sizes too big for his head. We had been given wide births on the streets and casinos of Sofia. But I was still COLD!
In less than an hour, Goce had the spare on one flat, and the other jacked up. He, my dad and I piled into a tiny, battered old taxi with the two flat tires hanging out of the absurdly inadequate little trunk. There was something wrong with the drivers seat and it literally hung down onto the back seat and in my dad’s lap. My dad tried pushing the driver up off his lap to no avail. The spectacle of my dad trying to push the man back into the front seat allowed me to see the hilarity of our situation: we were out on this crazy Monday morning errand on the snowy streets of Sofia-heading off to another Bulgarian garage on our weekend getaway. HA!
The driver- who did all of the lifting of the tires in and out of his taxi-wanted about a buck for the ride to the garage, and also insisted on sticking around until the tires were fixed. The little garage was busy, but the mechanics dropped everything to deal with our bum tires. As they dipped the first one into a huge vat of awful, sludgy, icy cold water, my dad remarked, presciently, “Godammit, I’m glad I don’t have to dip my hand in that cold, dirty water!”
As we waited for the mechanic’s verdict, we sat in a tiny little makeshift café attached to the garage, watching people with dull, blank expressions drink ebony black coffee from small white plastic cups. I felt certain that the man would tell us we needed new tires. I was wrong. They patched them up, charged us 7 Euros, and we were back in the battered taxi, with the driver on lap this time, heading back to the Hotel Meg.
“Bulgaria is alright!” my dad proclaimed, and I laughed.
“No seriously,” he continued, “you can get things fixed here, this place is wonderful!”
But it wasn’t just the cheap car repairs, coffee, and counterfeit sportswear that made us feel good about Bulgaria, it was also the fact that we had traveled back in time and lived in a place where things weren’t disposable, and spent a weekend in one of the few remaining parts of Europe where fleecing the tourist had not yet reached the level of an art form.
Part Two
Two weekends after our multiple breakdown weekend in Bulgaria, my wife and I were cruising around the beautiful interior of the Greek Cyclades island of Naxos on a rented moped. It was our second day on the rented bike, and my initial apprehension to the idea had given way to comfort and enjoyment behind the wheel. However the stars were not aligned properly as we came around one sharp turn, and slid across some water, tumbling off the bikes and down onto the road. Thankfully, I wasn’t driving fast, so we weren’t seriously hurt. The fall did, however, manage to put holes right through my sweater and thick jacket, and also rendered the bike inoperable.
We were a few kilometers outside a small village, so we just coasted back there, feeling a strange sense of deja vous. My wife, Jen and I squabbled a bit about who would call the rent a moped guy back in Naxos town. I lost the “discussion” and grudgingly trudged up to use the phone at the village’s only taverna. Another accident, and another man in a jumpsuit on the other end of the line. This time, one who spoke English. A Greek one, who was probably more accustomed to soaking tourists than his Bulgarian counterparts.
“If I come to pick you up, it will cost 2 euros per kilometer, just for the transportation fee,” he told me. I felt as though the bullets we’d dodged in Bulgaria were coming back, via some JFK-esque magic bullet theory.
Being the cheapskate I am, I relayed the news to my wife, and suggested that we might save money, and try to just coast all the way back to town, some 15 kilometers.
“Are you crazy! Tell him to bring his damn truck!” my wife barked.
“Fine,” you talk to him, I whined, handing the phone over to her, unable to speak any verbal assent to this creep’s insidious plan to charge us through the nose.
This Terrible Man ™ told Jen he’d be there in an hour or two, which I took to mean 2 or 3. I assessed the damage to the bike, while we waited. My professional analysis was that the mirror was cracked and that otherwise the thing was just plain broken. The contract we’d signed, and given our credit card to back up, stated that we were responsible for any damage done to the bike. We pondered aloud, over a beer in the taverna, how much our little Italian little piece of junk could be worth. A moment for the annals of Greek holidaymaking.
As we waited for the TM to arrive, I tried to clean up and dress wounds on my knee and elbow. I was not too badly hurt, but was walking with a very noticeable limp, which I did not want the moped guy to see, as I was trying to play down the seriousness of the accident at all costs.
The Terrible Man ™ arrived sooner than we had bargained for, and I was in fact, wandering around the pretty stone village taking photos when he arrived. Jen was not so amused when I returned, even though I had caused the two only a momentary delay. But this might be a good time to mention that my wonderful, loving wife had the good sense not to blame me for the accident. If there was one thing we could agree on, it was that the bike that was at fault, not me. Whew.
As soon as we got inside the TM’s old jalopy, he asked not of our physical or mental well being, but instead only commented that, “you are a very bad driver, I was surprised when you brought back the moped yesterday that you had not gotten into an accident.”
I diplomatically resisted the urge to throttle the little creep. After all, we still had the matter of the repairs to haggle over. For the rest of the ride back to his office, an unpleasant silence hung over the car as we zigged and zagged around the island’s beautiful circumference.
Back at Command Central, I was happy to see that there were some customers waiting to rent bikes. I felt as though, in a pinch, if all else went wrong, I could cause a scene, that would, if nothing else, cause the rest of the customers to probably go ahead and rent from the TM anyways. For a few minutes the TM and I held court on some of the great issues of the day, namely, who was to pay for the repairs to the bike, the owner, or the renter. The TM instructed us to come back later in the day, after he had time to assess the damage to the bike, and gauge exactly how much he’d need to charge us in order to retire in comfort.
