Day 143 - Home

312 Dudrey Court, Moorhead, MN, aka home

I noticed when I was in Iran that I started to think differently about what home meant. Instead of home conveying warmth about where I was currently living, I realized that I thought of home as the place I wasn't, the place I came from. I realized that when I lived in California after graduating from college, I thought of home as Minnesota. And when I traveled back to Moorhead from California, I thought of California as home. So it wasn't surprising when in Iran I thought of both Minnesota and California as home. Minnesota would always be my home state. And I expected to return to San Francisco. I went to Iran expecting to stay there two years, so it would never be home. But when after 15 months I traveled back to the U.S. on vacation, I surprised myself when I found myself thnking of Tehran as home. It happened both in Minnesota and California. I found myself talking about returning to Tehran as returning home.

Shellagh and Bill in my home in Tehran, Iran

After Iran, there was Romania, another place I hadn't expected to stay long, another place I knew I wouldn't ever consider home. So California and Minnesota were both home to me during that year. But while I was in Romania, California voters passed Proposition 13 which changed the way school districts would be funded. And the immediate response was for schools to stop hiring teachers. And that meant my return to California was no longer likely. Instead, after a few weeks in Minnesota, I was hired via a telephone interview to join the staff of the Center for English as a Second Language at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois. It was a one-year appointment, although I thought I might be able to remain there at least a few years. But Minnesota remained home during my stay in Illinois.

After Carbondale, I ended up in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area, back in Minnesota. And while I was there, I only had Minnesota to think of as home, until I joined the U.S. Department of State as a Foreign Service Officer. Now I was in a career where home was always going to be somewhere else. Minnesota would always be my home state. While overseas, home would be the District of Columbia metropolitan area.

An incident in Germany during my first tour emphasized this for me when one of the women I met there told me I looked familiar. She was a soldier, so I didn't think we had ever been in the same place at the same time, but I rattled off the list of places I had lived and when I lived there. We didn't find anything in common through that list. But then Lisa, another woman in the conversation, mentioned that she knew I had lived in Arlington, Virginia, for six months while I attended orientation and language classes at the Foreign Service Institute. The soldier asked me when and after I told her, she said that is where she had seen me. While she was stationed in DC, she had a part-time job as a security guard at one of the FSI buildings. She had seen me as I came and went each day.

The view from the kitchen of our home
in Arlington, Virginia

I learned a lot in that conversation. I learned that being in a place for a temporary period, even if only for a few months, doesn't mean it wasn't home. And I learned that it is all too easy to walk by someone every day without seeing. I decided that I would never do that again. I would look at the people in my life and I would see them, not look past them.

For the next 25 years, home meant three places - the one I was in; Washington, DC; and Minnesota. Then in August, we sold our house in Arlington, Virginia, and moved to San Diego. So many years had passed since I thought of California as home. I'm learning to think of it as home again. But a bit of my heart is still in Virginia, in the District of Columbia metropolitan area. Minnesota will always be my home state. And someday maybe California will again feel like home.

Living Room in El Cajon

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

Day 141 - French Words

image of Eiffel Tower by wlappe, via Flickr

One similarity between the university system in Romania and in the U.S. was that there was a break between sessions around the end of the calendar year. It wasn't referred to as a Christmas break, just the end of term. And there wasn't much incentive for me to stick around in either Iasi or even Bucharest, so I made plans to travel to Paris and Yugoslavia. I had friends living in both places, a strong incentive for picking them as destinations.

When I mentioned to the French lecturers that I planned to travel to Paris, one of them, Lionel*, suggested I practice my French with him before I went. I told him I didn't speak French. He looked at me sideways and paused thoughtfully, after which he said, "But surely you speak French words." After giving it some thought, I realized he was right. My French repertoire consisted at least of the following words and phrases.

Conversational Phrases

• Bonjour. (Good day.)
• Bonne nuit. (Good night.)
• Au revoir. (Until we meet again.)
• Tres bien. (Very good)
• Adieu. (Farewell)
• Comment allez-vous? comment ça va? (How are you?)
• Merci beaucoup. (Thanks very much.)

