by This is Romania. The land of the bogus. The land of the fictitious. The land of the phantom.
Last night I rushed to view an apartment in the south-west quadrant of the city, not too far from the centre. The flat was on the ground floor of a forbidding seventies block, and far bigger than anything I need. But the real turn-off wasn’t the flat (“too big” isn’t the worst problem a flat can have after all), it was the agent. He was thirty or so, and his BMW couldn’t have been more than four years old. In Romania, that means he’s making far too much money. He was suave, he was smooth, he was someone I trusted even less than I normally trust real estate agents. From there I had to find my way, somehow, to my student’s apartment in the north of the city. I didn’t have much time, it was dark, and buses still remain something of a mystery. At Piața Regina Maria I got on the 14 bus, which seemed right, and tried to follow the route on the far-too-small screen of my phone. Traffic was heavy. I got off at Peter and Paul Street, or Strada Petru și Pavel, parallel to my student’s street. Excellent. But actually finding the right tower block was another matter. These blocks aren’t numbered 1, 2, 3, 4 or 2, 4, 6, 8 or anything predictable. They often have a letter and a number, and within every block there are typically several staircases each denoted by a letter. I needed block A35, staircase (or scara) C. By the time I found it I was five minutes late. The door was locked and I had to press a button so that my student could let me in. But which one? I knew he lived on the fourth floor but didn’t know which apartment. I phoned him. No answer. Great. A few minutes later a woman arrived. I asked her if she knew Silviu, she said yes and pointed me to the correct flat. I trudged up to the fourth floor, rang his doorbell, and got no reply. Wonderful. I then took the bus back to Piața 700, where I got two pleșkavițe (which aren’t all they’re cracked up to be), and walked home. The temperature was zero and dropping fast.
Finding a suitable apartment isn’t easy or fun. On Wednesday I got ripped off by an agency who charged me 100 lei (what I charge for two lessons) for some useless search tool. Well, it isn’t useless, but it doesn’t do anything I can’t do online, and it swamps me with spam. For my money I also got to chat with a young woman who said that inhabitants of Romanian villages are merely animals. Nice.
My dad showed me this article from the New York Times. (Dad finds these articles using a news aggregator called News360.) Wow, 148 diaries found in a skip (or dumpster). Alexander Masters’ Stuart was a great read and I’d recommend it to anybody. I spent a lot of time wandering around central Cambridge in the late nineties so I found it particularly illuminating.
This sense that I can’t trust anybody is frustrating, but it hasn’t put me off wanting to live here. Finding somewhere to live is my top priority. Once I’ve done that and got all my paperwork sorted (I hope), I can concentrate on finding genuine students. I’m getting plenty of responses to my ads so I remain positive on that score. Christmas and New Year will be a non-event and I don’t really mind.
