Killing Batteries

A certain compact, rambunctious busy-body here in Iasi has repeatedly raked me over the coals about the fact that I only write in this blog about who’s pissed me off lately in Romania, never writing anything about incidents where people were nice to me.  This is true, once I commit to a pessimism dive, it’s very difficult to pull me out.  I freely admit this and don’t see any reason to change (stupid Berlin).

That said, in the interest of getting this little vampire off my back, I present the following:

A swanky new mall opened across the street from my building in recent months.  This mall has a food court and this food court has a shawarma stall – ‘shawarma’ is a loose term applied to a number of meals featuring meat/chicken, cabbage/veg, with French fries or rice, often on a plate but also served wrapped up like a kebap.

I go to get a kepab-style shawarma on days when I’m editing like a ‘caine nenorocit’ (miserable dog) and don’t have time to walk down to the Chinese restaurant to get a plate of rice and pig assholes, fried in dog fat (extra spicy), which one impish local assures me is what I’m being served when I order my favorite beef and Chinese garlic hotplate. 

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My intended September/October travel plans have taken a small twist. 

Instead of traveling four countries in Southeast Europe by train, Lonely Planet is flying me to San Francisco for an author workshop!  Who else didn’t see that coming?

Moreover, since I’ll be right there, I’m going to do a three week stopover in Minneapolis after the workshop so that my mother can count my digits and I can replace my asthmatic Dell notebook with something that won’t audibly whimper when I open Adobe Acrobat Professional.

So!  Party in Minneapolis!  Woo hoo!  My lord, I cannot wait!  Real hamburgers!  Mexican food!  Thai food!  Indian food!  Omelets the size and weight of a gold brick!  And, sweet jesus, FREE REFILLS!!!  God bless America!!!

Even more exquisite is that September is the best weather month in Minneapolis, my favorite time of year.  I couldn’t have planned this better if I tried.  Indeed, there’s a lot of preparation to be done, not the least of which will be eating five meals a day for the next six weeks to get my stomach appropriately stretched out.
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I’m finally back from Kiev.  Actually, I’ve been back for two days, but I’ve been occupied with the Cricova champaign that I brought back (and the brain damaging aftereffects).

Aside from being targeted for a lamely executed tourist scam and spending part of my time in a hostel with no hot water and, briefly, no electricity, I enjoyed myself thoroughly.  My body however, would disagree.

My approach to breaking the back of a new city is to walk all over the damn thing, ridiculous distances and unfavorable weather be damned.  After three solid months of sitting on my fanny in front of a laptop, the transition to walking for 10 hours a day - in melt-your-hair heat in this instance - didn’t go over well with my legs, feet and physiologically optimum hydration levels.  There was much bodily complaining.  You’d think my body would be used to these extreme lifestyle changes by now, as they occur several times a year, but sadly it hasn’t gotten any easier.  Granted, I didn’t exactly ease into foot research mode in Kiev.  More like sprinted into it, literally.

In addition to walking about 15 miles and mildly sun burning all exposed skin on my first day in Kiev, I started things off with a semi-deranged race across the city center to get to an appointment with a local tourism official.  As a result of my poor time management, I ended up with only 15 minutes to walk (run) about five kilometers in 93°F (34°C) heat, carrying an over-packed day bag.  At the time, I hadn’t yet had the chance to uncover the complexities of the city’s metro system and 15 minutes before an important appointment didn’t seem like the time to tackle that trial-and-error process in a foreign language with a funny alphabet to boot.  Furthermore, I had been advised to not take a taxi without a wise local at my side, lest I get stuck with a $50 fare.
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Busy, busy. Lots to tell, but no time… except for this one tidbit:

The highlight of my first full day in Kiev was the attempted scam two jackasses tried on me.  I was walking down a fairly quiet street about 100 meters from a hotel I was visiting for the article when a guy pulled up next to me and started to match my stride.  He walked awfully close to me, which set off my Danger Sense right away and I didn’t have long to wonder what was up.  He did a nifty pretend-to-pick-up-off-the-ground, slight-of-hand move with what appeard to be a wad of cash (there was a fifty dollar bill on top, but you couldn’t see the rest of the wad), wrapped in plastic.  He was like, ‘Oh wow!  Yeah!  Hey you!  Good luck huh? You speak English?’