Clothing and Cosmetics

• beret (hat)
• chemise (blouse)
• pantalon (pants)
• jaquette (jacket)
• haute couture (high fashion)
• parfum (perfume)

Food

• pain (bread)
• gâteau (cake)
• biscuit (cookie)
• chocolat (chocolate)
• orange (orange)
• limon (lemon)
• coq au vin (chicken in wine)
• pâtisserie (pastry)
• quiche (quiche)

Adjectives

• petit (small)
• grand (big)
• blanc (white)
• rouge (red)
• noir (black)
• bleu (blue)
• beige (beige)
• violet (violet, purple)
• brun (brown)

Phrases

• Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir? (Oh, come on now, don't try to tell me you don't know what this means.)
• chassez les femmes (chase the women)
• influence d'argent (influence of money)

Then Lionel pointed out the additional French words that I knew, perhaps without realizing I knew them, because they are also Romanian, Spanish, or English words, borrowed from French.

• cadeau (cadou in Romanian, gift)
• hier (ieri in Romanian, yesterday)
• the names of the days of the week

And suddenly the light went on. I could speak French. With Lionel's encouragement, I added a few more words and phrases:

• Parlez-vous anglais? (Do you speak English?)
• Je suis désolé, je ne parle pas français. (I'm sorry. I don't speak French.)
• Vouz avez [fill in the blank]? (Do you have [fill in the blank]?)
• Je veux [fill in the blank]. (I want [fill in the blank].)

Armed with overconfidence, I decided I could travel to Paris and make my way around with ease. I made plans, contacted my friends Shellagh and Bill who I met in Tehran before Bill was transferred to Paris by his employer, IBM. Shellagh told me how to get from the airport to an area near her office where she met me and showed me how to get to their apartment by metro and bus. After a quick lunch, Shellagh went back to work and I set out to explore.

Using my French words and phrases, I managed to accomplish the following all in that first afternoon: I brought a pair of boots to an atelier de réparations de chaussure to arrange to have the heel that snapped off as I got off the bus in Iași at the train station replaced, I brought a film to a boutique de photo to turn in a film to be developed, I made an appointment at a salon de coiffeur to have my hair cut, and I found a boutique that advertised l'anglais est parlé ici so that I knew I had an excellent opportunity to make myself understood as I looked for new clothes.  I returned to Bill and Shellagh's apartment that evening with a new dress, a black velvet pant suit, as well as the hair appointment and arrangements to pick up my repaired boots and developed prints the next day.

The rest of my stay in Paris, I toured the normal places: the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, Montmarte, Sacré-Coeur, Notre-Dame, Champs-Elysées, Centre Georges Pompidou. I took photos. I spent hours in front of artwork in museums, reading the titles to figure out more about the French language. It was helpful that most paintings had descriptive names, not just Untitled.  Riding the metro and buses offered more language learning opportunities. I got pretty good at figuring out the meaning. I still had trouble speaking and understanding when others spoke.

After Christmas, I flew from Paris to Belgrad, Yugoslavia, where I caught a bus to travel to Novi Sad, the capital of the autonomous region of Voivodina which is entirely surrounded by Serbia. A friend from San Francisco State University, George, had been at the university there for more than two years as a Fulbright lecturer. My roommate Annie and I had previously visited him from Iran on our trip at the end of our first year in Tehran. George invited me to join him at a New Years' Eve party with his colleagues and some of their students. I thought I could try out some of what I had learned about speaking French words while in Yugoslavia. After all, I had studied Russian at Concordia, so I thought I could make some sense out of Serbian through its similarity to Russian. Serbian uses the same Cyrillic alphabet as Russian, and I had had that earlier trip to Voivodina to build on. So imagine my surprise when one morning while listening to the radio, I heard the announcer say, "Ora este ora unsprezece," Romanian for "The time is now 11 o'clock."

That put thoughts of trying to learn more about Serbian and get back to Romania to concentrate on that language.

