Paranoia and other pleasant things

Shrink in the big city II

Anne’s apartment was hot but welcoming and - the most important aspect after being stuck in a microwave oven - like space for seven hours - it had a shower. I can’t tell you how much the feeling of non-sweatiness counts towards being human again. We chatted a lot and went to sleep at 1 AM, all windows open …

…. only to be woken around 3 AM by a drunk guy who was yelling at his wife that he’ll kill her and kill himself, because he doesn’t care anymore, or something along those lines. We were at the 9th floor, and he was somewhere on the street. He had some damn good lungs, , y’all . Half-woken I closed the balcony door and resigned to the idea of sweating again.

At 6:30 I was up, before the alarm clock even began to think about ringing. Poor Anne, who normally is the antithesis of an early bird, followed soon. She gave me the details on how to get to the shady part of Bucharest where the shindig was (go 8 bus stations, take the subway from University Square, switch to tram in Eroii Revolutiei Station). Easy as pie, thought I.

The first problem appeared when the names of the bus stops were said in the speaker at a level low enough to make babies fall asleep, while all the elderly ladies on the bus (what’s with the fatal attraction between old people and buses in Bucharest, anyway? There were no gray hairs on the subway, but the bus was full of them.) chatted about the price of the parsley and the bad manners of young people who weren’t giving their seats to them. So naturally, I missed the right stop and had to walk a pair of kilometers back, to Universitatii. Which is a big place that everybody knows … except it wasn’t marked by any written sign. There were University-looking buildings around me alright, but where was the damn square? And the subway station?

Submitting to the fact that I’m no Bucharestian, nor do I show any signs of innate Bucharestianism, I phoned Ina and asked for directions, describing whatever bigger buildings were in front of me. She had no idea either, so she passed the phone to her colleague, a natural-born local. Who at the beginning was also confused about my whereabouts (ha!) but then managed to point to my sorry ass in the right direction. Oh, that funky-smelling underground! Never have I expected to prefer it so much to the surface, where it was closing to 38 centigrades.

Eroii revolutiei was a very nice place to take a tram ..except for the fact that there were no tracks left, just a long deep hole with ten workers in it. Feeling my toes curl in fear at the mere idea of walking another few kilometers at that temperature, I ignored all warnings and approached a cab. The driver greeted me with “I’m not going to the center, they are working on all of the shortest routes to there” to which I replied with a sunny “And what do you say about a trip to Viilor Road?”

We agreed on a decent price and after some chat about how it was to be a cabby in the Communist era, I finally was where I was supposed to be, only 10 minutes late.

Posted under: chestii