botanizing

U-Haul to the sunset

The U-Hauls and other moving trucks parked outside the window of my stuffy room in a Motel 6 in Boise, Idaho, are emblematic of the season.  It’s time to move—time, before school starts, to pack one’s stuff, load the U-Haul yourself, and take the intrepid drive to new possibilities.  None of us rides off into the sunset on a horse anymore; instead, we are more likely to use a U-Haul to haul all of our enigmas out of old dilemmas and put them in new places.  By the time the sun sets on our U-Haul we are likely to be tucked into a table for dinner or napping lazily to the grumble of televisions in economy lodging.  Cheap comfort keeps us going.

Of course, I’m simply watching all of the moving while on my way home.  After a long day of driving, I peak through the motel window and imagine the inspiration that drives all the U-Hauls. 

Romanian light

Art historians like to call attention to the light of the Mediterranean and California.  They note the changes in Matisse’s colors and compositions when he began to paint in the south of France. One hears similarly about the uniqueness of California light influencing the style and colors of Richard Diebenkorn, especially in his Ocean Park series of abstractions.  I wonder about these claims of uniqueness for light. In both Matisse and Diebenkorn, one senses the colors of place, particularly where sea and land as well as heat and breeze met, evoked in their paintings.  Surely, much of light is place.  The particulars and peculiarities of place at a certain time create many of light’s senses.  I wondered about these senses of light as I travelled in Romania.

The light of Romania lies heavy and humid on the landscape.  In the fields of pastoral Romania, the light swamps in a bright murk around the wheat corns and sunflower heads.  The miscible yellow slides on the swaying leaves and stems of the crops, making the green flash and bend a yellow sheen and become shadowy viridian.  I squint as the train sweeps past sunflower fields to abstract the light in surreal swirls of bright blue shadows and red in the orange highlights of the ray flowers.

In the train stations, morning light sidles along the rail cars.  Light is squeezed between buildings and poles to make hard angles and cones on the blue and red sides of cars.  Best is the earliest light that, finding the top of a car, lies like beams of electricity, from which sine waves, hinting at purple and maroon from the rust that runs from rivets and dints, on curved metal panels of the roof.

Cupolas on the rooftops of the old cities are perches of enlightenment.  The cupolas are not only rounded but also faceted.  Long seams run up their lengths, and these turn the curves of light to planes. The facets make angles for shadows. The warm slips of stately light contrast sharply with the dark silhouettes of filigreed metalwork that edge rooftops.  This balance of intricate darkness and shaped planes of light on cupolas feels evocative of the Baroque, when Enlightenment reason and science spread despite the intricate weave of dark Medieval forces.

The light of Romania feels rustic.  Patinas of dust and age have darkened buildings, once painted pale yellow, to rusty shades that turn bittersweet in the evening light. This evening light is like a sweetly sad song, but I don’t hear any of these songs in Romania, where the thrumming, humping beat of techno music agitates public spaces.  There is a tension between light and sound, although in Bucharest one feels the rustic light being obliterated by the neon of casinos and nightclubs, where the techno thrust seems more at home.

Bucharest Taxis!

“Taxi?” the men say as they approach us near the door of the train station in Bucharest, Romania.  Guidebooks and some people we have met admonished us to be careful about taxi offers.  Take only official taxis and not ad hoc offers from someone who solicits you in a train station, we have been told. 

Yellow taxis make a line outside of the train station in Bucharest.  We need a ride to a hotel near the airport where we have a reservation for the night.  Several of the drivers in the line of taxis call to us, but we walk to the first taxi in line.

We are only steps away from the taxi’s driver when I notice he appears to be speaking angrily to three women who walked away from him rather than getting in his cab.  I don’t like this, and I try to steer Adrian from the man’s taxi, but she doesn’t hear me.  In that instant of my concern, we are only a step away from the driver, who wears a white muscle shirt and white shorts, and he reaches for our bags, takes them, and loads them in his trunk.  The driver is squat and stocky.  His head is completely bald; he looks like a bulldog.  I am apprehensive.

I watch the driver reach for the taxi’s meter and flip its switch.  Unfortunately, the meter is tilted downward, and I can’t read it.  I ask Adrian if she can read it.  Why don’t I stop the driver to tell him we want out?

In the taxi, the driver asks, “Where to go?”

I tell him the name of our hotel.

He says, “Good hotel.  Very near airport.  You have early flight?” 

The driver’s English is good and Adrian compliments him.  “How did you learn English?” she asks.

“I go to Spain,” he says.  “Live in Barcelona for two years.  My cousin there help me get job in restaurant.  I know Barcelona like Bucharest,” he brags.

I’m unsure how living in Spain helped him to learn English, but I’m glad he is chatting.

“I speak Spanish and English.  You speak Spanish?”

Adrian speaks to him in Spanish, but the driver does not respond.

I want to keep him talking and friendly.  “What do you like best about Bucharest?” I ask.

“Center of city,” he says.  “It is like Las Vegas.  Restaurant, casino, restaurant, casino.”  He says, “I like city at night.”

I cannot imagine a less appealing city than Las Vegas.

He says, “I stay in Bucharest.  Not like Americans who go to other cities.”  His tone has shifted, and the statement seems at odds with his earlier description of living in Barcelona.