*a name, not necessarily the right one

Day 140 - The Library

library bookshelf image by BinaryApe, via Flickr

I didn't realize how important that little library of books in the English Department was until I saw the University's library. My colleague Chris, the British lecturer, explained that it was essential that the books remain in the Department and not be turned over to the University's library. The books were in the Department for the students, although many of the teachers also borrowed them. The books that I remember were novels, many of them popular novels, not classics. But while they were kept in a cupboard for the students, not many students were comfortable coming into the Department to look at them. For this reason, Chris said we needed to press to get the University to give us a separate room that we could set up as a library for our book donations. He was convinced that until we had a separate space outside the Department, the books would never get into the hands of the students.

I began to understand why getting books into the hands of students was so important when I overheard a conversation between two of the teachers in the Department. Gabriela* asked Radu* if what her students told her was true, that he had assigned them all to copy 10 pages from Beowulf the evening before. Initially Radu seemed to deny it, but when Gabriela told him her students didn't get the work she had assigned to them because they said they were all in the library waiting for their turn to copy the pages. At that point Radu admitted that he had given the students that assignment, but he explained that he had made the assignment the week before. He hadn't expected they would all wait until the night before his class to complete it.

That's when I learned that students were not allowed to take books out of the library. If they had to read a book, or copy pages from one, they had to do so in the library. The teachers, however, not only could take books out of the library, they didn't have to return them by any particular date. And since there weren't many books - and certainly not multiple copies of books - there were incentives for the teachers to keep the books for the entire school year, a form of hoarding the information so that no other teacher would have access to it.

The students also often asked to see the books I mentioned. I thought it was a curious request, but when I had the book in hand, it was simple enough to show them.

When I finally visited the university library, I began to understand. At first glance, the library looked very much like any other. There were many tables for students to sit and study or read. There were familiar card catalog racks with those small drawers. And there were shelves of books, but they were  not open. Requests for books were turned over to the librarians who would retrieve them, if they could find them.

card catalog image by dfulmer, via Flickr

The card catalog drawers were there, but the Dewey Decimal System was nowhere to be seen. The only cards I recall seeing in the drawers were subject cards, not the trio of subject, title, and author cards I was used to. In addition, I understood from Chris that if two copies of the same book were received by the library at different times, the subject cards for the two wouldn't necessarily assign the same subject. It depended on what the librarian cataloging the book thought was the subject. And with foreign language books, the challenge was even greater. The students would use the card catalog to find a book they wanted, write down the details about its location for the request, and hand it over. Since multiple copies of the same book weren't necessarily stored next to one another, there was no foolproof way for students to get their hands on the book they wanted.

One way to improve their chances of getting the book they wanted was to provide a description of the book to the librarian as well. The color of the spine and the height of the book was additional information that could narrow down the possibility of locating the book, especially if the book was on a shelf directly behind the librarian's desk. Books stored on that shelf appeared to me to be organized by size and color - red books on one shelf, blue ones on another, tall books at the left, smaller books in descending sizes to the right.

In the second half of the school year, the Public Affairs Officer of the embassy arranged for an American literary critic to come to Romania as an International Visitor (IV). While in Romania, he and his wife traveled to Iași and other cities with universities and American lecturers in Romania to give special lectures for the students. The IV arranged for multiple copies of five novels to be provided to each of the universities he would visit. And that gave Chris and me some leverage as we repeated the request for a separate English foreign lecturers' room where we could set up our library. We got our room just before the IV. We moved all the books from the small library in the English Department, and added the magazines I brought with me and the multiple copies of the books from our visitor. Between the two of us, Chris and I kept the library open a few hours every day, providing an inviting place for students to come to read magazines or books and even borrow the books.

Of course, I had not considered that the room might have had some additional features, such as listening devices, until many years later.

