Romanian Vignettes

There is a system of heating and hot water in Romania, whereby for the (many) blocks of flats, there is a centralised building where they heat the water and pump it around the buildings, providing hot water all year long and heating in the winter. The heating gets turned on round about October 1st and turned off again in April.  (Round here anyway, down in some of the warmer parts of the country these dates may be different).

Now this system would actually be quite a good one, were it not for the fact that the facilities and infrastructure are old and they've never been updated since the communists built them.  So there is massive inefficiency, and loads of leaks and so on.  So the amount of money you pay each month for your heating and hot water is not related that closely to how much you've used.  Because of this most people try to get off the system and install their own gas boiler water/heating system, so that they only pay for what they use.

Our apartment was already off the grid when we bought it, and has been for something like 10 years, but because the pipes run through our flat we still have to pay something.  (When we first moved in they were all clad in insulation so we didn't pay that money, but then the law changed, so we took off the insulation - since we were paying anyway.  But I digress).

Last week, the one remaining apartment on our side of the building that still used the central system, installed their own system, and someone from the building came round telling us that we could finally get rid of the pipes and stop paying the (ridiculously large) monthly amount of money.  As ours is the lowest apartment in the building (one floor up above some shops), it was decided that it made sense if the pipes would be cut and capped in our apartment.

So, last week the blokes came around and sawed off all ten pipes that ran through our apartment, bottom and top, and welded them shut.  It was a surprisingly quick and not too disruptive a job. Until another resident of the building from some floors higher up on the other side, came in to see what was going on and got very upset because she said that the system went up one side of the building and then back down the other side, so when the heating was turned on (a) they wouldn't get any; and (b) we'd all get flooded by all the water going round the system.  

Now, it is at this point that the story becomes a truly Romanian* story. Because when we asked the workmen if it was possible that she was right, their answer was not "No, that's not a problem, we would never have cut these pipes if that could happen", but instead.  "Hmm.  We have no idea.  I guess we'd better check". 

(*By which I mean a story that takes place in Romania, rather than a story that is Romanian in its ethnicity :-) )

[Turns out that they did need to do some work up on the top floor to ensure that this problem didn't arise, but it wasn't the absolute clusterfuck that it would have been if they'd needed to re-install the pipes that they had just removed.  But it is a good job that the neighbour checked]

Things that irritate me about Romania

(part umpteen in an occasional, but almost certainly infinite, series)

If you try and change money here they only accept perfectly pristine mint-condition bank notes. Any rumpledness? Sorry, can't accept it. The slightest imperceptible tear in the side? Nope. Any indication that the note has in fact been used at all and has not just been issued by the European Central Bank? No can do.

Why? For the love of god, why? They're still legal tender, they're still banknotes. I'm not talking about something that's been torn into pieces and sellotaped back together, I'm talking about perfectly healthy banknotes that get rejected like they've been taken from a Monopoly set. Romania is not quite the only country that pursues this ridiculous policy, but in Europe, it only seems to be here and Bulgaria. I've asked bank employees why they refuse these notes and you either get a look that says "It's internationally normal for us to do this, you fool" (that's from people who've never travelled and don't realise that it really isn't), or "Sorry, that's just the rules. No idea why, but we've been told". It must be a national law, since it's across the board - every bank and change office follow the same ridiculously strict and unnecessary guidelines. It drives me bloody mental. (As may be obvious)

My Day in Court

Last week I went to court. I wasn't in the dock, you'll be sorry to hear, but instead I was there as a witness. I realised that I'd never actually been in a court before, not even as a heartless gloater/ghoul/audience member (is there a word for people who just go and watch court cases?) so this was a vaguely exciting moment.

I had received my summons in the post telling me to be in Court room 100 at 8.30am in Miercurea Ciuc's impressive Palatul Justiţie, so I duly showed up there right on time, wandering through the empty hallways until I located room 100 (sadly not Room 101). The only people visible in the entire building were four members of the Jandarmerie (Jandarms?). I'm not entirely sure of the function of the jandarmerie - like many European countries Romania has a lot of seperate police forces who all seem to have slightly different responsibilities, but what those responsibilities are seems a bit vague to me. In this case the jandarmerie are obviously charged with policing the courthouse building. Anyway there were four of them hanging around, a bit bored, and three of them looked about 18 (though obviously the usual proviso applies that as I'm knocking on a bit these days, nearly all police-type-people look about 18). Since there was nothing to do they were pissing about a bit, pretending to throw one another off the balcony, until finally the older one told them to stop it as the bloke sitting on his own outside room 100 (that's me) was watching. Eventually he obviously gave them all permission to go and sit in the jandarm room or whatever it was since they all disappeared into the room opposite 100 and started listening to manele.

I had peeped into the courtroom to check I wasn't supposed to go in, but there were just two people in there looking stern, and anyway, there was a paper posted up which listed the 6 cases that morning and mine was number 3 so I figured I just had to wait. Occasionally an announcement came over a speaker which was in the corridor I was sitting in, but despite the fact that I was the only person in the area it was still entirely indecipherable. Partly this was because of the manele emanating from next door, but partly it was because it just sounded like there was some kind of mysterious and geographically misplaced peat bog lying inconveniently between the microphone being spoken into and the speaker transmitting the sounds.

Eventually the one remaining jandarm came over and asked me what I was waiting for and when I explained, he told me to go and wait in the court room (it quickly became apparent that whenever anyone bothered to go into the courtroom their case was just taken up, and then left again when they were done). So I sat down, listened to some bloke telling some long complicated story and be excused, and then it was my turn. Then of course we had a problem. This was clearly a process that had to be dealt with in Romanian, and while I can understand a fair amount of Romanian, I rarely have to use it and so my productive Romanian is, for want of a better word, shit. The judge (I think she was the judge, she was the woman behind a big desk, though she wasn't wearing some stupid wig as I have been led to expect is de rigeur for the judging profession) asked if I spoke Romanian, and I was forced to reply "nu" (I would rather have said, "well, I know a bit, and I can kind of get by in a restaurant or bar, and you know I can stick Spanish words in whenever I don't know the Romanian, but in general my Romanian is not really at an acceptable level for courtroom interaction" - but of course I didn't know how to say all that in Romanian, so I stuck with "nu").

