cacoëthes

Na na na na, hey hey hey, goodbye

gkb 29. July 2008 - 21:15

I'll admit that, while I didn't have too many pangs of regret about my upcoming move, the circumstances in Sighet this week are wiping away the few that still existed.
As I mentioned, the town is without rail service, and water. It's unknown when either will resume, and I've not been able to get a clear answer on why this is. Granted, I don't know enough about trains to even be able to speculate as to what is causing the delay; is it that the tracks are underwater? Electrical lines blown out, making it impossible to move trains off to a siding or switch directions? Stations inaccessible, so that staff can't get to work? No clue.
With regards to the water, it sounds like a bad situation-comedy script: the flooding broke the pumps to the municipal water system, and there isn't anyone here with the expertise to repair them. So they need to be removed, and sent someplace where they CAN be repaired. But the town has no money to do this, so they mayor went to Bucureşti to petition some government ministry for the money to do the repair ... and this is where most everyone trails off in their explanation, as nobody seems to know the rest of the story. (Apparently the same thing happened here a few years ago: flooding broke the water pumps, they had to be repaired, the town was without water for weeks ... you'd think they would have learnt from the problems the first time around, and installed some system redundancies or drawn up a plan B or something that would have prevented this happening again, but apparently not.)

So the 'solution', at the moment, is to employ the fire department to drive around town all day, every day, filling up giant tanks of water at various locations, and for the townspeople to walk/ride/drive over and fill up pots, bottles, buckets, with non-potable water for bathing and cleaning, and to buy mineral water for drinking. I'm fortunate, I guess, in that there's a tank not terribly far from my apartment, so I'm at least not walking for blocks with my single bucket in order to accumulate enough water to pour over my head for a makeshift, cold shower or to clean my few dishes. It does severely complicate matters in this, my final week in town, though, as it's become orders of magnitude more difficult to clean the apartment in the way I'd intended before departing, and essentially impossible to do things like wash the carpets.
This has also helped me to realise just how little attachment I've forged with this place. Instead of the relative hardship inspiring me to reflect on the things I appreciate about being here, and those appreciable things in turn making the difficulties somewhat more tolerable, the inconveniences are just make me want to be away from here, yesterday. I've spent the past few days wishing I'd moved a month sooner, and had an additional month to familiarise myself with my new location, enjoy the benefits of Târgu Mureş, instead of whiling away my time here, without water and without transportation.
At least it's only a few more days; though I don't even want to think about doing this move if the rail system hasn't been repaired by then.

Home Sweet Home, indeed

gkb 27. July 2008 - 10:44

All of Romania has been receiving drenching rain for the past several days. While the only real visible effect in Bucureşti was a week's worth of lovely thunderstorms and mostly-tolerable temperatures, many northern towns and counties have been inundated and, in some cases, flooded. Maramureş included.

I departed for my site yesterday evening (once again a second-class warrior, but benefitting from beginning my travel on Saturday, instead of Friday, afternoon), and was enduring a chilly, music-less, but rather quiet ride back, counting the minutes until I could be off the train, and profoundly grateful that I would never again have to do the Bucureşti-Sighet CFR run. I deflated the rest of the way, though, when the conductor woke me at about half past three. He was moving through the cars and informing everyone that, because of flooding in the area, the train wasn't going back to Sighet--only as far as Vişeu de Jos.

Vişeu is about 60km or so from Sighet; not walking distance, in other words (though I might have considered it if not for the flooding and the amount of stuff I was carrying). There was a microbus that went from Săcel, a few stops earlier, but I had no idea when it left, or if it even ran on Sunday, as the vast majority of microbus business comes from people commuting for work or selling their wares in the piaţa. After some pondering, I decided that instead of getting off at Săcel and waiting who knows how long to catch another form of transport (or just saying the hell with it and hitching--a sketchy prospect on an inclement Sunday), I'd just go one more stop and drop into a nearby village where another volunteer lives. I couldn't call him to verify that he was there, so I crossed my fingers and hoped that it would work out, and that if I couldn't catch a microbus today, I could get the crack-of-dawn one tomorrow.