*a name, not necessarily the right one

Day 139 - Shopping

I have always enjoyed shopping. Even in Iran I enjoyed shopping, at least once I learned never to try to buy more than one item on my shopping list per day. The trick in Iran was to go in search of just one item and then to stop either a) the item was found and purchased, at which point it was time to celebrate, or b) it started to get frustrating, at which point it was time to stop and celebrate not falling over the emotion cliff.

But shopping in Romania took special skills and patience.

Cheese by MACSwriter, via Flickr

One of the teachers, Viorel*, who lived near my apartment in the Industrial zone took me around to the nearby shops and pointed out some of the items that he thought were the best on offer. He pointed out the importance of always carrying a pungă or plastic bag because one never knew when one might find something to purchase. Literally. I never knew. Years later, in Moldova, I met the chief of police in Chișinău whose name was Col. Pungă. Since we had just lived the previous three years in Barbados where calypso was king, I couldn't help comparing the Colonel's name with one of the kings of calypso, Red Plastic Bag. But I digress.

There weren't supermarkets in Iași. Even in the markets that looked something like grocery stores, many items were not out on shelves where they could be handled and put into a basket while wandering down the aisles. Eggs were behind one counter. Butter and cheese behind another. Salami and sausages behind another. And purchasing anything behind the counter meant lining up first to tell the clerk which and how many of each you wanted. The clerk would then hand over a scrap of paper with something written on it which was to be taken over to the person behind the cash register where waiting in line to pay was required. Then once payment had been made, the receipt on yet another scrap of paper had to be handed back to the person behind the first counter who would then hand over the purchases.

Shopping for groceries could take a long time. And since the university was at the other end of town from the industrial zone, I often had to leave for classes too early for any shopping in the morning and then I returned after my classes, many of which were in the evening, too late to do shopping in the evening. If there hadn't been Casă Universitarilor or University House, which served meals during the lunch hour, I wouldn't have been able to eat at all. My first meal there, however, was a disappointment because I ordered ciorbă de burtă. I was told that ciorbă was a hot spicy soup, and sometimes it was, but ciorbă really just means soup. And de burtă means of tripe.

The shopping I really looked forward to was shopping for craft items, not food. Each city of any size had at least one shop that specialized in artsy crafty things. In Iași, that shop was in the center of the city, along the tramway between the industrial zone and the university. I think I even had to change trams there, but I rarely had enough time to go checking out the items in the store. And that's when I learned how important the advice to carry a pungă at all times was because it also went along with the advice to buy whatever you see that you like when you see it because it won't likely be there if you wait. I can recall seeing some lovely embroidered items - probably a table cloth and napkins - from the window of the tram. But I didn't get out and check them out. The next day, they were gone.

Another challenge when shopping for items displayed in the window is that the clerks in the stores were very reluctant to take them out of the window if someone wanted to buy them. Items on display were apparently just for that - display - to get customers into the shop, but not to be sold. I recall others telling stories of going into shops to buy books that were clearly visible behind the counter, but the clerks would insist there were none available. I guess all those behind the counter may have been special orders and I suppose it just might have been that we foreigners didn't understand Romanian well enough to figure out explanations about special orders, but it is also equally believable that the clerks didn't think we foreigners needed to know more than they told us - there were no such books available. Period.

One day I found a box in the grocery store that was labeled shrimp cakes in English. The box also had text in Chinese and probably Vietnamese. I concluded those were the other two languages on the box because the box declared in English that the contents were packed in Vietnam. The year was 1977 so seeing items from Vietnam wasn't something I expected back it the U.S. I couldn't tell from the feel of the box just what shrimp cakes were. I imagined an interior tray with compartments to hold six soft cakes. I bought a box. When I got back to my apartment, I learned from the directions that the cakes should be fried in hot oil. When I opened the box, instead of six cakes held in a divided interior tray, I found a plastic bag full of what looked like poker chips. They were white, red, orange, and yellow. And they were as hard as poker chips. After heating oil in a frying pan, I dropped about a dozen of the chips into the hot oil and discovered they all puffed up to about 4 or 5 times their original size. They had a consistency a lot like rice krispie bars, but without the melted marshmallows to hold them together. Once I realized that putting more than two or three into the pan at a time was a bad idea, I cooked up a few and ate them like popcorn.