Somehow, though, within about two minutes, and with seemingly no action on the part of either the judge or the stenographer/assistant/other woman, a third woman appeared who did in fact speak English. I can only imagine there is some kind of hidden language panic button which someone pressed and it made some kind of English language bat sign in the building, which brought her running (either that or the jandarm realised that she'd be needed and had gone off and found her)

So, we were all set - first question "Do you believe in god?" Again, I could have gone a for a long winded response to this, which would have gone all round the houses of agnosticism, but I again plumped for a simple "nu" (showing willing by not relying on the translator for all my utterances). This foxed them a little, and everyone looked uncertainly for a moment at the bible lying there, and elected not to pick it up. The interpretor (channeling the judge) then started to ask me to repeat the lines "I promise to tell the truth..." at which point I took over and finished the sentence for her (since it is well established that 62.7% of all TV programmes take place either entirely or partially in courtrooms, my lack of actual experience was more than made up for). When I finished, there was an awkward little silence, before the judge asked the interpretor to ask me to finish with the words "So help me God". Which seemed a little weird, since I'd just told them I didn't believe in him/her/it. They obviously realised this, because the next thing I was told was "and you know not telling the truth is a felony, right?", which I assured them I did.

Finally we got to the questions pertinent to the case, which were all very easy (a few months ago, I was in a small car shunt, with another car which had come from my left at a crossroads in the back alleys near the flat. As he had come from the left, I was completely exonerated since there is automatic priority from the right. He faced having his licence suspended for three months and was arguing that because the junction was a blind one, being at a buliding site, and with a van parked on the corner, he hadn't been able to see. I'm not convinced of this as a defence, to be honest, but I had been called by his lawyer to confirm this van and the building site at the corner. Which I was able to do, since they were in fact there.)

After a couple of minutes, it was all over and done with. the stenographer printed out the statement, I signed it, and I was on my way. I sort of missed the whole drama aspect of it - no defendant, no opposing counsel (in fact no counsel at all), no jury, no wigs, no dramatic summing up statements, no nothing really. Just a large and fairly impressive room, with three people in it. I think even John Grisham would struggle to make a good story out of it.

Driller killer

This morning was hell. One of our neighbours decided to start doing some drilling work at about 7 o'clock. In any normal country this would be a situation in which you would feel completely justified in calling the police and having them tell him to show some respect for those living around him (though the apartment in question is next to ours, I have no idea who it is as they have a different entrance to the building and a different set of stairs, landing, etc etc). However, for understandable recent-historical reasons the idea of grassing up your neighbours to the authorities is pretty taboo here, so I didn't. Plus it would have taken energy I didn't have, so I instead resorted to just lying in bed wishing that he would be electrocuted by his drill, and then latterly (and in an indication of how knackered I was) falling asleep and incorporating the torturous noise into a dream . Luckily not a dream of dentists or trepanning, but one in which I was staying in a good hotel and someone in the next room was drilling and so I went all the way to the other side of the hotel grounds to locate the customer service people and tell them how pissed off I was, and being able to tell them "Listen, you can even hear it all the way over here". (They gave me a free dinner as a way of making up for the disturbance, which was fair I thought)

Still it's not the best way to wake up. It's bad enough struggling out of sleep thinking of all the unending lists of things you have to do that day, but to wake up and wish painful and juddering electrical death on someone you haven't met (or even, I dare to suggest, someone you have) is not a great frame of mind in which to start the day.

In other recent flat related irritations news, just between our two recent holidays (to Croatia and the UK, since you ask), we had a three day window at home. There was a paper affixed to the door of the building warning us in both Hungarian and Romanian that the hot water would be turned off on one of the days as some repairs were done. Since we don't use the hot water from the central system, but instead have our own gas heater, this was of no great concern to us, so we did nothing about it. In the morning in question, the taps were empty. All of them. Nothing, not a drip nor a drop of water could be found anywhere. I went back outside to check the notices, and discovered that overnight some bureaucratic scamp had been by to cross out the word "hot" in both languages and write in (in pen) "cold" instead. Oh, how we laughed, and didn't get at all annoyed at this little prank, no sirree.

Comfortable missionary position

Been slacking off on the blog a bit lately, don't really have much of an excuse, but since I'm providing a free service (albeit one of dubious value), I reckon you can cut down on the criticism a tad.

I'm writing this on a train home from Bucharest*, where I spent yesterday and this morning partly doing a workshop and then this morning getting myself a visa for Kazakhstan. This latter process had its own little set of interests, as I eventually located the embassy which is not an embassy, and is not even a consulate, but is a “diplomatic mission”, whatever that means. The bloke who works there is though officially a consul (rather than a missionary), and has what appears to be a nice cushy life. The place is only open from 9-12 and I duly showed up this morning at 9.30 to find he hadn't actually got to work yet. The policemen outside were friendly enough and spoke English which was a bonus. [Another positive was that I went for a stroll round the block while I waited and came across the gloriously named "Kunty Automotive Service". It's the first time I have ever thought that having a mobile phone with a camera in it would have some value. Sadly though, I still live in the dark ages, mobilephonewise] It seems a little bit much that Romania presumably has to pay for two policemen to sit outside what amounts to a house with a flag on it, 24 hours a day, to guard a consul (who only works a couple of hours a day) and two staff (I'd called them a few times and that experience, along with basically meeting everyone this morning, means that I have pretty much worked out the staffing levels of the place. I reckon I'd make a good spy). One thing I had to do before going there this morning was to pay for my visa - you can't just show up at the place with cash, you have to pay at a bank, and then show them the receipt. This I had to do in the Banca Transylvania (any branch), which is convenient as we live in the same building as that bank. So on Wednesday I went along to the Csikszereda Banca Transylvania and asked if I could pay for a Kazakh visa. This, as might be imagined, caused some consternation, since I suspect they don't get many people in there asking for such a thing. There were lots of phone calls and eventually a ledger was produced in which I managed to locate the Kazakhs and demonstrate that really this was possible. Anyway, I finally got my pieces of paper in order, and when the consul showed up, waited for half an hour reading about the glorious achievements of Kazakh government, while he stuck something in my passport. Not quite sure why it took him half an hour, but there you go. He was probably tired.

I'm off to Almaty the week after next, since you asked.

