Time Stands Still
We arrived in Romaniaa few days after Ceausescu was killed. Of course, we didn’t plan it that way, but there we were in the basement of the Frankfurt airport lining up to get on the plane for Bucharest.
We were the only non-Romanians getting on the flight. The German ticket agent told me he felt sorry for us because we were going to Romania. I felt sorry for myself. I sat next to a young girl on the plane and she wondered why we were going to visit her country during the ‘unruhe’ or unrest. I didn’t have an answer for her. And I wanted more than anything to tell her that we weren’t staying, we would just take a quick look and we’d be leaving on the next flight back.
We arrived at the Bucharest airport just at dark. It was dark inside the airport as well as outside. A few scattered 40 watt bulbs gave a weak yellow gleam to the sweaty, swarthy, and rather fearful looking faces of the passengers crowded into the waiting room to get through customs. One of those fearful faces was mine. I looked around for some other tourists. Nope. There was no one who looked as it they were on a tour of colorful, delightful Romania.
We spotted a young woman waving at us and relief flooded through my veins. Our guide! Doinia ushered us out to our waiting taxi and chattered brightly as we drove through the rain lashed city. There were other elements lashing the city as well: the miners had come from where ever they normally stay and had rampaged through the city smashing windows, cars and whatever else their sledgehammers could reach.
Our hotel lobby was filled with cigarette smoke, empty wine bottles, and noisy, dark-haired, mustachioed miners playing cards. The elevator quivered its way to the 6th floor where we locked ourselves in our room and I stared disconsolately out at the rainy streets below.
I didn’t think I’d be getting photographs of smiling people gathering hay, but that is the way things worked out.