London was easy; Bucharest is the beginning our challenge. Little to no knowledge of language, culture, bureaucracy, or geography puts us at a disadvantage in every respect. Americans are terribly insulated, and we discover that we are no different. When our flight arrived later than we had anticipated we had assumed ourselves too late to check in to our hostel, and so our anxieties began to work against us. Even as we leave two days later we wonder how we managed, though that is in fact what we came here to do: To manage, work things out, and learn to be human again. As an aside, how we will live for the next two weeks is how immigrants to the United States live every day, always being aware of their vulnerability.
It’s been two and a half decades since Romania threw off the shackles of the communist regime. Bucharest is in the intermediate stages of transformation, and the local people are damn proud of this fact. “First World” problems are all present in this capital city. Rising car ownership has created gridlock on the roads at the usual times; Public transit is straining to keep up with demand; Emissions, a population surge, and a renaissance in domestic manufacturing has brought new life and cash flow to proud people who see a path forward. In fact, the IMF projects Romania will be the fastest growing economy in the EU this year. That kind of activity is a sight few of us in the West need travel far to see, something I think we take for granted. At the hostel in Brasov someone casually mentioned that they don’t like Bucharest as much as the small towns and villages because it’s like any other city. That’s a tourist talking, because the homogeneity of city life is a reminder that we are more alike than we are different. I’m glad to see it.
Brasov is the other destination on our itinerary in Romania. Compared to the urban sprawl of Bucharest and the flat plain it occupies, Brasov is a compact city nestled between breathtaking mountains. At the top of Tampa Mare you can scry the entire city and its surrounding villages as islands of red ceramic roofs in an ocean of green. While Bucharest is transforming, Brasov is preserving. Romanian traditions are kept here, from cuisine and dress, to history.
In Brasov the many centuries old Black Church stands not fifty meters from where we sleep, and the city is in the midst of renovating the grounds around it while ensuring the church itself appears much as it did half a millennium ago. Half a millennium, that’s five hundred years for a single church that took two centuries to build. There are things far older in these mountains, and things even older elsewhere. That scale of time probably provides the single greatest cultural barrier between East and West. With our shorter memory we are more readily able to forgive, and for as fleeting and fickle as that forgiveness is, try to imagine how much more difficult it would be if your “whataboutism” went back to the Greeks. We should not judge older civilizations for their grudges.
There is a lot to love about Romania, so much so we extended our stay. It stands at a crossroads between the global human civilization of the 21st Century, and the hard scrabble way of life of our ancestors, a quirk of development that only happens when your nation’s history is as old as the soil it sits on.