A GIANT inflatable dog turd by American artist Paul McCarthy blew away from an exhibition in the garden of a Swiss museum, bringing down a power line and breaking a window before it landed again.

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My second thought was “Am I in Romania legally?”. Truth be told I had no idea – I know you’re allowed to be inside the Schengen zone for up 90 days per 180 days, and I think I’m pretty close to the 90 day limit if I’m not over it yet. However, according to the internet Romania isn’t a party to the Schengen agreement even though they’re in the EU and Romania allows Americans to stay up to 30 days as a tourist with no visa.

I kept my fingers crossed as the cops asked Liviu questions in Romanian and he relayed them to me in English, then translated my answers back for the police. “How long are you here?”.. “A few weeks, we’re just visiting”… “How long in Bucharest?”.. “We’ll probably leave at the end of the weekend”. He scowled as he looked over our papers, then went over to the van and began writing down all our information.

Naturally, I did what any enterprising American would do when faced with the prospect of arrest by suspicious police who didn’t speak my language in a country where I might not belong: I pulled out the iPhone and pretended to be checking messages while covertly taking pictures of the cops that were detaining us. Why? Who knows, it’d be nice to leave an evidence trail in case I got disappeared, but also for a bit of entertainment value. “Man, this one time when I was in Romania…” It’s how all the good stories start.

At long last he finally came back and said we were free to go. I suppose this either means I am in fact here legally, or it might mean he was too lazy to call it in. Thankfully I neglected to register with anyone, so if they do come looking it’ll be a little hard to locate me.  This probably also means that I’m in a database somewhere now, so I’m looking forward to the grilling I get when I try to leave the country.

Our plan was to meet up with Oasim and Liviu, two most excellent members of Isotx. I’ve been working with them for a while now but had never met them in person. Since they both live in Romania, I can’t go to Romania and not see them! We headed over to Unirii to meet up with them for lunch and also got to meet Oasim’s buddy Ali. Ali is a guy you want to know if you’re traveling since, as Oasim puts it, “Ali knows the best places to go and the best places to eat in any city in Romania”. We deferred to the expert and after some discussion ended up at one of the finer dining establishments in Bucharest: KFC.

This KFC was closer to the American version than the one I had been to in Greece. Gone was the authentic silverware, the ceramic plates, the healthy green choices on the menu. This KFC delivers the greasiest food imaginable, complete with garlic butter sauce, bread, and french fries (which we don’t even get in the US)! An artery clogged death guaranteed in 17 visits or less or your money back!

After lunch we took a walk over to the Palace of Parliament building built by Ceauşescu, which is the second largest building in the world after the Pentagon. The Palace itself was closed because of the NATO summit, so we just walked around the outside and marveled at the large number of police concentrated all over the area. If you were of a mind to go breaking into stores or spraying graffiti on the walls, this would be an excellent time to do it somewhere else in the city since approximately the entire police force was concentrated around the palace.

As we walked, I made another interesting observation: there are casinos approximately every 36 meters, making Bucharest a sort of mini-Vegas. There are many stories about people being ruined by gambling debts here, including one bank manager to who stole $100K from the bank (without thinking to disable the security cameras first!) spent it at the casinos. I was tempted to go in and check it out, but at the same time thinking about a repeat of the “I love you, buy me a drink!” fiasco from Athens.

We walked around the old town and saw some of the old buildings from original Bucharest that escaped destruction during the world wars and the communist regime. There is some really beautiful architecture there, so it’s lucky that we got a glimpse of this era.

