University of Virginia Library

Romania: A Nice Place To Visit

—ed.

By Charles K. Ribakoff II

Special to The Cavalier Daily

One of the first things you
notice about Romania is that the
women all wear ill-fitting miniskirts
and refuse to shave their legs. This
is, perhaps, a comment on the
whole society: a desire to be
Western, with an inability to carry
it off.

I'm sitting in the bar of the
Hotel Victoria in Bucharest, drinking
the quite terrible local red wine
and feeling very much like a
mysterious foreign correspondent
or spy or something. Forgive the
pretension; Romania is a place that
breeds intrigue and fantasy. I guess
one must do something to rationalize
a country that prints three
dollar bills and has no showers.

Romania is a very sad place. I
stood on a street corner downtown
at rush hour last night for nearly an
hour, and saw only two people
smile. It's reminiscent of Pepperland
after the attack of the Blue
Meanies. A girl I met told me she
would rather die than go on living
here; she will never leave. Another
girl I met has been waiting for 14
years to get permission to emigrate;
such permission rarely comes.

This must have been a very
beautiful country, once. Walking
through the city you come upon
random palaces, opera houses, elaborate
museums, and other beautiful
buildings. Today they all belong to
the People instead of the Kings who

built them; they may fall down
tomorrow. Everything smells like it
hasn't been cleaned in about 20
years (this includes most Romanians).
This may be because nothing
has been cleaned in 20 years. In my
hotel, there is a beautiful red carpet
throughout the lobby and stairs
(the elevator has been out of
commission for a year and a half,
they tell me). The carpet is covered
in walking areas by something that
looks like an endless towel (the
kind you see in bathrooms of cheap
restaurants, and pylons force you
to walk on it instead of the carpet.
This sort of sums up the whole
scene.

Gay Facade

But the city tries to put on a gay
facade, and at times succeeds. The
Government has put up a couple of
beautiful tourist hotels, one of
which is almost identical to the
Paradise Island Hotel in Nassau. It
even takes Diners' Club cards. The
restaurant is the Palace Athena is
fantastic, and the prices are rather
interesting. A meal of Russian
caviar, soup, a salad, a fantastic
filet, two wines, coffee and desert is
about 50 lay. This is as much as
most Romanians make in three
days. It is about two dollars and
fifty cents. But, walking back from
the restaurant, you are greeted by
the street sweepers, old women
wielding straw brooms, who ask in
cracked voices for an American
cigarette or two (worth about 25
cents each on the black market),
and the encompassing guilt kills
most of dinner.

The water in the city, which is a
curious brown, gravelly substance,
is turned off a couple of nights a
week. Last night was my turn to
take a shower (there are two in the
hotel for about 100 of us) and their
turn to turn off the water, so today
I'm especially perplexed at the
Peoples' Republic.

State Opera

Our first night here we went to
the State Opera, which costs about
12 cents. While there, we met a
couple of girls, one of whom turned
out to be the Director's daughter.
Although she, as one of the better
off people in Romania, has more
material things and a higher position
than anyone else we met, she
too was anxious to leave. The
opera, Othello done in (of all things,
Romanian) was very well done and
impressive, but very incongruous in
a country that retires workers with
a family of four on a pension of
about 15 dollars a month.

This should all be placed in
perspective, I suppose. Before the
Communist revolution right after
World War II, Romania was a
monarchy, and in even worse shape
than it is in now. At the time of the
revolution, someone tells me, about
90 per cent of all the babies born
were dying of starvation within six
months. So improvement — even
drastic improvement — is being
made.

Like Americans

Romanians like Americans better
than any other Europeans I've
encountered. As one of the few
American students to visit the
country since the revolution, I was
given something like a hero's
welcome by Bucharest students.
They idealize and idolize Americans
in much the same way that
American students idealize life in
Russia and Red China.

The students there have a
fantastic deal. The state pays all
their expenses, they get better
apartments than most families have
(the state handles all residence
distribution), and they get the best
education the country can provide.
For this they are something less
than grateful — three girls asked me
to marry them so they could get
out of the country. They are sure
all Americans are rich, drive around
in Mustangs, and live in a sort of
sunny fantasyland they would very
much like to join. I found they
know more about the capitalist
system than I do; I know more
about Marxism than they do.

Communication with the students
is difficult. Romanian is a
sort of confused combination of
French, Italian, Pig Latin, and
Spanish, with a mixture of Russian
idioms, which I don't speak, even a
little bit. While nearly everyone in
Romania learns English in school
(because most outstanding technical
journals and books are written
in English), they don't get a whole
lot of chance to practice. Still,
there is a feeling of community
among us, and we can get most
thoughts back and forth. They
continually ask disconcerting questions
like "I wonder how many
microphones there are in the
room." (I quickly learn my first
Romanian: "I am an American
citizen. Please let me speak to the
Ambassador.")

Nixon's Visit

President Nixon's visit is announced
while I am in Bucharest.
The students are curious about it. I
ask what kind of a reception he will
get, and am told by one of my
student friends "It will be fantastic.
Everyone is curious, and we are all
getting cards from the (Communist)
party telling us to be at certain
places and yell certain things. And
everyone is getting the day off."
When I express doubt that this is
really happening, he shows me his
post card from the party. Coincidentally,
perhaps, the number of
people said to have turned out for
Mr. Nixon's visit is about equal to
the number of Communist Party
members in the area.

It is relatively easy to get
arrested in Romania, as I found
out. Romanian police don't like
American students much better
than do American police. I had 2
brushes with Siberia, or whatever
they're using to store hardened
criminals in these days.

People's Gun

I was in the Peoples' Art
Museum, a fantastic museum. Leaning
on a glass case to read a rare
manuscript, I was somewhat disturbed
when the case broke. But I
was not nearly so disturbed as the
Peoples' Guard, who, brandishing a
particularly unfriendly looking Peoples'
gun, informed me in broken
pig latin that breaking the Peoples'
glass was frowned upon. I smiled,
and nearly went into cardiac arrest
on the spot. I kept thinking of the

comic strip The Wizard of Id, and
the character in the dungeon who is
always complaining about the gruel.
I have never before identified with
him. Fortunately, a well-placed
package of American cigarettes saved
that day.

Work For CIA

The next day I was taking
pictures of people in Bucharest's
department store. Romanians, who
can't afford anything, come to look
at the things in the stores. Taking
pictures in the Peoples' Department
Store is also not encouraged,
another man with another gun old
me. "You probably work for the
CIA." He spoke to me in, French as he
took my film.

There's something universal
about officers of the law.

I was not very sorry to leave
Romania.

Watching Planes

One of the most popular things
to do in Bucharest is to go to the
airport and watch the planes come
and go. It represents a sort of
freedom, I guess. I was taken to the
airport by about 20 students, all of
whom made me promise to write
and send books and come back. As
I cleared Customs, they started
singing, in perfect English, Dylan's
"We Shall Overcome." It was a very
heavy moment.

I was ushered onto a Romanian
Airlines plane by a particularly
unattractive stewardess.

One of the last things you notice
about Romania is that the women
wear ill-fitting miniskirts and refuse
to shave their legs.

Copyright By
Charles Ribakoff
1969