Remember now, the instructions for these were in English, Chinese, and Vietnamese, not Romanian or even French.

The next time I took the train to Bucharest, I discovered vendors walking along beside the passenger cars offering smaller bags of these shrimp cakes for sale as a snack for travelers. Each bag appeared to have about a dozen shrimp cakes in them - but these cakes hadn't been cooked. They were still their original poker chip size and texture. I wonder how many people broke teeth when trying to eat them.

A friend, Margaret*, told me of another example of imported goods that weren't selling well. This time the items were on display in a Parfumerie where toiletries such as soaps, perfumes and cosmetics were sold. In this case the boxes on display were a pastel color and had butterflies printed on the outside. Again, the description was in English, not Romania or French. When Margaret read the box, she realized it contained contraceptives - condoms - so she bought a box just for the novelty of it. Romania had an austere program to encourage population growth through forbidding the use of contraceptives. After Margaret put a box into her shopping basket, a Romanian woman approached her and asked quietly what was in the box. Margaret explained to the best of her ability in Romanian that the contents of the box prevented babies. The Romanian woman shared this news with the other women in the store and within minutes the display was empty.

beer by La.Catholique, via Flickr

My biggest shopping challenge was when I decided to invite a few of the other foreign lecturers to my house for an evening of socializing. There was a British lecturer, a Polish lecturer, and two French lecturers in town. I decided I should have beer on hand. But when I got to the store, I learned that in order to buy bottled beer - the only kind there was - it was necessary to bring in an empty bottle for each full bottle of beer I wanted. The bottles had to be brown bottles, not the clear ones that mineral water came in. After I explained that I didn't have any empty beer bottles, the clerk agreed to sell me two bottles of beer. These were not big bottles. These were more like the size that 7-Up and Coca Cola came in back in the days when the 8 ounce bottles of Pepsi were the biggest soft drink bargain in town.

The only other brown bottles I had seen in the market held cooking oil. In desperation, I bought four bottles of cooking oil in brown bottles, took them home and dumped the oil down the drain. I had to soak the bottles in hot soapy water to get both the labels off and the slickness from the oily contents out of the inside. With those four empty bottles, I was able to purchase another four bottles of beer. I think I settled for wine for the rest of the beverage offerings.

*a name, not necessarily the right one

Day 138 - Arriving in Iași

Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, Iași, Romania,
by blankdots via Flickr 

I arrived in Iași, often spelled Jassy in English texts, by train and was met by Eugene*, one of the teachers in the English Department of Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, probably the foreign instructor minder (responsible for keeping tabs on us, not for protecting us) for the University. After driving me through town when he pointed out a single building as "the university," Eugene brought me to my apartment on the 8th floor of a building in the industrial zone. Now the university building he pointed to was impressive, but I was used to a university consisting of multiple buildings located on a campus, so I probably didn't react with appropriate awe in response. And I probably also didn't react with appropriate awe to the apartment. It had two bedrooms, a luxury by Romanian standards, and the living room had a TV, the kitchen had a refrigerator, and there was quite a large storage cupboard, all of which were beyond the reach of many Romanians. But I didn't know that yet.

What I did know was that I was very thirsty, but I didn't want to drink tap water. I asked my escort if he could get some mineral water for me before I tried to get some sleep before he planned to return to pick me up in the afternoon to get checked in with the university administration. I knew that drinking tap water would invite digestive problems since I had learned that my system rejected tap water in Minnesota if it hadn't first been boiled and then refrigerated since my system had adjusted to tap water in Iran. Eugene returned a few minutes later with several bottles of mineral water. After opening one bottle and taking a big swallow, I realized why those providing our orientation in Bucharest had mentioned that Borsec brand mineral water was the best. The water Eugene brought was not Borsec and it tasted much more like minerals than water. And it smelled like sulfur.