However, due to the large number of people who were all trying to get back to the same place I was, there was a bus waiting for us at Săcel. I was pretty surprised--and grateful--for this, as it's not the kind of service one expects to receive in the backwater provinces of Transilvania. It was packed and uncomfortable, but it moved, and was vastly preferable to sitting in the depot waiting for six hours for another form of conveyance to arrive. We all packed ourselves into this ancient bus--watching bemusedly as tourists snapped photos of each other standing outside in the rain and in the aisles of the bus, imagining the stories they'd tell to their friends in the suburbs back home about the experience--and took off.
The ride took forever; between the suspension system bottoming out due to the bus being filled far beyond capacity, the slow going because of same as well as partial flooding of the roads, and the roundabout route taken to get everyone into a general proximity of their final destination. It felt like about three hours, though probably wasn't that long. We finally hit Sighet, I grabbed my stuff and popped like a cork out the door, and tramped the rest of the way back to the apartment; exhausted, dirty and stiff, wanting nothing more than a shower, a gallon of water and a nap.

Only to find that the water in the building had been shut off when I returned. No drinking water, no bathing water, not even enough to boil an egg. Apparently this is the case all over town; the flooding broke a pump, or something, and everywhere is without water, and nobody has any idea of when it will be back on (though everyone is advised to stay close to their taps because there are rumours that it might come back on for an hour or two, sometime today). So no shower, no tea, and after I drink the couple of glasses' worth I have left I'll be going out to buy mineral water for consumption.

Welcome home, indeed. If nothing else, this is making me quite happy that I'll be saying goodbye to this town next week.

Becoming all too familiar

gkb 20. July 2008 - 15:35

If someone had told me, a year or so ago, that I was soon to become disturbingly comfortable with the idea of taking regular 14-hour train rides, I probably would have laughed in their faces and assured them that the 4.5 hour flight between San Francisco and Chicago was interminable, and that there was no way I'd grow accustomed to sitting on a train for the amount of time required to fly from Australia to the US, in order to travel a distance smaller than that of the state of Oregon.
Yet here I am, taking this trip for what will most likely be the last time. I'm actually rather pleased, if truth be told; while I normally wouldn't have bought myself an expensive train ticket, fortune smiled upon me through a large group of travellers also purchasing tickets for my train, and all that was left when I arrived was a second-class seat ... or a first-class sleeper berth.

For a while I was enamoured of the workaday second-class trip; I saw it as a way to familiarise myself with the reality of daily life here, to understand what life was like for the vast majority of the populace. And I suppose I did ... but I also got fleas, got propositioned (and 'inappropriately handled') by passengers and conductors alike, got trapped in irritating conversations with people who couldn't seem to understand that I'd much rather continue reading The Economist in peace and insisted upon talking to me through headphones and an open magazine, got looked up and down in the lewdest manner possible by drunken assholes who utilised the opportunity of the narrow passage to pinch my nipples or grab my ass as I tried to pass by, got kicked out of my seat, got suffocated by people who refused to open the windows in miserable choking heat, and got robbed by fellow passengers.
But now, first class. A little berth all to myself in a clean car with a bathroom that doesn't look like an outtake from Trainspotting, a bed that's arguably more comfortable than the one in my apartment (not a terribly impressive feat, but still), an unimpeded view of whatever I want to look at, and carmates who are pleasant, sober, and clean.

Call me a snob, but I never want to leave here.

