Navigating the Bureaucracy

Beetlejuice, the movie, pictured Hell as one large DMV-type bureaucracy.  Romania has developed bureaucracy to the seventh ring of Dante's Inferno.  In typical Romanian fashion, after spending the day standing in line, I see a line (at the pretzel bakery) and run to get in it.  Also in typical Romanian fashion, a car almost runs over me on the sidewalk (see photo).

Here's the time and money we spent working on getting our Residence Visas:

1. Before we left the US, we had to get certified copies of our marriage license and of Cami's birth certificate so Nancy could prove she was married to me and Cami could prove she was my daughter.  But the certified copies had to have another certification, the Hague Apostille, to certifiy that the signatures on the  originals were actually authorized to sign marriage and birth certificates.  I had to drive to Austin to the Secretary of State to get the Apostille.
1.  $15
2.  $10
3.  $30
2. Soon after we arrived, we left certified originals of our marriage license and Cami's birth certificate to be translated into Romanian by a certified translator. 
1.  180 lei      $60
3. We each had to get passport sized photos.
1. 15 lei     $5
2. 50 lei     $16
3. 0 lei        $0
4. We had to have a certified original and copy of our rental contract, to show residence in Romania.
5. To start the day, we arrived at the Romanian National Health Insurance office at 7:30 to meet two other Fulbrighters.  To obtain a residency permit, we have to buy Romanian Health Insurance.  They don't want to go to the trouble to verify that our insurance back home really works.  Already had long lines, we took a number, #2024, for Room 1, and # 1054 for Room 2, just to hedge our bets.  We walked (in the dark) around to the back of the building to Room 1A and 1B. After waiting for maybe 30 minutes, our number came up on the electronic board.  We went in, filled out some papers, signed, stamped, paid and we were done.  Before 9:00!
6. Then we had to go the front of the building, actually the other side, since the front steps and entry collonade were boarded shut.  We waded through a long line of people to a small room off the side of a large waiting room, the cashier's window.  We got in this line, waited for 30 minutes, and caught up on all the travels we each have had since our orientation.  Our stories were disturbed by the cashier who shouted, in Romanian, of course, "Silence! Silence!  We are counting money.  We must have silence for the money!"  We lowered our voices, but continued excited conversations about places to see. Paid 128 lei each.
1. 128 lei    $42
   