 ’Yes, funny you should ask, I speak the hell out of English.  Congratulations.’

 ’Hey, Russian tradition, we split it!  Go to a bar!  Come on!’

 ’No man.  I’m working, it’s all yours.  American tradition is ‘take the money and run!’  Bye.’

‘No, no!  Wait!  Russian tradition, we split it!  Get some girls…’

 ’I'm going in this hotel now, goodbye’

Just then another guy came running up, ‘Oh!  You found my money!  Please, can I have it back?’ and by then I was 10 meters away and accelerating.

I have to assume that in the end, the ‘owner’ of the wad of money would count it, claim money was missing and demand that I give him all mine.  Furthermore, I’m willing to bet that if some cops happened to show up, they’d be in on the act too.

The moral of the story is, never accept free money from anyone under any circumstances and be extremely cautious around anyone that wants to be your instant friend.  Females included.

OK, back to work.

All,

Well it’s been an exciting weekend here at killing batteries headquarters in central Iasi. Since the nytimes story ran I’ve had more hits, comments and naughty offers from blog groupies in 72 hours than I received in the five months previous.

As much as I’d like to sit and discuss guidebook fees and the exact size and dexterity of my tongue all week, duty calls in the form of a magazine assignment in Kiev; trains and babushkas with spare rooms are standing by.

It should be good times.  I haven’t had a work-related nervous breakdown in over a month, but five high speed days of fact gathering in a place where the only words I know in the local language are ‘da’, ‘nyet’, and ‘babushka’ should fill the void perfectly.

As a ‘thank you’ for all your good words this weekend, I’d like to give something back by providing some insider info on lucrative, air-tight business opportunities here in Romania just waiting to be plundered by someone with the time, money and know-how. I’m talking instant riches here people, so get your financial planners on the horn and read them this:
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The guy didn’t use the headline I suggested (‘Beckham Look-a-Like Brings Travel Writing World to its Knees’), but nevertheless I appear in New York Times in a story about guidebook writers.  Unfortunately, you have to register with the nytimes site to view anything past the first two lines.  Copyright prevents me from posting the story here.

The guy actually called me on my mobile here in Romania (expensive call!) to conduct the interview last week, but with what seemed like a large number of writers being interviewed I wasn’t 100% that I’d make the cut, or last more than two sentences.  He did me right and even listed the link to this blog!!  Hello prospective editors!  I’m available for virtually any kind of work, TV in particular, and I’m open to partial nudity!

Oh glorious day!  I’m going to sit back with a coffee and watch my hit counts skyrocket as I try to figure out where I’m going to sleep in Kiev next week for less than US$40 a night.

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EDIT; TEN HOURS LATER

You know, not to blemish my impending fame, but now that I’ve taken the time to read the parts of the article that aren’t about me, I’m in a bit of a huff in regards to the comments made by Michael Spring the publisher of Frommer’s, who freely admits to paying his authors $1,500 to write an astounding 150 pages of new text (that’s $10 per page or about $0.025 per word, a rate that no professional freelancer in their right mind would consider in a million years, even without travel expenses) while encouraging authors to constantly scrap and beg for ethically difficult and personally demeaning freebies. 

This is an excerpt from the end of the article;
He had his own advice for new guide writers. First, he said, don’t complain. “Nobody is going to feel sorry for you getting six weeks of free travel in Europe,” he said.

Exactly when was the last time Mr. Spring traveled through Europe, leading him to the misconception that $1,500 will comfortably cover six weeks of travel during high season, including an international plane ticket? 

Even if his authors could win complimentary accommodation every other night, that $1,500 is only going to last 2-3 weeks tops, what with the authors being constantly on the move and coughing up train fare.

So, more accurately, the writers that Mr. Spring seems to have baffling contempt for are actually getting paid pennies per hour to work 16 hours a day, six days a week for the first 2-3 weeks, having little to no personal time, sleep or what Mr. Spring seems to imagine as a fun time, and once their tiny fee has been spent, they spend the remainder of that six weeks paying out of their pocket for the pleasure of doing the same workload. 