We are winding through neighborhoods, going from one side street to another through residential areas.  This is not the way we came into the city from the airport on a straight, major thoroughfare.

“Now Bucharest has wealthy people,” he says.  He waves his hand at brightly painted, single family homes that have been built recently behind plastered walls.  The houses are modest by American standards.  “Big houses,” he says.

We are well out of the center of the city when he says, “Trip from city to airport is fare plus 50%.”  He looks in the mirror at us.  “Some people just arrange cost ahead, but this company is fare plus 50%.  Cost is 120 lei.”

Our fare from the airport to the city when we arrived was 64 lei.

Adrian and the driver go back and forth about the price.  He repeatedly explains the fare.  “You understand?” he says forcefully.

I don’t say anything.  I prefer to ignore him and let him drive—let him get us to our hotel.

The driver is quiet for a few minutes.  He looks at us again in the mirror and again explains the fare to us.  It is clear to him that we are not pleased, although I simply look out of the window and refuse to engage his gaze.

We enter a poor neighborhood, where there is a small grocery on a corner.  “I can leave you here now,” the driver says, “but it will cost you 200 lei.”

“Just take us to the airport,” I say.  It would be best to have him take us to the airport, where other taxi drivers and possibly some police would be available when we get out.

Again he says, “Cost is fare plus 50%.  One hundred twenty lei.”

“We don’t have that much,” Adrian says.  We have spent our Romanian currency and planned to have only enough for the taxi fare and breakfast, which we estimated to be about 80 lei.

I touch Adrian’s leg to get her attention.  “Don’t say anything to him,” I whisper.

As we near the airport, our driver pulls into another residential neighborhood and stops outside of a bank.  He looks at us in the mirror and says, “Get money.”

“We have money,” I say.  “Take us to the airport.”

“I can take you to hotel,” he says and looks at me in the mirror.

“Take us to the airport,” I say.

Near the entrance to the airport, the taxi enters a round-about, which the driver goes around to head back toward the city.

“Did you take a wrong turn?” Adrian asks.

He doesn’t respond, but he does drive to our hotel.  He begins to cast out fare amounts, number after number.

I hand Adrian a pen and paper.  “First thing when you get out, go to the front and write down his license number.  I’ll get our bags,” I say.

At the hotel, the driver gets out and opens the trunk.  He is an amateur extortionist—a serious fiend would never have allowed us near our bags without a payment.  I put our packs on the steps of the hotel before I make any motion to pay him. 

We pull together the remaining lei we have and hand them to him.  We give him more than we should, far more than the fare from the city to the airport.

“Thank you, Americans,” the driver says as he walks toward his door. “Thank you, rich Americans.”

After we enter the hotel we see a couple go out and approach the taxi.  Adrian runs out to them and says, “He’s dishonest don’t get in.”  They don’t get in the cab.  We tell the bellman that the taxi driver is dishonest and threatening.  The bellman walks out of the hotel to peer at the cab, but he doesn’t do anything.

We tell the clerk at the reception desk about the taxi driver. 

“Ja,” the clerk says with knowing wariness and shakes his head: “Bucharest taxis!”

The Goodbye Game

Our packs have grown heavier over the course of the trip.  My purchases of books and local rugs make my bulging pack ride too heavily on my hips.  My steps grind.  We retrieve our packs from Pension Ana Marie and walk the length of Sinaia to the train station, arriving about 20 minutes before the departure of our train.

We sit under the awning of the station until a few minutes before the scheduled departure of our train, and then I walk down the platform, where I anticipate our reserved car will stop.  I put my pack on the platform.  The train doesn’t come.  I don’t like to stand so I sit on the platform to recline against my pack, resting my back.

Two young boys run among people on the platform.   The boys dodge in and out of groups, weaving around men and women who stand talking to each other.  The two boys eventually make their way to Adrian and me.  “Hello,” Adrian says to the boys.  She asks them questions.

The eyes of the older, bolder boy widen, and he stares at Adrian.  He speaks Romanian to her and then both boys run up the platform to their mother.  They come back in a few moments, running up to us.  “Goodbye,” the older boy says, and he turns to run.  His younger partner follows.

They come back. “Hello,” Adrian says.  The boys stare.  Adrian tries to talk to them using a few Romanian words.

“Goodbye,” the older boy says but he doesn’t turn to leave.

“Goodbye,” Adrian says.

The boys stare with will and incomprehension.  It is not that they do not know the meaning of ‘goodbye,’ it’s just that they can’t form words in the right way to make us understand what comes before goodbye.  Discovery takes words, the right words to make sense of experience, and this little boy doesn’t know the words to make us two foreigners understand.  We are oddly incomprehensible for him; we are also a curiosity, an attraction that keeps him standing and staring at us from a short distance; our language is unfathomable beyond ‘goodbye;’ our reason for being on this train platform in Sinaia can seem to a little boy to be only a spectacle for his own wonder.  Why else would he return time and again to us, running from his mother to us, back to her and to us, back and forth.  He is exploring the spectacle, curious about our oddity; he is turning a goodbye game into a story for his mother. Our little forays and longer travels are like that.  We put ourselves in new places, where we don’t understand the language and can’t surely put words together that explain well enough the places and lives we encounter, and, yet, impelled by curiosity and a will to comprehend, we string words together, making descriptions, telling judgments, and finding stories for our mothers and others.