2. 128 lei    $42
   
3. 128 lei    $42
7. So next we have to go to the national bank to pay our consular fees and residency permit fees.  This was the only bank during Communist times, and staff apparently consider those the good old days...not real high on customer service.  We arrived as they opened.  Since we arrived just as they opened, we paid the consular fee, $240 lei, without delay.  Things were looking up.   
1. 240 lei      $78
8. Same bank, the next fee was set by the Romanian legislature in Euro (125 Euro) but the Romanian bank, the only place to pay such things, only takes lei.  So what you have to do is exchange your lei into Euros, paying the exchange fee, then exchange it back to lei, again paying the exchange fee.  The end result, other than additional fees for the bank, is a receipt that lists the Euro rate on the day that you paid the fee, so that the Visa office, another place, can verify that you paid 125 Euro based on the day that you paid.  Complicated enough?  Well, the bank had not posted its exchange rates by the time we finished with the first transaction, so they would not go through the gyrations.  
9. So we went down the street to the next bank, exchanged lei for euro and back to lei, got our receipt and returned to the Romanian national bank.
1. 18 lei      $6
2. 18 lei       $6
10. By this time, the line was all the way across the lobby.  We went to the lady that we first dealt with, no line, to find out that all the computers were down except one. So, back to the end of the line.  An hour later, we show the lady our exchange receipt and tried to pay the 507 lei that our receipt said was the equivalent of 125 euro. But by now their exchange rates were posted, and they said that we had to pay 517 lei.  No matter how much our Romanian friend argued, we had to exhange the lei to Euro, back to lei, paying fees at each transaction...again. But they refused to give us a receipt showing the euro rate for the visa office!
1. 18 lei      $6
2. 18 lei       $6
3. 517 lei     $168
4. 517 lei     $168
11. Then Dan went to the Postal Service to pay his work permit fee of 1 lei.  Only, when I got there the lady told me it was 5 lei. I argued in vain, and paid 5 lei.
1. 5 lei    $2
12. Next we had to go to a Notary, sort of like a lawyer in Romania, to get a document certifying that Dan is married to only one wife, Nancy, and Cami is my daughter, and I give her and Cami permission to live with me in Romania.  For this document they needed the translated marriage license (# 1), our rental contract (# 3), and a sworn statement from me that I am only married to one wife, and this is her, her name is Nancy Ratliff, and this is Nancy Ratliff (show the passport), and I give her permission to live with me.  So now we had to wait for 2 hours while they put together the documents in Romanian.  When we came back, I had to demonstrate that I understood this legal document  (or else I would have to pay to have it translated by an official translator!) and state what I understand of it.  I successfully faked it, and on we go.
1. 60 lei     $20
13. Next visit was the medical clinic.  The Romanian government doesn't want to import any sick people, so we had to get a medical exam.  A cab drive later, we waited in a narrow hallway for half an hour.  When we were ushered into the doctor's office, she asked each of us, "Do you have any health problems?"  No.  "Passport, please."   Lots of paperwork.  All this for no fee!
1. 0 lei  $0
14. So the next day we go to the Visa office and hope and pray that all these papers are in order.  We have to show them that I have a job in Romania (Fulbright contract), I have a place to live in Romania (rental contract), I paid my fees (Consular fee is waived for Fulbright, #6;  Postal receipt, # 10), I have Romanian health insurance (# 4), I am healthy (medical form, #12). Then Nancy and Cami, since they are not employed and possibly a drag on Romanian society, have to show that I will let them live with me (#11), maybe show the marriage license and birth certificate translations (# 1), show they paid their fee....yada, yada, yada. 
15. When it was time for Dan to get a photo for the residency permit, they laughed and said, "you're too tall for our camera.  Bend down."  We all had a good laugh, then they said, more seriously, "no really, bend down." So I did a half squat, everyone laughing, then they said, "don't smile." "Really, don't smile." My reply was, "I don't know how to not smile." Again, serious voice, "Really, don't smile."  So I clenched my lips, puffed my cheeks out a little to try to get rid of the smile.  The camera operator took the picture while I was doing this.  They all broke out laughing, then serious lady in an inmpressive uniform said, "That will do. Next."  
16. I can hardly wait to see my residency permit!

So How Was Your First Class?

Așa și așa.  Which translates, "so-so."
I had four students, out of seven.  The other three were still planning on participating and had paired up on the project with students who were attending.  So we got the semester project assigned; the groups had done some discussion among themselves about which NGO they wished to study.
As I had been warned, they thought the weekly reading quizzes were... unusual.  They were too polite to imply anything stronger.  I'd been warned that students here are not accustomed to working on class assignments every week; in most classes, apparently, they come to listen to a four hour lecture and work on the class project independently toward the end of the semester, then take a final exam.
I talked about my teaching philosophy: how in our kind of discipline, "knowing how" is more important than "knowing about" (summary of Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 1986), and this class is focused on them learning how to do some important skills in program evaluation.  I also said that knowing how to do something assumes applying some concepts and learning some common knowledge, "knowing that" stuff. So before I could help them do something, I had to make sure they knew some things.
And that I was more interested in knowing that they knew some fundamental knowledge by the end of class, so the quizzes would be in a pre-test/post-test format, and they could take the grade after they had filled in their lack of understanding.
The class topic was how to do a logic model, a visual description of the needs, goals, activities, performance, and impact of a NGO.  They discussed politely. I passed out cookies as an instructional activity; they thought that was unusual and politely ate some cookie. The instructional activity was to order the steps in making cookies according to inputs (people, ingredients), activities (preheat oven, mix ingredients) and outcomes (happy bakers).  They organized the pieces of paper, more or less, with some confusion on people slips in the input (baker) and in the outcome (happy baker) columns.  And they didn't understand the joke (from the canned handout) about Cookie Monster.  When I asked them then to complete a logic model on the inputs, activities and desired outcomes for their NGO project, they sort of lost energy to complete the exercise as we were approaching (30 min) our end time.  It felt like we were in the picture "The Persistence of Memory" by Salvador Dali.
The Persistence of Memory, by Salvador Dali
The second class, the Juvenile Delinquency class the next night, had much more energy.  I had 25 students, they asked lots of questions and expressed opinions of US criminal justice system.  Presenting data from a juvenile justice study I participated in, I presented the top 8 juvenile crimes, the most frequent were Child in Need of Supervision (truancy, runaway, liquor violation), trespassing, grafitti... we had to get to number 6, assault, before they thought these were really crimes.  So, "why do you call all these misbehaviors crimes," seems like a relevant question to me.  I didn't have an answer: why are three kids who climbed the fire escape of Cambridge Elementary treated like criminals and get a criminal record that will follow them for the rest of their life?  I came home much more energized.

