Killing Batteries

The return to my unintended second home – Iasi, Romania – has been filled with equal parts business-as-usual and unlikely surprises.

The overnight train ride from Bucharest to Iasi was pure Romania:  The train was full to bursting.  My compartment was all men.  On that note, why am I always grouped with stinky men?  Never beautiful, nice smelling women. Whether I’m on a train, bus, airplane, hostel room or nude beach, always with the men.  One time, I sat next to an achingly pretty Swedish girl on a trans-Atlantic flight, who flirted, placed my hand on her firm breast (ostensibly to feel her heart beat) and slept on my arm for three hours.  That was 1991.  It’s been farting, sweating, drunken, deodorant flouting men ever since. 

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I’ve been thinking a lot about slow moving events lately - things that take unthinkable amounts of time – and trying to imagine what it would be like to sit through these glacial events as a spectator.  Continental drifting, the lifespan of stars, Bush’s presidential terms…

I’ve been doing this because I’m trying to imagine an event that would give the sensation of dragging on more agonizingly slowly than a bored, impulsive guy waiting to hear about his first book deal.

I’m on month number four of this ca-ca.  I’ve never been a patient man, but this exercise in waiting is quite possibly the hardest thing I have ever done – except for that time I researched a Lonely Planet guidebook for Romania and Moldova, in the winter, behind the wheel of a 1990 Dacia 1310.  So all in all, 2006 was not a serene year.  And people ask why I look so beleaguered lately.

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Guess what?  I’m going to Romania next week.

Don’t worry, I’m not staying for long.  I’m not completely backing down from the vow I announced in August, made at the urging of my lawyer, psychotherapy team and concerned parties at the American Embassy in Bucharest.  Also, my dietitian said I needed to detox from eating pizza six days a week for 13 months straight, but what does she know?

I’m jetting in via Rome with budget airline Blue Air for 11 indulgent days – December 28^th through January 8^th – after being successfully lured there on the strength of the New Years Eve celebrations and the unhinged street parties that will follow on January 1^st to celebrate Romania’s photo-finish acceptance into the European Union.

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Living in this abandoned vacation village in western Sardinia was exotic for about 12 minutes.  When I figured out that I couldn’t even buy bread out here and that it wasn’t going to be warm enough for topless sunbathing all winter, the novelty wore off rather quickly. 

OK, the village is not completely abandoned.  There are a handful of tenacious year-round residents keeping me company.  There’s also a small group of sorry people that actually commute out here from the city each day to run the three or four cafes serving the city folk that come out on the weekends to stroll by the sea, linger over coffee and smugly revel in the thought that they can jump into their cars and race back to civilization the instant they get bored.

However, at night, it’s really just me and a dozen or so other people, scattered over the length of the village, hiding out in our homes and cultivating weird eccentricities.

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I want to take some time out from the grim topics of homeless travel and travel writing this week and talk to you about something a little more lighthearted: your prostate. 
 

I’ve gotten the impression in recent years through various awareness campaigns, often designed to send people racing in a panic to their doctors and pharmacists, that I should be thinking about my prostate on a semi-regular basis.  Apparently you can get cancer there and if, for whatever reason, you had to choose where you were gonna get cancer, ‘prostate’ is right at the bottom of the list, just above ‘testicle’ and ‘all over’. (Ladies if it’ll make you feel more included, every time you read the words ‘prostate cancer’ substitute the words ‘osteoporosis cancer’ or whatever it is that you guys get.)
 

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