Monday, February 28, 2005

Editorial

Twice a month, we interns have to write two articles for a Canadian online journal, regarding work we are doing in our organisations and the situation in our respective countries. Most of us dread these articles and write them as quickly as possible. I usually just end up recycling old blog entries and then forget about it.

However, we each have to take a turn as editor. Myself, Kat in the Gambia and Naseem in Kenya were given the task of writing the last editorial. It was initially difficult for us as we were in three different countries with three different cultures and three different jobs. We each wrote a section and Kat did a wonderful job at editing them all together.

In the beginning, we were Young Professionals. Bags packed, and country profiles in hand, we set out upon what we hoped would be the ultimate experience. But did we have any idea what we were in for?

On the one hand, we had some vague notion of the internship we were undertaking, but on the other hand we were sketchy on the details regarding our work environment, our new countries of residence and so forth. That feeling may have stayed with us for quite a while. Most of us probably didn't come with any notions of drastically changing the world, but rather were probably concerned with being useful and being engaged in something worthwhile. The definition of “worthwhile”, however, was altered with time to better reflect our circumstances.

Throughout the first couple of weeks (and for many, months) we spent our time struggling to orient ourselves on both the personal and professional front. At times we found ourselves basking in giddy wonderment in the fact that we were actually here, in this exotic locale, living an experience that many at home found enviable. Other occasions, by contrast, found us frustrated and asking ourselves: “Is this it?” Whether positive or negative aspects dominated our placements, many of us realized that “human rights” and “development” function very differently in the classroom than they did in practice. However, there were many lessons to be drawn out of the ashes of our disillusionment.

On the personal front, our internships also included realizing to what degree we could assimilate into our communities, learning how to balance this barrier of being a foreigner with being a resident of this new society. Whether in Europe, Africa or Asia, part of our experience was based on living in a new country and new culture. Most of us had to deal with languages, customs and institutions very different from our own. Sometimes it was quirky and cute. Sometimes we wanted to lash out irrationally.

There were times where it may have felt as though we were making no progress, either at work or in our daily lives. Whether due to cultural shock or just plain exasperation, we wondered if and what we were really contributing.

As time passed, however, adjustments were made. Perhaps it was when we could finally have a simple conversation with a shopkeeper in the local language that didn't involve just nodding and smiling politely, or when we could pay for something without analyzing every piece of money and counting every zero. Progress was slow at times. But progress it was, nonetheless.

This progress is also echoed in our professional lives. Perhaps we asked ourselves if our work really was worthwhile, if it was worth it to leave our former lives and live half way across the world. Now, at the end of experiences, we realize how far we've come. Whether it was setting the foundations for a renewable project, completing two books or teaching our boss with multiple professional degrees how to use the “save as” function properly on the computer, each of us contributed in our own way.

As that last day of the internship comes and goes, and bags wait – packed and ready – near the door, are we ready to reflect on the passage of the last six months? What kinds of words will we use to paint our portraits of experience to those waiting for us back home? Will we be able to do justice to the highs and lows, or will something get lost in the translation?

We leave with local language greetings still tripping on our tongues. Sights, smells and sounds once foreign are now inextricably woven into our realities. Whatever (and whomever) we have loved, hated, or noted in passing has been added to our story book – whether it be a chapter or a mere footnote. Some of us were moved to tears by the injustice we found in our corner of the world, and some of us were moved to tears by the sheer boredom in our corner of the office.

Whether our position has helped us figure out what we want to do with or lives, or simply helped us figure out what we never want to do with our lives, we have learned a little bit more about life outside Canada, and a lot more about ourselves.

And perhaps for some of us, we are not only heading home, but leaving home as well…

Weather

The weather hates us.

It's freezing. And we got a mini-blizzard last night.

Well, only about ten centimetres of snow, but the wind was strong. I could have been back in Canada.

Everyone keeps teasing me: "You're Canadian, you should be used to this!"

I may be used to it but it doesn't mean I have to like it!

