We haggled with the guy a bit. Actually he did most of the haggling since he is one of those people who can’t stand a minute of silence. We organized a time to meet him and when we got there a middle-aged fast-talking guy with gold Nikes and a gold chain and bracelet to match, met us to discuss which rooms we wanted and when we wanted them. We saw all the rooms and they were pretty hooked-up. There were a number of rooms with stoves, a couple with Jacuzzis and the best part is that they are all in the center of the medieval part of town and all are equipped with free Wi-Fi.
My man with the gold shoes wouldn’t stand for us to be out in the rain so he told us to stay in one of the rooms until it stopped raining. He talked about how great the location is and tried to explain why his rooms didn’t need air conditioners. When he ran out of things to say, he lowered his prices. This was the pattern that we waited for. This is kind of what the conversation was like:
“And this room is very big. You have a microwave, a stove and you can make anything you want. If you want to cook in here or hang out outside, it’s ok!”
“… [nodding our heads with our “thinking faces” on]…”
“Well we can go as low as $50 for this one but the other ones must stay the same.”
“… [more nodding and not even Amanda is giving a polite smile]…”
“Well actually we can go as low as $42 dollars on these rooms”. He went on to explain that the other rooms could be rented out at any given minute so it was not worth it to him to reserve those at a reduced price. It was hot and he was sweating so I tried asking about other things in the hotel.
“I know that at other hotels they give a continental breakfast for free…”
“Yes, yes, we give great breakfasts here too. Usually it is toast and jam but for you we can establish a menu for a real breakfast every day and you can have omelets, fruit, whatever you want…”
This seemed like it was a good deal. We had checked out other places but really nothing could beat this guy’s prices and location. We let him talk his way down as far as he would go and after trying him for a little more we decided that we would maybe meet the next day since we were heading out for our vacation the day after tomorrow. We made our down payment and made sure that everything was in writing.
We also set up the menu and itinerary for our party on August 17 at our “secret location”. Most of this has to be kept a surprise but we can say that the food is bound to be off the chain. We have quite a schedule of events for the folks that will be able to make it. I hope that everybody is ready for it and we will be finding some “rain day” events in case of bad weather.
Anyways… So we went to Bucharest in order to go to our interview with Berlitz (the “teaching English” company we plan to work for). They seemed very pleased with us and scheduled us to start work on September 1st. We met the “rest of the team” and they seemed like they were looking forward to us working with them in Bucharest. We will get back to this later. Now let me tell you about our adventure when we were trying to set up our hotel reservations in Bucharest.
I called up our guy (Vlad) who I know that has a hotel… ok, so it’s a big house with rooms that he rents out but they are good quality. He said that we could get to his house from the Gara de Nord [northern Bucharest train station] which is where we started out from. We waited almost an hour for the city bus and it never came. They were supposed to come every 30 minutes. We walked down the street and as we were walking the bus came by so we had to run to get on it.
Right after we got on two guys got on after us and sat in the back. The bus driver asked us where we were going and suggested that we get off the bus because he thought we made a mistake. In hindsight he was probably trying to help us. I was adamant that we found the right bus and explained to him that we didn’t need to go as far as the airport so it was ok that we got on the bus.
As I was trying to stamp our tickets in the ticket-stamper thing, the two men in the bus ordered me to stop trying to stamp my tickets. It was at this point that I realized that these guys were plain-clothes ticket-checker dudes who give people fines when they try to get a free ride. The more dominant one had a jaw that moved a little bit more than it should and kind of reminded me of Phil Hartman’s Frankenstein character on Saturday Night Live so we will refer to him as Frankenstein. The other guy was Frankenstein’s yes man and played a supporting role so he will be referred to as Stooly the Stool Pigeon.
Frankenstein showed me his “bus patrol” badge, and ordered me again to stop trying to stamp my ticket. Bewildered, I stopped and asked him a logical question. “Why?”
Frankenstein complemented me on my Romanian and asked me where I had learned it. Was I going to get out of whatever mysterious mess I was in by smiling and explaining my story to him? I tried. It didn’t work. Frankenstein asked us for our passports and only after we gave them to him did he explain the dire circumstances that we were in.
Looking at my passport, “Ok, Roberto,” I didn’t tell him that this was not my name. He didn’t even mess with my last name, “You bought tickets for the city bus. This is the express bus because it goes more than 20km from the center of the city.”
“Well I bought tickets for the bus. I told the ticket seller where I was going and he gave me these tickets.”
“These are not the right tickets, I am sorry.” Stooly was standing behind Frankenstein slowly shaking his head in support. “The tickets that you are supposed to have can be read by this new electronic ticket-reader and don’t need to be stamped.” This was starting to get irritating. “For your convenience, of course.”
“I don’t understand. Why would the ticket seller give me these tickets if they don’t work?”
“Well it’s possible that you didn’t specify which tickets you needed so he gave you the regular city bus tickets instead of these convenient electronic tickets that we have now.”
At this point, Stooly piped up and explained again that because this bus goes further than 20km from the city, the tickets are slightly more expensive and they come only in electronic form. “And it is clearly written on the front of the bus that it is an ‘express’ bus.”
“But I didn’t even see the front of the bus because we got on from the side of the bus and besides you saw that we were trying to pay with our tickets.”
“Unfortunately this is a 150 lei [~$50] fine for both of you,” says Frankenstein with his jaw dropping and closing in an even more exaggerated way. “Fortunately for you, you can pay us 50 lei [~$15] and this will suffice. It’s your choice.”
This sounded like a bribe to me. I don’t normally support this kind of practice but here are our circumstances: We are on our way to make a down-payment for 17 people which will take up an entire guest house and we are already late for the appointment. In 4 hours we have to catch a train to Belgrade to start our “vacation” and the tickets are already paid for. We can’t afford to start a war with a corrupt, barely-non-third-world system today. We paid the bribe.
This was the most official-looking bribe that I have ever seen. Frankenstein took out some little calculator machine and after logging some information, it printed out a nice receipt for us. You may be wondering if this receipt had an official stamp on it. It did. On top of this, Frankenstein “helped us out” by writing on the back of a card that we had paid the bribe and he explained to us that if we have any other problems from any other bribe-takers on the bus then all we had to do is show them that we already paid the bribe. This would save us from having to buy another ticket. How helpful and convenient! Frankenstein and Stooly flitted off the bus, wishing us a good day.
Amanda obviously wasn’t happy with this. On top of the bribe situation, the “express bus” was stopped for over 20 minutes and Amanda started to have a break-down. She was banging her ringed hand on the bar of the bus, willing it to start up again. Maybe if she banged louder the bus would start. I heroically kept the temper-tantrums at bay by pointing out that we had traveled on plenty of buses without paying anything and we never got caught. It was ironic that the first time we tried to pay that morning was the day we got caught by the bus patrol.
We thought that these guys were targeting tourists. In our case they were, but thankfully we saw that there were plenty Romanians who got busted and fined because they didn’t know how the system worked. I think they busted at least 4 other people on our trip to and from the hotel. These guys were making bank so no wonder there were so many of them everywhere.
In any case we made it to the hotel, had a nice chat with the owners and then we made it to our train that night. Yeah, we were $30 short but we counted our blessings. The train ride was nice and it cheered Amanda up a bit. We paid for regular tickets but our seats in the cabin were empty so we basically paid half-price for sleeping cars. This made up for our lost money. And we had receipts for everything.
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