Day 142 - Returning from Paris

Iasi apartment in the industrial zone

I returned from Paris and Belgrade and found when I put the key into the lock, I didn't have to turn it. The door opened with the slightest bit of pressure because the left side of the door jamb was on the floor. It appeared that someone had kicked the door in while I was on my end-of-term holiday.

I looked around the apartment and was surprised that items of obvious value were still there: the TV that had never really worked and my combination radio, shortwave radio and cassette player. But there were things missing: a carton of cigarettes (of two) from the freezer, a carton of cigarettes (of two) from my underwear drawer, a bottle of scotch (of two) from my pantry cupboard, a bottle of gin (of two) from the same cupboard, and a very large bottle of soy sauce (of two) stored in the cupboard because they were too tall to fit in the kitchen cupboard.

After emptying my suitcases, I made my way to the university in order to report to Elena*, the foreign lecturer liaison for administration, that my apartment door needed to be repaired. After doing so, I went to the Department and mentioned to my colleagues that my apartment had been broken into. Then one of them mentioned that the same thing had happened the year before when my predecessor Michelle was the American lecturer. And another recalled that the same thing had happened two years before when Michelle's predecessor Harry was living in the apartment.

entertaining in my Iasi apartment in the industrial zone

There was a pattern. Every end-of-term break, the foreign lecturers left town. And every year for the past several years, the apartment I lived in had been the residence of the American lecturer.  I recalled the days before the end of term and I realized every evening for the week before I left, there had been a knock on my door sometime around 9 p.m.  Only one time was there someone at the door when I opened it, but he seemed to be looking for someone so after an exchange of a few Romanian words, he left. And then I remembered that a young man who lived in a nearby apartment had stopped by one evening to practice his English. He seemed very interested in the posters that I had hung on the walls in the living room.

I had never been keen on living so far away from the university. However, the embassy was very pleased that the university had provided such a large apartment for the American lecturer. It meant that a grantee with a family could be accommodated. They were opposed to my moving out of the apartment because they knew it would be unlikely the university would be able to provide such a large apartment as a replacement.

It wasn't just the distance from the university that disillusioned me about the apartment. It was on the 8th floor of a ten-story building. But the elevators frequently didn't work. Even when they worked, there was a problem with them. All elevators in Romania came to a gradual stop. The stops were so gradual that it was too easy to anticipate the stop and grab the door handle before it had reached a complete stop. The elevators stopped as soon as someone touched the door handle. The doors on Romanian elevators opened out. So anticipating the stop often meant getting stuck in the elevator until someone on another floor pressed the button to call it.

the kitchen in the Iasi apartment
in the industrial zone

And then there was the problem of water. The apartment was in the industrial zone. Industry requires water. That meant that the water was shut off in the middle of the day in residential apartment buildings in order to divert it to the factories. When the water was turned back on in the evenings, it often took several hours for the pressure to build up enough to reach the 8th floor. To mitigate this, I kept my bathtub full of water so I could flush the toilet with a bucket. I kept glass jars, pots and pans, and any other containers I could find full of water on every surface of the kitchen so that I could cook and wash up afterwards.

So it was ironic that when the university crew came to repair the door, I was in the tub when I heard a knock on the door. I ignored it, figuring that whoever was knocking would go away. I was more than surprised when I heard the door open and two men walked in. I grabbed a towel (a mighty skimpy Romanian towel) and wrapped it around as much of me as it would cover and I started yelling at them as I walked down the hallway toward the entrance of the apartment. The two guys turned around pretty quickly and high tailed it out of the apartment.

And then I started to worry. I still needed the door repaired, but I had just made it clear to the guys who showed up that I wouldn't let them in. If this had happened in Iran, I would never get those guys back to do the work. But by the time I got back to the university to tell Elena what had happened, she had already heard and apologized for not making a phone call ahead of time to let me know the workmen were coming.

I really didn't want to stay in that apartment, but I had to be patient. Within a week or so, I learned that the German lecturer wasn't coming back to Iași. Her apartment was some distance from the university which was appealing to the French lecturer whose apartment was downtown right on the tram line which meant it was noisy. The French lecturer asked to move to the German lecturer's apartment, and I asked to move into the French lecturer's apartment. Where the French lecturer preferred the solitude of being far from town, I preferred to be in the middle of the activity. The embassy agreed that the end-of-term break-in, for at least the third year in a row, was a compelling case for my move.

The downtown apartment was much smaller - one bedroom instead of two (or maybe it was three). The kitchen was half the size. There was no pantry cupboard. And there was only one electrical outlet in each room - and none in the bathroom. But it was within walking distance of the university, a big plus. It was also on a plaza with two hotels, each with restaurants, and a food market. There was a movie theater across the street with both the Tarom airlines office and the train station a quick jog away.

Life got just a little bit easier after my move.

*a name, not necessarily the right one