Romania

[ellarien]

I had a nice sunny day in London on Monday, visiting one of my old workplaces, after a pleasantly pampered train journey -- First class passengers get biscuits and a real cup with their complimentary tea and coffee. The new St Pancras station is starting to take shape now, but I hope the walk to the refurbished tube station is a bit shorter when they've properly finished! The college has been considerably extended and improved since I was there, by the addition of lots of nice new student flats on what used to be waste ground at the far end, payed for with the proceeds of selling the former Westfield College site, and the whole area has gone up in the world a bit; when I was there it was a rather cramped and scruffy little campus in a poor part of the East End.





The flight from Heathrow on Tuesday morning was delayed about half an hour because the crew had not allowed enough time to stand in the three-quarter-hour queue to go through security. The captain insisted at some length in both English and German that this was not their fault, but the passengers seemed to have managed it. (In my case, that involved being at the airport at 5am, so though the crew seemed genuinely frustrated at the lack of special provision for them I'm afraid my symapathy was a bit limited.) My bag, carefully packed, did fit the new testing-boxes quite neatly*. Once I started pulling out the laptop and adding miscellaneous bits of after-security shopping, of course, it bulged, but by then it didn't really matter. I did not notice any security measures that seemed aimed at actually detecting illicit tubes of toothpaste or bars of soap, but I wasn't looking very hard -- I was too busy stacking the trays at the end of the conveyor belt. I did catch my connecting flight to Bucharest, after a mad dash through the Frankfurt airport. Amazingly, so did my suitcase, which I had hardly dared hope for.





So I'm here in Sinaia, in a hotel room which seems decent though not luxurious -- at somewhere around 20 quid a night one can hardly expect luxury. The drive up here from the airport was interesting, with horses and carts and funny tall, thin haystacks, some pretty old churches, some ramshackle buildings, and some shiny new petrol stations and car dealerships. In places it was reminiscent of Colorado, with crops of maize and sunflowers, the odd 'nodding donkey' oil derrick, and the mountains looming in the distance. There were distinct signs of drought, in withered-looking maize and a river with very little water in it by the standards of anywhere that
isn't the US southwest. Sinaia itself seems quite pretty, though a bit spoilt by the presence of some ugly run-down factories.


I left my alarm clock in my bedroom at home, which didn't improve my ability to get to sleep on Monday night, but I have a new one now. I also, to my considerable annoyance, seem to have lost my nice blue pencil on the train, and the only alternative I could find isn't nearly as good for Sudoku purposes.

Romanian money is really confusing -- they're running two versions in parallel, one of which is has 10,000 times greater face value. I think the 'half-million' notes (old style) are worth about $20 worth, and the '5' notes (new style) are about $2 and thus just about right for tips. They're some kind of thin plastic, with little windows. The organizers thoughtfully provided a calculator in the conference portfolio, which makes a change from umbrellas.

On the other hand, written Romanian is a lot easier to understand than written Chinese, or Danish for that matter; I seem to be able to puzzle it out about as well as I can written Spanish, based on experience of French and Latin.




The current 'severe' state of security at UK airports involves restricting passengers to one rather small bag, 45x35x16 cm. And yes, the regulations restrict solid toiletries as well as liquid or goopy ones.