(*While I did actually write this on the train on Friday, I could not post it until today, Sunday. So, no, the Kazakh consul was not working on a Sunday. Or in the afternoons. Or before about 10. Or much at all really)

What the EU means for me

Yesterday, I got my new residency permit for Romania. Things have certainly changed. In the space of two years I have now had (and reported on) three entirely different documents which allow me to remain here. The first was a kind of rubbishy handwritten passport thing. The process to get this document was both expensive and baffling.

This document lasted a few months before being superseded by a fancy hi-tech card that had to be issued in Germany. Once again this was not exactly cheap. In fact by the time I'd got that one, I'd spent somewhere in the order of €200 in total on various documents enabling me to live here (and that doesn't include the money it cost me to set up a company which gave me legal permission to even start applying).

But now things have changed. Out has gone the German-issued laminated card, and in has come some other official looking large scale piece of paper. Because now, of course, Romania is in the EU, and my ability to stay here is determined by that new status. (Romanians can't stay in the UK longer than 3 months, but fortunately for me the Romanian state chooses not to reciprocate - though I would quite understand and even applaud them if they did). Anyway, the new piece of paper, with all the documentation and stuff that was needed to get it, cost me a sum total of 4 Lei. That's approximately €1.20. That sum still involved two different receipts of 1 and 3 Lei each from two different offices in two different parts of the town, with associated queueing, but let's not quibble about that.

The only downside of the whole thing is that while the card was very convenient and easy to carry around with me, this new document isn't, and if I were to stuff it in my wallet it would disintegrate within a couple of months, necessitating a replacement. And of course, being British, I don't possess an ID card. I don't fancy carrying around my passport all day every day, so will have to come up with some system to cope with the Romanian need for people to have official ID on their persons at all time. Hopefully my driving licence will do the trick.

Anyway, I thought you'd all be glad to know of the advantages of EU membership for me. It's not all strict legislation and baffling regulations you know.

Modern Post-ism

The Romanian post office is not the world's most reliable service. It is quite good at delivering mail within the country and often at surprisingly high speeds. It is also remarkably good (usually) at exporting post - a fairly large Christmas package sent to my parents' house a couple of weeks ago reached its destination in 6 days. But it really seems to have problem with mail coming in.

Postcards almost never make it to their destination - I have lost count of the number of postcards I have sent home when on some trip or other which have never made it. Is someone stealing them? And if so, why? Because they like the pictures? Is there someone, somewhere in Bucharest with my postcards and those of others like me plastered all over their apartment with which they attempt to convince visitors that they've either travelled very widely, or that they have loads of exotic wandering friends?

Letters, too, frequently go astray, and of the one magazine subscription I have from the UK, typically about one in four issues vanish. Parcels, though, never seem to disappear. This is quite odd, since I'm assuming the flaw in the system is that someone is actively nicking stuff (it can't all be getting lost - if it were there'd be a massive pile of undelivered mail down the back of someone's settee). Maybe, parcels, being parcels, and being eminently nickable are actually watched and are subject to greater outside scrutiny such that the odd light-fingered employee feels unable to siphon them off.

Perhaps it is this scrutiny that causes them to take so frigging long though. They never get here quickly. One box I received from the US took 10 weeks to get here from postmark to delivery. And it came by air, in case you were wondering. My guess is that it spent the majority of those 10 weeks in Romania, probably sitting in what I imagine is this dusty hanger in Bucharest called the parcel waiting room. Here, newly arrived packages, fresh off the plane and looking forward to exploring the sights of Romania - Bran Castle, Bucovina, the Danube Delta, Sighisoara, perhaps - are taken and asked to wait while a few minor bureaucratic details are taken care of. Their fresh faced exuberance at being in this fascinating foreign land is slowly ground into the dust as they become, with the passing weeks, increasingly disillusioned and bitter, offering up snorts of derision as new parcels arrive, eagerly looking forward to being let out in a few hours.

The Christmas presents that my family sent to us, for example, were mailed two or three weeks before I got around to sending one in the opposite direction, but somehow mine got there a week before their counterparts reached us here. Why, I have no idea. They did finally arrive though, all of them together, this morning. Maybe, there is in fact some kind of quota system whereby the sorting office in Bucharest waits until they have enough packages for a certain destination to make it worth bothering putting them on a train. "We have had this box for Miercurea Ciuc for months now, should I send it?" "Nah, wait until we have at least 5 packages for there before putting them all on together. You could easily spend 15 seconds sending that off on its own"

The really cunning thing is that you have to pay to liberate them from the post office. A little slip is stuck in your mailbox to let you know the box has come, and you must go to the Post Office and pick it up (as is quite normal in most places, especially those where a package cannot easily be left). When you go along, you have to cough up money to get it. This, I have to say, is much less usual. The sender has already paid a quite inordinate amount of money to his own post office to deliver this package to Romania, and that should be the end of the payment system. And in every other country I've lived (and I've lived in a fair few) it is. Not in Romania. Oh no. You have to pay the post office to collect the parcel. It's a great scam - I mean who's going to say no? "A birthday present for my daughter? No, you keep it.". I mean it's not like it's massive amounts of money - it seems to be a flat fee of 2.5 Lei per package (or 25,000 Lei as I still think of it, old-timer that I am) - but it's the principle of the thing. Perhaps that's why we never get any of the post cards: there's some office somewhere - the ministry of postcards - in which they all sit until such time as someone goes down and says "Have you got any postcards for me? And how much do you want for them?"

Down on the Pharm

Going to the Chemist’s in Romania is, quite frankly, a pain in the arse. Not actually literally a pain in the arse, though I suppose it could depend on what you’re going there for. No, literally, it’s a pain in the feet, and just metaphorically a pain in the arse. The thing is that pharmacies are one of the few businesses which have apparently remained unchanged since Ceausescu’s time. As you walk through the door of the average pharmacy, you step out of the 21st century (well, let’s say you step out of the late 20th century – this is Romania after all) and enter into this faded netherworld of old posters and long queues and overly complex bureaucracy and strict state controls. This feeling is not helped by the fact that the clientele are (as they are in chemists everywhere in the world) predominantly elderly and unhealthy.

