Leu Blues in a Strange Place

by Anika Chamberlain (United States of America)

A leap into the unknown Romania

So many buildings in Bucharest are tagged with graffiti that the city looks abandoned. I landed in the Romanian capital on a frigid December evening in 2018. I lugged my carry-on down a long, fluorescent-white hallway in Aeroportul Internaţional Henri Coandă București, trailing behind my boyfriend, John. The only people in the terminal were passengers from our flight. It felt eerie, like a movie theater after the last show of the night. Standing in line at customs felt like straddling the border between the familiar and the strange. All I knew about Romania were some useless fun facts (Palatul Parlamentului is the world’s largest parliament building!) and the address of the place we were staying. We ordered an Uber there. A stoic, stocky man drove us thirty minutes to Bucharest’s Jewish neighborhood. The room we rented was in an apartment building that, from the sidewalk, looked defunct. We stood outside a semi-vandalized door that was somehow both locked and slightly ajar. I feared we had the wrong address until our AirBnB host appeared. She didn’t know English, so communication was limited to gesticulation and pointing. The three of us squeezed into an elevator that hiccuped and stuttered it’s way to the fourth floor, where she led us down a cramped hallway with yellowing walls and scratched floors. She unlocked the door to our room, gestured through a tour of the place, then left us to our own devices. The apartment was a small open concept with honey-brown hardwood floors, a television, slightly out-of-date kitchen appliances, a bed with a thin mattress. A bench-seat sofa and large windows lined the far wall. The threshold of the apartment was a portal between two worlds: one unkempt, vandalized, dilapidated, the other a cute, nearly-modern space. I looked out the windows, expecting to be dazzled by freckles of city light on the horizon. But the city disappeared at night, except for a few inconsequential pools of streetlight-illuminated asphalt. While I found darkness, John found a restaurant for dinner. Noa Restoclub was a sleek place with high ceilings, delicious food, and empty tables. I figured most people were probably hiding from the cold at home, but the weather couldn’t stop us from fine dining in a country with such a low GDP. One Romanian leu (plural: lei) is worth roughly 23 pennies, so we felt rich as kings. That being said, I wore three layers head to toe and still couldn’t beat the bite of single digit temperatures on the walk from the restaurant to a nearby bar. After only a couple blocks my lips were chapped and the freezing wind had whipped my face red. We ordered shots at the bar to put a pit of warmth in our stomachs and stayed for a few rounds. When we were about to leave, our waitress approached our table sheepishly and told us she charged another table for one of our drinks. She asked if we could pay for it with cash so she could pay her other customers back. We explained that we'd been paying with card, and had zero physical lei. “There’s ATM down the street, we walk and you get money?” she offered. John side-eyed the situation, but I ultimately agreed. She ushered me out the door, leaving him behind. I followed her for less than a block before we hit a fork in the road and turned right. She led me to an alcove with plenty of spray paint, but no ATM. My mind flicked through a rolodex of anxieties: I’m being robbed; I’m being sex trafficked; I’m being murdered for my organs. But after our mission revealed itself as fruitless, she just walked me back to the bar and paid the other table herself for the extra beer she charged them. “Guess we aren’t in Kansas anymore,” John joked while he threw his coat on. I left feeling sorry for the waitress, but relieved that I returned from my outing with her with all my limbs still attached. While we waited for our Uber, a mostly empty, graffiti-covered city bus drove past us. The driver was smoking a cigarette at the wheel. “Definitely not in Kansas anymore,” I finally echoed.