Birthday

Normally my birthday sucks. It always falls on March break at home and I'm usually spending it home, alone. Since it's a holiday, no one even remembers to wish me happy birthday.

This year was different. I went to Arad to visit a girlfriend and we went out with some friends to Mooskea. We tried to go the last time I was in Arad but they asked for a 100,000 lei cover charge: quite expensive by Romanian standards.

However, it's a good bar and we wanted to have fun, so off we went Friday night. It was completely empty! (Turns out there was a "Playmate" party at another club that night). We used the opportunity to get to know the bartenders and DJs.

We told them we were celebrating my birthday and they kept bringing us drinks. We thought they were being extra nice to us...until we got the bill. I guess "bringing alcohol you didn't ask for" doesn't always mean "on the house".

We went back Saturday night and it was packed. They remembered us from the night before and gave us a great table. Until the people who reserved the table came. They were late, so the management assumed that they weren't going to show. We got a new table close by, but they stared at us all night.

A few guys came up and tried to dance with us. One obviously learned English from watching pornos, because the only English he knew was "You have a really hot body...it's coooool". We danced, I laughed and it was all good.


Snowstorm Posted by Hello


Snowstorm Posted by Hello


Snowstorm Posted by Hello


Snowstorm Posted by Hello


"Barbie" Posted by Hello


Me and a guy who kept trying to dance with us all night Posted by Hello


Midnight, February 27th. They played Deep Dish - Flashdance Posted by Hello


Dancers Posted by Hello


DJ Vali Posted by Hello


Mooskea on Saturday night Posted by Hello


The bathroom. There was a sheet of plexi-glass dividing the male and female halves. To look in the mirror, you had to look on the wall in the opposite bathroom. And, I discovered after I took this picture, if you stand at exactly the right angle, you can also see *into* the bathroom. Posted by Hello


DJ love part 1 Posted by Hello


Bartender love part 2 Posted by Hello


Bartender love part 1 Posted by Hello


Mooskea in Arad Posted by Hello

Saturday, February 26, 2005

Happy birthday to me!

I'm spending the weekend with my girlfriends in Arad. Drinking, dancing and general good times alround.

It's the big 24.

Also, a happy birthday to my friends Tim (23) and Ricardo (25).

Lots of other cool people were born on my birthday too! Lucky them!

Friday, February 25, 2005

Typical Romania

When things seem too good to be true, they probably are.

The weather was great. Perfect, in fact, for late February. Warm, sunny and cheerful.

Then Mr. Murphy and his damn law had to go flexing their muscles.

The view outside my window looks like a stereotypical image of south-east Europe. The sky is this sickly yellow colour and it's snowing a mixture of sleet and rain. It's gross. I hope the weather improves this weekend, at least.

Thursday, February 24, 2005

Police

Just how everyone likes to be woken up: by the police.

I was cooking myself breakfast when the doorbell rang. I ignored it.
Ring ring ring ring ring.

Finally it stopped.

I was in the bathroom when it started again. "Persistent little guy" I thought to myself.

I went to the intercom:
"Da?"
"Incomprensible Romanian"
"Nu vorbest Romanest"
"Incomprehensible Romanian"
"I don't speak Romanian"
"Police"

So I opened the foor, fully prepared to see an imposted.

No, it really was the police! He asked me if I owned the apartment. With bad Fromanian (French-Romanian) and even worse body language, I conveyed that I was renting the apartment from my boss' wife's mother. He showed me a piece of paper with a name. I didn't know who it was. I told him the name the apartment should be registered under. He told me he was going to check elsewhere in the building.

I've lived in Timisoara since August and I've only seen police a handful of times. Today was a bonus. I've started talking the tram everywhere and have never seen a ticket controller. Although the tickets are quite cheap, I was debating whether it was worth it to purchase the tickets, or should just hop on like the rest of the residents?

I bought tickets today and just my luck, the ticket controllers came. Seems everyone else had tram cards. I guess I was lucky this time.