My First Day of School!

I've been gone from home six weeks, and today I am meeting my first class.  Everything I've done up to now is to prepare me for this moment.

I am teaching one graduate class in the Masters in Social Work program: a research methods course on Program Evaluation Research (teaching on my own).  I am co-teaching another course in the Masters in Criminal Justice Social Work, a Juvenile Delinquency course where I am teaching techniques of an evidence-based treatment approach for working with multi-problem youth and their families.  In addition, I am doing guest lectures in three other courses in the Master's programs in Social Economy (like our Social Entrepreneurship), Social Services Management, and Social Policy.
The courses meet every two weeks for four hours a pop, from 4:00 to 8:00, one on Thursday and the other on Friday.  The guest lectures are on Thursday, Friday and Saturday mornings in November, December and January. 
Most of the students work full-time, and everyone, from local professors to former Fulbrighters, tell me I have to make my expectations extremely clear.  Things I may take for granted in the US system, may be unusual here: like attendance, for example, or coming in late, or doing homework or readings, or taking a cell phone call during class, or texting during class, or participating in discussion (a joke here is about professors have lots of tongue and little brain).  I need to communicate my expectations, but I'll wait until they get to know me and what they can learn from me.  In order to do the experiential learning and applications that my teaching style prefers, I have to have a room full of students who are reasonably informed about what we are talking about.  Students seem to expect irrelevant long lectures; I need to surprise them with relevance and learner centered experiential activities.
So, my last minute class prep this morning includes baking chocolate chip cookies.  An instructional activity for learning about logic models is to take the steps of baking chocolate chip cookies and create a logic model (INPUTS, RESOURCES, ACTIONS, OUTCOMES). I wasn't sure Chocolate Chip Cookies were as common in this culture as in ours, most cookies I've encountered are in the prepackaged "food-like-substance" category, so Cami helped me to engineer a cultural exchange.  Yumm!
Other last minute preps are to print and copy handouts, and go over my lesson plan to make sure I haven't left anything out.  Teaching 4 hours every two weeks doesn't leave me much time to wing it!  We'll see how it goes (next post).

Signs you are in a former Communist state

You know you're in a former Communist state when...

•  
• you find toilet regulations in the bathroom (see photo).  However, I don't have the language skills to know if I'm doing it right. I may be risking an unpleasant encounter with the Toiletta Politza.
• Bureaucracy: It takes me 4 windows, 3 receipts, stamped and signed, and 45 minutes at the bank to exchange dollars to Euros. Knowing that I've employed a substantial number of Romanians...PRICELESS. 
• Bus stops are centrally designed to be every 1000 meters, regardless if the rider population would support stops every 500 meters or every block.  Transfers aren't particularly coordinated; everyone seems to expect to walk 300 meters or so between bus routes.  Apparently, no one thinks to themselves, "if the 30 would let me out 200 meters down the block, and the 38 would pick up 100 meters closer to the corner, then I wouldn't have to trudge through the snow and rain every day;" or they keep it to themselves.
• Parking violations result in your car being snatched off the street (see picture 2).  They have this tow truck system they call the spider, with a crane that hooks under your wheels and lifts your car out of the parking space and puts it on a flat bed truck.  What happens next I have not figured out; I'm sure it is inconvenient.  As a friend says, "They never come tow someone who is blocking my garage; they say 'we decide who we tow, not you.'"
• Social services are state secrets.  One of the Fulbrighters is studying the health care system,  and was initially denied access to the state-run hospitals, "State secrets."  He finally got permission from the equivalent to the Romanian State Public Health Director.
• The waiter refuses to sell you a glass of wine, then removes all the wine bottles so you can't serve yourself.  And no, it wasn't because we'd had too much!  We were at a wine tasting, and Jim and I wanted to have a glass of our favorite with our meal.  After failure in getting the waiter to understand what we wanted, we went to the tasting table to pour a glass from the remaining bottles.  Jim got half a glass before the waiter took the bottle out of his hand, scooped up the remaining bottles (before I had even gotten a drop!) and whisked them off to the back rooms.  Our culture is set up to maximize cash flow, and at home if we were willing to pay, we could get what we want. Here, the culture follows a different value.

