16/3/90

Romanian Holiday

Now that the revolution is over, Ceausescu's palace has joined Dracula's castle as a must-see on any tourist's itinerary.

Byline: Sam Orbaum

THE RESTAURANT is Swiss-style, the food richly haute cuisine and the floor show very western and decadent. At the next table, six clean-cut Israeli students watch near-naked dancers prancing about the stage to throbbing rock music. This is Romania?
    It is. Romania may seem on the edge, but so does Tel Aviv to the outside world. Forget the misconceptions: Romania is not dangerous, not fearful and certainly not inhospitable. People are not shot in the streets (any more), and mortar-fire no longer rattles hotel windows. There is food, heat, electricity, happiness, indulgence, breathtaking beauty and, as anywhere, crooked cabbies.
    What's more, Romania is only two-and-a-half hours away and is embarrassingly cheap, one of the most economical destinations in the world for Israelis.
    In addition, only a few weeks after the guns fell silent, the revolution is already an integrated tourist attraction. The visitor to Bucharest cannot help but notice the stark little shrines of wreaths, flowers, crosses and flickering candles that identify the sites where fighters fell.
    You will want to know, and they want to tell you. Ask to be taken to the little Bucharest cemetery where 400 revolutionary victims are interred in shallow graves.
    And, of course, you must see that legacy of lunacy, Ceausescu's new palace.   Romania is not sure what to do with it. The Ministry of Culture wants to turn it into a sort of museum of madness, though it may end up as a convention centre. Whatever it becomes, its intended glorification of Ceausescu makes it a fine curio.
    One of the world's largest buildings, the palace is a Versailles-like complex built on a gentle hill and fronted by a huge lawn and an even larger cobblestone plaza.
    Facing it is Victory of Socialism Street, a magnificent boulevard with ornate fountains along the median and luxury apartment buildings along its length. Until the revolution, traffic was banned along this street and around the palace. But now everyone drives there, davka.

BUCHAREST is a curious city. Grand baroque architecture interrupts the long blocks of colourless and offensively dull Stalinesque buildings, and every so often, boom! , Ceausescuan self-aggrandizement. The city centre looks like it is in shadow even in the sunlight, but wide, tree-lined avenues and spacious squares suggest a sparkling European metropolis, complete with even a splendid duplicate of Paris's Arc de Triomphe.
    The visitor's first view of Romania, however, confirms the worst expectations. The airport, built for Richard Nixon's visit in the early 1970s, is extraordinarily drab and seedy. Instead of a slick glass-and-steel decor, heavily varnished sandwich board and primitive accoutrements, such as the clanking luggage carousel, make a bad first impression.
The saving grace, at least for night-time arrivals, is that the airport is also badly lit. I was told that this is an improvement: "It's only half as dark as it used to be," a fellow-traveller and former Romanian noted. Completing this first impression were two bullet holes - "from the revolution" - in the airport windows.
    From then on, until the next time I saw the airport on the way out, Romania was a feast.

"NOROC." Get used to the word, Romania's equivalent of L'chaim. Every few minutes of my five days in the country, I was handed a glass of tuica (pronounced "tzwika"), a potent plum brandy that is usually boiled and sometimes spiked with peppercorns. And every few minutes I would exclaim "Noroc!" and fall down in an instant stupor. If it wasn't tuica, it was one or another of the fine fruity Romanian wines, and I spent more time in, er, good spirits than I'd like to admit.
    For what it costs, you might as well have a wild time. One evening three friends and I painted the town red, if that can be said in a city purging its communist past. For six hours the four of us drank more wine than we breathed air, pausing only to drink vodka, and to nosh. For this binge, the bill came to 1,300 lei, the equivalent of $61 or, if you've bought your lei on the black market, $16.
    (With apologies to Romania's desperate economy, let me explain that a member of my entourage volunteered to convert my $100 bill, and returned with a wad of 8,000 lei instead of the 2,100 I expected from the official rate. After five days of frantic spending to get rid of the unconvertible cash, I still had plenty left over. )
    The night club at the Athenee Palace Hotel, where we drank that night away, hardly wanted our lei. It took some mighty cajolery and two press cards - plus 40 lei each - to get us past the bouncer. A woman who got in with some unspecified form of protektzia informed us later that a fistfight had broken out at the entrance when a group of pleasure-seekers from Timisoara was turned away.
    The three young Syrians at the next table came alive when a belly-dancer writhed to an Ofra Haza recording, a song they obviously knew. Any culture-gap between us and them vanished with the floor show: titillating Las Vegas-style dancers; an overdressed singer with a voice that showed off the sound system; an Elvis Presley imitator who looked just like Elvis Costello; a Romanian-American West mime; a contortionist; "My Way" in Romanian. I told the Syrians I live in Al-Quds. They liked that.