Sunday, February 20, 2005

Posting adventures

Last month, my minidisc player died on me.

Yes, my wonderful, beautiful silvery friend, which has been almost like an extension of my own body, just stopped working. Luckily, I had the foresight to:
a) get a three year warranty when I bought it
b) bring a CD player with me to Romania.

Unfortunately, said waranty is finished at the end of February (but never fear. If they can't repair it after 60 days, I get a free player on the 61st day. I love Future Shop!). I had one day in which to post it back home before I went to Turkey. I went to the post office with my minidisc player all neatly packed up and asked for a padded envelope.

Most of you know about my ongoing war with the Romanian postal service. Apparently, to mail packages home (and this was packaged in a 10-pack diskette box, so you can imagine how small it was) I had to go to the big central post office. I didn't have time for that, so when I returned to the office, I asked my cowkrer, Eugen, if he could do it for me.

This is the email he wrote me while I was away:

To post a minidisk from Romania to Canada isn't easy!
...Everything started when Karla asked me to post for her a minidisk, last Thursday.
I promised to do so.
She told me that Central Post provides the service.
Friday I went there.
After queuing, I was told that the office serves only internal mail and have to move at the external mail office.
After queuing in that place, I was told that the minidisk cannot be posted from there (only simply letters) and have to go at the Post Office in the main Railstation of the town.
I went to the Railstation Post and after queuing I was told that the custom officer shall check the minidisk and he works only three hours a day, from Monday to Friday, mornings only.
As it was already afternoon, I returned Monday morning.
After queuing in the Railstation Post, I was told to go at the next floor, where Customs is, deal with the officer and after to return for posting.
I went to the next floor.
After queuing to Customs, the officer simply stamped the envelope and I returned to the first floor (he told me that perhaps he knows Karla, as for him sounds popular this Canadian girl).
After queuing, I was told that the envelope isn't good, need to be a special one, with plastic protection, which I can buy from the shop opposite to the railstation (17000 Lei / the previous, paper made, costed 12000 Lei).
I went to the shop, bought the correct envelope (of course, after queuing), I went to Customs (of course, after queuing, the officer stamped this new envelope) and I happy entered to the Post Office...
After filling the expedition form, I was told about the cost: 716000 Lei.
As I not had such money in cash with me, I went home and SMS Karla if deserves to send it so expensive.
She answered YES (that was Tuesday) and I went to the Railstation Post with the money, the plastic envelope stamped by the custom officer and the minidisk inside...
It was Wednesday morning, back in the Railstation Post, finally after debating that addresses should be written on the envelope on the same side and cannot have a delivery confirmation by signature from Canada (that service not operates), I SENT IT!!!
So, my last queuing was this Wednesday morning, almost a week after last Thursday, when everything started...
I guess now that I deserve a drink from Karla (after several moves in a triangle of Central Post, Rail Post and home), queuing everywhere along few days.
Of course, plus the amount directly spent, in total 745000 Lei.

It's a long story

My Romanian friends know now to dread these four words.

"Hi, what did you do last night?"
"It's a long story..."
"Oh no. Just please tell me this does not involve schizophrenics, crazy old men or the like"

Last night, I left work much later than I intended. I wanted to go home, eat and then sleep. As I walked out of the building, I noticed a crowd of people at the far end of the street. Then I saw what was making them gape.

Huge metal...things.

I still don't know what they are. I walked up the street to the crowd (well, if you consider groups of two or three drunken men a crowd) and surveyed what was rolling down the street.

Two huge (I'm talking five metres high by ten metres long) canisters on trucks. They were so high that there was a man on each cannister raising the power lines so they could pass under.

I asked the others if they knew what they were. No one spoke English. I had to settle with "Ce e asta?" but no one knew anything. One person told me it was for agriculture. Another just gave me a blank stare.

I thought they were nuclear reactors or WMDs. Later on, a friend suggested that they were for holding beer.