Legitimaţie

That afternoon Eugene returned and brought me to the university where I turned over my passport and an appropriate number of photographs so that I could get my legitimaţie or official identification card. I also saw the English Department office for the first time. It was a very large room with tables lining three sides with chairs behind them. None of the instructors had their own offices; the English Department office was for all the instructors.

There was always one instructor on duty in the Department. The responsibilities of the person on duty was to answer the telephone - there was only one telephone for the Department - and to write notes for others in the ledger. Other instructors would always check the ledger when they arrived, to see if there were messages for them.

The Department had a small library of books, most of which had been left behind by previous British or American lecturers. I had been given a small amount of money, I think $100, to buy English language materials to bring with me. Since I wasn't able to attend the orientation the summer before my arrival, I wasn't quite sure what materials I was supposed to bring; the guidelines were pretty general. So I bought one copy of every magazine in the rack at Hornbachers with a little money left over that I decided I would figure out how to spend once I arrived in Romania.

My schedule included 5 classes with 15 students in each. Since American music had been very popular in our classes in Iran, I decided I would play a piece of music that I thought was clever for my classes on our first meeting. I knew that listening to music was challenging in one way - it is not always easy to figure out the words from a song - but in other ways music made learning language easier. Think of all the nursery rhymes and stories set to song that we learned in kindergarten and still haven't forgotten.  Sing along with me: I'm a little teapot, short and stout. . .

The song I picked was "Put Another Log On the Fire"** sung by Waylon Jennings. I was pretty sure the students wouldn't have heard the song before, and because of the ironic humor in the second verse, I thought I would be able to see on their faces whether they really understood the words. And I knew I had to have handouts with the words on them to satisfy their curiosity after playing the song.

And that meant - I thought - that I had to have 75 copies, one for each of the 15 students in the 5 classes. But there were no photocopiers in Romania. There were no ditto machines in Romania. And while there were mimeograph machines in the country, they were closely controlled by the government or its institutions, such as the universities, so getting a paper copied meant filling out a form, providing an explanation that someone in the hierarchy would accept, and then waiting three weeks for the work to be done. My alternative was to line up five pieces of paper with carbon paper between them and type the lyrics 15 times - very slowly so that I wouldn't make any mistakes that would be difficult to correct.

My first class all expressed interest in listening to music for their American culture class. I played the song on my 1977 version of a boom box, a very heavy combination radio, short-wave radio and cassette tape player. There was no electric outlet in the room, so I was lucky I had batteries in it. I watched the students' faces and there wasn't a flicker of recognition of the irony at the end of the second verse. When the song ended, I asked they they enjoyed it. They all said they did. I asked if they understood the words. They all said they did. I asked if they would like to hear it again. They all said they would. But this time I asked if they would like to see the words while they listened. They all agreed they would. So I handed out the lyrics and watched as the students began reading them. Before I was able to rewind the cassette and press Play, they had all finished reading and now they were all laughing.

I played the song again. And then we had a discussion in English about what the song meant.

At the end of the class, as the students began leaving the room, they all came up to the desk to return the lyrics. I was stunned that they didn't realize they could keep them. And they were stunned that I was giving them something to keep.

I never typed 75 copies of a handout again.

*a name, not necessarily the right one

**Put Another Log On the Fire

(Shel Silverstein)
Waylon Jennings & Tompall Glaser

Put another log on the fire,
Cook me up some bacon and some beans,
And go out to the car and change the tire,
Wash my socks and sew my old blue jeans.

Come on baby you can fill my pipe and then go fetch my slippers,
And boil me up another pot of tea,
Then put another log on the fire babe,
And come and tell me why you're leaving me.

Now don't I let you wash the car on Sunday,
And don't I warn you when you're gettin' fat,
Ain't I a gonna take you fishin' with me someday,
Well, a man can't love a woman more than that.

Ain't I always nice to your kid sister,
Don't I take her driving every night,
So sit here at my feet cause I like you when you're sweet,
And you know it ain't feminine to fight.

So put another log on the fire...