I DIDN'T make time to visit any museums (there are about a dozen in Bucharest), but there was one that piqued my curiosity: my tourist map of the city still listed something called "The History Museum of the Romanian Communist Party, of the Revolutionary and Democratic Movement in Romania." It was, of course, closed, my guide told me with a giggle.
    (The guide's name was Iacob; the driver's was Iosef. "Typical Romanian names," Iacob said; neither was Jewish. Ironically, the Jewish Romanian journalists in our entourage were named Lucian and Sebastian. )
    Lunch at the Inter-Continental Hotel provided an opportunity to peruse a five-star menu. Although this is the most expensive restaurant in Bucharest, the priciest item was the pheasant at 146.90 lei, a mere $7 (or $1.85 in "black" lei). The cheapest dish, cucumber salad, was 4.80 lei, grushim either way. The roast beef was 49.10 lei, soups 10-20 lei, Zingara deer 89.70, frogs' legs 74. Tack on 15 per cent service charge and the bill for seven of us, with unlimited wine and hearty appetites, was 2,000 lei ($95, but it cost us $25).
    The tab was equivalent to the minimum monthly salary in Romania: the average salary is 2,800 lei a month.
    If you're going to have money to burn in Romania, you can really only burn it on food or prostitutes (my companions and I decided on the food). Shopping is what you'd expect in a bankrupt, recently socialist country - with the exception of lovely handmade souvenirs. I did have one triumphant shopping excursion when I bought a few birthday cards and a Romanian-language Scrabble set. What else could one need?

I WAS BEGINNING to enjoy Bucharest when we hit the road northward for Brasov.
This is where I fell in love with Romania.
    It was snowing when we arrived, which seemed a little theatrical, because we were heading for the city's winter-resort area, Poiana Brasov, 12 kilometres away. Brasov (pronounced Brashov) is 500 metres above sea level, and Poiana Brasov more than double that, so the undulating journey up the mountain afforded a grand view of this picturesque corner of Transylvania.
    Poiana Brasov, cradled in the Carpathian Mountains, is a lovely little valley dotted with 16 chalet-style hotels and cabanas, a handful of restaurants and night clubs, an entertainment centre, a ranch, and nothing else but the shadow of Mount Timpa, rising 1,799 metres above it. Ski-lifts, cable-cars and cable-gondolas deliver skiers to slopes of varying degrees of difficulty, which include the gentlest grade for the greenest novices.
    Poiana Brasov draws vacationers in the summertime as well, with a great array of pleasures, including hang-gliding, grass skiing, horseback riding, fishing, swimming and hiking, and, of course, sipping tuica.
    The luxurious-but-still-very-rustic Alpin Hotel charges $78 for a double room in season (March 15-May 15, and October 15-December 15) and $64 off-season. I was most impressed with the heated towel-rack in my room, which surely indicated that energy-saving austerity is over.

