My Bloody Romania: Ia

Dateline: Ia??i, Romania

Further to my short list of conspicuous changes that have taken hold in Ia??i in the past 12 months, equally some things haven’t changed at all. Things that you’d kinda wished they’d prioritized. Like the city works.

I’m staying in a private apartment that hasn’t had hot water in over a week. Unless you go to the store and buy a dodgy mini-boiler that sucks down so much electricity that it makes the power point smoke, hot water in Romania is provided by the city and since the city suddenly has all these EU funds, they’ve made themselves busy replacing all the perfectly good municipal water pipes with new pipes that make the water taste metallic and hurt your kidneys. And they’re in no particular rushed to complete the conversion.

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The haste to beatify the city, sadly, hasn’t included one of the coolest edifices in town: The Church of the Three Hierarchs. Its unique exterior is embroidered in a wealth of intricate patterns in stone, but this beauty has been languishing under scaffolding since before I first visited here and doesn’t appear to be much closer to being unveiled than when I took this picture in 2004. Indeed, there’s actually more scaffolding on it now and parts of it are wallpapered in plastic sheeting. For my money, they could have put off replacing the hot water pipes forever in lieu of fixing this wonderful piece of history.

Also, the Flintstones-era German trams that were handed down to Poland, that were handed down to eastern Slovakia, that were handed down to Romania, are still groaning along, tinkling chandeliers in every house they pass, filthy and sounding as if they’re one bolt failure away from collapsing into a thousand pieces then spontaneously bursting in flames, a la the Simpsons. Bucharest has futuristic trams, why not Iaşi?

The train station is still a crumbing eyesore. The platforms look as if they were shelled in 1941 and no one has gotten around to filling the holes, or even sweeping away the debris. Travelers who didn’t have specific business in Iaşi might be tempted to simply stay on the train and go anywhere else if they followed gut instinct upon seeing this sorry station.

On a positive note, three blocks of the city center’s main artery, Stefan cel Mare Boulevard, is still closed down each weekend to motor vehicles, so Iaşi’s families, unattended children and young couples in love can idly stroll back and forth (or race along on precarious rollerblades), much like the Italian passeggiata, without fear of being run down by maniacal, suicidal Romanian drivers. This may be one of Iaşi’s most pleasurable (free) pastimes.

Also, those wanting to do some quality souvenir shopping for the ladies in their lives, Romanian amber (yellow, brownish-orange and green) set in Turkish silver continues to be sold at shockingly low prices. In fact, going by my dim memory, prices may have even dropped in the past year. As always, the pieces have a very non-manufactured, unique and genuine look, as if some countryside matriarch was fashioning the pieces out in the shed during her downtime between milking the cows and hauling water from the community well.

Well, that’s enough reminiscing for now, I’ve gotta pack. Tomorrow I depart on a seven day road trip through Transylvania, visiting towns like Targu Mures and Sibiu (a 2007 European Capital of Culture), driving the Transfagarasan Road, seeing Poienari Castle (the real Dracula’s castle) and climbing the Bucegi Mountains. A somewhat dubious rental car has been acquired (22 euros per day) and a stash of Valium will be secreted in one of my cargo shorts pockets to deal with the non-stop, white knuckle, sphincter-collapsing danger that is driving in the Romanian countryside.

Leif Pettersen, originally from Minneapolis, Minnesota, co-authored the current edition of Lonely Planet’s Romania and Moldova. Visit his personal blog, Killing Batteries, for further musings on why he should be a city planner and how his lady friends hate being referred to as ‘ladies’.

My Bloody Romania: Ia

Dateline: Ia??i, Romania

Having finally found the strength to leave the house for a good wander around the city center, I slipped into a phone booth and switched into my alter ego, Travel Writer Man.

Travel Writer Man has a lot of crap that he likes to haul around: Palm Pilot, digital camera, pens, map, guidebook, sunglasses, business cards, cell phone, three kinds of currency, key-chain light, extra socks, crash helmet, death ray, almost-death ray, breath mints and lotion.

In cold weather, outfitting himself with this array of paraphernalia was never a problem having acquired a jacket with seven pockets that weighs almost 20 pounds when fully loaded. However, in warm weather, Travel Writer Man has always struggled with how to carry all of his critical apparatuses without resorting to a Man Bag, until recently when he discovered the exquisite beauty and priceless utilitarianism of cargo shorts.

