Day 129 - Getting Ready for Romania

When I made arrangements to pack up my things in Iran so I could leave at the end of the USC program, I didn't know that I would be going to Romania. I was set to return to the U.S. where I expected to land in San Francisco to get my life restarted. My roommate Maureen and I had managed to get flights leaving Tehran going east to allow for stops in India, Thailand, Indonesia, Korea, and Japan before returning to the U.S. by way of Los Angeles where I planned to visit Ed and others from the program now in southern California. I planned to spend three months traveling.

Indonesian statue

But a week after arranging for the packers to come and a week before we were set to leave, I received a telephone call from the embassy in Tehran, telling me that I had been selected for a Fulbright lectureship in Iasi, Romania. The office in Washington, D.C. that handled the arrangements for Fulbrighters in eastern Europe wanted me to go straight back to the U.S. to take part in an orientation program. I decided to skip the orientation and shorten my planned travel from 3 months to 3 weeks, allowing me to spend about four days at each stop and still arrive in Romania on schedule.

That meant a quick rearrangement of what would be packed up. Instead of shipping everything to California, I had to separate things so that some would go to Minnesota and some directly to Romania.  Maureen's things were being packed out at the same time, so we had to keep everything segregated to ensure that Maureen's things ended up heading to Hawaii, some of mine heading to Romania, and the rest heading to Minnesota. The men who showed up to do the packing were not pleased by these complications. In addition, we had been warned that packers in Iran took every opportunity to include anything of weight they could into boxes to increase how much they could charge.

The supervisor of the packers didn't do any packing - he supervised; he looked over everyone's shoulders while they worked and he marked down what was being packed on the inventory list, a fact that I now have a greater appreciation for after having experienced the worst packout ever when we moved from Virginia to California. Once the boxes were full, he closed the lids and taped them shut, and then wrote the name and destination in large letters. He began by writing Maureen's last name on all the boxes, but with "Mr." in front of it. I pointed out that not all of the boxes were for Maureen, He crossed off Maureen's last name and replaced it with mine, still with "Mr." in front of it. I pushed a little further, pointing out that it would not be accurate to ship my boxes to Romania for Mr. Wenner since there wouldn't be a Mr. Wenner at the other end. With a flourish and a not so friendly look on his face, he marched over to the boxes and added an "s" after "Mr." I decided it wasn't worth the effort to point out that there wouldn't be a Mrs. Wenner in Romania either. At least the last name and gender were correct.

Because I missed the orientation session, my information packet was mailed to Ed's house for me. Ed and I sat on his balcony and read through it. We both found ourselves laughing and reading out paragraphs to one another, paragraphs that made it sound like Romania was going to be a repetition of Iran. It stopped me up short because I was very happy to have left Iran and really didn't want to go to another country that would bring up the same feelings that Iran had. Both countries were governed by autocratic leaders who insisted on the adoration, even if feigned, of everyone around them. Both countries had a reputation for not being able to believe everything people said. Both countries had a reputation for it taking a long time and many bureaucratic hurdles to get things done. I wasn't sure I was going to be any happier in Romania than I had been in Iran.

In the end, I discovered Romania was very, very different. The same words applied in the descriptions of both, but there was a difference in the intensity. More on that later.