Jen and I foolishly, shrugged off our wounds and took a long hike outside of town. Partly because we wanted the exercise, but mostly, because, having already spent money to rent a moped for the day, we could not stomach the idea of paying for other modes of transport. By day’s end, my knee was throbbing, and I was hobbling around Naxos town’s mercilessly steep, hilly streets like an old, wounded combat veteran of some old war, kids know nothing about these days. I could not bear the thought of allowing the TM to see me hobble into his little shop, only to be assessed with some astronomical and quite arbitrary repair bill.
I thought about dispatching my chief emissary, and Special Liaison to Greek Moped Rental Guys (SLGMRG), Jen, to tangle with the TM, but thought better of it, figuring that the sexist creep would probably see that as a sign of weakness and/or acquiescence. I was dismayed to see no one else in his petty little shop, which at this time was now filled with what I considered to be his defective mopeds. If things got ugly, there was no one to make a scene in front of. And I was ready; I had mentally prepared myself to battle with this TM, and his dreadful Spartan mentality.
Blessedly though, this clash did not materialize as the TM, proved himself to be not so terrible, charging us only 30 euros, 15 for the broken mirror and 15 for the tow into town. Still, I did not act too grateful for fear that he would have the pleasure of thinking he had done me some kind of favor. I just limped out of the shop, wallet and pride still marginally intact.
Give Me the Chance to Lose 7 Billion Dollars
By now you must have heard about, Jérôme Kerviel, the 31 year old French banker who tried to conceal some 7.2 BILLION dollars worth of bad trades he made over the course of a year. But does anyone know if his employer, Societe Generale, has started interviewing to fill his job? Because I sure would like to have his job. I mean, think about it, how badly could I fuck it up? If they tried to criticize me, I'd just say, "hey, at least I'm not as bad as Jerome, remember that dipshit?"
I also think it would be great to have an employer that gives its employees so much freedom. Shit, I've heard of empowering one's subordinates, but allowing them to fritter away 7 billion bucks? Damn, sign me up. Jerome might not have been a model employee- but he did manage to conceal his losses for a long time- and while I might not let him balance my checkbook, he might be a pretty clever guy to have around too. In fact, as a Cubs fan, I'd like to see Jerome as the new Cubs GM. Any guy that can spend money like that should be the guy pulling the trigger on possible free agent acquisitions as far as I'm concerned.
I also think it would be great to have an employer that gives its employees so much freedom. Shit, I've heard of empowering one's subordinates, but allowing them to fritter away 7 billion bucks? Damn, sign me up. Jerome might not have been a model employee- but he did manage to conceal his losses for a long time- and while I might not let him balance my checkbook, he might be a pretty clever guy to have around too. In fact, as a Cubs fan, I'd like to see Jerome as the new Cubs GM. Any guy that can spend money like that should be the guy pulling the trigger on possible free agent acquisitions as far as I'm concerned.
Do You Live At Borders?
I like to browse through the books and magazines as much as the next guy, but, has anyone else noticed that some people take the whole Borders browsing experience just a tad too far? I lived within walking distance of a Borders, and I stop by probably once or twice a week, and have come to notice that there are at least two people that appear to actually LIVE in the store. Of course, I cannot be certain that they are always there, but I have never been to the store at any time of day or night, when these two men AREN'T at the store. Presumably the staff boots them out at closing time, but who knows, the staff members appear to have such a laissez faire attitude that I cannot be entirely sure.
Borders guy #1 has long, greasy gray hair, and appears to carry all of his belongings with him in an army surplus store canvas bag. I won't call him homeless, because, as I said before, he appears to live at Borders. He also wears the same kind of New Balance sneakers that I do- only his are whiter and in better condition than mine. Borders Guy 1 always sits at the far left of a row of four plush comfortable black leather seats. The thing that I like about him is that he always his nose in a book, whereas the homeless guy that lives at our local library does nothing but sleep.
Borders guy #2 is a lot more annoying. He's an older man, overweight but not morbidly obese, and seems to be a pensionier rather than a homeless drifter, so he doesn't carry all of his belongings with him. That said, he takes up more space and always has more stuff with him than guy #1. Guy 2 can almost always be found blocking all of the fiction authors whose name begins with the letter P. If he's not there, he's usually camped out in the cafe with his collection of bags and paraphanalia. Lest you conclude that he is a paying customer that patronizes the cafe- fear not- guy 2 brings his own meals and drinks, and unashamadely unwraps and eats them in the cafe, as though it were a student canteen.
The annoying thing about guy #2 is that if you come near his area he gets visibly annoyed, and often loudly harummphs if you piss him off. One time I was pushing my son Leo through the store and the stroller bumped the upright chair he sits on, and guy 2 audibly tsk'd, as though we had ruined his whole day. Moments later when my son farted, I saw him shaking his head in disgust. Try to look at books behind his fat ass and he grows visibly disturbed.
There are a few basic rules of ettiqete that I think everyone should observe at the big box bookstores...
1. Please don't ever take your filthy shoes off and prop your rank-ass feet anywhere.
2. Do you have to read the local paper? Really, the damn thing is 50 cents, please. Bring your damn cheap ass down to the library if you can't bust out the quarters.
