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.