I will attempt to describe this step-back-in-time for those of you lucky enough not to ever have to go to a Romanian pharmacy. Firstly, you can’t see in them from outside, since they have these small grimy windows which often have bars across them, or if there are lower windows they are frosted. I don’t know why. Then you go inside, pushing aside the large iron framed door, to the world that time forgot. The floor is concrete. Just concrete. There is a large area of nothingness in the pharmacy itself, which may, in more upmarket establishments, have a chair here or there round the side, or even a set of weighing scales (presumably so that you may see how much weight you lose while waiting to be served). Around this central void, there are barriers of varying degrees of sturdiness punctuated by serving-hatch style windows. Regardless of the actual composition of the barriers (full wall, counter, half glass wall, even no barrier just space defined by the windows), the impenetrability of it is unquestioned. Something about the lay out and design of the space tells you in no uncertain terms that stepping beyond the defined limits of the customers’ area would lead to imprisonment and possibly a beating of some sort. Probably involving the securitate.

Behind the windows, are a number (never greater than 3, usually 1) of women in white coats. They’re always women, and I’ve never ever seen a male pharmacist in Romania. Behind them, and sometimes surrounding them, are various pharmaceutical products, that you cannot touch, unless they hand them to you through the little window. There are also little wooden drawers and cupboards that look like they haven’t been opened since sometime before the moon landing.

So, you join a queue. If there is only one pharmacist, then you join the only queue. And you wait, patiently, in line with all the other people in the queue. And you have to wait a long time, because every transaction involves not only the handing over of prescriptions, money and drugs, but also the laborious filling in of numerous forms and ledgers full of information. In many of these places they now have computers too, looking seriously out of place, but the benefit of these machines seems to be that the information needs to be entered now both onto the computer and into the ledger.

Now the big problem with all this, other than the olde-world, Dickensian drudgery of it all, is that you have to do this no matter what you want to buy. This system is not just for those who have prescriptions that they need filling. It’s for everything – from aspirins to tampons to baby food to vitamin C pills. Now luckily, a few of those things (notably baby food and tampons), have escaped from the system and are now also available in regular supermarkets and the like. But certain things, notably headache medication and other over-the-counter remedies, are not available elsewhere and have to be bought at the pharmacy in this painfully laborious way. Why it is not possible to use the dead zone in the heart of the shop for some display cases and have a till at the entrance for those who don’t need prescription drugs is beyond me. It’s all about control, it seems. And for ensuring that if you have popped in for some paracetamol because you have a small headache, that by the time you actually get the paracetamol you have a raging migraine. I’d love to take a picture of the interior of a pharmacy here so you could see I wasn’t making any of this up, but frankly I fear that if I got a camera out in the middle of any one of these establishments, I’d be arrested and shipped out to some gulag – or at the very least, forced to live in the Dobrogea and dig canals.

Interesting to note that things are obviously not dissimilar in Hungary. I wonder if this retail-pharmaceutical refusal to embrace 1989 is typical throughout Eastern Europe?

Carpet tax

We, and by "we" here I mean Hox and Erix SRL our hugely successful company, received a registered letter the other day. Actually we received a piece of paper informing us that we had to go to the post office to pick up a registered letter, but the upshot of it all was that we had in our hands a registered letter. It was from the Romanian tax authorities and was a detailed description of our tax debts for the year, by quarter. We had, of course, already paid our taxes, this letter was just to let us know what extra we had to pay. A total of 3 Lei (three quarters of 1 Lei each, and one quarter where we owed nothing). Three NEW lei, I should stress here, not three old lei. (3 New Lei is about 80 Eurocents, while 3 Old Lei would be about .008 of a cent.) Registered mail is not especially cheap here, although presumably the government gives itself a discount, but even so, I'm guessing there is a net loss to the tax people from this letter - adding up the cost of calculating it, printing it out, stamping it umpteen times, the labour of all the signatures, and then collecting and cashing out the money to the cost of sending a registered letter. And apparently (meaning: our accountant said so) more or less everyone gets one of these letters at this time of the year. The purpose (allegedly) is to keep everyone working in the employee heavy tax office, and to make it clear to the outside world that they are gainfully employed and busy.

Temperature update

It is getting warmer! It was only -19 this morning! I wonder if I can find out what the average temerature for January was in Csikszereda this year. I reckon it was probably somewhere between -15 and -20. Average. Roll on February.

Rom-Anglican

More inter-linguistic cross-cultural bureaucratic fun.

On Tuesday I went to Udvarhely to pick Erika and Paula up and bring them home. Before they could be released from the hospital though, I had to complete a bunch of paperwork, and take it to the city hall to get a birth certificate. I was ushered into an office where myself and a nurse proceeded to complete these forms. This was interesting as it was a conversation that happened in my limited Hungarian and her limited English in order to complete a form in Romanian.

Many of the lines were easy to fill in - the names etc were all printed on the wedding certificate and our ID cards. For that it was just a question of her copying stuff down correctly. Others involved a little bit of dialogue - her asking me what Erika's job is and her level of education and so on. This I could cope with though, and was feeling quite chuffed with my comprehension and responses, when suddenly she asked me something about Erika which question I had absolutely no understanding of. She tried repeating it a couple of times but it wasn't helping, so I asked to see the form - often I can understand Romanian better than Hungarian from speaking other latin languages. Aha, it said "Religia". This I could have a stab at and we continued. Then she had to do the same thing for me, and once again we hit the "Religia" question. Rather than go into detail about my own particular brand of agnosticism, I took the lazy way out and went for "Anglican". Fine. She understood what that was...but then, she realised she had no idea how to write Anglican in Romanian. (It's not terribly surprising, while I'm sure she was pretty fluent in the language, it's unlikely that she would ever have had to use the word Anglican in any way ever in her life before that moment). Eventually, she made the guess that I would have, and wrote Anglican as phonetically as possible as if it were said by a Romanian (which may actually be "Anglican")

So, once I got the papers out, I was free to go to the City Hall and get the birth certificate. This proved to be surprisingly easy and there is no funny story to tell about the experience. I have to go back and get it next week though, since they had a bit of a backlog, what with it having been a holiday period and there being a number of births to go into the register.

Eventually though, my girls were free to go, and were released from the delicious cuisine of Udvarhely Hospital. (Most of my trips over involved a shopping list of goods to supplement the culinary offerings). And now they're home safely and our entire existence has been thrown upside down. In a good way though.

Wed Tape

So, I’ve teased you (the reader) for a while with references to TB and chest X-rays, and I feel it is now time to come clean. It is, as you may have guessed, yet another example of my continuing adventures in Romanian bureaucracy (and British in this case).

