Killing Batteries

The good people at BootsnAll, this blog’s host, took pity on the dull and generic appearance of ‘Every Notable Patch of Grass in Romania’ and offered to spruce it up for me on the condition that I dismantle my shrine to Chris and stop pestering his mother about his shoe size and blood type.

That done, please allow me to re-introduce this blog: Killing Batteries (dot com). 

Check this out; I got a new banner courtesy of the Bootz Graphic Design Team, a domain name (my first) and sooner or later I’m gonna get my hands on some wicked blog publishing software that I intend to play with obnoxiously as soon as I finish cutting 6,000 words from a disastrously over-length guidebook manuscript, which shall remain nameless, but rhymes with ‘Bonley Janet’.

I’m more than a little excited about this and I’m sure there’s palpable relief on the BnA side of things as well.  I mean really, the old blog was more homely than a 16 year old Dacia.  I was too lazy and artistically incompetent to beautify it myself and besides, I was too busy to think about it while duly annihilating the word count on the aforementioned manuscript.

In fact, this is the second time the charitable Bootz Boyz (and Girl) have offered this service to me.  The first time I was pretty sure my blogging days were numbered and I didn’t want all the fuss over a blog I intended to abandon after only four months.  But this is just too fun to give up.  And I have nine die hard readers, three of which are actually outside of my immediate family, who might be heart-broken if I quit now. 

Thus, my current calling on this earth is clear; write about being a homeless, nascent travel writer, lugging a debilitating sack of battery-driven tech around the world, without which I’d be biblically screwed and instead be one of those eccentric weirdos street performing on the Ramblas in Barcelona.  Or something more succinct.  Editors?

Thank you for visiting and/or your continued readership.  I will do my best to not suck and provide insight into this low paying, exhausting, yet bizarrely fulfilling journey.

I knew this day was coming.  My little Dell Latitude 200 that has been with me through three years of untold rain, snow, oppressive heat, flights, buses, boats, trains and meandering hikes through large, confusing cities in 38 countries is showing its age.  After 25 or so Windows updates, an ill-considered upgrade to Office 2003 and the addition of some vital, but resource hogging software, the old girl (I never even named her - tragic) is limping along with what can only be described as ‘digital emphysema’.  The 30 gig hard drive that seemed insatiable at first is nearing maximum capacity (I gotta start deleting some of those Simpsons episodes…), the formerly lightning quick 999 megahertz processor is now laughably insufficient and the virtual memory sputters out after I open and close a handful of software.  Regular reboots are required throughout the day and random, bizarre device failures are becoming more frequent.  An undignified death, to be sure.

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The summer cook off calibre heat has finally reached Iasi.  Who wants some well-done travel writer?  White meat?  I’m Norwegian, that’s all I got.  The breasts are OK, but if you want a real treat go for the rump.

We’ve had a full week of this heat now.  My old Spanish schedule is engaging.  It’s too hot to go to sleep before 1:00 or 2:00am.  I wake up in a sweat at 10:00am and get in all the frantic work I can before lunch.  I stuff myself silly with Chinese food and take a nap (if the jackhammers and car alarms will allow).  Start work again at about 5:00pm and keep going until 11:00pm, with a pizza break at 9:00ish.

Even at 10:00am, the intense effort of editing has me sweating like defrosting sherbet.  I sit here all day in my tasteful boxers, windows wide open.  The at-home mom in the building across from mine has never been happier (and who wouldn’t be?).  I’m in an efficiency apartment with windows facing east, so the beating sun warms up my little box first thing.  I’m out of direct sunlight by 11:00, but the circulation in here sucks, so the cool down is negligible.  Indeed, the hallway is much cooler (no windows) and I’d sit out there and work if the Internet cable were long enough.

Once an hour or so I get up to air my bum and, if it’s particularly bad, duck my head under the shower for a minute.  Welcome to the sexy life of a struggling freelance writer in Europe folks!

The best part of my days are my walks through the city’s pedestrian areas.  Romanian women are constantly testing the lower limits of near-nudity on the street.  Braless and threadbare tops are common and the latest thing seems to be virtually see-through white pants with a contrasting dark coloured thong underneath.  However, the heat has inspired even more pronounced and daring wardrobe-waiting-to-malfunction selections.  Recently when my server at the bar was sporting one of her near-ass baring skirts, she bent over a table every so slightly to gather some glasses and, yup, no underwear.  She repeated the manoeuvre a few minutes later at a different table and the girls at the table next to mine took pictures with their mobile phones.  I never have my camera when I really need it.