All about Dracula

I visited the Dracula exhibit at the Romanian Museum of Art, where I learned these pressing issues:

The best Dracula movies of all time

A scientific investigation of vampire phenomena

Are vampires zombies?

Who was Dracula in history?

Why do Romanians think George Washington was  a zombie?

Dracula movies:

1922 Nosferatu (Germany) A silent movie classic, called “the greatest screen adaptation,” that influenced all other Dracula productions. Bram Stoker’s widow sued the producers for copywrite violations, since the only thing they changed from Stoker’s novel was the name of the vampire.  The court ordered all copies destroyed, but some were already in distribution and were saved.

1931  Dracula (US) made Bela Lugosi famous. 

1932 Vampyr: The Dreams of  Allen Gray (France)

1957  The Vampire (USA)

1958 The Horror of Dracula (UK) made Christopher Lee famous in Europe.  He made sequels annually of the Dracula series.

1965 Prince of Darkness: Blood for Dracula (UK)

1967 Dance of the Vampires; or Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are In My Neck (USA)  This is Roman Polanski’s parody.

1968  The Mark of the Wolfman, Hell’s Creatures, The Wolfman of Count Dracula, and Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror (Spain).  They were churning them out that year.  Great material for midnight scary movies back in the day before cable.

1970  Scars of Dracula (UK)

1970  Vampiros Lesbos (Germany).  Vampires meet the Sexual Revolution.  The museum commentary said “The emphasis on the erotic relationship with the victim was not present in early folklore.”  [So, Mister SmartyPants, that’s all you can say about lesbian vampires?]

1971  Lust for a Vampire (UK)

1971  Walpurgis Night (Germany)

1972 Dracula AD 1972 (UK)

1974  Blood for Dracula (France)

1975  Lady Dracula (Germany) She targeted female victims, too.  Mister SmartyPants must have had a field day.

1979  Nosferatu: The Vampire (Germany)

1979  Dracula Sucks (USA)

1983 The Hunger (US)  starring David Bowie, Catherine DeNeuve, and Susan Sarandon as vampires.  Gotta get that one!

1988  Nosferatu in Venice

On my personal “must watch” list:

1983 The Hunger (US)  starring David Bowie, Catherine DeNeuve, and Susan Sarandon as vampires.  Gotta get that one!

Vampires in early literature

Homer’s Odyssey

Ovid’s Fastele

Vampire folktales come from the border areas between the Austria-Hungarian and the Ottoman empires.  Generally along a line from Timisoara, Romania to Belgrade.

1733 Vampire articles in Austria, Germany, France, and England about Arnaut Paute, a Serbian alleged to be a vampire

1748  der Vampire, by Ossenfelder

1797  Mireosa din Corint, by Goethe

1813  Ghiaurul, by Lord Byron

1815  Dans Macabre, by Goethe

1859  History of Mythology (German) mentions a vampire named Dracul as the source of the vampire phenomena.

1817 novel (the name escaped me) made the vampire a pale, melancholic Eastern European aristocrat.

1872  Carmilla

1897  Bram Stoker’s Dracula.  First time to link the historical character Vlad Dracul as a vampire.  Wrote the novel without ever visiting Romania; based it on a map and traveler’s tales.

A Scientific Investigation of Vampires

In the 1730s the Hapsburg emperor commissioned a scientific study of the vampire phenomena.  The notebooks from this investigation were on display in the exhibit.  The best medical experts from Vienna dug up Arnout Paute, a Serbian who was alleged to be a vampire.  The Serbian county had reported a number of cattle deaths and unexplained fatalities due to high fever (“High fever? it has to be vampires”).  The good doctors disinterred Mr. Paute’s remains and declared that they were not sufficiently decayed, at which time the villagers burned the corpse at the stake.  They (not sure if it were the doctors or the villagers) dug up other suspected vampires, and, sure enough, some were not decayed to their satisfaction, so they burned them at the stake.  Apparently, this works better than garlic, and it wasn’t until later movie magic that the “stake to the heart” cure was developed.