Going back to the beginning, much of this started when I checked out the regulations regarding registering our upcoming daughter as a British citizen. It was then that I learned that under British law, a baby which is “illegitimate” is not entitled to be a British citizen, regardless of whether its father is British. Now, obviously my first reaction to this piece of news was to launch into a tirade of abuse at my own country’s government for being so bloody Victorian. I mean “illegitimate”? Come on. That word in the sense of the meaning “born out of wedlock” became obsolete years ago, surely. Do people really still refer to babies born to parents who are not legally wed as illegitimate in the real world? Why not just call them bastards and be done with it?

Anyway, once I got over my twenty first century rage at my nineteenth century government, we started thinking about what we needed to do to enshrine in law the various rights responsibilities and support for our family. One day in the not too distant future these rights and responsibilities will not need to be linked to a marriage certificate, but for now, at least in Romania, and seemingly in quaint old-fashioned Britain, they are. And so, we decided to go ahead and sign the necessary documents that give you the requisite legal status, or, as it’s often referred to, get married.

And so, obviously, we one again set out on an extended stroll through the dark forest that is the Romanian bureaucracy. In fact, initially, all seemed remarkably easy. We went to the city hall and they told us we needed was our birth certificates, proof that neither of us were already married to someone else, and a medical certificate. Three things. That was all. It seemed too good to be true. And, it was.

The birth certificate was relatively easy. It had to be translated into Romanian and the translation notarised, which as ever with notarising cost an inordinate amount of money, but generally speaking it was easy.

Next up was the hard part. Proving that I wasn’t married. Now, as you know, proving something doesn’t exist is much harder than proving something does exist. For Erika it was relatively easy, since she’s lived all her life in Romania, and she could at least produce a divorce certificate. For me, things were slightly more complex. I had visions of having to get sworn statements from everywhere I’ve ever lived saying that I hadn’t got hitched while in their jurisdiction. Getting one from the Federated States of Micronesia would have been particularly tricky, especially since marriage there was more or less merely a transaction involving the exchange of pigs, without any great legal mumbo jumbo. But it turned out all I needed to do was swear in front of the British consul in Bucharest. Sounded like exactly my kind of deal. Sadly, it wasn’t as fun as it sounds. (How cool would it have been to have to have found a way to be captured on film getting in his way and saying “bollocks”?) I travelled, then to Bucharest on the morning minibus (my first, and I hope last, experience of using this particular leg-compressing mode of transportation), showed up at the embassy, and filled in various pieces of paper protesting my singleness (or bachelorhood – once again I was taken aback by the archaic language promoted by the British Government and its representatives overseas. At one point I had to fill in a table with my and Erika’s information, one column of which was marital status. There I am looking for the “unmarried” option, or at a pinch “single”. But no. Here in the world of official documentation we are still using such words as “bachelor” and “spinster”). I then had to wait for the vice consul to show up and read in front of her a document which said that I was not married and over 18 and so on. Then we both signed it and she put this big official stamp on it and I was charged 4.5 million Lei, which seemed a bit steep. The remainder of this process involved them pinning the notice of my intention to marry outside the front gate of the embassy for 21 days in some kind of mediaeval style proclamation so that any of my other wives who happened to pass the building and glance at the noticeboard could then put a stop to my polygamy. Since I haven’t heard from them, I assume this didn’t happen.

At least once I got the train home, and therefore completed a 14 hour day for the sake of half an hour of quality time in an embassy waiting room, I felt it was all taken care of. So now all that was left was the medical certificate. I assumed that this would be a fairly simple procedure. This, however, is where the red tape really began to kick in. A visit to the relevant doctor was all that it took to shatter my illusions. On her door was the list of five items we would need to bring in order for her to sign off on our permission to marry. That’s five more pieces of paper each of us needed to get in order to get through this final hoop. I can’t even remember what half of them were now, but they were all ridiculous. I mean the proof that I wasn’t married already, I could at least see the point of, but why on earth would I need a chest X-Ray? Are people with TB prevented from marrying in Romania? Isn’t that a tad discriminatory? Is there a support group for tuberculosic singles? Can I even say “tuberculosic”?

Well, it was proved through the magic of radiography that I don’t have TB (Erika avoided that one on account of X-Rays being contraindicated during pregnancy – so women with TB can get round the state restrictions by getting pregnant before applying for the clearance), and by blood test that I don’t have syphilis or some other things (not HIV/AIDS apparently – not sure if that’s because the bureaucracy hasn’t yet caught up with the existence of such diseases or because HIV is not seen as a barrier to marriage in the same way that, say, TB is).

To cut a long story short, or slightly less long I suppose since I’ve already gone on a bit, we finally got the medical certificates, combined them with the other documentation and presented them at the City Hall. Once Erika’s clearance had come through (i.e. after no-one had commented on her name being similarly pinned on the wall of the city hall) we were free to go. And so we did. Though there was one final scare, five minutes before the wedding, when the woman filling in the forms suddenly hit a wall regarding the difference between my citizenship and nationality. Now, to me, there is no difference between the two. I have a UK passport and UK nationality. But here, it’s a huge deal. 90% of this town list their citizenship as Romanian but their nationality as Hungarian. So my attitude that they were the same baffled her. Eventually she offered up “English” as nationality, which I accepted in order to placate her.

My next adventure in red tape is likely to be getting the birth certificate sorted out. That sounds like one I’ll have to do fairly solo. I presume anyway - it certainly sounds like the kind of thing that fathers ought to take care of.

Romanian in schools

Last weekend at a party, my host's son, a 10 year old who has just come back to Romania after living in Budapest for a few years, performed his recently learned party piece. That is, he recited a long and complex Octavian Goga poem in the original Romanian. Romanians present (both Hungarian Romanians and Romanian Romanians) were very impressed by his ability.

Not very interesting, you might be thinking, until you realise that the reciter doesn't actually speak Romanian (or at least speaks very little). His first language is Hungarian, he spent the early part of his school years in Hungary itself, and he is now back here and in the Romanian school system. So, basically he is reciting this poem without understanding it, more or less at all. In fact, so difficult was the poem that many of the adults didn't know some of the words.