I’ve been meaning to start a list like this for a while now.  Each country has it’s own little oddities that aren’t necessarily going to thrill anthropologists, but are still intriguing. Here’s the start of a ongoing collection of my favourites from Romania:

• Mobile (cell phone) ‘beeps’ – Even if you invest in a cellular contract, the per minute prices here are still somewhat out of reach of only the most well-off Romanians.  It’s strange, as everyone has a mobile, but few can actually afford to use them.  But that hasn’t stopped Romanians from using the little status symbols as social tools.  Romanians routinely send ‘beeps’ to their friends and family.  A ‘beep’ is when someone uses their mobile to ring another mobile, then hangs up after the first ring, so all the recipient has is the caller ID entry.  Beeps are used in a number of ways.  At the basic level, it’s a little ‘hello’ of sorts or ‘I’m thinking about you’ for young lovers with no credit on their phones.  You can also use a ‘beep’ to organize a meet-up.  ‘Beep me when you get to the plaza and we’ll meet at the fountain’ is a typical plan of action.  However some people have lost all self-control with the beeps, firing them off 10 or 15 at a time while sitting on the maxitaxi on their way home from school.  Equally, insanely jealous boyfriends and girlfriends (there are no other kind in Romania) will resort to sending their sweeties beeps every 15 minutes as a kind of rudimentary check-up.  If the sweetie doesn’t return the beep within a minute, this can only mean that the sweetie is engaged in an illicit tryst (being in class or in a movie or at work or having a dead battery is no excuse for not returning a ‘beep’) and there’ll be hell to pay in the form of more beeps and maybe even a genuine phone call to interrogate the offender, but that’s only a last resort.

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‘Not my problem’.  Over the past year, I’ve slowly come to realize that this is the Romanian mantra, seemingly uttered with a frequency that most people reserve for ‘how are you?’ and in some cases ‘dude, I’m so wasted’.  This is particularly true with the over-40 Romanian age group, who are still more or less running things here and clinging to the Ceausescu mentality of ‘Look Out for Number One’.

If a guy gets caught in the middle of an intersection behind a traffic jam while running a stale yellow in order to gain five seconds on his journey and ends up blocking cross traffic, he says ‘not my problem’ gesturing as if the traffic in front of him is to blame.  If the post office changes it hours to a lazy 10am-to-4pm schedule so that anyone with a normal job cannot pick up their packages (and no one can pick up packages on their behalf) you’re told ‘not my problem’.  If the water to your building is cut with no notice for construction or maintenance, you’re told ‘not my problem’ as well as ‘how should I know?’ when you ask the foreman when the water might be turned back on.  If the brand new street, that took four months to resurface, has potholes within a week because the guys hired to do the job were the brothers and nephews of the lead engineer rather than qualified workers, you’re told ‘not my problem’.

The lack of even basic accountability in Romania has never been a selling point, but it has really been killing me in recent weeks.

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Hey, this is just a friendly public service announcement for you travellers to stay cognizant of some of the older scams that are still alive and well all over Europe.

A friend of mine was just burned by the old menu switcheroo scam in Budapest last week, an art honed to perfection in my own love-to-hate Bucharest, and ended up being intimated by several goons into coughing up the equivalent of plane-fare for dinner and a few drinks.  This was a very experienced traveller, but exhaustion and a little too much drinking stripped away his defences (as well as a few very attractive accomplices employed by the restaurant).  Alone and drunk should be avoided no matter where you are and what you’re doing, but even mostly sober groups can fall prey to this particular plot.

Overly helpful taxi drivers and overly amorous local women are usually the bait that brings guy(s) to these places, since crooked restaurants and clubs typically don’t buy ad space in the local weekly or get reviewed in tourist brochures.  Be wary of this kind of ‘assistance’.  Persistent street hawkers are also to be avoided.  I’ve heard first hand accounts of this type of thing happening in Bucharest, Budapest, Paris, Madrid, Warsaw and Athens, and it’s safe to assume that this element exists in just about any medium sized city or better.  Sadly, the local police are usually in on the scam and are little help.

This stuff really burns my ass and if I weren’t a pacifist I’d promote a revenge campaign in the form of fire-bombing the vehicles of the conspirators.  Instead, I’ll just pass along this warning and for those of you that are going to Budapest in particular, here’s a link to their tourist advisory.

And while I’m warning you about scams, despite crackdowns throughout the rest of the country, one still cannot find an honest taxi driver anywhere in Bucharest.  Avoid taxis in that city at all costs!

Alert the international press!  My long awaited second appearance in book print has finally occurred with the release of What Color Is Your Jockstrap?, the latest in a series of travel humour anthologies by tireless editor and poker socialite Jen Leo.

