Regulars
My Health

Happy to be in Bucharest, not Budapest

by Mikael Fredholm, Sales Manager World Class Romania

All my friends in Sweden said enviably that Budapest is such a beautiful city and that I was really lucky to have gotten a job there. And not any job. A job as Sales Manager for World Class, one of the premier fitness chains in Europe. What an adventure I had in store, they said: moving to Budapest, an unknown city for most Swedes, and to work with my biggest passion – fitness and health. It was not until later, after I had finally located Budapest on the map, that I took a closer look at my contract. Had someone changed it? It didn’t say Budapest; it said Bucharest. My friends were skeptical. “Isn’t that the city that is famous for its wild dogs, and nothing much else?” they asked. So it should be a great market for fitness clubs I told them. Who wants to be chased by wild dogs while training?

Dogs have been the least of my concerns, even though they have a big problem with my rollerblading here. Elevators, for example, have proven to be far more dangerous than dogs in this city. Slightly late for a dinner date I entered the elevator, pressed the button for the ground floor, and with the same exhilaration as I had during my first bungee jump the elevator plummeted to the ground. So much for that dinner! Luckily, I was in Bucharest, not Budapest, because I have realised how friendly Romanian people are. After four hours of keeping me company my dinner date finally found an elevator repair man who managed to get me out. Luckily I had gotten my phone back a couple of days earlier from a guy I found on the street were I live. It had been stolen but this guy told me he had some connections and three days later I got it back. First time in my life that I bought my phone, twice.

This country is full of surprises. Where else would you be asked to be in a ski movie to be filmed deep in the Romanian mountains? I had found a helicopter skiing company on the Internet and after having met with the owner I was asked to be in a ski movie he was going to make. What a dream! Five days of unlimited helicopter lifts deep in the Carpathians together with some really talented extreme skiers. Unfortunately the helicopter crashed a week before the filming and my deepest sympathy goes to the people that were aboard.
But I had got a taste of the wild mountains of Romania so I hired a mountain guide that took me to Balea Lac for a weekend of off-pist skiing. I have been skiing all over the world but I have never seen a cable car like the one that was going to take us up to our chalet. On top of that the wind was blowing like crazy. My guide decided that we should go for it: the alternative was to walk up but that would take half the night. Halfway up it was chaos. The force of the wind made the cable car swing so much that it risked unhooking from the steel wire. The operator talked frenetically over the intercom and I understood that it was pretty bad. After one hour of stopping and starting we finally arrived safely. When asking the guide how bad it was he replied, “You should be happy that you don’t understand Romanian.”

After three days of incredible skiing and a lunch in a remote village at the home of my guide’s grandmother, I was finally back at my apartment complex. My legs were like jelly but I decided to take the stairs to my apartment on the sixth floor instead of the elevator. Tomorrow was a new day at World Class and I didn’t want to be late for work.