Travel Writer Man used to openly mock people wearing these hilarious things outside of jungle safari, but Travel Writer Man changed his tune last April while he was writing the definitive works on large parts of Tuscany for an obscure guidebook series that rhymes with ‘Homely Janet’. Having acquired a pair of cargo shorts for lack of any other option during an emergency fit of speed shopping, he was amazed at how versatile and accommodating of spare death-ray clips these garments were. He is now a convert, having recently bought a new pair with nine pockets of varying size, including special receptacles for a cell phone and flash bombs and nine, yes nine, pen/pencil loops that can double as a bandolier for groupie-dispersing nerve gas slugs. But I digress back into the first person, before this becomes unfunny…

I paid rent in Iaşi (pronounced ‘yash’) for a cumulative 16 months between 2004-06, making it, longevity-wise, my second home. I have a love/hate relationship with this town that I could drone on about for 10,000 words, but since a post like that would put Gadling’s payroll into overdraft, I’ll keep this topical.

Iaşi has had an industrious year, with several changes/improvements standing out. Most heartening, an honest-to-Buddha tourism office has been opened just off Piaţa Unirii, being manned in part by a woman not opposed to wearing Elvira Mistress of the Night cast-off blouses and giving away wondrous 64-color city maps that money couldn’t buy 12 months ago. People, this should be your first stop in Iaşi, both for the brochures and the view. Loved it.

On that note, Piaţa Unirii (‘Union Plaza’) which has been in various stages of ruin and slo-mo refurbishment since 2004 is finally cleaned up and not even that unsightly, considering that butt-ugly piece of leftover 70’s tastelessness, Hotel Unirea, is sitting behind it at center stage. For a better view, move to the east side of the square, so your backdrop is taken up by the neoclassic Hotel Traian, designed by Gustave Eiffel in 1882 who, legend has it, was inspired to build his tower in Paris a few years later by the long legs and short skirts of Iaşi’s women (see historically accurate 19th century photo, right).

Some cleaver entrepreneur was standing ready at the Romanian border on January 1st 2007. While a legion of Romanians seeking work in Western Europe surged forward at the stroke of midnight, this guy towed about 10 pizza slice wagons across the country and parked them all over Iaşi (and I assume the rest of Romania). The pizza sucks, but at least now one has the choice of grabbing a sucky pizza over a sucky sandwich or a sucky hotdog while on the go.

The streets are in much better condition. Historically, Romania had some of the worst roads in Europe. During the eight months that I was a demoralized owner of a 1990 Dacia 1310, I averaged one flat tire per week. Inevitably on a Sunday. On my way to get anti-hangover coffee. I rarely handled it gracefully. Now streets are smooth and, more importantly, not disintegrating two weeks after being ‘fixed’ by a team of road workers consisting of the foreman’s out of work nephews and sons in-law. On a related note, despite the silky smooth streets, pizza delivery drivers still can’t seem to break the 90 minute mark (or the luke-warm serving temperature). Maybe in 2008.

Restaurants are opening at a dizzying pace, a trend that started at the beginning of 2006, with a focus on mid-range prices (previously non-existent), making the Iaşi eating section of the LP guide partially obsolete.

Also, many of you will be dying to know, beer prices have been affected, or rather not affected in the post-EU membership way that we’d hoped. A 0.5 liter glass of the local Romanian brew, which doesn’t suck by a long shot, can still be acquired in a stylish bar for a mere US$2. However, the fancy imports that used to cost US$5 for a .25 liter bottle, well they still cost US$5. Having EU import tariffs disappear has had zero effect, unless you count the new clutch of luxury homes being snatched up by Romania’s Heineken jackhole distributor.

Some photos from around Iasi to further intrigue you…

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Leif Pettersen, originally from Minneapolis, Minnesota, co-authored the current edition of Lonely Planet’s Romania and Moldova. Visit his personal blog, Killing Batteries, for further musings on beer, sucky food and his limited wardrobe.

My Bloody Romania: In which the author finally reaches Iasi after 49 hours of continuous travel and refuses to get out of bed for two days, but blogs anyway

Dateline: Iasi, Romania

Hello again. It is I, your intrepid hero/sex symbol, finally writing to you from Iasi, Romania. Despite Delta Airlines’ best efforts at the contrary, I ultimately arrived in Madrid with enough time to travel the roughly six miles from my arriving gate to the departure gate for my flight to Bucharest. Though it was far from being a graceful connection.

After what was eventually a very pleasant unintended 24 hour layover in New York, during which time I was treated to a rocketing motorcycle ride through Brooklyn and Manhattan, sitting in the ‘bitch seat’, clinging to my oldest friend with an intimacy usually reserved for trees during catastrophic flooding, I blasted off for Madrid. Not content at having already left me stranded for 24 hours and f*cked over in regards to onward transport, Delta Airlines attempted to twist the knife further when, after loading us all onto the plane to Madrid, they suddenly remembered that they had repairs to make.

