Day 249 - Perspective Matters

Image of Novi Sad, Voivodina, Yugoslavia,
the city I visited in Yugoslavia in 1976, by P Donovan
via Flickr.com

In the spring of 1976, I traveled from Tehran to Yugoslavia to visit a friend. On my return from Belgrade to Athens by train, I shared a compartment with a young American woman who had traveled through Romania where she spent three days because the Romanians required that she exchange $30 for Romanian lei. Tourists were required to change at least that much or $10 per day of their stay, whichever was more. She didn't have anything nice to say about Romania. I didn't know at the time that I would soon be living in Romania.

When I lived in Romania in the late 1970s, the shops were full, but there was little variety. And some things, no matter that they were on display, could not be purchased at any cost. I heard from others who traveled to Romania in later years that the plenty I experienced disappeared over time. By the time I joined the Foreign Service, Romania was a post that couldn't take care of itself. Bucharest survived because it received assistance from the embassy in Vienna.

Image of Bucharest by mariosp, via Flickr.com

When the embassy in Chişinău opened, the perspective on Bucharest changed, as did support roles. For the first time, Bucharest was able to help another embassy. David, the general services officer, went with a driver in a truck to pick up whatever office supplies Bucharest could spare from their warehouse. Those supplies became our supply cupboard stocks.

On my first day, David told me to give him a list of the supplies I needed for my desk. I did. He delivered the cardboard top of a box of photocopier paper as my new inbox. In it, he had placed a handful of paperclips, another handful of rubber bands, two pencils, two pens and one pad of lined paper. We all had to share a stapler, a pair of scissors, and a pencil sharpener.

Bucharest had supplies to spare, but not much.

Image of Chişinău City Hall by whl.travel,
via Flickr.com 

Our first winter in Moldova, the Department sent Walt, a retired management officer, for a month to help us locate and lease housing. The Department wanted us out of hotel rooms because of the cost. Walt played a memory game whenever he went into a shop. He would count up the number of different items in the shop and when he walked out the door, he would try to remember them all. Since he rarely found more than 20 items in a shop, he did very well. For comparison, try counting the number of items on one side of one aisle in a supermarket in your town - every brand and size is a new item.

One Saturday morning Alex and I woke up earlier than usual. It was cold. There was no heat in our building. So we decided to get into our Tavria and drive to Iaşi, the town in Romania where I had spent a year teaching at the university. It was only 60 miles from Chişinău as the crow flies, but closer to 100 miles by car. We had all day, so we took off before 7 a.m. and arrived in Iaşi by 9 a.m. The shops were open until at least noon, so we had three or more hours to shop after which we planned to have lunch at one of the restaurants.

Image of Iaşi City Hall by valyt, via Flickr.com

The first thing we noticed was that the shops in Iaşi were full, and this time the shelves offered variety. There wasn't just long-life regular milk on the shelves, there was also long-life 2% milk, long-life 1% milk and long-life skim milk. There wasn't just tomato juice, there was orange juice, pineapple juice, grapefruit juice, peach juice, and pear juice. There wasn't just salami on the shelves, there were a dozen varieties of salami. There wasn't just cheese, there was caşcaval cheese, Swiss cheese, cheddar cheese, feta cheese and half a dozen varieties of soft cheese that resembled brie and ricotta. There were fresh potatoes, tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots, lemons, limes, green beans, squash, apples, oranges, grapefruit, lettuce and several fresh herbs such as basil and rosemary in the shops. There was fresh poultry, beef, lamb, pork and fish. What we didn't see fresh, we saw in cans. We couldn't think of anything that we didn't see in the shops.

Then there was the remarkable difference in the restaurant at lunch. When I lived in Romania, we used to joke that the secret police could always identify the foreigners in the country because we laughed and smiled. Romanians were always so serious. But during our first restaurant meal in Iaşi, the waitress smiled at us. In contrast to the days I lived in Iaşi, the menu represented what we could order and not just what the restaurant hoped one day to be able to provide. While in Romania, the only meat I was sure we could get was chicken. But the new Romanian restaurants offered chicken, beef, pork, lamb, and fish, the same options available in the grocery shops.

By 2 p.m., the shops had all closed, we had eaten a good lunch, and we were on our way back to Chişinău. The following Monday we shared our experiences with our colleagues, perhaps overly enthusiastically as we said we could get everything we wanted there. The following weekend, Becky, the one whose parents were sending her on average a box a day through the pouch to supplement her household effects shipment, her airfreight shipment, and her 2,000 pound consumables shipment, went with two of her friends to Iaşi in search of all that it offered. On their return, Becky made clear that she felt we had misled her because she wasn't able to find the two things she drove all that way to look for - smoked salmon and smoked oysters.

The clearest example of how perspective matters came a few months later when a training session for local employees of the Peace Corps was held in Bucharest. Local staff from Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Belorussia, Ukraine, Bulgaria, what was left of Yugoslavia and Moldova all traveled to Bucharest for the week-long training. When those Moldovan local staff returned to Chişinău, they couldn't stop talking about everything that was available in Bucharest. They sounded jealous of their Romanian colleagues. But the next week one of the American staff from Peace Corps in Warsaw came to Chişinău and told us how the Polish Peace Corps staff related how sorry they felt for their poor Romanian colleagues because there was really nothing at all in Bucharest.