I stand up to go to the WC and have walked only halfway up the platform when our train is announced.  The sharp whistle of the train crossing into Sinaia echoes down the valley.  I walk back to my pack as the train slows at the platform.  It is 40 minutes late and has allowed time for our goodbye game with the boys.

I am reluctant to board the train. The cars are old and decrepit—it is the shabbiest train we have encountered in Romania—but my reluctance has nothing to do with the quality of the train. This is the last train of our travel in Romania.  We are returning this evening to Bucharest and a flight early in the morning out of the country.

The window of our train compartment won’t stay open.  We prop it open with an AA battery that we find in the compartment and then tie the curtains back to allow air to blow through the hot compartment.  Another rain shower begins soon after we leave Sinaia.  The rain patters gently on the roof and wets our window, distorting slightly our view.  The train goes slowly through the valley and the rain.  We descend to the Wallachian plains, leaving behind the mountains.  The rain ends, and there is sun.  There are broad fields of bright yellow sunflowers, then a forest of birch and beech, and then more sunflowers.  We pass the ugly apartment blocks, empty shells of industrial buildings, and cooling towers of Ploiesti before we return to a more pastoral landscape of fields.  Wheat, corn, and hay lay in repetitive strips.  I try to hold on to the scene, to see the form of the place and commit it to memory, but even our slow train brings the country too fast for me to gather its form and content; I struggle to make sense of Romania.

The orange evening sun is two inches above the horizon when we enter Bucharest.

The Beech Wood

Thk! . . . Thk! . . . Thk! . . . Large drops of water fall from the beech canopy.  It has been raining, as it has during nearly all of our days in Romania.  The trail we follow down a mountain slope in a beech wood above Sinaia is wet and a bit slippery.  The thigh high vegetation of gooseberries and figwort that edges the trail slaps water on my pants as I walk.

The wetness of the woodland accommodates orchids.  There are several different species, as there have been on our other hikes through montane woods and meadows, but I have no idea of their identities.  The one with pink tepals and brown spotted leaves is perhaps a Dactylorhiza—maybe the common spotted orchid (D. fuchsii).  Another orchid that has white petals appears to be a helleborine.

Thick patches and channels of moss hold to the upper sides of the beech trunks—another sign of the wetness of this place.  The beeches are of various ages, and it is a pleasure to sense this forest is stable and replacing itself.  The older beeches have branches that swoop outward like arms. “Welcome to the wood,” the beeches seem to say.

Bucegi Clouds

The alarm rings at 7.00 a.m.  We hope to reach the Bucegi Massif, high mountains that stand above Sinaia, Romania, before rain begins.  On our way to town, we select cherry and apple pastries from a stand on the street.  In town, we get apples, an orange, salami, chocolate, and bread, the makings for lunch, and walk up the hill to the telecabina station, where we will get a cable car to the mountaintop.  At the station, we find that the first cable car will leave at 10.30—we are an hour early and decide to wait in a restaurant.

The restaurant of a ski shop is a few yards away.  It offers a good breakfast, although I hardly need any more food after the delicious pastries.  The great disappointment of the restaurant is that it doesn’t have black tea, and I can’t communicate with the waiter that a cup of hot water will be o.k.  I could make tea with my own tea bag, but the waiter ignores my request for the water.

Two small kittens clamber around the flowers that surround the restaurant’s terrace.  They climb also on the tables.  A little girl plays with the kittens, and Adrian begins to feed them—soon one is on her lap and on the table, nosing repeatedly, relentlessly toward her plate.

*

The telecabina fills with people, and we take it to Cota 1400, a station at 1400 meters that is halfway up the mountain.  Although we have tickets for the ride to the top of the mountain, we stop here for tea.  We step out of the station to a sprinkle of rain.  At the restaurant adjacent to the station, we hunch under an umbrella over a picnic table just as a downpour of rain begins.  The rain is too hard and the temperature too cold to stay outside so we go in the restaurant.  A warming cup of tea is welcome, and, after the first, I have a second cup.

About an hour later, the rain stops.  There is blue sky above, but it is caught in a V of black cloud.  Thunder continues, but we go back to the telecabina station for the steep ride up the mountain face to Cota 2000.

*

On the mountaintop, we can hear cowbells ring in the valley.  Thunder rumbles over the mountains to the west.  A bee buzzes behind Adrian.

We walk northward over a gentle rise, botanizing as we go across the tundra. The first plant to get my attention is an alpine sainfoin* (Hedysarum hedysaroides).  Its showy magenta flowers stand in a tall raceme above the low vegetation of the tundra. We find plants that are widespread in alpine and high latitude environments, like mountain dryad (Dryas octopetala), but there are others that are more restricted to the mountains of Europe.  There are short shoots of alpine bartsia (Bartsia alpina), which is dark in the exposed tundra landscape.  Its stems and leaves are deeply purple, even blackish, rather than green, and its tightly clustered leaves nearly hide the tubular flowers at the top of the stems.  Other plants are more airy than the bartsia—there is, for example, the lady’s mantle (Alchemilla), which has leaves like Spanish fans that lie open among the blades of grass while its flowering stalk leans upward for several inches.  The flowers of the lady’s mantle are tiny, but clumped, and have the appearance of yellow dots.  I see also a milkvetch that has silvery leaves created by their coating of long, stiff hairs that lie along the surfaces of the leaflets.  Heads of magenta, pea-like flowers radiate from the spray of leaves formed by this Samnitic milkvetch (Oxytropis pyrenaica).  The most intriguing plant is the alpine bellflower (Campanula alpina).  This small bellflower holds itself in a tight hunch.   It stands no more than three inches tall and has several thin stems that emerge in a ring from a green thatch of its own leaves.  Its flowers, which are few on each stem, dangle top-down around the entire plant. 