But this, it seems, is how Romanian is taught in school. Kids can go to school in their native language, so, for example, most children here go to Hungarian medium schools. But the curriculum is a national one and therefore Romanian (as a subject) is taught as if it were a first language for all. And so, you end up with impressive but flawed scenes such as the one described above. Now, I have my doubts whether kids whose first language is Romanian are getting much benefit from being able to recite by heart Octavian Goga poems, but for non-native speakers of the language it seems the pointlessness is magnified tenfold. There is no provision within the curriculum or within the testing structure for people learning Romanian as a second language. They are Romanians ipso facto they speak Romanian, seems to be the thinking. And so, every year, a large number of kids whose first language isn't Romanian fail and are made to resit their exams or stay back a year - merely because there is no official provision for their situation. It doesn't seem that difficult to create a curriculum for Romanian as a Second Language students. It would also make them much more willing to learn the language if it were properly taught. It's no wonder that when they are older and can speak Romanian well, they'd rather not because their school experience of it was so grim.

New chain, new dog?

You may remember some time ago the bureaucratic struggles I had attaining my highly prized “Legitimaţie de Şedere” (try clicking December 2004 in that little list to the right and scrolling down). You may then imagine my lack of elation on being told that the crappy little book thing I had been issued with was being phased out and replaced with a jazzy new card.

Initially we were told that this change would happen sometime early in the year, but it kept getting put back, until finally in August the police rang and said we’d have to get it by the end of the month. Come the end of August and we call and see if it’s really necessary to do it then since it’s a holiday month and hard to organise oneselves and also we were thinking of moving and would we need a new card if we did etc etc. The police replied that in fact nobody on their list (of foreigners resident in Miercurea Ciuc) had actually bothered to do it yet, so maybe we could do it in September.

So, come the end of September, we remembered this, and had by now decided we wouldn’t be moving this year, so called to find out what we needed to do. Just show up with the old one, my passport, a receipt for a further 4 million Lei (about €120, the bloody chancers), and they would do the rest. They even allowed me to come at 8am even though the official office hours didn’t start to 9, since I was teaching that week and couldn’t possibly come at the official time. In addition to this new spirit of helpfulness, they have moved the office for dealing with foreigners round the other side of the police station and done radical things like put a coffee machine in the waiting area. The first time we saw this shockingly civilised arrangement Erika taught me the Hungarian expression which translates as “New chain, same dog”, but it seems maybe that not only has the chain been changed but also that a newer friendlier dog has been purchased too.

So, I showed up on the appointed day at 8am, and handed over my receipt, my little green book, my passport. In return they handed me two pieces of paper to fill out - some kind of application form with personal details, and another form which I had to sign to say that it was OK for them to send my personal information to Germany. So, this was possibly the reason for at least part of this insanely high 4 million Lei fee. Despite requiring this new card and despite requiring it for every foreigner in the country, the government hadn’t actually got around to buying a machine to make them. So everyone’s details are sent to Germany, where they make the cards and send them back. You’d think they could invest in their own machine. I have no idea how many foreigners there are residing in Romania but I’m going to hazard a guess at upwards of 200,000, which number, I’d say, would justify the expense involved in getting a machine. Somewhere in Germany there’s a businessman rubbing his hands in glee as he looks at this guaranteed source of income.

Anyway, I signed the form, and they took me next door to have my picture taken. And that was that. I was in and out in less than 15 minutes. On my way home I called Erika to inform her of this fact and her first words were “What went wrong? What else do they need?” being completely incapable of imagining that the process could actually have been over in less than an hour and in only one visit. So, in a few short weeks (in theory) I should have my new fancy laminated card residence permit, which presumably is so ultra modern that it can’t even be produced east of the Rhine – I have no idea what features it could possibly have that make it so hi-tech, but there you are (they didn’t take my fingerprints or a swab of DNA from under my foreskin or anything like that, so it’s not one of these biometric things that the US is pushing for in everyone’s passports). Perhaps some foreigner in another part of Romania who already has one can let me know what exactly it is I have to look forward to.

A Wunch of Bankers

The bank we have been using (until now) has just started charging us to use their services. I hate banks, they act like you need to be beholden to them and that they are doing you this massive favour. Any other business treated its customers that way banks treat theirs and they’d quickly go out of business. If shops made you beg for the privilege of buying something or decided that they were going to charge people a fee for squeezing the tomatoes, no-one would go. There’s a reason why bankers rhymes with wankers.

Anyway, to get back to the point, they (and I think I can reveal the fact that it is BCR, pronounced Bay Chay Ray, and short for Banca Comerciala Romana) have created a raft of fees for various transactions. The most fascinating of these is the commission charted for withdrawing money. Everytime you withdraw money from them, the bank now pockets 0.05% of whatever it is you’re taking out. This really isn’t a vast amount of money, but it’s the principle of the thing. But there is a weird catch. They ask you if you want notes only or would be prepared to take some of the money in coins. If you take some of it in coins it remains at 0.05%. If you insist on only notes, and I swear I am not making this up, they charge 0.08%. It sounds like the kind of policy instituted one night by a couple of high ranking accountants who were high and started trying to outdo themselves. “Hey man, what do you think? We ask customers to pay extra unless they agree to walk away with 1 kilo of coins?” “Oh, like, that is so cool, dude. Let’s put it in the new policies”

We’ve moved to a new bank as of today.

New Lei

Tomorrow, July 1st, ushers in a new era for Romania. The Leu (which apparently is the singular name of the currency here, not a word I normally have occasion to use as there are roughly 35,000 of them to one Euro. The much more commonly needed word -the plural- is Lei) is being thrown out in favour of a brave new currency - New Lei. These will be the same as old Lei but divided by 10,000. So, while a beer now costs something like 30,000 Lei in the future (tomorrow) it will cost 3.

It's probably a good idea, but I can't help feeling they chose the date poorly. On paper "July 1st" has a nice ring to it, it's exactly half way through the year, it sounds like a good day to change currency. But it's a Friday, and there are many things to be done in the introduction of this new money, and thus everything is shut. The banks have been closed since yesterday. The post office is closed (irritatingly as I apparently have a package to collect). If they had changed over on the 3rd (Sunday) one wonders if it may have been a little less disruptive.

[A bit later: The shops are closed too. I've just been out to buy myself a snack. Not today. Bloody new lei. I already hate it]

Permission to sit

I forgot to mention, I have finally been granted Permission To Sit in Romania. In fact I am now the owner of a very fancy looking dark green booklet entitled "Legitimaţie de Şedere Temporară Pentru Cetăţeni Străini" Which means (roughly) Temporary permission to sit for strange citizens. I am very glad about this, as having to constantly stand or lie down was beginning to wear on me.