3. At least bring your own damned cutlery if you plan to bring your own meal to the cafe.
4. Feel free to get off that comfy chair every now and again- start with getting off it for important family functions like weddings and funerals and work your way up from there. Remember, there are only like 5 good chairs in the whole store, and lots of assholes like you out there.
5. If you start to notice that you are looking as unkempt as the employees, its time to re-think how much time you are spending at Borders.
All of this chatter about ne'er do wells at Borders, has me thinking about a radical idea. What if municipalities with over-crowded prisons were authorized to drop petty thieves, street hookers, loiterers, low level drug mules and other public nuisances off at Borders each day. Would they become better people if they were allowed to spend their days browsing for books and magazines or would Borders just become a really dangerous and unpleasant place to shop in?
Borders guy #1 has long, greasy gray hair, and appears to carry all of his belongings with him in an army surplus store canvas bag. I won't call him homeless, because, as I said before, he appears to live at Borders. He also wears the same kind of New Balance sneakers that I do- only his are whiter and in better condition than mine. Borders Guy 1 always sits at the far left of a row of four plush comfortable black leather seats. The thing that I like about him is that he always his nose in a book, whereas the homeless guy that lives at our local library does nothing but sleep.
Borders guy #2 is a lot more annoying. He's an older man, overweight but not morbidly obese, and seems to be a pensionier rather than a homeless drifter, so he doesn't carry all of his belongings with him. That said, he takes up more space and always has more stuff with him than guy #1. Guy 2 can almost always be found blocking all of the fiction authors whose name begins with the letter P. If he's not there, he's usually camped out in the cafe with his collection of bags and paraphanalia. Lest you conclude that he is a paying customer that patronizes the cafe- fear not- guy 2 brings his own meals and drinks, and unashamadely unwraps and eats them in the cafe, as though it were a student canteen.
The annoying thing about guy #2 is that if you come near his area he gets visibly annoyed, and often loudly harummphs if you piss him off. One time I was pushing my son Leo through the store and the stroller bumped the upright chair he sits on, and guy 2 audibly tsk'd, as though we had ruined his whole day. Moments later when my son farted, I saw him shaking his head in disgust. Try to look at books behind his fat ass and he grows visibly disturbed.
There are a few basic rules of ettiqete that I think everyone should observe at the big box bookstores...
1. Please don't ever take your filthy shoes off and prop your rank-ass feet anywhere.
2. Do you have to read the local paper? Really, the damn thing is 50 cents, please. Bring your damn cheap ass down to the library if you can't bust out the quarters.
3. At least bring your own damned cutlery if you plan to bring your own meal to the cafe.
4. Feel free to get off that comfy chair every now and again- start with getting off it for important family functions like weddings and funerals and work your way up from there. Remember, there are only like 5 good chairs in the whole store, and lots of assholes like you out there.
5. If you start to notice that you are looking as unkempt as the employees, its time to re-think how much time you are spending at Borders.
All of this chatter about ne'er do wells at Borders, has me thinking about a radical idea. What if municipalities with over-crowded prisons were authorized to drop petty thieves, street hookers, loiterers, low level drug mules and other public nuisances off at Borders each day. Would they become better people if they were allowed to spend their days browsing for books and magazines or would Borders just become a really dangerous and unpleasant place to shop in?
Lets Move Ahead with WW3 Anyways!
There was a spectacularly entertaining presidential press conference about a month ago that slipped under the radar. In early December, portions of a national intelligence estimate (NIE) on Iran's nuclear threat were released to the public, and the report concluded that it is "highly likely" that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program more than four years ago. Though parts of the report were only just made public, apparently it was produced some time ago. This is stunningly bad news for the more hawkish members of the administration and for Israel and its more zealous supporters here in the United States who have been clamoring for war, or failing that, air strikes on Iran for the last few years.
You have probably noticed that the Iran threat has been hyped in a similar fashion to the way the war in Iraq was sold, only this time, the public has been more skeptical. What was most interesting about this press conference was how Bush handled the questions on the NIE. Let me paraphrase parts of the press conference for you.
Question from reporter: Mr. President, after you warned of a mushroom cloud if Iraq was not dealt with and then there were no weapons of mass destruction, and now, as recently as October you were warning about a "World War 3" with Iran, even though you, by that time, would have already had this report stating that the Iranians ended their weapons program four years ago, don't you worry that you may begin to lack credibility around the world?
Bush: Well that's not true- because I was told that there was some new intelligence about Iran's nuclear program, but I don't remember….no one told me what the new intelligence was.
Shockingly, the reporter did not follow up by asking, "so, you as the President of the United States, did not ask what this new information was? How could you not ask- given the fact that you have been painting this country as a grave threat to our very survival as a country- what if the new information was that Iran had a nuclear weapon and was about to attack us?"
But the question did not get asked, though the press corps did continue to press him about Iran.
Question from reporter: So given what we know now from this intelligence report, will there be any change in our policy toward Iran?
Bush: I thought Iran was dangerous before I read the report, and I still think Iran is dangerous now. They could re-start their program at any time.
He rambled on for a bit, but his point was clear, there would be no change in our Iran policy.
What is clear is that the only thing that prevented war with Iran was the fiasco in Iraq. If things had gone smoother in Iraq, our troops would already be in Tehran. Why? Because the neo-cons, a loose coalition of hawks both in and out of the administration, have had dreams of remaking the Middle East, and removing threats to Israel in the region for a very long time and 9/11 finally gave them the chance to execute phase one of their dream plan.