I have looked forward since beginning to plan a trip to Romania to long walks in alpine environments.  The bright blue forget-me-nots remind me of this wish.  Brilliant blue forget-me-nots that I saw on my first crossing of the Rocky Mountains more than 30 years ago were an instant attraction to the alpine.  The small blue flowers have delicate puckers just below the meeting of the petal lobes as if they awaited a kiss.  This little intimacy, as if the alluring blue color was not sufficient, draws one into a relationship with them.  The name forget-me-not is like a call to the memory of that relationship, and I find myself smitten again by the delicate flowers, the blue lobes of their petals around a ring of bright yellow in the center of the corolla, of the alpine wood forget-me-not (Myosotis alpestris) that we find tucked among the blades of grass.

We walk over the hump of a fellfield to a rock outcrop and more flowers.  Thunder closes on us; its booms become frequent.  Lightning flashes.  The sharp flashes draw one’s entire focus.  We are exposed on the tundra and turn to walk quickly back toward the cable car station.  A gentle rain begins and then stops.  Thunder and lightning continue.  The clouds above us begin to buzz as if they held hives of bees.  I look up for the bees or at least some visible machination above, but there is only cloud.  These clouds suddenly throw ferocious hail.  Large, hard pellets strike forcefully the ground and bounce high.  Fortunately, we are only 100 feet from the cable car station when the hail begins, although we take a few hard hits of hail before we reach the doorway.

The cable car station has a restaurant that is warm—too warm, like a steam bath—but we take a table near a window to wait through the storm.  People at other tables are eating or having beer or cappuccinos.  Adrian and I have tea and read through the storm.  It is the middle of the afternoon before we go out again.

*

Thunder continues to rumble to the south when we begin to walk again across the tundra.  Slowly, we walk down the slope to the west and then begin to edge our way around the backside of a hill.  On the rocky slope, I find paniculate saxifrage (Saxifraga paniculata), which has a many-layered rosette of tongue-like leaves.  Although small—hardly a centimeter at their widest—the leaves are spectacular—each has a margin of teeth, and these teeth are encrusted with a calcareous secretion.  The secretion surrounds a small pit at the base of each tooth. 

Rain begins as we climb the hill.  We tire of the rain and turn back toward the cable car station.  Far below us, there are bands of clouds like silk sashes in the valleys.

At the cable car station, a man gestures us through a door to the cement platform beside the waiting car.  No one else follows us, and we stand at the opening of the platform above the face of the mountain.  We stand behind a yellow-painted, metal railing and watch House Martins dart and swarm above us.  The ceiling of this departure cave, where it is crossed by a support beam, is lined by the mud nests of the martins, which swiftly fly in to visit.  The martins seem to slip through the small, round hole at top of the nest without landing.

Finally, we step into the cable car, the telecabina, less gracefully than a martin enters a nest, and the car sways, banging against the far side, then the near side, of its bay, becoming a pendulum at the force of our entry.  The car eases slowly out of the bay, and there is the momentary sense of dropping.


*The common name sainfoin used for Hedysarum hedysaroides and some other members of the legume family comes from the French for healthy hay.

Arriving in Sinaia

Sinaia sits on a hillside, and its train station is at the town’s lowest point.  We must walk up flights of steps in our heavy packs to reach the main street—it is a tough introduction to this Romanian mountain town.

When we achieve the main street, we find a shady park lies above the train station.  Children and families are at play.  Many people sit in the park’s large outdoor café.  The sidewalks of Sinaia are crowded.  The town is one of Romanian’s main tourist destinations—a mountain retreat, where King Carol I built castles.  Before we can explore the town, however, we need to find a place to stay.  We walk the few blocks to the town center, where our Lonely Planet guide described the location of a tourist information office.  We do not find the Lonely Planet’s tourist office, so we turn next to the Rough Guide for its suggested location of a tourist office, which is a few more blocks down the main street.

We find the second of the suggested tourist information offices, but it is closed on Sunday. Adrian is concerned that we didn’t search well enough for the tourist information office described in the Lonely Planet guide, which the book indicated would book rooms at a reduced rate.  I lean my pack against a building in the shade and sit down to use the pack as a backrest while Adrian returns to the center of town.  We haven’t yet had breakfast, and I’m very hungry. I walk to a nearby stand that is selling roasted corn on the cob.  The corn is over-cooked, but, despite this, the kernels are hard.

Adrian returns to confirm that the tourist information office described in the Lonely Plant guide no longer exists.  “I went up the steps of a house at the address,” Adrian says.  “There was an old woman sitting in the dark, and she motioned me in.  I walked into her living room—we couldn’t communicate, but I knew it wasn’t the right place.”