The careful language used during the announcement that we had just been seated on a jacked up plane suggested that they’d known it was busted for a good long time, but due to extraneous circumstances that we needn’t worry about, they had neglected to address the repair until just that moment. At length we were informed that a mechanic was coming over, but then maybe he wasn’t, but then he performed an enormous act of generosity and resolved to perform his primary job functions in a somewhat timely manner and two hours later we pushed back. After a blistering 15 feet of backwards motion, we halted. We had missed our departure window (natch), but fear not, there was only 50 planes ahead of us. Oh wait, only 50 planes when we were eventually invited to join that line, which we weren’t just yet.

Thirty minutes later we moved again, some deft line-cutting ensued and we were airborne a mere three hours late. Had the space-time continuum remained intact and had my now standard knack for misfortune endured, by my calculations, I would have arrived in Madrid about an hour beyond reasonable transfer time, what with immigration, baggage collection, the bus and trains rides involved in changing terminals and the undoubtedly bureaucratic acquisition of new tickets with Tarom after failing to materialize for my reserved flight the previous day. But this was not to be.

Our pilot, already my hero for having somehow moved us from number 50 in line to number six in the airplane taxiing equivalent of a trick play, apparently steered our plane through a tropospheric wormhole, allowing us to somehow make up almost two hours of lost time in the air. We landed in Madrid only 75 minutes after our intended arrival time. Moreover, inconceivably, my suitcase whose whereabouts had not been definitively confirmed for over 24 hours was, as shakily promised, on the plane and was among the first bags to trundle out on Madrid’s baggage conveyor! All connection chores thereafter went relatively smoothly and I flew to Bucharest and on to Iasi without further incident (unless you count spontaneous bursts of medium-loud vulgarity directed toward Delta and Northwest ‘incidents’).

I’d like to finally conclude the matter of my harrowing trip from Minneapolis to Iasi with the following diatribe: I have been abroad and/or traveling continuously for over four years now. During that time I have braved through such black holes of customer service as Paris, Berlin, Iceland and every notable patch of grass in Romania and in all that time I have never been treated as badly as Delta Airlines treated me on this flight. Their startling mismanagement, reluctance of staff to actually interact with the passengers and their adversarial approach to assisting customers they’ve inconvenienced is deplorable at best and criminal at worst. While I was being left to sit with my thumb up my ass for 24 hours in JFK without reasonable shelter or the bulk of my belongings, wondering how I might actually get to Iasi what with me being a no-show for my onward flights on Tarom Airlines, I encountered a never-ending series of proudly useless people. Exactly zero out of the 12-15 people I interacted with during my ordeal acquiesced to my pleas for help or even pretended to be concerned:

Can you do anything to get me to Romania now that you’ve caused me to miss all my flights? “No.”

Can you give me a place to sleep so I’m not forced to sleep on an airport floor? “No.”

Can you give me my suitcase? “Well, I guess, but not until you’ve suffered more.” (I paraphrased that by the look in her eyes at the time, but she actually said something else)

Can you at least tell me where my suitcase is? “I have no way of knowing.”

Can you call someone that does know? “Yes, but I won’t because they won’t answer.”

Since you’ve no idea where my suitcase is exactly, can you give me a phone number that I can call collect from Europe when my suitcase doesn’t turn up in Madrid so I can get someone on the case in New York? “No.”

Can I have a glass of water? We’ve been trapped like rats on this plane for over 10 hours and I’m really thirsty. “No.”

The consistency of these flagrant affronts to customer service seems to indicate a new company-wide movement where customers are made to suffer and pay both physically and financially for any airline debacle short of a plane exploding in mid-air.

Shame on you Delta Airlines. Shame on you for treating your paying customers like prisoners and freeloaders. Shame on you for reorganizing reality so that as long as you’re not guilty of manslaughter, you take no responsibility for the welfare of your passengers. Shame on you for continuing to employ people with social skills that makes them exclusively suitable for jobs in basement corners, where there’s no fear of them actually interacting with another human.

Oh, I haven’t forgotten that Northwest Airlines is at least 50% responsible for this rolling clusterf*ck, but Northwest has been conducting themselves in precisely this manner for over 20 years and their shortcomings are so commonly known in the traveler world by now that to chastise them for unreliability, disdain and horrid customer service at this stage would simply be overkill.

