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TOURISM THE EASTERN WAY
June 2004
by Oliver Meister
December 2004
It was recently pointed out to me that it is now eleven years since I first set foot in Romania. My first trip was for nine months, teaching English in a small Romanian town. Romania was sold to us on the basis that the ''company'' that sent us (later to appear on British television's Crime Watch, exposed as a front for an international fraud that led to our swift departure back to London) operated only in Ukraine, Moldova and Romania.
Two friends and I went for Ukraine on the basis it was the furthest east and therefore the most exotic. Fortunately for me, my two friends were intelligent enough to have been studying at Cambridge at the time with a professor who new his nuclear physics. He helpfully pointed out to them that the proposed Ukrainian town where our new job would start was just north of Chernobyl (the way the wind blew on that day back in 1985).
He said that so long as we didn't drink any milk or eat any local fruit or vegetables we should be alright. Call me Mr Cautious but we decided that it wasn't worth it. So it was left as a toss up between Moldova and Romania. As Moldova had just finished a civil war, Romania it was. More precisely Brasov, Romania.
We landed at Otopeni airport to the sight of birds nesting inside the terminal and smells that indicated something worse was nesting inside the armpits of customs inspectors. The transport to Gara de Nord reminded me of that line from the Goon Show: ''Do you realise there are people that will drive you from this place at any price'' / ''Who?'' / ''Taxi drivers''. The twenty minute ride to the railway station was twice what it cost for three of us and our two Romanian chaperones to take the train from Bucharest to Brasov.
It wasn't until we had passed through Gara de Nord (imagine a scene from Escape from New York) and onto the train that our supposed helpers informed us that we were not in fact going to Brasov but instead to Intorura Buzaului, a small town on top of a mountain near Brasov. By 'near' read a personal train that took 70 minutes to travel 35 kilometres.
This train took the ''workers'' to the Tractorul and Roman factories in Brasov in the morning (4:45am ñ station bar therefore opened at 4am) and back again at 4pm. Half of them were inebriated going to work, the remainder joined them for the trip back. The smell of tuica and Carpati filterless cigarettes filled every carriage. Happy days.
We arrived in this tiny town (the coldest in Romania) on 5th November 1993. By 20 November it had plummeted to minus 26 degrees. Unpleasant warm wine bought from the local shop was chilled to perfection by the time you arrived back in your apartment block two minutes later. It also turned the town into an ice rink and we were all covered in bruises within a week.
During this time we started to teach at the local school. Through lack of anything to do in the afternoon (school finished at 1:30pm) our afternoon English classes were a hit with the local kids. We had an hour of grammar followed by an hour of ''conversation''. The conversation would be the three of us each speaking to small groups to discuss what they were up to. Due to lack of any money or facilities in this town the answers rarely went beyond ''I watched television'' or ''I don't know.''
We therefore began to record conversations on cassette to prompt the children. These were often extracts of dialogue from James Bond movies and English quiz shows. We took pathetically infantile pleasure in two seven-year-olds debating the quality of an indifferently blended brandy or the right way to prepare Bond's martinis. It did have the effect of engaging them enough that we were kindly asked if we would join them and the school history teacher on a trip to Alba ulia to hear President Iliescu delivering the 1 December speech for National Day.
We duly arrived there the night before following a backbreaking seven-hour journey on a 1968 Volvo bus. We obtained some Romanian flags and the next morning joined the throng. After a day meeting Corneliu Vadim Tudor, listening to Mr Iliescu and quietly freezing, we finally headed back to the meeting point where the bus waited for us.
Due to the fact that no diesel fuel could be found in the town, the bus had to drive to Sibiu to refuel and we were left stranded for two hours. By 5pm I had my head wrapped in the Romanian flag with another of my English colleagues wrapping his around his legs in an effort to keep warm. Some unfriendly git promptly went to tell the overtly nationalist and suspicious history teacher that I was blowing my nose on the flag and my colleague was cleaning his shoes on his.
By the time we arrived back in Intorsura Buzaului the teacher had convinced himself that we worked for MI6. He immediately went to the police and the SRI was called to the town to investigate.
He also told the pupils in school that we were secret service agents planning to start a coup in Romania to make up for the recent loss of the empire. The children were being brainwashed to be used as shock troops in the takeover of Romania (this really is true). Overnight we lost about 30 per cent of our pupils whose parents withdrew them from our class for fear of this brainwashing. Perhaps it was those James Bond conversations.
The SRI finally arrived in the town and interviewed the local police and the families who we lived with. This resulted (unbeknownst to us) in the police tailing us for the next few months. Fairly regular aggravation from drunk local youths looking to test the foreigners were always broken up by a mystery policeman who would appear in the bar within 30 seconds of anything happening. We just thought that Romania had an efficient policing system.
We remained in blissful ignorance until the head of the local police approached the family I lived with to ask if we could stop drinking quite so late into the night as his men were getting very tired and cold sitting outside one bar after another watching us enjoy our 230 lei beer and 1,900 lei pink champagne. Matters were resolved when we teamed up with Dinu, who was the local policeman who had the job of ensuring all the bars and restaurants paid their taxes.
Being a screaming alcoholic, Dinu and the local hostelries had reached an understanding that free booze meant a blind eye was turned to the very predictable tax evasion that was going on. Dinu was dark skinned but assured us that he burnt himself at the Black Sea one year and had remained this colour. His daughter, one of our remaining pupils, was even darker and apparently she had also had the same misfortune during a trip to the beach soon after she was born. Conversation beyond that was limited to a few ''noroc''s and toasts about Anglo-Romanian friendship. We all soon realised that we couldn't keep the pace and instead reverted to being followed every night.
The sheer fact we were in this town at all was news (I was there recently and 5-year-olds who weren't alive when I taught in 1993-1994 came up to me counting out loud in English). The fact that we were spies was the talk of the town.
Our Romanian families were involved in a series of almost unbelievable exchanges with suspicious or nosey neighbours. One family in my block asked if I was really a spy. My Romanian ''father'' told him that we had been sent by MI6 to steal educational secrets from Romania and that my job was to count how many pens and pencils the children used every day.
This was immediately believed and went round the town like wildfire. Before things managed to get out of control I received a phone call from the UK telling me that the head of the company that sent us to Romania, Teaching Abroad, had appeared on Crime Watch. He had been exposed as a serial fraudster and was using this company and our teaching as a cover for some form of money laundering. The Romanian authorities assumed, not unreasonably, that the teachers were involved. There were several spread around the country and some had their passports confiscated. We were all tipped off by the British Embassy to get out quick and we did.
As we took off I swore I'd never return to such a lunatic country. Since then I've lived in Bucharest for three years, then visited regularly, and just recently returned for what looks like the foreseeable future. I can hardly imagine this is the same country as the one I came to in 1993. Anyone who says that things haven't changed either hasn't been around long enough or has a very short memory.
Oliver Meister is a director of ProTV.