Fortunately, the closed tourist office where I’ve been sitting has an electronic guide to the hotels and pensions of Sinaia.  We select the pension option on the electronic monitor and pick a couple that are a few blocks away at the southern end of town.  Shouldering our packs and stepping into the sun, we walk down a sidewalk toward the far end of town and then turn uphill, where we see Pension Ana Marie on the outside of the corner.  Inside the pension, we don’t find anyone until Adrian goes in search.  She returns with a small, round-faced man, who has light-colored hair and a mustache.  He is very jovial and talks fast, speaking to us in a mix of English and French about the layout of the town and places to eat.  He spreads a map on the reception counter to tell us how to get into the mountains and how long each of the hikes requires.  We take our packs up to our room, which is still being cleaned.

*

In the late afternoon, we walk back to the train station to reserve tickets for our return in two days to Bucharest and then walk uphill toward the edge of town.  There are racecars parked along the street.  Earlier today and for the past couple of days, races have been held on the mountain road that comes into Sinaia.  Banners and signs in town advertise the ‘first annual” race.

We pass the Sinaia Monastery, which was established in 1690.  The current church on the monastery’s grounds is a lovely building, dating perhaps to the 19th century, with a frescoed interior.  The broad, curving dome of the ceiling has a fresco that appears to show Jesus with Merlin the magician, who holds a magic wand.  I drink cool water from an outdoor fountain.  On a sidewalk just above the monastery, we step around a large, dead rat.

At the edge of town, where narrow roads diverge into forest, we stop to rest.  The walk has been tiring, and the heat is strong.  There are several new houses and condominiums being constructed here.  The houses have a pseudo-Tyrolean style, and the condominiums have the ugly modernity of condominiums in every mountain town.

On our way downhill, we take a road to Pele’s Castle, which was built by King Carol I as a summer home.  We pass first an expensive, old hotel that is tucked among trees.  A security guard, speaking on his mobile phone, stands beside the hotel.  Sachie Sitwell in his 1938 book Roumanian Journey commented that Sinaia “possesses at least one excellent hotel, with bedrooms and bathrooms that are on par with the finest hotels in Europe, and a restaurant in which the hors d’oeuvre . . . are in a class by themselves in a land of excellent food.”  I note the hotel’s restaurant has a prominent sign declaring itself in class 1A, but this does not tempt me to sample the hors d’oeuvres.

Pele’s Castle has a beautiful setting in an opening on a wooded hillside. This “castle” is no redoubt; it has no towers with gun slits, no moat, and no fortified walls; it was simply a very wealthy man’s house. Terraces descend the hillside.  I imagine the immense garden parties they once held.

The wooded road below the castle is lined by kiosks that offer the worst sort of tourist junk—plastic toys, cowboy hats, cheap icons, souvenior coffee cups, and such before the road returns to the Sinaia Monastery, where I note King Carol I and his wife Elizabeth lived before they built Pele’s Castle.

*

On our way back to the Pension Ana Marie, we look for a restaurant with outdoor seating that does not have blaring music or street noise.  Pulsing techno music appears to be the standard for restaurants in Romania.  We search for restaurants that have the least offensive music played at the lowest volume.  The one we select this evening is along the main street and has both street noise and music, but at least both are at moderate volumes.

There have been signs throughout our trip warning of bears.  These were especially prominent this afternoon at the edge of Sinaia, where the bears must be particularly aggressive.  In homage to the power of bears, Adrian has a bear sandwich for dinner.  I begin to detect a slightly gravelly growl in her voice as the evening progresses.  Very powerful bears, I think.

Romanian Art

I.

As one of the great pleasures of life, art is also one of the best reasons to travel.  It is especially satisfying to explore art outside of Paris, New York, and London; beyond those centers, one finds artists that have stood outside the reach of art history surveys, but produced none-the-less beautiful and provocative works.  They are artists that help me connect a place and its times to broader movements in the arts.  To see modern art outside of Paris, New York, and London is also interesting because one sees more figurative art and so-called genre-painting, that evokes better the local scene than does abstraction and conceptual art (although there was plenty of abstract art in Bucharest).

In Romania, we have examined collections of the National Art Museum in Bucharest and the Brukenthal Museum in Sibiu.  Both were marvelous, but I found that I had too little time in them to grasp in any way the ‘art of Romania.’ When we were in the museums, I asked about catalogs for their collections, hoping that I would find a volume of pictures that would help to remind me about the art; however, there were no catalogs and even few books about the art in the collections.  In contrast to the museum shops of North American and western European cities, there are were no racks of postcard images of paintings and certainly no ‘on request’ digital reproductions of the art works.  The notes that I made in the museums are spotty and incomplete—but I try here to gather a few observations.

II.

On the Piata Revolutei in Bucharest, where a metal fence facing the street has placards with photographs and text that tell a story of the trade unions and velvet revolutions as well as the more violent overthrow of Ceausescu in Romania that led to the downfall of the communist East Bloc of Soviet influence in the late 1980s, the National Art Museum is housed in a former royal palace.  The gray monolith dates from the 1920s and now has European art in one wing and Romanian art in another. 

The pall of the entryway to the Romanian wing was mortuary.  A thin security guard stood when we opened the heavy doors, and he swept an arm toward the ticket window to give us direction.  We purchased tickets and walked up marble stairs to the galleries of Romanian Medieval art.  On the landing outside of these galleries, security guards were having a vibrant chat that quieted when they saw us.  One of them urged us through the closed double doors opposite the stairwell and another of the guards followed us.  The mood was faintly ominous—it was an oppressive sense that I had felt before in the East Bloc, especially when I went through Checkpoint Charlie many years ago into the East Berlin of the German Democratic Republic.

