Killing Batteries

I got a sobering lesson on how secure my car and its contents aren’t last night.

A friend of a friend was over, who also owns a Dacia 1310. He recently lost or broke the key to his trunk and needed to get something out of it, so he asked me for my keys. I didn’t understand this bizarre request at first, what with the language barrier and all.

You want what now?

Your car keys.

Why?

To open my trunk.

But how…

Just give me the keys!

First he tried my trunk key and it didn’t work.  Then he tried my door key and it open the mother$^%$@.  Apparently Dacia only makes a handful of unique key cuts, then adds minor alterations for each lock that are so faint and pointless that odds are that if you have a half dozen Dacia keys and give the lock a good jiggle, you can open virtually any Dacia.

Now I understand why every clunker on the street has a car alarm, set to maximum sensitivity, so that it will trigger if someone lightly coughs within 10 metres of the car. Two minutes doesn’t pass during the day when you can’t hear a car alarm going off somewhere nearby.  Unfortunately, with all these alarms blaring all day, no one bats an eye when an alarm goes off anymore, as they all sound exactly the same and if the car is sitting on a busy street, the alarm is set off every time a bus rolls by or a dog pees on it.

I’m planning to leave for a 2-3 weeks road trip early next week and suddenly I have to seriously rethink security for my bags, which hold items of monetary and work value that would hopelessly sink me if they were to be pinched.

We got dumped on by the third snow storm in less than a week last night. The all night snow was preceded by about two hours of freezing rain, so things are slick as a luge track outside. The situation is starting to get a little dire. The Romanian snow removal system is neither efficient, effective nor dedicated and we are running out of places to put the stuff.

The driving conditions are being exacerbated by short-sighted car owners who, while digging out their cars, rather than take an extra two steps and dumping the snow on the grass or a similarly out-of-the-way place, they just toss it in the street. Passing cars immediately pack down these piles of snow into thick, patchy hunks of ice, which are not only slippery and unplowable, but they are the equivalent of reverse potholes, hammering and occasionally shattering suspension and axels.

This unholy amount of snow has made all forms of transportation difficult, delayed or impossible. Aside from delaying my trip last week, I’m being personally affected in that the supermarket has not received its shipment of my favourite merlot in a week, upsetting the delicate chemical balance that my body has grown accustomed to.

Fortunately, I don’t have to go anywhere for another week, but if we keep getting zapped by 13 centimetres (five inches) of snow every second day, my only option for getting out of Iasi will be a helicopter rescue.

Give a Man a  Bucket…
Buckets are a big accessory in rural Romania.  Everyone carries one; children, men, grannies, like a countryside handbag. I would assume they are for hauling water from the well if they weren’t usually empty, so I’m not entirely sure why they’re such an ubiquitous item.

Out of Dodge
There seems to be a mass exodus happening in small Romanian towns.  People on the street are either 12 years old and younger or 50 and older.  Everyone with even a shred of free will seems to have skipped town for the trappings and money of the big city.

New Road Hierarchy
I need to adjust my former road hierarchy. In descending order of priority it is:

I made it back from Dobrogea (Black Sea coast) in one piece.  The car only broke once and cost me US$35 to fix, but it set me back by four hours while they dismantled half the engine just to rewire a few bits. I managed to get out of Iasi just hours before yet another massive snow storm shut down all roads for the second time in three days. Despite very warm temps all weekend, we’re still half-buried here.

My trip was made infinitely easier by the good people at Danube Delta Biosphere Reserve Authority and the Information and Ecological Education Centre (www.deltaturism.ro) both in Tulcea, the gateway to the Danube Delta region, and the Info Litoral Tourist Information Centre (www.infolitoral.ro) in Constanta.

I’m gonna be home for about eight days, writing and spending a lot of time dealing with various car issues (it was very apparent on the open road that my brand new, rear brakes are at about 0% effectiveness), before I head down to Bucharest to meet Robert and then onward from there to attack the south, west and northern parts or Romania all in one go.

After meticulous planning and making firm appointments in three cities I went to bed early last night planning to drive out of town at 6:30am this morning, heading for southeast Romania. Seeing how hard I had worked and prepared, God decided to screw me and dropped four inches of snow on northeastern Romania last night. Since snow plows are expensive, when it snows like this in Romania they simply close the roads, so I am trapped in Iasi for another day.

This is just the latest in an unholy series of events perpetrated by the Almighty, the elements and Romanian bureaucracy to thwart any chance of me hitting my deadlines in June. I’ve sent a letter to my editor for comment on my deteriorating productivity and to inquire about any payment penalties that Lonely Planet invokes if an author drives his car into a gorge out of frustration.

As the temperatures will be above freezing all day, the snow should melt significantly and I should be able to leave tomorrow, pushing everything back a day and forcing me to do the bulk of my research in the large and busy city of Constanta on Sunday, when none of the travel resources that I will be needing will be open for business. I may actually have to delay the trip until Monday, putting me a whopping 2 weeks behind my original schedule.

So this is what utter doom feels like. A scintillating mix of anxiety, panic, hopelessness, mental fatigue and indigestion. Fascinating.