The other missed opportunity of the press conference involved Russia and the recent parliamentary elections there, which were widely condemned as fraudulent. After raising the question of Bush's credibility there was some mild question lobbed about Bush's opinion on Russia's election. What the reporter should have asked was,
"Mr. President, in 2001, you said that you looked into Mr. Putin's eyes and were able to see into his soul. After his recent attempts to stay in power for life and yesterday's fraudulent election, if you gazed deeply into his eyes once more, what would you see inside his soul now?"
The bottom line is: forget all that crap we said before, and just listen to us now!
You have probably noticed that the Iran threat has been hyped in a similar fashion to the way the war in Iraq was sold, only this time, the public has been more skeptical. What was most interesting about this press conference was how Bush handled the questions on the NIE. Let me paraphrase parts of the press conference for you.
Question from reporter: Mr. President, after you warned of a mushroom cloud if Iraq was not dealt with and then there were no weapons of mass destruction, and now, as recently as October you were warning about a "World War 3" with Iran, even though you, by that time, would have already had this report stating that the Iranians ended their weapons program four years ago, don't you worry that you may begin to lack credibility around the world?
Bush: Well that's not true- because I was told that there was some new intelligence about Iran's nuclear program, but I don't remember….no one told me what the new intelligence was.
Shockingly, the reporter did not follow up by asking, "so, you as the President of the United States, did not ask what this new information was? How could you not ask- given the fact that you have been painting this country as a grave threat to our very survival as a country- what if the new information was that Iran had a nuclear weapon and was about to attack us?"
But the question did not get asked, though the press corps did continue to press him about Iran.
Question from reporter: So given what we know now from this intelligence report, will there be any change in our policy toward Iran?
Bush: I thought Iran was dangerous before I read the report, and I still think Iran is dangerous now. They could re-start their program at any time.
He rambled on for a bit, but his point was clear, there would be no change in our Iran policy.
What is clear is that the only thing that prevented war with Iran was the fiasco in Iraq. If things had gone smoother in Iraq, our troops would already be in Tehran. Why? Because the neo-cons, a loose coalition of hawks both in and out of the administration, have had dreams of remaking the Middle East, and removing threats to Israel in the region for a very long time and 9/11 finally gave them the chance to execute phase one of their dream plan.
The other missed opportunity of the press conference involved Russia and the recent parliamentary elections there, which were widely condemned as fraudulent. After raising the question of Bush's credibility there was some mild question lobbed about Bush's opinion on Russia's election. What the reporter should have asked was,
"Mr. President, in 2001, you said that you looked into Mr. Putin's eyes and were able to see into his soul. After his recent attempts to stay in power for life and yesterday's fraudulent election, if you gazed deeply into his eyes once more, what would you see inside his soul now?"
The bottom line is: forget all that crap we said before, and just listen to us now!
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Check Out My New $5 Haircut
Can I guy get a decent haircut in Chicago for $5? This question haunted me for weeks each time I passed by a place that advertised $5 haircuts on a collapsible board on Harlem Avenue on the western fringe of the city. Sylvia and Mike’s is located right across the street from a grocery store that I frequent, and despite all of the neon signs and low price, it took me a long time to summon up the courage to actually patronize the place.
I’ve gotten haircuts in many different countries around the world, and, on several occasions, I’ve paid far less than $5, and come away relatively unscathed. When I lived in Macedonia, I had a barber named Dime (pronounced DEE-MAY) who gave a pretty mean cut for the equivalent of $2. If I had been willing to part with $4, I could have gone to the kind of place where a pretty girl cuts your hair and washes it to boot. But why toss around that kind of money, when you can get a good cut for $2? I’ve also gotten cuts for less than $5 in Russia, Turkey and China. In each case, there was a language barrier, so even walking in the door was a bit of a leap of faith. When it comes to cheap barbers overseas, I am so trusting, that I once allowed an 11-year-old boy to give me a shave with a straight razor in Turkey. He actually did a damn good job.
But the United States is not the land of $5 haircuts. John Edwards recently received a well-publicized $400 haircut by a guy named Joe Villanueva. The incident was an embarrassment to his campaign, but Villanueva later told the Washington Post that the $400 cut was actually a discount price- he had previously charged Edwards $1250. Not too shabby for a guy who reminds everyone at least 15 times per day that he is the son of a mill worker from North Carolina. (Never mind the fact that he lives in this 28,000 square foot home, (that is when he isn’t at one of his vacation homes), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:JohnEdwardsHome.jpg)
The one common theme that I have noticed is that no matter what I spend on haircuts, I pretty much always look the same. If I paid Joe Villanueva $1250 for a haircut, I don’t think I would look much better than I do when I get a $15 cut. In truth, expensive haircuts are probably just a measure of one’s social status, and since I have no social status, what’s the point? So applying that same logic- I wondered- how bad could I possibly look if given a $5 cut? I resolved to find out.
When I walked into Sylvia and Mike’s Family Hair Care on Harlem Avenue one afternoon in late October, I had to resist the urge to confirm that the haircuts were truly $5. Only three of twelve chairs were occupied, and all the customers were middle aged Latinas speaking Spanish. A middle-aged woman doing a crossword puzzle sized me up with a quizzical glance.