If the atmosphere of the museum’s entryway was like a mortuary, the gallery of Romanian Medieval art was like a tomb.  The stagnant, old air was thin and hot.  I struggled to breathe.

The Medieval of Europe was a thoroughly Christian time, and I have had no religious training. My university courses on world religions and anthropological perspectives of religion don’t really count as the kind of religious training that teaches one the body of stories and symbols of a particular religious faith.  I feel this lack of religious training when I am in museums in Europe that have significant collections of Medieval and Renaissance art, in which much of the imagery refers to biblical stories.  I am limited to admiring that art in formal ways rather than connecting to the narrative that the paintings were meant traditionally to evoke.  I am remarkably devoid of connection to the myths and images of the Christian tradition; thus, when I look at Medieval art in particular, which was thematically largely confined to a few scenes from the life of Christ and so stylistically limited that neither personal artistic expression nor the individuality of the sitter or scene come through, I feel lost.

The displays of Romanian Medieval art began with carved wooden doors from churches, illuminated Bibles, and embroidered fabrics.  I began to think about a carved door for my pseudo-Frank Lloyd Wright house, which is all planar surfaces, hard angles, and projecting eaves, and wondered where I could find a craftsman with the adze and chisel skills to sculpt a door.  Beyond these fascinating relics there were altarpieces and paintings.  The styles were pervasively Romanesque—stiff, highly stylized and highly conserved figures set against a background of gold leaf.  Any sense of natural setting or perspective was lacking.  Any sense that the figure portrayed was an individual was lacking and so was any expression of artistic individuality. Romanesque art reified selected images approved by the church in Constantinople and its later dispersed bishops. The many Madonna and child images are similar enough to one another that one might think they had been reproduced by computer—indeed, as they are today for sale in tourist shops and monasteries.

This Romanesque style of these earliest altarpieces from Romania is not surprising—it was the art of much of Medieval Europe and was pervasive largely throughout the Christian domain of the time.  What surpises me is the long persistence of the Romanesque in Romania.

When Giotto in 13h century Italy began to paint Madonnas with shadowed faces and bodies covered by folds of drapery—giving a hint of human form that went beyond outline and linear features—Romanesque art began to lose its appeal in the West.  It soon disappeared in Florence and other cities in which artists became intrigued by classical statues and the marvels of depth that could be simulated on canvas.

There is no artistic renaissance in late Medieval Romania—the Romanesque style persists through the 13th, 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries.  One feels the awesome power of the Orthodox Church in this persistence—in the absence of individual expression in art for centuries (at least in the art that remains)—or perhaps it was the isolation of Romania, caught as it was between the Black Sea and Carpathian Mountains, that kept out new ideas.

At least by the 18th century, Romanian art had expanded to include portraits of Orthodox bishops.  These are nearly surreal—bright faces enclosed by gray hair and beards and enclosed by black garb and set in a dark umber background.

III.

Had we known that Bucharest’s National Art Museum had an upper floor devoted to modern Romanian art, we would not have exhausted ourselves with the vast collection of religious art.  The air on the upper floor was no less like that of a tomb, hot and dead, than on the lower floor, but the art, in contrast, was engaging.

We went suddenly in one flight of stairs from Madonnas surrounded in gold leaf to Theodore Aman’s paintings of garden parties, villages by the sea, and orientalist fantasies of harems.  Asserting himself as the center of creation, Aman also interestingly painted his studio, showing a model posing and his paintings on the wall.  He is not as audacious as Courbet on this subject of the artist’s domain and power, but one sensed in Aman’s self-reflective paintings his image of himself as a creator, who found great pleasure in the place he had made.

The most powerful of the Aman paintings was “Return from the Ball,” which portrayed a woman, who was perhaps in her 30s, dressed in a ball gown and slumped in a chair.  She is alone in the room, except for a few white doves.  Two large bouquets of flowers add a certain pleasurable lushness to the scene.  The woman’s coat, with its pink lining showing, has been thrown on a chair next to her.  In the woman’s reflective moment, having just arrived home alone from the ball, one sees her wealth and privilege, but one feels her loneliness, her sense of promise unmet.  The painting has a cool pensiveness—the kind of mood that Whistler would later exploit with mastery.

In the next gallery, there are several paintings by Nicolae Grigorescu (1838-1907), who is often regarded as the great master of early modernism in Romania.  Grigorescu’s early paintings reminded me of Delacroix’s work.  They were dark, shadowy, and filled with action.  There was a horseman speeding across a plain with his sword raised to strike a combatant, and there were soldiers who moved across a battlefield.  I was surprised to read later that Grigorescu and others of his circle in Romania were rebelling against Delacroix given the similarity of their pictures to his—and this made me think that subtle change, especially as we look backward, in art can have seemed radical in its time; and every artist who makes a subtle stylistic shift must surely be possessed by his or her own sense of the radical gesture that underlies the novelty.