After a quick walk through the old town, we did what any self-respecting group of Romanians would do on a Friday afternoon – we went to a hookah bar. I had never tried a hookah before, but Oasim convinced me to embrace the local culture. He ordered us up some flavored hookahs and fifteen minutes later I was puffing smoke and discussing politics like the men of old. We had a long discussion about Romanian history and culture. We discovered that the government is completely dysfunctional and doesn’t really work. There are so many parties which are basically the same, but there is no consensus on anything related to politics. The prime minister passes down laws which are supposed to be debated in Parliament and either approved or rejected, but since there is no consensus nobody cares and nothing ever happens. Politicians can be seen surfing the internet or playing with their phones on public TV, and not much seems to happen. We also learned that the Romanian minister of finance has absolutely no idea what he’s talking about. Every prediction that he has made so far has been wrong: whenever he predicts a recession the economy enjoys a booming success and whenever he predicts expansion then the economy tanks. It’s gotten to the point where everyone ignores him, although they’d probably do well to bet against him. If the prime minister catches wind of this and starts announcing opinions opposite to what he really believes and starts a race to outsmart the guy that’s outsmarting you, the economy would probably just implode like a dwarf star in it’s final stages. We also swapped some entertaining stories, such as the time I managed to get a concussion on my second snowboarding outing.

After the hookah action, we took a walk through the main park.  Ali (our resident culinary expert) was telling us about some traditional Romanian foods that we should try. These included bear and wolf (available seasonally or depending on which animals were rooting through the trash) and a special soup made out of cow stomachs (which the receptionist at our hostel later described as “One of the most horrific things she has ever tried”). We did get to walk around a lot of the city though and see the Arc de Triumph, the parks, and some of downtown.

Oasim and Ali had both lived in the middle east for a while, so they could speak Arabic and were fond of yelling curses in Arabic at random people who couldn’t understand what they were saying. As discussions between happy-go-lucky computer nerds tend to do, they took a turn toward the ridiculous and in between the Arabic cursing our group was loudly discussing  the upcoming NATO summit and the imminent arrival of President Bush from the USA. The general consensus among the locals was that Bush’s arrival was a bit of a pain, since they closed down all the streets and jammed cell phone traffic while he was traveling. Politically incorrect, perhaps, but at least Romania has freedom of speech right?

We walked down the main street of Bucharest talking and laughing, occasionally poking into the various shops that were along the road, when suddenly four policemen materialized in front of us. These weren’t your every day police officers, they came dressed in kevlar and carrying machine guns. One stern faced officer stepped forward with his hand on his gun, looking right at me, and said “Excuse me sir, do you speak english? Please come with us”

The main two people we spent most of the night drinking with were Gao Gao and Sally.

Gao Gao is a Chinese chick who grew up in the UK and is going to school at Georgetown. At first we surmised that she might be here as part of the NATO summit thing, but it turns out that she’s only 20. She’s been stuck in Romania for about a week since her passport was stolen. She got a new passport but is waiting on a replacement visa so she can get back into the US and go back to school. She’s opinionated, witty, talks a lot, and is generally a lot of fun to hang out with. She’s also lactose-intolerant, which severely limits the selection of available food for her to eat. Not one to let genetics get her down, she’s taken to calling herself “Lactose” and flashing the gang sign as her defining image.

Sally is an Australian who is working in the UK with NHS. After a long chat with her I was relieved to discover that in England it’s not standard practice to leave patients unconscious on the operating table while the surgeons break for lunch. She’s got a degree in statistics, which combined with Bedlam and I led to a drunken nerd-fest. She also gave us hope for the future because we’re not yet “proper old”.

The whole flight over Bedlam and I were taking odds on whether the orange would have exploded and been splattered all over my bag by the time we land. The smart money was 80% in favor of the citrus explosion all over the packpack with 10% odds that an airline worker saw it and grabbed it and 10% that it would arrive intact. The luck of the Irish came through for us though, since when we arrived in Bucharest not only were our backpacks sitting at the baggage claim waiting for us but there was an undamaged orange in the side pocket of mine! Success!

With our goods reclaimed, the next order of business was to figure out how to get to the hostel. We made online reservations for the Butterfly Villa hostel but naturally we didn’t print out a map or directions or any instructions for how to get there. We navigated our way to the taxi line, asked to go to the Butterfly Villa hostel, and were met with a blank stare.

Romania has emerged from the technological dark ages though, since once I produced a scrap of paper where I had scribbled the address of the hostel, the taxi driver typed it into his GPS navigation system and off we went. We had a pretty cool taxi driver, he was from Moldova and spoke English decently well. He said he was a mechanical engineer but was having a hard time finding work as an engineer so he was driving a taxi in the meantime. On the ride over, he showed us pictures of his kids and he told us a long story that was either about how he served in the French foreign legion and became disillusioned early so he dropped out, or it might have been a story about how he really liked that Jean Claude Van Damme movie “Legionnaire”. We’re not really sure.