“You want haircut?” she said, in a vaguely eastern european accent.
“Umm, I think so,” I said, trying hard not to chicken out as the rumble of salsa music echoed over my head.
“You want haircut, right?” she asked again to confirm.
“Yes, yes, I want a haircut,” I confirmed, eventually convincing both her and me.
The woman disappeared into the backroom and emerged with a skinny Hispanic man in his twenties who was carrying a styrofoam cup which he later used to spit tobacco into. Before I tell you about my haircut, first we need to resolve the issue of what to call the guy who cut my hair. It wasn’t a barbershop, so barber does not fit, and I would hesitate to give someone who gives $5 haircuts the term “stylist”, so why don’t we just call him by his name, David.
“What kind of haircut do you want?” David asked.
I told David what I have told every single person who has ever brandished a pair of scissors in my general vicinity in my lifetime, “just a normal haircut,” but I added the caveat I use only when I am in a particularly distrustful frame of mind, “not too short though.”
The first thing that impressed me about David was the fact that, after our initial exchange, he did not speak to me. There are few things I dislike more than a chatty barber who tries to force conversation on me, especially when they ask me, “so what do you do?” when I have no convenient answer to the question. But I was curious to know more about the man behind the $5 haircuts.
“Do you live around here?” I asked.
“I live in Lincoln Park,” he said.
Lincoln Park is a yuppie-oriented neighborhood located at least a half hour away from Syliva and Mike’s, it’s the kind of place where twenty-something’s jog to Starbucks in sweatshirts from big ten colleges or double park their VW Jetta’s right outside because there are no legal spaces.
I could not fathom why someone would actually commute through Chicago traffic to a place that gives $5 cuts, though I suspected it was because no place that charges more than $5 was willing to take David on. I hoped that he was merely an illegal immigrant who knew how to cut hair, rather than a legal one with no training or skills.
“Did you hear about John Edwards’ $400 haircut?” I ask.
“Somebody paid $400 for a haircut?” he asked, his brow furrowed in confusion.
“Even more, I guess he used to pay $1,250,” I replied.
“That’s fucked up,” he said, “yeah, I think David Beckham spent like $900 on a haircut too, now that I think of it!”
“What kind of person needs to pay that much for a haircut?” I asked, feeling like a righteously indignant member of the proletariat as I enjoyed my five-dollar scalping.
“Only a dumb ass would pay that much!” David said, laughing.
“Absolutely, you could come here and get a cut for $5,” I said.
Somewhere around the middle of my haircut, we came to a point where I thought that if he stopped right then, I would actually look halfway decent. This happens to me all the time. I think my hair looks best about a week or two after its been cut, but I can’t bring myself to: A) get it cut more frequently, or B) let it grow longer. So when he asked, “should I keep cutting?” I answered, “sure, why not?” like the scalped riverboat gambler that I am.
The cut seemed to go all right, save for three small problems. The first was that I told him to just trim the sideburns a bit, but instead he completely lopped them off, leaving me with two patches of skin on my face that I have not seen in years. The second glitch was when he took the straight razor to the back of my neck. It was a really dull blade. The kind of blade that I suppose one should expect at this kind of establishment, but still, a very dull blade nonetheless. As he painfully scraped away at my neck, I almost asked him to cut it out, but decided to just grin and bear it. The third problem, and I hesitate to even mention this one, was that I didn’t look good. But I wasn’t too thrown by this, because I frequently come to this conclusion after spending 15-20 minutes gazing at myself in a mirror, and often times, my haircuts don’t turn out to be as bad as I think they are.
After David was done with me, I paid the eastern european woman the $5 and gave David a $2 tip. He acted as though he was taken aback and it took me a few moments to realize that he was actually very pleased with his tip. David wrote his name, hours and telephone number on the back of a business card and handed it to me. The phone number he wrote on the back was different than the number listed on the front of the card. Was he so thrilled with the $2 tip that he was giving me his personal number? Or did he have some other motive? I resolved not to find out.
Just as it takes the military time to assess the fallout from an aerial carpet bomb campaign, it takes some time to assess the damage from a bad haircut. When I left Sylvia and Mike’s I was reasonably sure that I still looked reasonably presentable. My evidence of this was that I went to the supermarket afterwards, and no one seemed to be looking at me and then covering their children’s eye’s and running in horror in the opposite direction. I arrived home and my wife, Jen studied my head from all angles.
“It doesn’t look much different than when you spend $15,” she said, affirming my initial impression.
Jen never likes any of my haircuts, and if she had her way, I’d have Dog the Bounty Hunter locks resting comfortably on my shoulders.
But in the hours and days that followed, I came to realize that my hair was, for lack of a better phrase, all fucked up. It was kind of like the opposite of a bowl cut, it was a square head Herman Munster cut from hell, but I’ve been wearing hats recently and trying to keep a low profile, so the fallout from the $5 cut has been negligible. So can a guy get a decent haircut in Chicago for $5? Based upon my experience, no, I don’t think so, but now I feel as justified in spending $15 as John Edwards must when he drops $400.