I DIDN'T do any skiing, unless you count skittering down an icy stretch of road on my derriere on the way to dinner. I found my feet, only to be administered an emergency dose of boiled tuica, which knocked me right back down.
    I didn't touch the stuff again until a moment later, when we arrived at the Capra Neagra restaurant, practically next door. We were greeted with tuica. Noroc!
    The Capra Neagra ("Black Goat") is a large log-cabin on four stepped levels with a sloping, beamed wooden roof and a garish disco floor in the middle. The chef did some beautiful things with the potato, but not, I'm afraid, with the cow: the chunk on my plate wanted to be a fillet steak but, alas, proved to be a knot of muscle, and cold at that. Surely I was just unlucky; my companions had no complaints.
    Then, deja vu: the floor show was strangely reminiscent of the previous night in Bucharest, except that the Las Vegas titillaters this time included one blonde instead of two, and I didn't recognize several of the legs. Also, this evening we had breakdancers, and Israeli students instead of Syrian students at the next table.

I DIDN'T really care to see any more Western entertainment. The next day's schedule took care of that.
    Stina is a little farm in a remote part of the valley, inaccessible except by horse-drawn cart. The 20-minute trek across snowy countryside was a rare escape from urbania. In the absence of vehicles and habitation, with no noise but our horses' clip-clop, no movement, no other people, and a fresh coat of snow completing the pristineness, we wound our way to the distinctive wooden tepee that is Stina. The horses were fed hay; we got mamaliga.
    Stina raises livestock to provide the region with milk and cheese. We were invited inside the tepee to warm up from our wintry journey. O, paradise! There should have been a giant flashing neon sign at the door: "Sanctuary."
    A cosy fire in the middle of the tiny, pineneedle-carpeted floor was ample invitation. Then they brought out steaming plates of mamaliga, a sticky, malty corn-meal mush, and their sensational cheese, called brinza de burduf, rich, creamy and salty. The Stina farmers are very proud of the cheese, which is fermented in a sheep's stomach. Needless to say, we were also served tuica.
    Before bidding cheery farewells, our host presented us with a couple of day-old lambs for a few minutes of cuddling, which we did to squeals of delight and baas of dismay.

THE STINA tepee serves up wonderful full meals, I was told, but instead we were hustled off to the other side of the valley to sample lunch at the Coliba Haiducului ("The Outlaw's Hut").
Serenaded in the snow by singers and musicians around a stone-pit bonfire, we gobbled down a selection of fabulous barbecued mititei (hors d'oeuvres) before joining the rollicking, lusty throng inside. There wasn't an empty seat in the place. Waiters competed for aisle space with singers, including one rousing songbird named Elena, who joined up with our group for a couple of days, filling our tour bus with joyous Romanian music.
    Her performance at the Coliba indicated that she had prepared for us: the Brasov native treated the entire restaurant to a full-volume medley of Israeli and Jewish favourites such as “Yerushalayim shel Zahav," a song from Fiddler on the Roof in Romanian, and "My Yiddische Mama." We merrily toasted her with Tarnave wine and, naturally, tuica.