Leif Pettersen, originally from Minneapolis, Minnesota, co-authored the current edition of Lonely Planet’s Romania and Moldova. Visit his personal blog, Killing Batteries, for further posturing about how everyone is an idiot except him and idle speculation on which chromosome has been removed from the genetic makeup of Northwest Airlines’ gate agents .

My Bloody Romania: JFK unintended layover (part two) – further adventures into indignant curse words and wholly fact-based libel

Dateline: JFK Airport (yes, still)

Previously on My Bloody Romania: We re-lived, at length, how my four hour late flight ‘serviced’ by North-motherf*cking-west on behalf of Del-$hiteating-ta had delivered me to JFK four hours late. I had been brushed off by JFK’s Del-$hiteating-ta representative, who had failed to see a connection between screwing my trip to Iasi, Romania and proffering even the most infinitesimal crumb of assistance or compensation. After being ordered to calm down in a tone that could only be summoned by a guy who didn’t just have several hundred of his hard earned dollars flushed down the crapper and had a comfortable bed somewhere in his immediate future, I’d been told to take my case to North-motherf*cking-west.

Meanwhile, where was my luggage? Apparently, when a flight lands at JFK after your connecting Del-$hiteating-ta flight has already departed, your luggage is taken directly to Del-$hiteating-ta’s cavernous storage area and haphazardly tossed into a pile. So when, after you’ve stood in line for yet another hour at Del-$hiteating-ta’s baggage management office, you try to collect your bag, it takes two hours for them to pick through the mountain of carelessly strewn baggage to retrieve it.

It was 11pm by now. As I waited for my bag, I was confidently informed that all North-motherf*cking-west staff had gone home and that I’d have to call their 1-800 line to inquire about where I might sleep that night. I did this. Long story short, North-motherf*cking-west has seeming plagiarized Del-$hiteating-ta’s ‘It’s Never Actually Our Fault’ guide to covering their asses. Not only was North-motherf*cking-west reading from an identical Blame It on Pixies and Gremlins script I’d heard from Del-$hiteating-ta in regards to my three missed flights, but in the meantime they were quite content, indeed righteous, about the concept of me camping for the night in JFK’s Terminal 3 rather than providing a hotel room.

I argued. Then I pleaded. Then I drew on an battery of words, phrases and gesticulations normally associated with Tourettes suffers and injured pirates, causing the lingering passengers waiting for luggage to clear a ten foot circle around me. North-motherf*cking-west maintained that God and the ATC were entirely to blame and no they couldn’t provide phone numbers to said entities to learn their policies on providing reasonable shelter to people whose $hit they’ve f*cked up. I was eventually forced to hang up, with further expletives and moderate violence, and return to the unmoving conveyor belt that would, maybe, produce my suitcase before 1am.

Perhaps as a premonition to the misfortune to come, I had not slept well the two nights prior to leaving Minneapolis and I was fairly certain that if I spent a sleepless night sprawled in a JFK chair that I’d go insane from either fatigue or wrath or a lively combination of the two. Even though it was past midnight on a Saturday night, I took a chance and phoned an old friend in Brooklyn who was not only home, but almost completely awake, who advised me to f*ck waiting for my suitcase, jump into a unlicensed car service, travel the 35 minutes to his home and sleep on his couch.

The next day I returned to JFK, slightly better rested, though unshaven, teeth unbrushen and, though still irate about the injustices and eventual out-of-pocket cash outlay necessary to right most of them, I was at least finally on my way to Iasi, Romania.

POSTSCRIPT: The Del-$hiteating-ta flight from JFK to Madrid left over three hours late due to yet another series of utterly avoidable mechanical blunders, ostensibly closing my window of opportunity to catch my flight from Madrid to Bucharest.

Leif Pettersen, originally from Minneapolis, Minnesota, co-authored the current edition of Lonely Planet’s Romania and Moldova. Visit his personal blog, Killing Batteries, for further musings about the promiscuity of the mothers of Delta Airlines’ employees and why, if there’s a god, and there isn’t, the bastard loathes him so goddamn much.

My Bloody Romania: JFK unintended layover (part one) – Northwest/Delta policy: ‘Everything is God’s fault’

Dateline: JFK Airport

I’m an hour away from Try Number Two of getting the hell out of the United States.

In a dizzying succession of tag team worthlessness, Northwest (heretofore, because I’m bitter, referred to as ‘North-motherf*cking-west’) and Delta (A.K.A. ‘Del-$hiteating-ta’ – rolls off the tongue, no?) succeeded in stranding me at JFK homeless, bagless and costing me no shortage of cash in missed flight expenses on another airline between Madrid and Iasi, Romania.