I’ve gotten haircuts in many different countries around the world, and, on several occasions, I’ve paid far less than $5, and come away relatively unscathed. When I lived in Macedonia, I had a barber named Dime (pronounced DEE-MAY) who gave a pretty mean cut for the equivalent of $2. If I had been willing to part with $4, I could have gone to the kind of place where a pretty girl cuts your hair and washes it to boot. But why toss around that kind of money, when you can get a good cut for $2? I’ve also gotten cuts for less than $5 in Russia, Turkey and China. In each case, there was a language barrier, so even walking in the door was a bit of a leap of faith. When it comes to cheap barbers overseas, I am so trusting, that I once allowed an 11-year-old boy to give me a shave with a straight razor in Turkey. He actually did a damn good job.
But the United States is not the land of $5 haircuts. John Edwards recently received a well-publicized $400 haircut by a guy named Joe Villanueva. The incident was an embarrassment to his campaign, but Villanueva later told the Washington Post that the $400 cut was actually a discount price- he had previously charged Edwards $1250. Not too shabby for a guy who reminds everyone at least 15 times per day that he is the son of a mill worker from North Carolina. (Never mind the fact that he lives in this 28,000 square foot home, (that is when he isn’t at one of his vacation homes), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:JohnEdwardsHome.jpg)
The one common theme that I have noticed is that no matter what I spend on haircuts, I pretty much always look the same. If I paid Joe Villanueva $1250 for a haircut, I don’t think I would look much better than I do when I get a $15 cut. In truth, expensive haircuts are probably just a measure of one’s social status, and since I have no social status, what’s the point? So applying that same logic- I wondered- how bad could I possibly look if given a $5 cut? I resolved to find out.
When I walked into Sylvia and Mike’s Family Hair Care on Harlem Avenue one afternoon in late October, I had to resist the urge to confirm that the haircuts were truly $5. Only three of twelve chairs were occupied, and all the customers were middle aged Latinas speaking Spanish. A middle-aged woman doing a crossword puzzle sized me up with a quizzical glance.
“You want haircut?” she said, in a vaguely eastern european accent.
“Umm, I think so,” I said, trying hard not to chicken out as the rumble of salsa music echoed over my head.
“You want haircut, right?” she asked again to confirm.
“Yes, yes, I want a haircut,” I confirmed, eventually convincing both her and me.
The woman disappeared into the backroom and emerged with a skinny Hispanic man in his twenties who was carrying a styrofoam cup which he later used to spit tobacco into. Before I tell you about my haircut, first we need to resolve the issue of what to call the guy who cut my hair. It wasn’t a barbershop, so barber does not fit, and I would hesitate to give someone who gives $5 haircuts the term “stylist”, so why don’t we just call him by his name, David.
“What kind of haircut do you want?” David asked.
I told David what I have told every single person who has ever brandished a pair of scissors in my general vicinity in my lifetime, “just a normal haircut,” but I added the caveat I use only when I am in a particularly distrustful frame of mind, “not too short though.”
The first thing that impressed me about David was the fact that, after our initial exchange, he did not speak to me. There are few things I dislike more than a chatty barber who tries to force conversation on me, especially when they ask me, “so what do you do?” when I have no convenient answer to the question. But I was curious to know more about the man behind the $5 haircuts.
“Do you live around here?” I asked.
“I live in Lincoln Park,” he said.
Lincoln Park is a yuppie-oriented neighborhood located at least a half hour away from Syliva and Mike’s, it’s the kind of place where twenty-something’s jog to Starbucks in sweatshirts from big ten colleges or double park their VW Jetta’s right outside because there are no legal spaces.
I could not fathom why someone would actually commute through Chicago traffic to a place that gives $5 cuts, though I suspected it was because no place that charges more than $5 was willing to take David on. I hoped that he was merely an illegal immigrant who knew how to cut hair, rather than a legal one with no training or skills.
“Did you hear about John Edwards’ $400 haircut?” I ask.
“Somebody paid $400 for a haircut?” he asked, his brow furrowed in confusion.
“Even more, I guess he used to pay $1,250,” I replied.
“That’s fucked up,” he said, “yeah, I think David Beckham spent like $900 on a haircut too, now that I think of it!”
“What kind of person needs to pay that much for a haircut?” I asked, feeling like a righteously indignant member of the proletariat as I enjoyed my five-dollar scalping.
“Only a dumb ass would pay that much!” David said, laughing.
“Absolutely, you could come here and get a cut for $5,” I said.
Somewhere around the middle of my haircut, we came to a point where I thought that if he stopped right then, I would actually look halfway decent. This happens to me all the time. I think my hair looks best about a week or two after its been cut, but I can’t bring myself to: A) get it cut more frequently, or B) let it grow longer. So when he asked, “should I keep cutting?” I answered, “sure, why not?” like the scalped riverboat gambler that I am.
The cut seemed to go all right, save for three small problems. The first was that I told him to just trim the sideburns a bit, but instead he completely lopped them off, leaving me with two patches of skin on my face that I have not seen in years. The second glitch was when he took the straight razor to the back of my neck. It was a really dull blade. The kind of blade that I suppose one should expect at this kind of establishment, but still, a very dull blade nonetheless. As he painfully scraped away at my neck, I almost asked him to cut it out, but decided to just grin and bear it. The third problem, and I hesitate to even mention this one, was that I didn’t look good. But I wasn’t too thrown by this, because I frequently come to this conclusion after spending 15-20 minutes gazing at myself in a mirror, and often times, my haircuts don’t turn out to be as bad as I think they are.
