I send weekly emails to my friends and family back home. Sometimes I am going to post them here. They have been edited to ensure that certain private details never see the light of day!

Spring has sprung.

That cliched phrase is one which does not make any obvious sense in Aotearoa; the signs of spring back home are subtle and gradual; the temperature rises, the sky looks bluer, and people start wearing shorts. But in Bucharest spring means that one day trees have no leaves, but the next day they do.

For those of us who have mostly lived with evergreens, winters in the northern hemisphere are stark. The grey skies combined with a general lack of foliage is alien and therefore disconcerting. But spring here is just as weird, because it is all too sudden. Part of that is due to climate change; it is not uncommon these days for Bucharest, as winter ends and spring begins, to see a change in temperature of ten or fifteen degrees in one day, something which did not happen even ten years ago. A decade ago spring was a slow process, but now Bucarestis (and, my extension, myself) live in a place where it is minus seven one day, and positive twelve the next.

But more startling than that are the aforementioned trees, because waking up to trees with leaves that had no leaves the previous day is weird, and makes you think you have slipped through time. Or, in my case, make you almost spill your coffee when looking out your kitchen window.

A word about coffee in Romania: it’s not very good.

Well, that’s four words, but they are considered and polite.

Unlike the coffee.

I spent a lot of time on my last trip being very snobbish about coffee, because coffee snobbery is one of our national sports (as is making fun of Australians, binge drinking, and ignoring systemic racism and sexism in our society). This time I decided to bite the bullet and not bring all my fancy coffee making equipment with me, including my hand coffee grinder. I now now consider to be a mistake, even though the only way to have rectified that mistake would have been to purchase extra luggage for the flight.

The issues are these: ground coffee here is a) not great and b) not all that fresh.

The first issue can be skirted. I could spend more and buy better coffee, although my experience of even the best ground coffee here pales in comparison to what we can buy at reasonable prices in supermarkets back home. My theory about coffee in Europe (including Italy) is that coffee roasters go for one flavour profile; either they roast for spiciness, or chocolate-iness, or smokiness, but never more than one flavour. Back home we like a coffee with a complex profile, and I think that is part of what makes our coffee so well-appreciated worldwide.

The second issue can also be skirted, but it requires a bit more work. A lot of goods which make it to supermarkets in Romania are at the tail end of their lifetime. Romania is a poor country; the average monthly wage is about €230 (I earn almost three times that, which makes me rich in Romanian terms but still impoverished as soon as I leave the country) and so, to keep the cost of foreign goods down (particularly food), some imports are end of runs and the like. An awful lot of the imported coffee is closer to its use-by date than you would expect, and this results in it being both a bit stale and probably means it has been transported across several borders before arriving in Romania (thus increasing the likelihood of it having been refrigerated several times over, dulling its taste).

Actually, there is a final note to this digression on coffee; cheap, no brand coffee grinds. I decided to test a bag of 5 lei (NZD1.80) coffee the other day. If coffee flavouring is the cousin to the taste of proper coffee, that particular bag of coffee was the distant cousin of a friend’s acquaintance to the taste of coffee flavouring. I somewhat marvelled at that bag of coffee, because someone had to have quite deliberately taken all the worst coffee beans they could find from a batch, then over roast them, then overgrind them (in order to burn the beans a second time) and then package said grinds in a bag. The effort required to produce such terrible coffee shows such a dedication to craft that I almost feel there should be some reward for the poor fool who—by dint of personal evil or corporate mandate—was responsible for my thinking “Well, the coffee’s bad but at least that tree is doing alright.”

It’s the little things.

I send weekly emails to my friends and family back home. Sometimes I am going to post them here. They have been edited to ensure that certain private details never see the light of day!

Elvis Rromano is an Elvis impersonator who also happens to be Roma. He plays Rock and Rrom, which is a melange of Western music and the kind of traditional music you hear at weddings and funerals. The latter style is distinguished not by proficiency but by performance; you want your music to have character and energy, even if it does not necessarily sound professional.

Which is not to say that the Romanian Elvis cannot play; his finger work with the guitar was exemplary, but his Elvis performance… Not so much. But then I could only go by the scant phrases sung in English, because a lot of the rewritten lyrics (like “Viva Constansa” and “Don’t step on my Gypsy shoes”) were political songs sung in a register and language I still do not understand.