The booklet is actually deceptive, as from the outside it looks quite offical and impressive - like a small passport, actually - but when you open it up it looks dead rubbish. Cheap paper with lots of information about me in very bad handwriting (not mine, better than that, but still crappy looking). Some bloke at the police station just filled it in when he felt like it (we handed all the paperwork in at the beginning of December and he said it would be ready between Christmas and New Year. We popped in on the 30th to see if it was done, and he said "Oh, it's you. Hmmm. Yes it'll be ready tomorrow morning". He then obviously went off and filled it in and stuck my picture in the correct place).

Ben

No, not Michael Jackson's pet rat from that crappy song, but my new nephew. He was born in November and I met him on Boxing Day. He's dead cool. Even though he is not even two months old yet, he has already been selected for England at football, unified quantum and newtonian physics, and written a book of poetry which the Times Literary Supplement described as "Breathtaking". He's currently appearing as Prospero in the RSC's production of The Tempest.

A mixed bag of stuff

Bureaucracy day 2

First up, an update on yesterday's farcical tale of bureaucratic hilarity. Having completed all the relevant paperwork, as stated to us by the guy at the police station who we asked in the first place, we went today to see him and hand over all of our paperwork. I was optimistic, Erika less so. He went through all of the papers and found that one paper as stated in a new rule book (that he hadn't produced formerly) was not there. This was a paper which had exactly the same info on as the other pieces of paper but in a diferent order. So we have to get that piece of paper, have it signed by the justice office or something and then return on Monday. I'm pretty certain that there is an unstated rule that officials cannot accept paperwork the first time it is offered for fear of setting a dangerous precedent. As soon as you make life vaguely easy, who knows what floodgates will open. There'll be people all over the country expecting to get through the system quickly and relatively easily. That can't be allowed to happen.

The other thing we had to do was go back to the mayor's offie and pay another tax. One of the taxes that we paid earlier this week was for 2000 Lei at that office. Those of you paying attention will realise that this is approximately 6 cents in US money, or about 3p in the UK. Now apparently this has gone up (in the two weeks since we were told to pay it) and is now a whopping 4500 Lei. So we had to go back to the Mayor's office and get another receipt for an additional 2500 Lei with which to supplement our previous one. This is a computerised print out that takes up some civil servant's time, and I now have 2. One for 3p and one for 4p. I will say no more about the logic of this.

Elections continued

The Romanian election I wrote about a couple of weeks ago happened with polls predicting (broadly speaking) the result. The presidential run-off goes ahead next weekend (I think) between Nastase and Basescu. Basescu has spent the week complaining of electoral fraud, but since the OSCE and subsequently the EU have said they think it was broadly fair, he seems to have the ground whipped away from under him. He looks a bit like he's trying too hard to be Yuschenko. I think it will cost him votes in the second round. Although one Romania paper today has published some revelations about Nastase and Ceasescu (that I can't really understand as they're in Romanian), so maybe he has hope yet.

In Hungary this weekend there is a referendum which will potentially have more impact on Miercurea Ciuc than the Romanian general elections. It's a referendum asking Hungarians if they want to offer dual citizenship to all Hungarians living outside of Hungary (or, if I understand correctly, all the Hungarians living in Romania, Slovakia, Serbia, and Ukraine). The impact of this in this region could be dramatic, since the vast majority of people here are Hungarian. Those people will then have the right to have Hungarian passports along with their Romanian ones. They thus become EU citizens ( a minimum of two years before the rest of Romania's citizens become part of the EU), and can move around freely and easily.

Romania is pretty ticked off about this - particularly the EU thing - but can't really complain about it because they did the exact same thing for Romanians in Moldova. One foaming nutter from the (night)Mare party (Vadim Tudor's ultranationalist psychos) was on (Romanian) TV last night going crazy about it. I don't really know how I feel about it, but when I see people like this wanker going off on one it's hard not to support it.

The first indications were that the law would really only have an effect on the Hungarian population of Vojvodina (Northern Serbia), as they are the Hungarian minority who are most oppressed. The Hungarian populaton here are well established and pretty large (1.6m) and while they do suffer from discrimination it's not exactly oppression, so the thought was that very few would choose to go to Hungary. But apparently they've recently done a poll which suggests 17% would. This would severely effect Csikszereda as you can imagine. The size of that number though probably means that the measure won't pass the referendum anyway, as Hungary doesn't want to be flooded with more people - even if they are Magyar "brothers". The other issue that has come to light is the problem that will arise when all these citizens suddenly have the vote. How will this effect the political scene in Hungary? I hadn't even thought about it, but it is seemingly the biggest and most divisive issue in the referendum camp.

Last bit

I was going to write smething about Miklos, but I don't really know how to spell his name, and so I'll leave it until Monday. Has that enticed you? I bet it hasn't.

Adventures in bureaucracy

So, I'm working on getting my legal status in Romania. It's an experience. Today for example we (Erika and I) went to the tax payment office to pay the two taxes that I need to pay to fulfil one of the requirements. One is a 30,000 Lei sum (not sure what for) and the other is a $60 (ie US Dollar) sum payable in Lei. So we showed up at the office and queued for a while, and when we got to the window the woman said that for the $60 fee we had to have a receipt from the bank showing that we had changed $60 into Lei, and what this worked out at. I don't have any dollars (well I do, but thy're sitting in a bank account in the US and I access them through the cashpoint at which point they instantly get turned into Lei). So, we had to go to the bank, queue up again, change $60 worth of Romanian Lei into dollars, and then change it back again into Lei. It's brilliant.

As everyone knows you lose money when changing back and forth through currencies, and in this case the bank was prepared to buy my Lei at 29,500 to the dollar*. And then to buy back those self same dollars at 28,500 Lei. Thus in the course of the transaction the bank made 60,000 Lei. The somewhat (he says understatedly) ridiculous aspect of this is that I would actually have been quite happy to pay the state this extra 60,000 Lei, but object to paying it to the bank. The closest bank to the tax office is in fact an Austrian owned bank, so it's not even going to Romania at all.