Soon, a young man on a bicycle road up and started talking pictures. I regretted not having my camera with me, so I asked if he spoke English. He didn't, so I tried communicating in Romanian. I ended up giving him my email address and asking if he would please send me the pictures.

He asked where I was from. I prepared for the onslaught of "My neighbour/nephew/cousin is in Canada" but instead he invited me to a party.

Through a lot of body language, he explained that he's an artist and that he and his friends were having a small get-together and I was welcome to come.

It was 11:30 pm. The streets were deserted. I was curious but also reluctant. He seemed nice, and as he hadn't tried to touch me or ask for my phone number (and the fact that the party was 20 metres away) I agreed.

We walked there, talking the whole time. He led me through a door into a coutyard and then through another door. Inside were about ten people smoking, drinking beer, talking and laughing. Except for two people, no one spoke English.

I still had a great time. They called me "Quebec" the entire evening. I guess "Karla" is close enough to "Quebec".

It's always a pain describing where I'm from. If I say "east of Quebec", no one knows where it is. When people ask if I come from the French part or the English part, I say "Bilingual" because New Brunswick is the only bilingual province in Canada. I don't like confusing people.

I had to speak Romanian almost the entire time. They laughed at my bad pronounciation, lack of grammar and accent but it was good-hearted laughter and I didn't feel embarassed. When they asked if I was a student and I responded "Nu, sunt terminat", everyone burst out laughing. Apparently, "terminat" means "terminated" in the dead sense, not finished. Even I laughed at myself!

I stayed there till 3:30 in the morning. There was traditional Hungarian folk music, Russian gypsy music, some Bach and even Pachabel's Cannon. Towards the end of the evening, they played traditional French music and people got up and started twirling each other around.

I had actually seen the work of one of the artists there. When Delphine arrived, we went downtown together and checked out a gallery which featured pictures of cows, sheep and bull terriers with chandeliers (seriously). While I didn't much care for the exhibit, the painter is very nice and I got to see other examples of his work which I preferred much more.

One of the girls was Serbian and spoke good English. We started joking about my bad Romanian and then we made a deal. For every swear word that she would teach me in Serbian, I would teach her something in Swedish.

I learned a tonne of words last night but I can't remember a single one. I hope she remembers mine!

They invited me to a movie tonight by some Russian director. I'm looking forward to it but I bet it's Russian with Romanian subtitles. We'll see!

Saturday, February 19, 2005

Georgia

I was cheated out of my Georgia experience.

I'm bitter. Very bitter, in fact.

On the last day of the conference, I called the airline to change my tickets. Seeing as I hadn't arranged my Georgia travel yet, I couldn't give them a fixed date of return. They gave me five days in which to finalise my travel.

When I got to Ankara, Cem and I spent the next four days trying to arrange travel to Tbilisi. We went to different travel agencies and no one could give me any info for flights. No charters, and the only Turkish airline flight left before the conference started and flew back a few days after the conference was done. Oh, and costed 450 euros.

So we went to bus stations. No one had any itineraries. The closest we got was at one office, they told me I could take a nine hour bus trip to Trabzone and then *possibly* find a bus to Tbilisi from there.

Riiiiight.

They couldn't guarantee service, especially this time of year. Half of Turkey was paralised from snow storms and they said bus service was going to be delayed.

I had to make a quick decision. It wasn't helping matters any that Cem kept telling me stories of the PKK kidnapping and raping female tourists. When I said that I hadn't heard anything on the news about that, he told me that these incidents were so common that the media stopped reporting them.

I had to make a snap decision. It was the last day to make my tickets home, so I chose certainty over uncertainty and booked them for February 14th.

A few days later, I received an email from the Spanish intern in Tbilisi, who was in the mountains the week before and had no email access. He told me that as soon as he had gotten to Trabzone, someone had asked him where to go and then led him to the Georgian bus. However, he also could have been lucky that time.

On the flight to Istanbul, the man I sat next to told me that there had been two avalanches in eastern Turkey.