After David was done with me, I paid the eastern european woman the $5 and gave David a $2 tip. He acted as though he was taken aback and it took me a few moments to realize that he was actually very pleased with his tip. David wrote his name, hours and telephone number on the back of a business card and handed it to me. The phone number he wrote on the back was different than the number listed on the front of the card. Was he so thrilled with the $2 tip that he was giving me his personal number? Or did he have some other motive? I resolved not to find out.
Just as it takes the military time to assess the fallout from an aerial carpet bomb campaign, it takes some time to assess the damage from a bad haircut. When I left Sylvia and Mike’s I was reasonably sure that I still looked reasonably presentable. My evidence of this was that I went to the supermarket afterwards, and no one seemed to be looking at me and then covering their children’s eye’s and running in horror in the opposite direction. I arrived home and my wife, Jen studied my head from all angles.
“It doesn’t look much different than when you spend $15,” she said, affirming my initial impression.
Jen never likes any of my haircuts, and if she had her way, I’d have Dog the Bounty Hunter locks resting comfortably on my shoulders.
But in the hours and days that followed, I came to realize that my hair was, for lack of a better phrase, all fucked up. It was kind of like the opposite of a bowl cut, it was a square head Herman Munster cut from hell, but I’ve been wearing hats recently and trying to keep a low profile, so the fallout from the $5 cut has been negligible. So can a guy get a decent haircut in Chicago for $5? Based upon my experience, no, I don’t think so, but now I feel as justified in spending $15 as John Edwards must when he drops $400.
The Ignorance Files- Ignorance on Vacation
My wife and I recently stayed at perhaps the least restful hotel in the western hemisphere. Imagine the antithesis of those zen like spa/retreat places that you see advertised in the New York Times Sunday magazine that cater to the over-programmed soccer mom that hopes to “re-connect” with her distant husband who watches too much sports and won’t take her see Pride and Prejudice, and wants to be rubbed down by a beefy ethnic guy with strong hands, and given a facial by a less ethnic, less strong guy who watches Will and Grace. No, this was not that kind of place.
This was the place where troops of girl scouts stayed. The place the Red Hat Soceity Ladies held their banquet. The class trip place. The joint that the local fraternity rented a floor at to trash every now and again. All of these groups, and probably more, were at what I came to think of as The Park Bench Inn during our stay. During a three night stay, we switched rooms 3 times in fruitless efforts to try to get some rest. It was a complete 24-hour cycle of annoyance. The scouts/schoolkids/and red hat society ladies took the early morning shifts. The incredibly tardy housekeeping staff took the late afternoon/early evening shift, and the frat boys and their slutty dates picked up the late night slack.
On our first morning at the Park Bench Inn, the school group that dominated the floor we stayed on in room #1 was up and reeking havoc in the hallways at 6AM. The kids were running the halls, playing and generally doing the kinds of things kids do on field trips. Worse, though, were the shrill voices of the chaperones- who gamely tried to chide them at top volume- “Jason!! Come Over here!! Line up!! Where is Brittany?? Has ANYONE SEEN BRITTANY?”
This was early on in our stay, and I had not yet become resigned to getting less sleep than we would have otherwise been able to get at a bus shelter, so I stumbled out of bed, bleary eyed and in boxers and a t-shirt. I focused a deathly stare at the louder and, seemingly more ignorant of the two ditzy chaperones, hand on hips, hoping perhaps she might come to her senses- realize that they were disturbing people and offer an apology w/o me having to say anything. No such luck. This miserable bag of bones smiled at me and almost looked as though she were about to wish me “good morning.”
“It’s 6AM, we’re trying to sleep, can you PLEASE bring the kids down to the lobby?” I asked. (ok, demanded)
“They’re kids- what can you expect from them?” she asked.
“But YOU’RE louder than they are!” I protested.
At this point, chaperone #2 came over and chided me for being “ sooo rude.” I’m up at 6AM, arguing with two functionally illiterate teachers from Bumblefuck County in the hallway of a 2 star hotel on my vacation, and I’m the rude one. Of course, trying to fall back asleep after a heated argument is quite pointless.
We moved rooms, and the next morning I had it out with three old ladies from the red hat society. It was 7AM- on a Saturday no less- and they were gabbing- loudly and for several minutes- directly outside our door, in spite of a hand made sign I had taped up that said, “SILENCE PLEASE!” Jen thought that asking for “silence” instead of “quiet” was unrealistic, but after one really bad night of sleep, I figured I’d shoot for the moon and hope for the stars. I stormed out to confront the offending seniors.
“Excuse me, ladies, would you mind keeping it down, we’re trying to sleep?” I said.
One of the seniors, dressed in a bright red sweatshirt that nearly blinded me in the early morning light, looked at her watch, and then responded, “but its time to get up!” cheerfully, casting a bright toothy dentured smiled at me. I could have strangled her- but instead I just slammed my door and complained to my wife for a long time.
At 7.30, as we lay in bed trying to get back to sleep, a loud leaf blower roared in the parking lot several floors below. We had seen the same moron at the same time the morning before, but were already getting dressed by that point, so we had not stressed over it. It seemed almost cruel- as though the hotel were deliberately trying to disturb its guests, early on a weekend morning no less. I called down to the front desk, absurdly believing that a sympathetic clerk would share my outrage and immediately punish the moron who was out operating loud machinery at this time of the morning. Of course, I was wrong- the front desk clerk responded, “oh, he does that every morning at this time,” as though his activity was the most logical thing imaginable.