Once we had thrown 60,000 Lei in the direction of Jorg Haider or Kurt Waldheim or whichever nice Austrian person owns Raffeisen Bank, we took our Lei and our receipt and our slightly older selves back to the tax office queue and finally got the receipts necessary. Next up in my exciting trek to be officially legitimate in Romania: health insurance. I can hardly wait.

[* the fact that the dollar is now worth aproximately 29,000 Lei is proof if proof were needed as to what a worthless and useless currency the dollar currently is. 4 months ago the rate was about 33,500. In other words the US Dollar has lost over 13% of its value in the last four months against the Romanian Leu. Yes, that's right, you heard me correctly.]

The other fascinating (and somehow funnier) manifestation of rampant bureaucracy here is the cult of the stamp. To do anything you need to have a stamp. An inkstamp with which you stamp all offical documents and receipts etc. People carry around multiple stamps. They're really hi-tech also, they have ink somehow inside them and you can buy different styles and different sizes. I don't know if people look down on others with old or unfashionable stamps. There are entire stores devoted to selling stamps. (Really, I swear I'm not making this up). They're everywhere, almost more popular than mobile phone shops.

You don't believe me do you? Look, this www.stampile.ro is the website of one of the leading shops. Here you can see some of the vast array of stamps available, pictures of their store fronts around the country, a map of Romania with their locations marked, accessories to go with your stamp, and everything stamp related.

But I am not promoting their wares. I have no idea of the value for money in stamping that they offer, or cannot verify the quality of their stamping products. I myself did not buy my stamp from them, but from a local merchant. I take no responsibility for any of you if, transfixed by the Trodat Printy 4922, you find yourself unable to resist ordering a gross of them from Stampile. On your own head be it.

I'd stamp the bottom of this blog entry if I could. But you'll have to just imagine it.

Good Company

This week Erika and I began the process of becoming a company. This is a modern method of marriage free from the scourge of same sex coupling. Ok it’s not, and neither do I think that same sex marriages are a scourge or a “virus” on society (as one Spanish catholic bishop/complete bastard said this week). No, we really are becoming a company. This is partly because it allows me to do various training courses here and anything else that comes my way. Partly it’s because it means I pay less tax when I do so. And it’s partly a step on the process of becoming a legal alien in Romania. The first method we tried of legalising my status here (not that it’s illegal yet you understand, but it won’t last for ever and I can’t work officially in Romania yet) was an interesting one. I was going to become freelance, but in one of those catch-22 situations beloved of bureaucracy, I needed the permission to live and work here to get the freelance status and I needed the freelance status to get the permission to live and work here. I think people coming to Romania without a job and without the immediate intention to marry are uncatered for in the law as the state hasn’t yet got around the idea that anyone would actually want to do that. The story goes that lesbianism was never made illegal in the UK because Queen Victoria could never believe that it would be practiced by anyone. The same goes for moving to Romania it seems.

Anyway, the upshot of all this is that becoming a company is the best way of living and working here. The two of us make up this company and we were asked to supply three possible names of our company in case the first choice sounded too much like an organisation already in existence here. We chose “Training in Education and Management” as our primary choice, and were very pleased with it – after all the acronym would be TEAM, and that sounded dead good. I was already imagining our website our logo and everything else. But we failed to get our first choice. The second was the more prosaic but still fairly professional sounding “Education and Management”. Again no. When we were told that we had to have three, we thought the last one could be something faintly amusing as clearly we wouldn’t get down that far – after all how many companies could there possibly be registered in Romania with long English names? So our third and final choice was “Hox and Erix’ (an ancient nickname of mine and an ancient nickname of hers). So, as you have no doubt gathered you are talking to one of the partners of Hox and Erix SRL. I’m actually beginning to warm to it already. It has a nicely peculiar quality to it. Like Google. Or Bang and Olufson. As you can see I’m already setting my sights high – thinking of the day that Hox and Erix is a multinational corporation, even though it has been set up in order to administer teacher training activities in rural Eastern Transylvania. I think I may need someone to give me the occasional slap in the face.

The legal papers were also funny. Having been awarded the name, our lawyers (i.e. the people we hired to take care of all this stuff for us) printed out the official paperwork of the company which we had to sign. This names Erika and me as the associates in the company and requires us to call a general assembly every year – to be made up of the two associates. That general assembly has the responsibility (if need be) of firing the administrators of the company. The administrators of the company are, you guessed it, also Erika and me. It’s a very labyrinthine and complex organigram. I’d draw it for you, but (a) I can’t, and (b) if I did so the whole thing would implode on itself and create a wormhole in the space-time continuum.

The upshot of all this is that Erika is now my partner in a sense other than the romantic. She’s also my administrator. (this is not some kind of bondage code word). And my co-assembly member. Oh and we sleep together too. Nepotism? We got it. I’m thinking of hiring Bogi as our accountant.

Random moments

Erika got a tax bill today. It was sent by recorded mail by the tax office a couple of days ago, but it was issued by that office two months ago. Because she is late in paying the bill (i.e. it is two months since it was issued) she has to pay a fine too. This might seem unfair to most of us. Well, it is unfair, after all. She just shrugged and said, “This is Romania – there’s nothing I can do”

I have discovered that the Hungarian word for cheese is sajt. There may be nothing interesting in that you might think, but in fact this word is pronounced like “shite”. Well, at least shite uttered in a light Belfast accent. Those of you who know me and of my huge aversion to cheese (or satan’s jism, as I prefer), will understand how enjoyable I feel this fact to be. Want some shite with that? Fancy a shite sandwich? Shall we go to McDonalds for a shiteburger? The humorous anti-cheese possibilities are endless.

One or two people have asked how you leave comments on this blog. (Honestly) Well, you click on the bit where it says “0 Comments” at the bottom of the post in question, and then you’ll have the option of adding one of your own. I realise I’m setting myself up here for a severe ego-trashing. Right now I can imagine that the lack of comments is down to the inability of people to contribute. Now I’ll have to assume it’s down to disinterest.

I am within days of posting photos – sorry it’s taken so long, but I’m a little slow, and using the computer for a length of time beyond about 7 minutes is regarded as unnecessarily long and boring by Bogi, and I am often forced from the seat in favour of devoting my attention to her rather than this boring screen.

Update from an earleir post: One of the villages we passed through on our abortive trip down the Csango valley was partially buried in a landslide later that day. As of yesterday, Comanesti was still closed due to the floods.