HOW MUCH more can one eat, drink and be merry in one day?
    Plenty, fortunately, because that evening we drove down to Brasov for dinner at the Cerbul Carpatin ("Carpathian Stag"). As with most meals we had in Romania, food was only something that kept our mouths busy while the show went on. But for once, at this restaurant, I found the very good meal a distraction from a most rapturous programme.
    The Cerbul Carpatin, built in 1544-47, is one of the country's largest restaurants, comprising several dining rooms with seating for over 1,000. It had been a fish market until it was reincarnated as a restaurant in 1963.
    A tour of the complex started with a greeting by two men in traditional dress who welcomed us with fanfares from two-metre-long horns, used in days of yore to communicate between mountaintops.
    Downstairs, we were ceremoniously invited into the cellar by a hearty, pudgy old fellow who identified himself as Bacchus, the god of wine, accompanied by a "nymph" - none other than our songstress, Elena.
    The impishly grinning Bacchus, dressed in full Roman regalia, delivered a short speech in the local lingo, which must have been awfully funny, because all the Romanians among us cracked up. He put gold-painted plastic "medals" round our necks, and about 30 dancers joined us at a table stocked with several varieties of local wines and cheeses, in a room dominated by great barrels of the restaurant's immense stock of wine. You don't even have to ask: we were served tuica as well.
    On through the beautifully preserved building to a narrow room about 75 metres long. They made the best of the unwieldy shape, however: the entertainment was staged the full length of the aisle, with singers, dancers and musicians in a great-gusto floor show of strictly Romanian content.
    The performers are amateurs who work the gig by night and toil in Brasov's factories by day. These people dance and sing and play because they love to. They are not jaded, and this is not a job for them, and it shows in their bubbly enthusiasm and radiant pleasure. It also shows in the resounding response of their audience.
    The programme is not put on for tourists alone. The majority of revellers were Romanians, judging by the sing-along and the gales of laughter at the comedy skits. But you didn't need to be Romanian to enjoy the frantically funny Dance of the Soup Ladles, led by Bacchus himself and with six dancers dressed as chefs, each waltzing with an enormous, tenderly held ladle.
    Most of the time they performed more traditional thigh-slapping, leather-boot-kicking routines. Just before they finished up for the evening, each dancer took someone of the opposite sex from the audience and whirled his or her partner through simple dance-steps. Dancer and diner then knelt and kissed one another on each cheek before the dancers bade us a good night. The post-prandial audience then took over the floor, dancing to ethnic numbers as well as sterling 1950s rock 'n' roll, sung in Romanian.
    The dinner-show at the Cerbul Carpatin is staged nightly, and costs $20. Reservations (Tel. in Brasov 42840, ext. 106) are a must, as it is always fully booked.
    An evening at the Cerbul could be preceded by a full day in Brasov's old city. The restaurant is located on August 23 Square, where the city was first settled 1,500 years ago. Around the corner is the eerie, foreboding 300-year-old Black Church, which boasts a fine carpet collection.

DRACULA WAS here. You certainly get that feeling when you visit Bran Castle on the way back to Bucharest from Brasov. Dracula, meaning the devil, was one of the nicknames of Vlad "the Impaler" Tepes; but my guide insisted that he never actually set foot in this 15th-century castle of his, so I was disappointed in my hope that I would be walking in Dracula's footsteps.
    Still, the heavy wooden door creaked theatrically when I opened it, and the place was certainly spooky enough, so I thought, well, just maybe he'd stopped by for lunch once and didn't tell anybody.
    All but the first floor of the Gothic castle was closed for renovations during our visit, but there was a good display of 15th-century tools, artefacts and torture implements, as well as the office of the castle's ancient proprietor.
    Even if Dracula was never there, Roman Polanski was; he shot some sequences for the film Vampire's Feast there.

LEAVING BRAN, we realized we hadn't eaten for, heavens, an hour at least, so we sped off to our next destination, a youth village run by the Youth Tourism Bureau.
    Called Piriul Rece ("Cool Brook"), the village offers absolutely everything to the young traveller, from skiing, tennis and bowling to a 24-hour disco, a sauna and a library.
Piriul Rece, and a similar establishment nearby in Busteni, vies for the under-35 crowd with cheap rates ($20-$25 full board per day, including all facilities except skiing) and one condition: ya gotta have fun. During our visit, the place was filled to capacity with over 300 young Romanians, Soviets, Czechs, Britons, French, East Germans, Turks, Greeks and Italians, and no one looked remotely miserable.
    Another first-rate lunch, more tuica - and a momentous gift. During the December uprising, Piriul Rece defiantly flew a revolutionary flag with the socialist symbol cut out of the middle. The flag was later removed for safekeeping by the area's revolutionary leader, a 38-year-old engineer named Antoniu Gecse, and on this grand day was ceremoniously presented to me as a gift, to be a treasure of Jerusalem.