Day 137 - Bucharest

When I arrived in Bucharest, the US Embassy had arranged for me to stay in a modest hotel near the embassy. The hotel had a restaurant next door that often was entirely reseved for tour groups from the Soviet Union. I was never sure when I could have a meal there. When it was possible, breakfast was the easiest meal because it was continental style so I didn't have to order anything; the waiter just brought me food.

One evening, when I was able to have dinner there, alone, a young man at a neighboring table, Vlad*,  offered to help me understand the menu items. I hadn't picked up enough Romanian to figure out everything yet, so I needed help. He sat down to join me. I hadn't figured out the profile of a gigolo yet, so I wasn't suspicious; and while I wasn't looking for company, the offer of help was appealing.

After dinner, he asked if I was interested in seeing the old section of the city. There had been an earthquake in Bucharest the March before, so much of the city had been destroyed, including part of the old city, making it an opportunity to see what was still there as well as some of the damage, something I thought worth seeing. Before we took off, he asked if I had any cigarettes. I hadn't learned yet about the importance of American cigarettes, especially Marlboro 100s. All I had was a carton of Eve cigarettes that I bought in New York before getting on the plane. I had picked up the bad habit of smoking in Iran because of the taarof politeness system there. Eve cigarettes were 100 milligram in length, but had a distinctively feminie design around the filter. Vlad never hesitated. He accepted the pack I offered.

image of the People's Palace, Ceaucescu's white palace,
by hchalkley, via Flickr

We walked to the old city and wandered around what I understood to be an area attractive to tourists with lots of shops selling craft items, artwork, and Romanian folk music. What I didn't realize was that the area I toured that evening would be flattened in the near future by Nicolae Ceaucescu to make room for his mostrosity of a monument to himself, the white palace.

Vlad asked me how much I was going to earn teaching at the university in Iasi. I knew that the amount I would receive from the university, only part of my compensation, equated to less than $400 per month, so I thought it would be safe to tell him. When I did, he nearly fell out of his chair. I learned later that the amount I would receive from the university, which was less than one fourth of what I received overall, was ten times what my Romanian colleagues would receive each month. That made it clearer why my Romanian violin teacher in Tehran was so shocked at how little his salary in Iran was. What had sounded to him like a small fortune in Romania, when in put into an Iranian context, wasn't enough for him to rent an apartment without sharing it with roommates. And he wasn't the kind of guy who shared anything willingly. His offer to provide private violin lessons was necessary for him to make ends meet.

One of the first purchases I made was a Romanian/English dictionary. My Teach-Yourself-Romanian book from Karl was only good enough for me to construct sentences I wanted to speak, not good enough for me to understand the answers. I found a bookstore and walked up to the counter to ask if they had a Romanian/English dictionary, in the best Romanian I could muster. Books weren't out on shelves for people to look through, they were all behind the counter. My Romanian must have been pretty good because the guy behind the counter then asked me a question in Romanian that I couldn't understand. Eventually he figured that out and handed me a dictionary which I purchased.

image of Intercontinental Hotel in
Bucharest by anaadi+, via Flickr

It was at that point when I realized I wasn't going to be able to pick up English language books for my reading pleasure, a big difference between Bucharest and Tehran. The next day, I walked to the Intercontinental Hotel for a meal. The Intercon was much closer to the embassy, but it was much more expensive. While I waited for my order to arrive, I finished reading the paper back novel I had brought with me. (Introverts always have a book, magazine, or newspaper with them so we have something to do while we wait, something that also discourages others from thinking they can join us.) My eyes fell on those pages at the back with an order form listing more paper backs from the same publisher. I recognized this solution, I took out my pen, checked off all the novels offered on the form regardless that I knew nothing about them or the authors, pulled out my checkbook and wrote out a check for the total and dropped that order off at the embassy. Those novels arrived in my mailbox at the U.S. Embassy in Bucharest a few weeks later - all except The Painted Bird which was delivered to the door of my apartment in the industrial zone of Iasi anonymously,  and just one of many mysteries during my time in Romania.

*a name, not necessarily the right one