There change in Grigorescu’s work when he begins to paint en plein air, adopting a style more like that of the Impressionists.  He had learned this from a visit to France to study in the 1860s, when he met Millet, Corot, and Courbet.  His palette lightened and his brush strokes quickened, and he achieved a light and color similar to that of early Monet or Pissaro—I saw this especially in paintings of a young woman seated in a garden and also of a young woman walking on headlands above the sea.  Many of his subjects were like those of Millet and Corot—peasants and pastoral landscapes of the Romanian countryside—but Grigorescu’s paintings are lighter than the work of those French predecessors of the Impressionists, and he began to achieve an effect almost like that of Whistler in the simplicity and limited brushwork displayed.

Paintings by Stefan Luchan and Gheorghe Petrascu followed.  Luchan’s paintings of flower girls and flower bouquets from which the petals had fallen were bittersweet.  Petrascu adopted a more expressionist style in which his colors were smeared and his figures were outlined boldly in black.  And later there were cubist and constructivist games played on canvas by Marcel Iancu, who as a young man had collaborated with another young man, who later would be known as Tristan Tzara, the pappa of dada, on artistic and literary journals at the center of the Romanian avant garde.

In the galleries of Romanian modern art in Bucharest, we found exemplars for all the styles of European modern art.  In his book on modern art in Eastern Europe, S. A. Mansbach commented that Romanian artists looked primarily to France for training and maintained what was effectively a French aesthetic.  Mansbach contrasted this Romanian tradition of following the French with those of other Eastern European and Balkan countries in which western styles were appropriated and then adapted to intrinsic national and cultural norms.

IV.

In Sibiu at the Brukenthal Museum, we found also a handful of galleries filled with Romanian paintings.  These were primarily from the late 18th to early 20th centuries, and the most strikig were portraits and landscapes from the mid to late19th century.  I was struck especially by the portraits made by Misu Popp, whose work had the detail, delicacy, and psychological taunt of J.-D. Ingres.  There was also a painting of a bowl of cherries and peaches, sensually rendered by Aman, and there were several paintings by Grigorescu, although these did not have the quality of the paintings we saw in Bucharest.   Since seeing these paintings, I have wished only to have had more time with them.

Hotel views in Romania

An instructor I once had for a fiction writing class told me that he always photographed the views from hotel windows when he travelled. The photograph of the hotel view provided him with a scene that he could describe if he later wanted to set a story in the place where he had travelled.  It would be simple to begin a story, I sensed in the instructor’s words, if you began by describing the view from the hotel. 

The hotel view is one of the most basic memories of travel.  The memories of travel can be various.   There are memories of arrival and of departure, and these draw undoubtedly the strongest emotions, eliciting, as they do, the sensations of disconnection and wonder that one feels on arrival and the pleasures of both accomplishing the journey and turning toward home that one feels on departure.  The memory of the hotel view is different for it is one of solace.  The hotel is a temporary home, no matter how awful the room or the setting of the hotel, that provides at least the simulacrum of shelter, with its opportunity to set oneself off from the outside, to have a refuge from the foreign, and to have a private space for reflection and focus on one’s thoughts without intrusion.

The hotel view is a framed view. It sets the place in the window’s boundary and encapsulates the scene.  The framed hotel view is reinforced by repetition, for one inevitably walks to the hotel window to see the place, and one usually does this over and over.

The photographs are the views from our hotel rooms in Sibiu, Brasov, Gura Humorului, and Vatra Dornei.

Ploiesti Nord

We can smell it coming.  On a night train from the north, we’ve passed broad fields of sunflowers with bright yellow heads in the early morning sun, passed fields of corn that had stiff brown tassels, and passed dense fields of ochre wheat; now our approach to Ploiesti is marked by an oily and acrid industrial smell. Ploiesti, a city north of Bucharest, is at the center of Romania’s oil fields.  It is now the center of industrial ruins, many of which we pass on the train as we come into the city.  We see the frames of buildings, facades that lack windows, and naked metal towers.  At active industrial plants, cooling towers smoke.

It is a little after 7.00 a.m. when we arrive at Ploiesti Est, a train station at which we must change to a train to Ploiesti Vest.  It’s nearly an hour before our train next arrives, and we survey our options from the platform.  We would like to have breakfast and walk toward a knife and fork on a blue sign at the end of the station.  The restaurant has several round, plastic tables and two drink coolers beside the bar at the front. There is hard liquor behind the bar and beer in the cooler.  Several men sit at various tables—hardly any table has more than one man at it.  All of the men are drinking beer this morning for breakfast and smoking.  The room is blue with smoke.  I assume the knife and fork symbol on the sign outside refers to the tools needed to cut one’s way through the smoke. We plunge into the room with our packs on our backs and ask the woman at the bar for tea.  “No tea,” she says, “only coffee.”  She also says there is no hot water for us to make our own tea.

We walk to the front of the Ploiesti Est station, where there are several kiosks, but none of them have tea.  Adrian gets a cappuccino from a vending machine, and I buy fresh bread at a stand.

An old train creeps to platform 1 just a few minutes before our train is scheduled to depart.  We board the train, and it leaves a few minutes late.  There are several railroad workers in our car and few other people.  Our ride from Ploiesti Est to the Ploiesti Vest station is scheduled to take six minutes, and as our train slows for its first station, I pull on my backpack and walk to the door.  The name on the station reads Ploiesti Sud.  I’m unsure why this is not our stop.  “Ploiesti Vest?” I say inquiringly to a conductor near the car’s doors.  She shakes her head ‘no’ and points backward.