When I got back to work, I checked my email. Apparently the Georgian organisation didn't read the last email that I sent to them (the one telling them to send all correspondance to my webmail account and not my work address). Turns out that there was another delegate coming from Ankara and they thought we should arrange our travel together.

To say that I am disappointed and bitter is an understatement.

Friday, February 18, 2005

Bucharest

I wrote this at the Amsterdam Cafe, waiting for my food to be served, while we celebrated Maud's birthdya with her Romanian language class. It's written with a sense of humour and satire, so please don't take it seriously.

Bucharest is like that old prostitute crazy lady who is always at the end of your street. Sure, she's loud, obnoxious and screams unintelligible things at you, and you may even often wish that she wasn't there, but the times you've passed by her "spot" and she was missing, admit it, you felt a pang of longing. Deep down, you have a secret affection for her tight leopard print skirt long skirt and beautiful jewelery.

Bucharest is loud. It's also ugly, but I will always remember it for being loud. Horns are constantly honking, as if the drivers are trying to announce "My dick is bigger than yours!" An hour after I landed, a police blockade went by. Police sirens, a voice screaming unintelligibly into a megaphone and an entourage worthy of a member of the royal family (and not a minor politician). A lady in the crowd told us it was Basescu but apparently he was in Moscow that day. I thought I had arrived in Hades instead of the "Paris of the East".

Bucharest is ugly but it does have its charms. Interspersed amongst the old grey blocky Communist architecture are some real gems. French Neoclassical offices, Orthodox churches hidden like flowers between weeds, small cobbled streets curving silently into new neighbourhoods... However, the majority *is* ugly. Everything is grey, blocky and concrete. Some buildings are abandoned and left to crumble, like modern day ruins. The streets are uneven, covered in dirty black snow. now I know why so many people were wearing black: it doesn't show the dirt.

Clichees abound here. We're sitting in a popular eatery frequented by expats. outside, shiny new cars line the streets. Not a single Dacia to be seen. Street children diligently wash and polish the cars in hopes that their owners will reward them favourably. One boy, in a knit sweater and tuque, has been working on one car for almost the entire duration of my evening. Is the car that dirty or does he think the car's ownder is that rich? An older boy paces back and forth. Is he the leader? He's good looking in a roguish sort of way. I look at him and he looks at me. He helps a patron park his car and is rewarded with 10,000 lei for his efforts. The smile on his face tells me he's happy. Everyone has their own way of making a living, I guess.

This club is called "Amsterdam". Supposedly, it's modelled after a genuine Dutch establishment. It's generic, in a classy sort of way. Soft contemporary jazz-rock is piped through the speakers (even though it's from Winamp and not a band) and beautiful people sit together at tables smoking cigarettes. This could be Amsterdam or Bucharest or even my city in New Brunswick.

This feels less like Romania than a nameless concrete city. Piata Unirii could be any mid-sized city's equivalent Times Square. There's nothing that really distinguishes it to make it special. Sure, they have that wedding cake monstrosity, the concert hall and significant buildings from the Revolution but it was rare that I felt the warmth that I got from Timisoara and Arad. I've read articles saying that Bucharest is an untapped resource and the latest "it" spot for trendy travellers. I don't know how much I agree with this. Personally, I couldn't wait to get back to my beloved Timisoara.


Maud and I celebrating her birthday at the Amsterdam Cafe Posted by Hello


Busts of Lenin at the Communism museum (very highly recommended, except no English translations). This one's for you, Rob. Posted by Hello


A piata whose name escapes me right now. Victorei, maybe? Posted by Hello


An abandoned building Posted by Hello


The hostel where I stayed (much recommended) Posted by Hello


The boulevard Posted by Hello


The palace in the daytime Posted by Hello


Skating rink in Piata Unirii Posted by Hello


Again through the trees Posted by Hello


This boulevard was made deliberately 6 metres longer than Les Champs Elysees Posted by Hello