(Box 1)

Traveller's Tips

WRESTLING with your vacation budget, remember that travel tax to Romania is half (NIS 125). The flight to Bucharest is $232 return, via El Al or Romania's Tarom. Land arrangements should be made in Israel, or the flight costs an extra $18.
    Expect little from the telephone system. I asked a hotel receptionist to place a call to Jerusalem, and 10 minutes later I called her back a mite impatient. She told me it was a "lot of work and may not be accomplished for hours."
    Bring photographic supplies from Israel. Internationally known brand names are difficult to find there.
    Changing currency on the black market is a very touchy subject. My black-market windfall was unintentional, and I was sternly warned against it. It is a risk that is hardly worthwhile, as everything is so cheap.
    Bringing western goods to sell in Romania is another touchy subject. On the one hand, I was constantly besieged to sell dollars, cigarettes, my jeans and even gold. But on the other hand, a Jew in Brasov told me it was a grating embarrassment that Israeli tourists have a bad reputation for trying to flog such items. That is good enough reason not to. However, it might be a nice idea to bring along inexpensive giveaways. Everyone appreciated the Bazooka gum I handed out. You might also bring a few Israeli-flag lapel pins.
    Traditionally, the thing to bring to Romania has been Kent 100s - no other cigarette brand but. Most of the packs of Kent I gave away were received with near-reverence. But a word of warning: Kent 100s are so established a symbol of corruption in Romania, that you may insult some people. This did, in fact, happen to me. After a very friendly conversation with a group of young people in their mid-20s, they gave me a small gift and I responded in kind - or so I thought. One of the recipients spurned the pack of cigarettes, and told me coldly that "I will speak to you for free; you do not have to buy me." A conciliatory explanation of my naivete smoothed things over, and we became friends again.

(Box 2)

Doing it the capitalist way

"YOU CAN'T cook Chinese food with mamaliga," Ion Mihai said with a smile, but he wasn't being funny: Bucharest's sole Chinese restaurant has had to contend with the impossible task of dishing up exotic cuisine without imported ingredients. Using only local food sources is a tough enough challenge; but before the revolution that was compounded by a desperate food shortage, since relieved. What's more, the chef of the Nan Jing Mi restaurant is Romanian, and never had formal training in Chinese cookery.
    Mihai, the urbane vice-president of Romania's Youth Tourism Bureau, mentioned the Chinese restaurant as a symbol of the challenges facing Romania's tourism industry. He stressed the importance of sending Romanians abroad to learn such trades as restaurant cookery and management, but Mihai Tepelus, general manager of Poiana Brasov, envisions a hotel school in Romania, to teach the locals locally.

AS MUCH as there is at present for the tourist in Romania, there is much more to be done. At a press conference in Brasov, Florin Crizbasan, that city's new mayor of only five days, outlined his plans for the region's tourism industry.
    With the coming of democracy, he said, privatization will be encouraged for establishments such as small hotels and restaurants, with special incentive for peasant hospitality. He listed several coming attractions: restaurants of the Chinese, German, Hungarian, Russian and seafood genres (he said there already is a small kosher eatery), and a new horse-riding centre, skating rink and swimming pool in Poiana Brasov, all indoors.
    The resort's Alpin Hotel will be upgraded with a casino and disco-night club, and he envisions new religious facilities - "a church and maybe a synagogue" - in the resort valley.
All quite optimistic, but not reckless: Tepelus promised not to transform Poiana Brasov into a bustling city, saying that "we won't destroy the ambience for the sake of 'progress.' We'll grow with the same homey style."
    Competition is a brand-new catchword. Crizbasan's master plan is to develop the country to offer Poiana Brasov a run for the tourist dollar.    

THE BEST example of capitalist competition is that the Tourism Ministry is now encouraging private travel agencies to open shop in Romania.
    Leading the way is Melia Tours of Tel Aviv, which arranged our jaunt through Romania on the invitation of its Tourism Ministry. Prolonged negotiations between ministry officials and Melia's Lica Bluthal ended in an announcement last month that the company would be the first private travel agency to operate in Romania.