I'm glad I didn't find myself in this situation sooner, or I'd imagine I would have gotten very used to it. Thinking back to all the unpleasant trips I've taken; cars that were always either stiflingly hot or bitterly cold, people boarding the train at three in the morning and rudely kicking or shoving your feet out of their way as you doze, being wedged into the corner of a seat because someone decided to sprawl along the length of it to sleep, standing in the passage at the open window in the dead of winter because your assigned seat is in a closed compartment with someone who hasn't been introduced to soap in what seems like a month. Dehydrating myself for 18-or-so hours so I don't have to even think about visiting those bathrooms. Arriving at my destination at 7am, haggard and exhausted from lack of sleep and water, staring down a wasted day of exhaustion and half-dozing.
I'd say I'm certainly over the romanticism I felt about second-class travel.
I could absolutely see travelling a good distance like this, though. Even though these compartments are spare by some 'first class' standards, there are two bunks, racks and hangers for baggage, a window that opens, a sink and mirror. The bathroom is clean and doesn't make you want to gag just thinking about it. The silence and the view, the pleasant carmates, complimentary water (!) and functioning outlets make this a thoroughly enjoyable prospect, so much so that I almost wish my trip was longer so that I had more time to take advantage of it. (It is true that it's not always this advatageous; I got lucky this time by virtue of there not being many first-class passengers, and not having a cabinmate. Riding in a cabin like this with the wrong person could easily be 14 hours of misery.)
The result of this is that I'm now looking forward to post-service travel even more, if such a sentiment is possible. A couple of fellow volunteers and I have the plan to ride the Trans-Siberian railway on our way home, and the more I think about it, the more I think I'd like to travel back to the west coast of the States and hop a train back to Chicago. Not having a schedule for Amtrak's chronic lateness to screw up, and riding from San Francisco to Chicago in a roomette for a couple of days, hanging out in the dining and observation cars chatting with fellow travellers, seems like a great way to meander my way back. I've done enough of these trips behind the wheel of a car; it would be nice to sit back and watch the scenery go by, with someone else at the helm.

iTunes 7.7, and a dilemma worthy of White Whine

gkb 15. July 2008 - 21:48

So, I made the colossal mistake yesterday of allowing Software Update to upgrade iTunes 7.6.2 to iTunes 7.7. Normally I do this sort of thing without even thinking about it (oh, what a change from the Linux days), and yesterday was no exception.

This jaunt into mindlessness has reminded me of the Value of the Backup. Because you see, dear Readers, the new version was pretty b0rked. Files wouldn't delete properly, mp3 players synced and then wouldn't play. There may well be more problems than that, but it was after my shuffle refused to function (depriving me of a much-needed distraction when I went out for a walk about town) that I put the brakes on the enterprise.

Of course, I hadn't saved the old version of iTunes, and Apple had already removed it from their site. After some frantic searching and forum-posting, I found a kindly soul who provided a link to download the previous version that was (miraculously) still functional.

The reinstall was not without its issues, though--namely that the libraries between the two versions don't want to play nicely with one another. So after a couple of fruitless attempts to migrate my previous library into the downgraded version, I just gave up and copied all my files back into the new (old) iTunes. Now ratings and playcounts are wiped, and a few other annoyances need to be dealt with, but files delete from interface and the library and mp3 players sync and then actually play as they're meant to, instead of refusing to do anything aside from invoking das blinkenlights.

Once again, iTunes has gobbled up my day, made it frustrating and snarl-inducing, and as I sit here--watching it sloooooooowly grind its way through almost 4000 album artwork requests--I find myself once again thinking of what a pain in the ass it has all been, and whether this application is even worth it. How much time it will take to rebuild playlists and organise ratings, sort through the massive "Unknown Artist" file and label all the tracks which were stripped of all identifying tags (quite the feat, considering the number of obscure jazz recordings I have), figure out which podcasts have been played, which I'd played and wanted to keep, which had been lackluster and skipped.

Then I kick myself back into the land of reality, and remember just how inconsequential this really is. Eminently suitable, dare I say, for a sumbission to White Whine.

Who knew?

gkb 2. July 2008 - 20:21

Earlier today I was poking about YouTube, looking for some media on a French musician. I plugged in just his name--Shurik'n--expecting to find the usual videos, photo montages set to songs, and 'fan videos' *twitch* that one runs across when doing such a search. And while I did find some info on the subject I was searching for, I also found ... wait for it ...

Romanian Parkour.

Not only Romanian parkour, but a group of free runners who apparently practice in Ploieşti (and call themselves "Shurik'n"--hence their popping up in my search). It was a rather strange juxtaposition, to watch these guys running and jumping around the familiar locales I'd wandered about in with other trainees last summer, never imagining that anything like this was happening here.
Unfortunately, David Belle these guys were not. Most of what they did was pretty simple--nowhere near the Dvinsk Clan, or even some of the entries from the ScavHunt (assuming those were actual UofC'ers, and not Aero Chicago recruits or something). But hey; they're out there and they're trying, so I guess that's worth something.