The ride over to the hostel went by pretty quickly, it took about 20 minutes from the airport but as we drove the neighborhoods looked progressively more and more sketchy. We started out in a modern looking metropolis near the airport and ended up in a ghetto full of communist-era concrete block buildings with angry looking youth hanging around out front. A lot of the stores that we did see right around the hostel had arabic writing all over the windows, so the guard went up.

We finally arrived at the hostel and went inside to check it out…

Romania’s not too far away and I’ve never been there, so next week I’m heading to Romania to spend a few weeks backpacking through  Transylvania. I figure it can’t be any worse than Greece!

In central Athens, police fired tear gas in after groups of self-proclaimed anarchists threw petrol bombs and rocks.

The anarchists also set fire to rubbish bins and cars, and smashed bank windows, before dispersing, police said.

Some violence was also reported in the northern city of Thessaloniki as protesters set fire to banks and cash machines.

Unions describe the general strike – the third of its kind in as many months – as the biggest protest so far against the pension reform plan.

It follows a wave of stoppages by workers from various sectors:

• an ongoing two-week refuse collectors’ strike has left piles of uncollected rubbish rotting on streets
• protest action by power sector workers has caused nationwide blackouts
• a public transport strike on Tuesday created traffic chaos in the capital Athens

Read the full story here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7304154.stm

Strangely enough, St. Patrick’s Day seems to be more popular in the US than anywhere in Europe, but one thing we’re definitely good at is coopting holidays from other countries and turning them into an excuse to go drinking! (I’ve got Cinco de Mayo marked on the calendar!)

Regardless, I was determined to find a new place to go that wasn’t full of sailors and cheap hookers, so I dragged Stuffie up to Syntagma Square with me. Our original plan was to find Coloniki (sp?) but we ended up wandering around downtown Athens for a while without running into any huge flashing signs to point us in the right direction. A light rain had started by this point in time, so the cobblestone on the roads and sidewalks was very slippery. Stuffie almost fell over a couple of times, but somehow we soldiered on. Eventually, we decided to rely on a fallback tactic of finding a fun looking crowd that looks like they know what they’re doing and following them. It was slim pickings though, and after a few minutes of searching the only group that presented itself was a big group of Russian tourists walking along yammering excitedly in Russian. We followed them around for a little while, but they seemed to be more interested in taking blurry pictures of old Greek ruins getting rained on than finding a cool bar, so we eventually bailed. We walked down a small maze of alleyways and ended up somewhere near Plaka. Just when all hope seemed lost, we stumbled across the James Joyce bar.

As you might expect, the James Joyce bar was your typical Irish joint. Approximately every single American in Athens was there tonight, because there were so many people packed into this bar you were scared to breathe too deeply since somebody might fill the space. The majority of the crowd was American, either students studying abroad or visiting for spring break, but we did meet one Irish chick, a few greek locals, and a dude from Hungary.

Try as I might, I can’t seem to escape from our fellow computer dorks. When we finally pushed our way up to the bar and got drinks, sitting right beside us was the only Irish chick in the whole place who (as it turned out) also worked for Microsoft in Europe. She was there with her Hungarian boyfriend, who also worked at Microsoft in Europe, and who didn’t seem to be too thrilled that she wanted to talk to us more than to him.

Other notable people we met included a really annoying drunk dude from New York who was majoring in political science (”majoring in traveling abroad for a year” as he put it), a submariner in the Greek navy (the greeks have a navy??), and a cute local greek girl that I ended up talking to for about an hour before discovering she was only 18 years old! That threw me for a loop since I was used to people being 21+ in the US, but I’m not complaining.

In summary, I got quite drunk, had a great time, and got a cool plastic green top hat to wear!

You can imagine my surprise when I came back to Athens from Gstaad and the very next day Athens was hit with a snowstorm the likes of which had never been seen before, shutting down the whole city.

I put some pictures on the photo gallery - http://picasaweb.google.com/valtrain/SnowInAthens