This fantastic misfortune was due to my flight from Minneapolis to JFK being delayed four times, causing us to arrive four hours late. It went down like this: First haze in JFK roped us into a gate delay in Minneapolis, then Air Traffic Control (ATC) at JFK decided that they needed to change landing directions, a lengthy process, to correct the visibility problem (so it was only one-way haze?), then since North-motherf*cking-west had seen fit to keep a plane with no auxiliary power in service they couldn’t start our engines without some kind of ‘air truck’ that disappeared the minute we needed it, then we were put into a holding pattern above JFK for reasons they never felt compelled to divulge.

On a strange and frankly dubious side note, while all incoming flights to JFK were delayed by several hours all day long, outgoing flights were curiously leaving at the stroke of departure (actually, the Madrid flight I missed left 30 minutes late, but in the We’ll-Get-You-There-Eventually summer of 2007 air travel, a mere 30 minutes late is hailed as quite a feat at most airports, and a modern miracle at JFK).

JFK’s genuine surprise and coping deficiencies with the haze that has been appearing there every morning about this time of year since the last ice shelf retreated notwithstanding, North-motherf*cking-west’s ineptitude sparked an inconceivable chain reaction of increasingly dire consequences that I was condemned to suffer alone. But let’s back up to the beginning of this snowballing clusterf*ck.

My troubles actually began four weeks ago when I rebooked my Minneapolis to Madrid journey (a delay necessitated by my wretched exhaustion) through Del-$hiteating-ta, only to learn while examining my new itinerary that the Minneapolis to JFK leg was being ‘serviced’ North-motherf*cking-west, an airline that I swore to never fly again three years ago after I suffered through five consecutive inexcusably effed up flights. This bait and switch irked me. Apparently, since North-motherf*cking-west has succeeded in alienating every frequent traveler in the western world, the only way they can fill seats now is to bribe other airlines to sell tickets on their behalf.

Before we left Minneapolis, I expressed concern to the North-motherf*cking-west gate agent that our delays would cause me to miss my connecting flight in JFK (and my connecting flight in Madrid and my connecting flight in Bucharest). That person, wielding a courageous lack of compassion, essentially told me to bugger off and call Del-$hiteating-ta. Del-$hiteating-ta in turn happily told me that it was North-motherf*cking-west’s fault and they would do nothing and refused to discuss it for one moment longer. And so it went back and forth, me playing messenger boy, until we took off with no resolution.

On the ground at JFK that night, I stood in line for nearly two hours with a crowd of seething, raw-nerved travelers that had also been stranded by the combination of four hour late arrivals and on-time departures JFK was maintaining. When I finally stepped up to the desk, I was coolly informed that the delay had been due to weather and since this was an act of God, Del-$hiteating-ta was not at fault. This enraged and spiritually offended me – I’m a staunch Atheist. In my faith (The Church of Potty-Mouthed Heathens of Minnesota), explaining something away that was largely a case of gross mismanagement as an ‘act of God’ was comparable to blaming fairytale characters (e.g. “Although I was physically and solely present and involved when the window of your car was smashed, the engine was hotwired and the car was driven into a river three states away, technically it wasn’t my fault, due to it being an act of Peter Pan. Amen.”).

Furthermore, since weather was the reason for the first delay, Del-$hiteating-ta took the stance that the delays by the ATC debacle, the broken plane and the mysterious flying of circles over Buffalo were extraneous. That pesky weather was entirely to blame and no amount of logic and reality was going to change their minds.

Del-$hiteating-ta booked me on the same flight the following day, generous seeing as how it was all Pinocchio’s fault, but they were of the opinion that they were not obliged to do anything about the fact that I missed my flights on Tarom Airlines from Madrid to Bucharest and from Bucharest to Iasi, as this was on an entirely different airline and therefore it was somehow up to Tarom to cope with a screw up perpetrated by unrelated halfwits 8,000 miles away. And anyway this was all North-motherf*cking-west’s problem, so why don’t I go talk to them?

And boy did I ever.

Tune in tomorrow for further adventures into indignant curse words and wholly fact-based libel.

Leif Pettersen, originally from Minneapolis, Minnesota, co-authored the current edition of Lonely Planet’s Romania and Moldova. Visit his personal blog, Killing Batteries, for further musings about sleeplessness, first-hand injustices he’s suffered and smarmy airlines that he’s building a lavish case against for a landmark Better Business Bureau inquiry.

Leif would like to extend special thanks at this time to Willy and Justin at Gadling for allowing him to curse freely and extravagantly.