Drum Bun. What poet can sing your praises? Whose arms are thick enough to heft that industrial-strength lyre? Whose inner eye can see past your grit and mud, your packs of ownerless little nippy dogs, your undrainable streets, your unsportingly silent mosquito, and celebrate the glowing, inner you? I certainly could never do it. And it was always so damn hard to get out of there. In the spring of , Diane who was doing a Peace Corps stint in Romania decided to go on vacation with her American friend.
She needed to get to the airport in Cluj-Napoca, to catch a discount flight to Italy. Rather than condemning her to an overnight bus journey or train trip on the local bone-shaker, we decided it might be fun to rent a car and make the drive over the mountains. In the process, we could see a chunk of the country that is ordinarily hard to get to.
The proprietors seemed surprised that someone was actually renting their car, but rallied quickly. We filled out the handwritten rental forms in pentuplicate, participated in the fusillade of stamping that accompanies any official transaction in Romania, and set off on the Friday before Easter in a growly diesel Renault.
The first part of our drive is the familiar road to Suceava, the city you go to when you want to go somewhere else. We pass the large metal stork statue near the local airport. Spring is far enough along that the real storks have started making their way back to Romania, too. They are big, goofy birds who walk through fields with a quiet dignity, looking for frogs to eat. Whether because they eat pests, or set a good example by mating for life, storks are universally beloved.
You can see their big nests on top of some power poles and a lucky roof or two. It's a longstanding superstition that having a pair of storks nest on top of your house brings luck, so many people will set up a platform in hopes of enticing a couple.