This was the first Leo venture to allow submissions from the hairier gender and I leapt at the opportunity, submitting a diced up version of my laugh-riot essay Clean Underwear: Or the Secret to Backpacker Ecstasy.  I imagined that this was a killer pitch, what with Miss Leo’s inordinate fixation with undergarments.  Unfortunately, as the edited piece did not include any actual references to a destination, public embarrassment or out-of-control bodily functions, she passed.  Not having anything more appropriate on hand and being swamped with other duties, I did not re-pitch.  Nevertheless, a contract eventually arrived requesting permission to use an excerpt of the already concise piece.

So, I’m in there somewhere, albeit briefly, and despite not appearing in the table of contents I’m mighty proud.  Looking at the list of contributors it should be a smashing read, one which I will not be able to enjoy myself until I find the time and funds to fly home to Minneapolis, where my copy awaits.

If someone locates a copy, please report back about how hilarious I am.

I’m suffering on several fronts at the moment.  After the unremitting exhaustion, panic and exhilaration of my final three weeks on the LP write-up, the past two weeks have been a bit of a bummer.  I’ve been slowly poking at two non-travel articles on Sarajevo and Bratislava for Global Traveler, a business traveller magazine, focusing on the local business and political climates of each city.  Those of you familiar with my preferred style of writing will understand when I say that this type of dry, humourless, research oriented writing breaks my heart and tempts me to start drinking at 10am.  But the people at Global Traveler are great, they gave me my first big magazine assignment two years ago and they didn’t show a scrap of disdain during all the dipshit newbie questions I peppered them with as I found my footing in magazine writing during subsequent assignments.  So, I am always happy to work for these guys and moreover they pay marvellously well at a time when freelance writers are being asked to provide 1,000 word articles for $25 a pop.

Also, I’m trying to cut back on my caffeine intake.  The amount of coffee and energy drinks that I put away between February and June should have killed me and I’m keen to re-balance my body’s chemical composition to something less toxic before my eyeballs turn orange.  But I tell ya, reading about Slovakia tax reforms has me continually scrambling for the coffee beans for wont of any kind of break from the work.  Meanwhile, on a possibly related note, I’ve sleeping like utter doo doo, making the caffeine wean even more agonizing.

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Well, thats the headline I would have written.  Got you to click on the link, didnt I?

Instead the BBC chose a more tactful line:  ”Europe under ‘rendition’ cloud”, an uninspired title that I wouldnt  have clicked in a million years if it werent accompanied by a naked photo of Salma Hayak.

It seems Romanian officials, being the selfless and helpful bunch that they are, may have (allegedly) bowed to American pressure - big bags of money are surprisingly heavy - and invited them to set up a CIA jail, or ‘black site, where terror suspects could be detained and interrogated (tortured) with wild abandon by foreign security officials where there is ‘no legal protection or rights under American law.  As punishment, its been suggested that Romania should have their EU membership delayed until they learn right from wrong.

Realistically, with the evidence being so thin, and Romanias accession treaty having already been inked, theres little chance theyll be barred from the EU.  And even if there was a strong case, we all know that with the slow, groaning wheels of politics that no one would get around to condemning Romania until, oh, 2018 or so. As such, we can all relax and continue to dream of membership in the European Monetary Union and no travel restrictions for people going to work in Italy and Spain.  Whew!

On an unrelated note, the first person to spit on Ann Coulter will receive a free, autographed copy of Lonely Planet – Romania and Moldova.  Photographic evidence required.

On Saturday June 10th, I will turn 36 years old.  I love getting older.  Each year I get wiser, blissfully more deranged and, reportedly, better looking.  I’m told that I am afflicted with the ‘George Clooney Effect’ where, although I wasn’t unattractive when I was younger, I somehow become better looking as I age.  Well bully for me!  By the time I hit 40 I should be an irresistibly sexy, literary genius!  I can’t wait!

In the meantime, I’m just an adorable hack who’s flirting with financial ruin.  Knowing this, my sweet mother has deposited $200 into my bank account so that I can ‘treat myself in some special way’ for my birthday.  Moreover, I’m under orders that whatever I do must not jeopardize my life in any way.  She says this every time she gives me a cash gift ever since two Christmases ago when to her horror I used them money to go skydiving in New Zealand.

So, even factoring out all the ways I might get killed, my options for spending that money here in Romania are still somewhat limitless. That kind of money will go a long way.  Do I go get an all-over tan at the Black Sea?  Bond with nature at the Danube Delta?  Immerse myself in the peasant lifestyle in Maramures? Party in Timisoara?  Spend it all on hookers and blow here in Iasi?  Decisions, decisions.

Or maybe I’ll spend it on a device that deactivates and permanently fries all car alarms, so I can go outside and blast the one that’s been going off outside my building for the past 45 minutes.