And so the three nights passed in this fashion- ignorant, thoughtless people making all kinds of noise in the hallways and common areas at any time they wanted, and then acting completely unapologetic when called on it. And this kind of ignorant behavior is not confined to the Park Bench Inn. I had another not so pleasant early morning “discussion” on thanksgiving with a dad who thought it wise to send his 4 young children into the hallways of the hotel to play at 7AM, rather than to bother he and his wife in their room. “Happy Thanksgiving” he sarcastically told me, instead of apologizing. And a few weeks before that, we had the misfortune of staying in a hotel room next to a complete ignoramus who: a) set his alarm clock to go off at 4.15 AM on a Sunday morning, b) did not respond to said alarm, c) only responded after I repeatedly pounded on his door and cursed he and his ancestors vigorously, d) in actuality, as we discovered 8 minutes later, did not turn the alarm off, but actually hit Snooze, thus re-starting the entire cycle, e) see points A-C all over again
This was the place where troops of girl scouts stayed. The place the Red Hat Soceity Ladies held their banquet. The class trip place. The joint that the local fraternity rented a floor at to trash every now and again. All of these groups, and probably more, were at what I came to think of as The Park Bench Inn during our stay. During a three night stay, we switched rooms 3 times in fruitless efforts to try to get some rest. It was a complete 24-hour cycle of annoyance. The scouts/schoolkids/and red hat society ladies took the early morning shifts. The incredibly tardy housekeeping staff took the late afternoon/early evening shift, and the frat boys and their slutty dates picked up the late night slack.
On our first morning at the Park Bench Inn, the school group that dominated the floor we stayed on in room #1 was up and reeking havoc in the hallways at 6AM. The kids were running the halls, playing and generally doing the kinds of things kids do on field trips. Worse, though, were the shrill voices of the chaperones- who gamely tried to chide them at top volume- “Jason!! Come Over here!! Line up!! Where is Brittany?? Has ANYONE SEEN BRITTANY?”
This was early on in our stay, and I had not yet become resigned to getting less sleep than we would have otherwise been able to get at a bus shelter, so I stumbled out of bed, bleary eyed and in boxers and a t-shirt. I focused a deathly stare at the louder and, seemingly more ignorant of the two ditzy chaperones, hand on hips, hoping perhaps she might come to her senses- realize that they were disturbing people and offer an apology w/o me having to say anything. No such luck. This miserable bag of bones smiled at me and almost looked as though she were about to wish me “good morning.”
“It’s 6AM, we’re trying to sleep, can you PLEASE bring the kids down to the lobby?” I asked. (ok, demanded)
“They’re kids- what can you expect from them?” she asked.
“But YOU’RE louder than they are!” I protested.
At this point, chaperone #2 came over and chided me for being “ sooo rude.” I’m up at 6AM, arguing with two functionally illiterate teachers from Bumblefuck County in the hallway of a 2 star hotel on my vacation, and I’m the rude one. Of course, trying to fall back asleep after a heated argument is quite pointless.
We moved rooms, and the next morning I had it out with three old ladies from the red hat society. It was 7AM- on a Saturday no less- and they were gabbing- loudly and for several minutes- directly outside our door, in spite of a hand made sign I had taped up that said, “SILENCE PLEASE!” Jen thought that asking for “silence” instead of “quiet” was unrealistic, but after one really bad night of sleep, I figured I’d shoot for the moon and hope for the stars. I stormed out to confront the offending seniors.
“Excuse me, ladies, would you mind keeping it down, we’re trying to sleep?” I said.
One of the seniors, dressed in a bright red sweatshirt that nearly blinded me in the early morning light, looked at her watch, and then responded, “but its time to get up!” cheerfully, casting a bright toothy dentured smiled at me. I could have strangled her- but instead I just slammed my door and complained to my wife for a long time.
At 7.30, as we lay in bed trying to get back to sleep, a loud leaf blower roared in the parking lot several floors below. We had seen the same moron at the same time the morning before, but were already getting dressed by that point, so we had not stressed over it. It seemed almost cruel- as though the hotel were deliberately trying to disturb its guests, early on a weekend morning no less. I called down to the front desk, absurdly believing that a sympathetic clerk would share my outrage and immediately punish the moron who was out operating loud machinery at this time of the morning. Of course, I was wrong- the front desk clerk responded, “oh, he does that every morning at this time,” as though his activity was the most logical thing imaginable.
And so the three nights passed in this fashion- ignorant, thoughtless people making all kinds of noise in the hallways and common areas at any time they wanted, and then acting completely unapologetic when called on it. And this kind of ignorant behavior is not confined to the Park Bench Inn. I had another not so pleasant early morning “discussion” on thanksgiving with a dad who thought it wise to send his 4 young children into the hallways of the hotel to play at 7AM, rather than to bother he and his wife in their room. “Happy Thanksgiving” he sarcastically told me, instead of apologizing. And a few weeks before that, we had the misfortune of staying in a hotel room next to a complete ignoramus who: a) set his alarm clock to go off at 4.15 AM on a Sunday morning, b) did not respond to said alarm, c) only responded after I repeatedly pounded on his door and cursed he and his ancestors vigorously, d) in actuality, as we discovered 8 minutes later, did not turn the alarm off, but actually hit Snooze, thus re-starting the entire cycle, e) see points A-C all over again
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