"Welcome to Bratislava!! You are lucky you come in the summer, things can be verrry bleak here in the winter..."
We're entering spring now, I think/hope, which means alllll the snow that had covered the streets, the trees, the sidewalks, the buildings is dripping away .... revealing the dirty, chipped, unkempt sights beneath it, that its clean bright whiteness had been obscuring..
I can never get over the Romania 'aesthetic.' In Western Europe, in the US, neighborhoods of a certain 'quality' and cities of a certain 'reputation' look a 'certain' way. People in one apartment of a building don't feel free to install a cheap, non-matching balcony that they have plastered in with exposed grit and building materials. People who pay about the national average monthly income in rent front the extra cost per year to have their buildings scrubbed clean every once in a while. Well-tended gardens are not strewn with plastic bottles and rusted barbed wire.
It gets tiring to go into a medical building that is situated in the most dismal cement hulk that communist architectural genius could create, with a garden that looks like its growing trash, rusty wires, and dying weeds. The grime that covers every building, the scabbed sidewalks, the decimated lawns, the shabby everything! New, expensive houses are being built in the hills overlooking my side of town. Next to a European sports car and flashy new Jacuzzi is an old decrepit garden hut with scrap wood piled around it. How does no one see this?! The US suburban ideal which involves cutting a lawn that has crept above regulation 2.2 inches tall might be a bit inane and compulsive, but anything is better than the unmatched wire fences that enclose an expensive new house that is surrounded by broken building materials, trash, and old weeds. Money could be part of it, but it is more.
It is impossible to get things done WELL here. Have 'nice' cupboards with doors that close correctly and lay flat, matching handles on drawers, painted walls that aren't sloppily splashed over the edges- none of this exists here. I don't think it would be possible to get it done here, regardless of money. I have brand new windows in my apartment that don't close unless you jimmy the handle just right.
I have found many Romanians to be very clever and creative when handling or fixing certain things. Lacking fully stocked stores that have the correctly sized screw, a matching paint, a necessary tool, they make do and figure out a makeshift way of solving the problem. Now, with more money, more stores, they so frequently still choose to do things the old way. Money that comes in is used to buy flashy cars, new sunglasses, and trips to Italy. The car is parked in a potholed driveway, under a rusted and paint-splotched garage, while they come home from vacation to a house that has plaster around the corners of new windows, crumbling facades, and a dirty balcony that looks like it belongs in the projects; they run around all glammed up in sleek Italian clothing and step over piles their dog has made in their yard that no one bothers to pick up.
I will be glad when its springtime so I can hike around in the mountains and at least enjoy the natural beauty of the country (that which isn't trash strewn, anyways...)
1 comment:
A while back, a Native American passing through Romania commented to me that "this place is like a Reservation". That set me thinking. The problem, I gather, with the Reservations is that they aren't truly the home areas of the people living there. Hence there is no real connection felt with the land or location. Romania has some similarities. The country was, for most of the past five hundred years, run by other people - Austrians, Hungarians, Turks, etc. The main tourist attractions were built by other nationalities, the Painted Monasteries excepted. The current population, for these and perhaps other reasons, don't feel connected to the land or heritage. They are surrounded by reminders that, frankly, the Habsburgs made a better job of governance. So Romania is little more than a Reservation for Romanians - a place to live, exploit and throw trash. As for the psychological need for a homeland, that is provided by the bizarre nationalistic construct that passes for "history" within the average Romanian mind.
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