Vacation

Recently I read Under the Banner of Heaven, by Jon Krakauer, and Lucky by Alice Sebold.

I had a fun and busy 2 week vacation with my parents. We started with a week in Kiev, Ukraine. It is a beautiful cosmopolitan city, and I was very happy to be back there again. We went to many places I had not visited before, as well as revisited several places I had seen on my first trip to Kiev in 1992. I still marvel at how the city has changed in the last 13 years, and I’m looking forward to digging out my photos from ’92 so my parents can see the drastic differences themselves.

Of particular interest was the Chernobyl Museum. Before the trip, I had printed a bunch of reports and articles from the web on the situation since the 1986 disaster, and I learned a great deal about the current ecological, public health, and social issues still effecting the people and the area. One of the rare benefits of disasters like Chernobyl is that scientists are able to study a real-life situation and develop new technologies that otherwise might never be researched. To most people’s astonishment, the negative ecological and health consequences of Chernobyl were contained better than one might expect, and scientists have even developed new methods to cleanse contaminated foodstuffs to make them safe again for consumption. Absolutely there are still severe ecological and health effects from the disaster, but the problems as yet to be addressed are the social ones – thousands of people displaced, they lost absolutely everything. One city was given 4 hours to evacuate, and people had to leave all but their most vital documents behind. 19 years later, a generation of young people lead reckless lives because they don’t expect to live beyond adolescence. It’s incredible to think that we are approaching the 20 year anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, in April 2006. I highly recommend the museum to anyone visiting Kiev, and suggest that you tour it with a guide. The displays are generally unlabeled, and the few descriptions and explanations that do exist are only in Ukrainian. We ended up listening in to English language tour and learned a lot more than we could have on our own.

Well, back to the lighter side of our travels. After a fun and tiring week in Kiev, we flew to Chisinau. I had arranged for a neighbor to pick us up at the airport so as not to impose the uncomfortable bus ride on my parents. We went more or less straight to Tvarditsa, after about 2 1/2 hours of errands the neighbor wanted to do. We arrived about the same time as the bus – so much for trying to find a faster way! I’d “forbidden” my parents to eat anything once we left Kiev, knowing that there would be a huge feast awaiting us in Tvarditsa. I was right, and we ate until we could burst. That was the theme for the weekend. It seems Anya was intent on showing my parents exactly every single dish in her repertoire, including the numerous vegetarian dishes she’s learned and/or created over the past year to meet my dietary needs. She said she wanted my parents to see what I eat so they could know I’m well fed. I don’t think they ever doubted that fact, and for sure they now agree wholeheartedly! In addition to the vegetarian cuisine, she also managed to serve a different meat dish with every meal – turkey, chicken, lamb, rabbit, goose. The only kind of their animals she didn’t serve was pig, but she promised to slaughter one next time Mom and Dad visit.

After 2 1/2 days in Tvarditsa, we went back to Chisinau for a day. My parents have been to Armenia several times, and I was quite surprised when they told me that Chisinau is in much better shape than Yerevan, the Armenian capital.

Tuesday we flew to Bucharest. It was so totally different from what we all expected! It’s a large, bustling city, with a population of approximately 2 million. We were staying in the busy University district. Wednesday we walked around a bit on our own before taking a city tour in the afternoon. Our guide, Oana, was a lovely young woman and we learned more about Romania in those 4 hours than I could have imagined possible. It always saddens me to realize exactly how little we learned about other countries, especially Eastern bloc countries, in school. I knew absolutely nothing about Romanian history, and all three of us listened with great interest to Oana’s description of the revolution that ended Ceausescu’s dictatorial rule. One of our favorite stops was at the Village Museum, a large outdoor museum where traditional Romanian village houses have been relocated from around the country. I was quite surprised by how the architecture differed so drastically from traditional and historical Moldovan homes. The main difference was the amount of wood used. As I’ve mentioned before, Moldova is far from rich in trees. First, it’s part of the steppe, like the Plains in central U.S., so there never were expansive forests here. Second, so many trees have been cut down for fuel that the Ministry of Ecology has started an urgent tree-planting effort throughout the country. Romania, on the other hand, has vast lush forests, bountiful supplies of wood, and a decent amount of oil resources to boot. We learned that Romania is able to meet 50% of its oil needs with its own natural sources, a fact which alone enables the country to be light years ahead of it’s eastern neighbor. Moldova is dependent on Russia for most of its oil, and Russia has no problem raising prices whenever it is displeased with Moldova. The price of gasoline has nearly doubled within the last year, and is now higher than in most of the U.S.: about $1/liter (~$3.70/gallon). And this in a country where the average monthly income is under $60.

Thursday we took a day trip with a guide to Sinaia, where the first king of unified Romania, Carol I, built a huge and absolutely beautiful castle in the late 19th century. Carol I was actually from Germany, and thus the castle’s style is very Germanic. From there we went to Brasov, in the region of Transylvania. It is a town originally settled by Germans, and the town square looks exactly like any one of the old town squares I saw in Germany in July. Next, we drove to Bran, where another beautiful castle is located. This one, however, is hundreds of years old. It is advertised as “Dracula’s Castle” but in reality, Vlad the Impaler never lived near that area. The truth is (a) there was no Dracula, and (b) there is no Dracula’s Castle. Bram Stoker made up the story, loosely based on some legends, but he himself never even saw Bran Castle. The historical figure of Vlad the Impaler, also know as Vlad Dracula (which means son of Dracul) lived in Wallachia, the southern region of modern Romania. Stoker just thought the word “Transylvania” sounded cool, and thus set his fictional story in that region. Our guide told us that when Romania started to open up in the 80’s to foreigners, many Western tourists came in search of Dracula’s Castle in Transylvania, and were very disappointed to see the boring and rather decrepit ruins of Vlad’s castle in Wallachia. The facts weren’t encouraging the budding tourism industry in Romania, so some smart “entrepreneurs” decided to dub the better preserved and more “romantic” castle in Bran, Transylvania, as Dracula’s Castle. Score 2 points for commercialism, I guess! The castle was nice, but the town seemingly exists only to profit from the ignorance of Western tourists.

Friday we strolled around Bucharest in the morning, had a leisurely lunch, and eventually met up with fellow PCV Mark, who had also been vacationing in Romania. He and I rode the overnight train back to Chisinau together Friday, and my parents flew home on Saturday. The train ride from Bucharest was much easier than my previous train trips to Kiev. Our documents were checked at the border only one time on each side, although the Moldovan guard seemed to have a hard time believing that Mark and I had only one backpack apiece, as he asked us about 20 times where the rest of our luggage was. I also got to experience the famous change in track gauge. One of the Russian tsars (I forget which one exactly) thought it was a strategic idea to use a different size of train track within his empire, to prevent any would-be invaders from storming the country by train. Thus, when you enter Moldova from Romania, each train car is lifted by a hydraulic lift and workers change the undercarriages. All passengers must remain on the train during the procedure. I had heard that it was a noisy, jostling experience, but honestly, if I hadn’t been specifically watching out the window, I’m not sure I would have noticed it.

I got back to Tvarditsa Saturday night, tired and happy to be home.