We were at the Elvis Rromano concert at the Londophone near Parcul Cismigiu to celebrate a colleague recent awarding of a PhD. Ironically, said colleague was not with us, having (one could say predictably) developed the kind of tension-related migraines one gets when the body suddenly realises it can start focussing on the fact you’ve been putting your body under a lot of stress for quite some time (but have not had the time to deal with it).

So, sans our special guest, five Fellows and a few friends met up in a crowded underground bar to watch an Elvis impersonator play.

And play.

And play.

One of the few Romanians in the group pointed out to us after the fourth set that Elvis and his retinue would play all night if the crowd demanded it; the expectation was that the audience would decide when the performance would end, not the performers themselves. This was all part of the particular musical culture Elvis Rromano was manipulating; when you get someone to provide the music for a wedding or funereal celebration you want someone who will play as long as possible. For those of us with more Western sensibilities around going to a gig this was a bit confusing; no one wanted to leave until it was over but the performer would only go home when we did.

As luck would have it, it was the bar staff who decided that the show could not go on; when your work shift is about to end and you still need to clean the bar it doesn’t matter that Elvis and his fans are in the building.

Capitalism always wins out in the end.

We were locked into the room by a Romanian man whose name I never found out. He told us that we had one hour to solve a series of increasingly difficult puzzles. My partner in crime stared at me. We knew the cost of failure; it was not an option. But we did not know what might befall us before the hour was out. Surrounded only by books on esoterica and maps of unknown islands, we set out to free ourselves.

How we had got into this predicament I will reveal shortly, but I guess I should speak to what would happen if in an hour’s time we had failed in our task. There would have been embarrassment, a wealth of it. After all, a world renown expert on conspiracy theories and a systems architect on a six figure (British Pounds) salary should have no trouble puzzling our way out of anything… Except we were operating on less than three hours sleep after having had quite the night.

Step back some twelve hours to the night before. My friend had come over from London to spend Easter weekend with me (his Easter, though, and not mine; Romania is an Eastern Orthodox country and Easter this year in their calendar was the next weekend). Wanting to show him a good time, I recommended that we have drinks with some of my fellow Fellows at the NEC (having introduced him to my friends from the ICUB the night before) and the night had gone (as the kids say) large. One of the Fellows (she who had failed to attend her own PhD awarding celebration the week before) joined us and insisted we go to one of Bucharest’s most popular clubs for a few drinks and some dancing.

We did not get home until after five.

I’m not opposed to dancing (something many people seem to find surprising) but noisy dance clubs are not exactly my scene. But I both wanted to show my guest a good time and appreciated that this was my colleagues first chance to properly blow off steam post her PhD. But I had made what was, in retrospect, the mistake of booking my UK-based friend and I into an Escape Room the next morning. Escape Rooms require some amount of concentration; dancing into the wee hours and getting little sleep after, however, tends to dull the mind.

For those of you not sure what an Escape Room is, it’s a series of puzzles which terminate either in utter failure or finding the key to get out iof the room. They tend to be themed and I had found the perfect one (for me at least): the Secret Society. My partner-in-crime and I were too unlucky researchers who had discovered that the secret society we were researching was all too real, and we were now its victims.

Armed only with coffee inside of us, we began our work, deciphering puzzles, locating objects from hidden spaces, and discovering that in my sleep-addled state I had forgotten that there was a V in the alphabet. It was, then, a miracle we finished the thing on time, but part of our problem was often overthinking the solutions to puzzles, inferring there was some extra step we had to take. The best of example of this? We found the key to get out of the room but assumed it was just the next item to be unlocked. Eventually the organisers had to slip a note under the door to say we had finished the room and could unlock the door now…

The lesson? Don’t stay out until five in the morning when you have cognitively-challenging work to do the next day. Or realise that if a Kiwi is going to come and stay, maybe organise activities for the afternoons only.

…in which Josh talks about sticky balls and M makes sure you realise it’s all cricket.

Behold, footage which proved I was in a room giving a talk. Allegedly at Pitzer on the 28th of November…