Let’s say his authors didn’t do the travel and wrote everything from their living rooms, solely through Internet research, with no mushrooming travel expenses.  Even then, at their rate of pay, they’d be earning a mere $13,000 a year for their specialized skills.  I’d be curious to see how long it would take Mr. Spring to start complaining under similar circumstances.

I don’t believe I have ever heard or read someone make statements demonstrating a more out-of-touch, condescending attitude for the people who have made him rich through their diligent work, done largely in the throes of intense mental, physical and emotional stress. 

The absence of a tangible, observable sweatshop is possibly the only thing between this wanker and an international labor laws violation.

Things seem to be getting worse in Transdniestr. 

Trans-Dniester blast kills eight:  At least eight people have been killed in an explosion on a city minibus in Moldova’s breakaway Trans-Dniester region, officials say.

No word on whether the maxitaxi was the target or whether the bomb was intended for another target and went off by accident.

You may be surprised to hear that travel writing has a seedy underside. Quite often, almost routinely in fact (when you’re not working for Lonely Planet), travel writers are given a free room, meal or service, with an accompanying wink, on the condition that they compose glowing praise for whatever the free thing was, no matter how much ass it sucked.

The nadir of this ritual is called a ‘press trip’. This is where some tourism bureau organizes an all-expenses paid trip for a pack of travel writers (with assignment letters in hand, obviously, we gotta keep out the riffraff), arranging for flights, hotel rooms, meals and tours, hands held for every waking second, and then the travel writer is sent home to write an article, or more preferably articles, about how great the destination was, even if it was Miami.

Mostly this is just underhanded advertising under the guise of what lay-people assume is an objective travel article. However, tourism bureaus aren’t completely to blame for the popularity of this tactic. In the defense of what may seem like greed on the part of the travel writers, the reality is that newspapers can’t find it in their hearts to pay more than $100-200 per article. So, if a professional travel writer were to pay their own way on a one week trip, even to some relatively cheap destination like Duluth, then came back and spent two days diligently writing the article for an average newspaper fee, the travel writer’s net earnings for that assignment (nine days of time, plus expenses) would be about -$500. Over the course of a calendar year, that travel writer would net between -$25,000 and -$50,000, depending on trips and expenses. The upshot is all these negative earnings would be tax free. In your face IRS!!!

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When I first stepped into my current apartment last August with the rental agent, two things struck me immediately; first, it was by far the least decrepit place she’d shown me and second the odor of cat piss was so overwhelming that I had to steady myself against a wall.  It smelled like the alley behind a cat nightclub in Madrid at closing time. 

The former renter had obviously been cutting corners in her budget, namely not investing $6 in a kitty litter box, choosing instead to make one corner of the carpet the designated cat latrine. 

After three vigorous carpet scrubbings, the smell finally appeared to have left the building.  Fast-forward to last week.  The recent heat and humidity has somehow reactivated the pee spores and I’m now benefiting from the all the joys of cat ownership without the lazy, demanding cat part.

I’m moving out in August and I don’t plan to be around a heck of a lot in the interim, so I loathe the thought of going through the whole carpet cleaning process again.  Unfortunately, I have to regularly get up close and personal with that corner of the room.  During the non-stinky period, that area became the dumping ground for my collection of Lonely Planet research items; a small mound of maps, brochures, business cards and cocktail napkins with phone numbers of amorous, toothless waitresses from countryside bars.

I’m forced to kneel in this area and sift through scraps of paper several times a day as I complete my editing and the smell has duly impregnated itself into me and my clothes.  Women have been unusually put off by my presence lately - just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse - though the saggy, psyche-ward-escapee bags under my eyes might be contributing to this ostracism.

I know I drone on too much about how unsexy my job can be, yet there are still very few people I’d trade places with right now (eg Lebron James, Beck, whoever’s dating Salma Hayak).  That said, I’m not sure I can stoically take almost two months of increasingly offensive cat piss in my life.

The way I see it, my only choice is to start smoking.  I’d still stink, but at least I’d stink like everyone else here in Romania and it’s certain to ease my social acceptance in France as well.