Impressions of Bucharest

My Air Baltic flight landed at Henri Coanda Airport in Bucharest on a pretty October afternoon. The handsome border guard (why was he so good looking?) took my passport and asked me if I was coming from London. “No, Riga,” I said.

He blinked at me. I do not look like a person who has been to Latvia.

“And you’re here for…tourism?” I nodded again.

“How long will you be in Romania?”

“I’m leaving tomorrow.” He blinked at me again and gave me a questioning smile.

I smiled back. “I’m heading to Bulgaria.”

“So, you’re just in transit, then.”

“Well, yes, but I am leaving the airport.”

He gave me a final nod, stamped my passport, and slid it back to me. I thanked him and crossed the border into Romania.

Romania is a country of nineteen million, known only to most Americans as the home of vampires and elite gymnasts like Nadia Comaneci. Although it was occupied by the Soviets at the beginning of the Cold War, the communist dictator Nikolae Ceaușescu broke from the USSR on a number of key foreign policy issues, especially the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Romania remained basically part of the Communist “second world” but was not part of the Soviet bloc. But Ceaușescu was actually much worse than the USSR’s later leaders; he created a North Korea-style cult of personality and starved his own people to pay back Romania’s debts to the IMF. He was overthrown in a violent revolution and executed by firing squad on Christmas in 1989. Romania joined NATO in 2004 and the EU in 2007, although it’s still not part of the Schengen Zone (hence the border guard).

the Bucharest train station

But quality of life in Romania is still not on par with states in western Europe. Virgil, my twenty-four-year-old Bolt driver, told me that medical care in Romania isn’t very good because the best doctors all leave for western Europe or North America. “If you need a serious surgery,” he told me, “they might have to helicopter you to another country to take care of you."

Virgil drove me from the airport to my hotel on his fourth-ever day as a Bolt driver. He liked it, he told me, because he likes to drive. But he knows he can’t do this job forever. “Soon, there will be self-driving cars, like in the U.S., and Bolt won’t need drivers like me.” I informed him that self-driving cars were still quite rare in the U.S. This led us to a five-minute discussion on the various pros and cons of “robots.”

Virgil apologized many times for his English, which he told me is considered “mediocre” by standardized tests. I told him he’s doing great, because he was. He said he was glad I had an American accent, because we’re much easier to understand than the British. Although British English is taught in Romanian schools, Virgil said he learned most of his English from video games and American rap music.

Before he dropped me at my hotel, he warned me to be careful in the dark because people go drag racing at night. “Sometimes they crash and end up on the sidewalk. So be careful.” I told him I'd take it under advisement.

I deposited my stuff in my hotel room and headed out into Bucharest to find some food. It’s immediately clear to me that I do not blend in here as well as I did in Estonia, the Netherlands, and Norway. The women my age are dark-haired, wear heavy eye makeup, and carry themselves with a kind of tough, in-your-face confidence. They slouch against the sides of buildings and on park benches and take seductive drags from lit cigarettes. I have never wanted to smoke before, but in southern Europe, part of me wants to puff on a cigarette just to try to look as cool as those girls. Instead, I felt like my plaid shirt, blonde hair and white cast were glowing, like neon signs that announced: I AM NOT A LOCAL AND I DON’T KNOW WHAT I’M DOING.

As I walked through Bucharest, I was greeted by giant flocks of fearless pigeons clustered on bushes, turning them dishwater-gray, and gathered around old people on park benches who were doling out crumbs of food. I visited a grocery store to look for dark chocolate, like I usually do, and I observed two major things: first, the grocery store was at least one-third cheese. Blocks of mystery white cheese wrapped in plastic, packets of sliced Swiss and cheddar, imported slivers of Camembert and Roquefort. Second, you could buy any and every kind of alcohol in astronomical quantities. There’s beer sold in liter bottles—I saw a man on a public bus cradling one of these bottles like it was his baby.

Like most of Europe, Bucharest is a study in contrasts, albeit in Romania these contrasts are more pronounced. You’ve got the ornate national theater built by Ceauçescu in a fit of vanity and the classical buildings that house government buildings, but the rest of the city is crumbling. Most of Bucharest is covered in graffiti and falling apart, composed of the kind of buildings you can imagine the Communist Party divvying up into apartments for the loyal proletariat. The train station smells like feces mixed with coal. I imagine it smells like it did in Soviet times. Sometimes you walk into a building that looks like a death trap on the outside but on the inside it is a perfectly nice café or hotel or museum.

the aforementioned fancy theater

The people are kind of like that too—they look scary and mean on the outside, but you don’t always know what you’ll find on the inside. I ate dinner (a very early dinner) at a small vegan restaurant a short walk from my hotel. The woman was at first gruff, but she softened and carried my food outside for me. “The weather is so nice,” she said. I told her that I’d just been in cold, rainy Latvia the day before and she tsked at me. “Sun is important,” she said. When I brought my dishes back inside and told her how delicious it was, she smiled, surprised to see my enthusiasm. “I will look for you again,” she said. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I was leaving Bucharest tomorrow. But I’ll be back soon.