Adrian has remained at our seats and didn’t put her pack on for the stop.  “I think we’ve taken the wrong train,” I say, but Adrian tells me it was just the wrong station.  Our train continues down the tracks for several more minutes and, as it slows to a station, both Adrian and I pull on our backpacks and walk to the door.  Again, I inquire of the conductor:  “Ploiesti Vest?”

The conductor wags her finger back and forth, and then she points behind her.  Her words urge us off the train, and she points through the door toward the station—she even goes so far as to begin sweeping her arms as if she would dust us from the old train.

The sign on this station reads Ploiesti Nord. On the platform, the station mistress holds a signal stick, which has a green circle around a red circle at one end.  She wears her railroad uniform, a dark blue skirt and lighter blue blouse and a crimson cap that has a black brim.  A diminutive man in an orange vest stands next to the station mistress.

We walk up to the station mistress, who has seen us ushered from the train. “Ploiesti Vest,” I say.  “We need to get to Ploiesti Vest.”

The woman shakes her head ‘no’—even emphatically ‘NO!’  Her lips are pursed with the impossibility of our need.  She is simply, frankly dismissive.  We sense immediately that she does not want us at her station.

“Billetti,” she says to us.  We hand her our tickets and suddenly her expression shifts from uncaring to concerned.  We have a train to catch at Ploiesti Vest at 9.00 a.m.  The station mistress goes into her office, where she rifles through papers to find a schedule.  When she returns to us on the platform, she says, “You need taxi.”  Her eyes question us but also command.  She takes out her cell phone to make a call.  I look down and can’t help noticing that she is wearing high heels and shear stockings.  Her toenails are painted a very rich crimson that matches her hat.  No one answers her first phone call or her second.

The short man in the orange vest, who has been posing questions to the station mistress and making comments, turns to us to ask where we are from.  “Polonaise? Czech?” he inquires.

Adrian says, “From U.S.”  The man doesn’t understand her.  “From United States,” Adrian says.

“Ah, America,” the man says with surprise—he seems shocked that Americans would be at Ploiesti Nord, even that Americans would be lost.

The mistress-in-chief makes another phone call to ask for phone numbers for taxis.  The first person she calls gives her numbers that don’t work.  She calls finally her husband to ask him for the number of the taxi dispatcher, and she calls that number.  When the taxi dispatcher is on the phone she tells him she has “dua straine”—two foreigners who need a cab quick.

After she makes the call, the woman walks to the shade at the corner of the station.  There is a bit of bread on the ground, and a stray dog is biting at it.  The bread is only inches from the woman’s right ankle.  The dog snarls at us when we walk toward the woman and the bread.  I worry that the dog will bite the woman’s ankle in anger at our approach.

“Three minutes,” the station mistress says.  “Taxi here in three minutes.” 

I doubt this—never have I had a taxi arrive that quickly.

A well dressed man, who has been standing on the platform watching and listening, walks over to the station mistress to ask her where we are going.  On a piece of paper, she writes “Ploiesti Vest --> ??”  The two question marks are pregnant with dilemma.

“Sinaia,” we say.

“Ah, Sinaia,” the station mistress repeats and smiles broadly at our good choice.

Hardly three minutes have passed when I see a yellow taxi rush up the street to the front of the station.  The station mistress escorts us to the cab.  She tells the driver that we need to get to Ploiesti Vest, and he laughs.  He pops open the trunk for our packs.  The driver looks as if he has just been awakened.

It’s 8.35 a.m.  We have about 30 minutes before our next train departs.  The taxi takes us through a neighborhood of poor houses, down a backstreet, and past an industrial area.  We come to a long stoplight and turn left onto a main street that goes through the center of town.  The taxi tailgates a four-wheeled ATV that two boys ride without helmets.  I worry that we will slam into the two kids.  The taxi pulls out to pass the ATV, squeezing it to the side where cars are parked along the road.  The taxi rushes to the tail of a delivery truck, which we follow for several blocks.  Finally, the delivery truck driver extends his arm from the door to motion us around, and the taxi thrusts forward through an opening in the traffic.  At a stoplight the delivery truck pulls up beside us.  The light turns green, and our taxi accelerates quickly.  A woman is crossing the street in a crosswalk ahead of us, and our driver hesitates just slightly to allow her to pass.  Cars are parked at an angle along the right side of the street.  One car protrudes into the street, and we swerve just barely missing it.  I watch the time.  It is nearly 9.00 a.m.

A traffic light ahead of us is going from green to yellow.  Our driver accelerates through the light.  I can see the Ploiesti Vest train station ahead of us and pull out my wallet.  The taxi stops, I pay the driver, and we get our bags from the taxi’s trunk.  We walk around the station to the main platform to check where our train will arrive.  It will be on line 2, and, when I look up the line, I see a train approaching.  “That may be our train,” I say to Adrian, and we walk as quickly as our packs will permit down steps to an underpass and then up steps to platform 2 just as the train is pulling in.  The train is on platform 3.  Adrian walks down the platform to check with a signalman near the engine to make sure this is not our train.  It is not our train.  We take off our packs and breathe deeply of Ploiesti’s industrial air.  It feels good to have had a bit of adventure.