Back in the olden days

June 6, 2007

There are times you realise just how far you've gone in Romania, not just geographically but in time. I see it and I don't notice because I've seen it so much, and then suddenly it sinks in: at times I could be back in medieval times.

Right across Romania, we have passed enormous fields of crops. They're not the scale of the Canadian prairies, of course, but you'll realise they're plenty large enough when I tell you they're ploughed and weeded and cropped by hand. Wherever we've been, there have been stooped or bending figures, women for the most part, plucking weeds one by one. Or there has been a lone man or a man and a boy, monotonously guiding a horse and a single plough one way across a field and then back in the other.

However large the field - and this was a tiny one - work is all done by hand or with a single horse

We'd concluded that farm mechanisation just didn't exist when finally we reached the coastal plain from Brasov to Constanta. There, for the first time, we saw tractors. Just tiny things they were, of no manufacturer that I knew. But tractors.

The contrast was never more extreme than one evening when, not having found a place to camp, we cooked by the road before riding on to a discreet spot in a wood or pasture land as it began to get dark. And there we were, tucking in, when at our backs there arrived not one but two tractors. This must have been a farm beyond all value in Romania.

The drivers paused behind us, engines clattering and exhaust pipes rattling. "Look," it seemed they were saying, "we've got TWO tractors!"

And why was that so striking, beyond the quantity? Because only just down the road we had stopped in enchantment when we saw, on one side of the road, a shepherd herding sheep and, on the other, a man leading cows while, nearby, another chased pigs with a stick.

That is the contrast of Romania. Villages have beautiful churches but never running water. If place on a map is

Few Romanian houses have running water. It's fetched from wells or, occasionally, stand-pipes. Now and then people wash their clothes in troughs.

spelled in capitals, some side streets may be surfaced. In small letters, no side streets will be surfaced. And if, as in half the places, the name is printed in ordinary light type, you can be sure that nowhere at all will have a tar surface.

That makes communities insular. Most have a shop and a bar but the shop never stocks fresh meat or vegetables. There's no need. This is what I take to be a country of self-sufficiency, where you kill the cow and dig your potatoes. Or you trade cabbage for someone else's lamb.

Gardens are never flowers or grass; they are vegetable patches, or running with goats or sheep, or now and then vineyards.

A consequence is a money shortage. Not in the sense that people are poor (Steph had the unnerving experience of having a young girl peer into her purse one day to see how fabulously rich we western Europeans are) but because, if money doesn't circulate in a bartering society, there's not much of it about.

If you need change, there's a good chance you'll get a stick of chewing gum rather than the smallest coins. Small change just isn't available. And nor is large change. Fifty lei is about 15 euros. There isn't a 15-euro note but, in France, offer a 20-euro and it will cause no comment. In Romania, it's different. This morning, in a largish town, we offered 50 lei (all the bank machine would supply) for two coffees and it cleared the place out of change.

Finally, I must tell you something...

There are few hotels in rural Romania but in the oddest places you can come across concrete boxes now labelled 'Co-op' but which reek of their communist origins. They are functional, they are invariably ugly and they are always cheap. What they also have is numbered furniture. Look and you'll see that in less than subtle hand-writing someone has painted a number on the bed, the cupboards, the table and the mirror. Not just a little number, either, but six or seven digits and letters. Communism may have had its faults but when it came to keeping track of the nation's commodes, it couldn't be bettered.

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