by We’ll get the results of the exit poll in just eight hours. I fully expect Simion to be elected as president. He talks just like Trump. He’s pro-Trump, pro-Putin, and anti-brain. All the progress I’ve seen in the last nine years is about to be undone in a flash. That’s where the zeitgeist is right now. It’s terrifying and there’s nothing I can do about it. I’m just glad I put the wheels of my residency renewal in motion prior to the election.
After Mum and Dad’s ordeal which I hope they won’t repeat – Dad’s feet had swollen up like nothing I’d ever seen before – they acclimatised pretty quickly. But now they’ve only got three full days left in Romania. We left Timișoara on Tuesday and got back yesterday after spending two nights in Brașov and one each in Râmnicu Vâlcea and Sibiu.
I messed up twice on this trip, or really before the trip. I had a long, exhausting day of lessons on Monday and had to give Kitty to Dorothy, so my preparation wasn’t fantastic. Due to lack of time on my part, I let Mum book the accommodation in Brașov – she said she’d used booking.com dozens of times and was very adept at it. Hmmm. My other mistake was travelling to three different places with my parents in such a short space of time – I really was asking for it. Dorothy had given me some elderflower heads, which can normally make a very nice summer beverage, but under the circumstances were a pain in the arse. I was frantically trying to bottle the socată (elderflower champagne) even though it hadn’t had enough time to brew.
It was a long old drive to Brașov, but nothing I hadn’t done before. Before we left, Mum went to the loo for the first time in a week. Fantastic news. The motorway (one of Romania’s few such roads) is very good and mostly empty, so I could bomb along at 130 km/h without many problems. We stopped in a lovely little village called Porumbacu de Jos, just to the east of Sibiu. (De jos means lower. For every de jos there was also a de sus, or upper. In this region, the de joses were on the main road.) Near our destination, we stopped in Codlea and got a pizza from a sleepy little restaurant with no other customers apart from us. When we arrived in Brașov, we found our apartment in a handy spot just up the hill from the centre of town. I’m lucky that my parents can still do hills. But otherwise the apartment was pretty crappy – it was too small for the three of us and it lacked some of the most basic facilities.
Brașov is a great city. I’d always wanted to visit it, but the only chances I’d got previously were in the height of the tourist season – no thanks. We spent Wednesday morning walking by the fortress and then into town where we visited the Black Church – a Lutheran church whose construction began in the late 14th century. The soot from the fire it suffered 300 years later gave it its name. In between it was struck by a series of earthquakes. Because you had to pay and my parents don’t really like paying for stuff (yeah, that’s something I’ve picked up from them), we nearly didn’t go in, but we did. We learnt of the importance of guilds back in the day. Parishioners sat in different sections of the church based on which guild (association of tradesmen or professionals) they belonged to. There was a clear hierarchy of the guilds; if you represented a trade with status, you’d get larger seats nearer the front. Perhaps the main attraction of the church is its enormous collection of beautiful Persian rugs from the 15th and 16th centuries.
We went back to the apartment for lunch. At this point I could see (and hear, and practically taste) that Mum was getting anxious. It happens so quickly. You hear those big sighs and you know you’re in for a rough ride. Batten down the hatches. In the afternoon we visited the local museum. The two main attractions of the museum for me were the building itself – it was once a fancy council building, which must have become less fancy before getting an extreme makeover 20 years ago – and everything about the two photographers that had successive monopolies in the industry at the back end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. We found a Vietnamese place to eat in the middle of town, as you do in Romania, and walked back to the apartment.
What happened next wasn’t much fun, to put it mildly.