Nancy’s comment, “Well, at least they were dead when they burned them. In Germany, they were doing that to the living.”

Are vampires Zombies?

The museum exhibit said that the vampire myth referred to “the living dead” or “the undead” which leave their graves to attack humans and animals.  Humans who were attacked develop a high fever and die within weeks, then turn into vampires themselves to repeat the cycle (Bite, Die, Repeat).  The main characteristic of vampires is their inability or unwillingness to decay after internment.  Other characteristics such as the ability to turn into bats or lizards, their fear of the sunlight, and their stalky, erotic relationship with their victim are inventions of overworked imaginations in the nineteenth century.  Puritans were especially scandalized and attracted to the idea of the “blood kiss,” the act of sucking the blood from a nearly naked young woman.

This leaves the question unanswered, but we all know that the main characteristic of zombies is their decomposition.  A good Zombie has to be missing an eye and some cheek meat.  So, I conclude that they are two different species of the undead.

Who was Dracula in history?

 It appears that Vlad II Dracula was a victim of bad press.  He got caught in the middle between the Crusade (starring the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund of Luxemborg, the Pope, and the Duke of Burgundy) and the Ottoman empire (starring Murad II, Mehmet II, and Suleyman the Magnificent).  This was the time that the Ottomans retook  Constantinople (1453) and the Ottomans lay siege to Vienna, not once (1521) but twice (1683).  Legend says that on one of these occasions the Ottoman forces left behind a strange black bean that when boiled with water produced a tasty drink, coffee.  [And the rest is history, Starbucks.]

In 1459-1477, Vlad, King of Wallachia, one of the three Romanian states (Wallachia, Transylvania, and Moravia), tried to play both sides against each other, encouraging Western powers’ resistance against the Ottoman forces, then entering into alliances with the Ottomans. Vlad was called Vlad Tepesh (Vlad the Impaler) by the Ottomans, Vlad Dracula (Vlad the son of the Devil) by the Western powers, and Vlad Voivode (Vlad the King) by Romanians. 

The bad press:  During his lifetime, his portrait started showing up as the bad guy in European religious art (Pilate, Satan, Judas; or so the art historians say).  There were several examples of “crypto-portraits” in the exhibit, and I have to say there was a remarkable resemblance!  The same mixture of Hungarian embroidered robes and an Ottoman turban with a pearl hat band, sharp pointy beard, beady black eyes.  In 1463, again during his lifetime, Hungarian, German, and Papal historians wrote his biography comparing him to the most cruel tyrants of the pagan world, Herod, Nero, Nebuchadnezzar.  His portrait, or at least the copies of copies, hung in the Vatican and in the Emperor’s home in Vienna in the fifteenth century, in a sort of “hall of shame,” with the most despicable figures of history.  Just goes to show you, if you stick it to The Man, The Man will say bad things about you.  Or history is written by the victors.

Russian biographers, on the other hand writing for the Csar, emphasized his belief in justice and morality.  And in fact, his most notable deed was to preserve the Romanian lands by making alliance with the Ottomans. This resulted in his enforcing trade regulations restricting and taxing trade on the eastern borderlands between German and Saxon settlements within his lands and the Austian-Hungarian Empire.  Vlad punished the towns that defied the ban, but with no greater violence than “was common in medieval time,” the exhibit informs us.  No mention, however, was made of why the Ottomans gave him the “Impaler” name (conspiracy theories; Impaler-gate; it’s a whitewash, obstruction of justice. Wait till Fox News gets a hold of this one!)

The boundary between the Ottoman and Austrian-Hungarian Empires lay along the Carpathian Mountains, so it was to the locals’ advantage to nurture folk tales of “vampire diseases” so the great powers would not find any reason to like their forested lands.  In the 18^th century, with the rise of Russian power, these tales really took off, as Western Europeans defined themselves as civilized in contrast to the primitive Eastern barbarians and vampires.

Why do Romanians think George Washington was  a zombie?

Well they don’t really, but they do find it curious that the first to unite the Romanian state got such a bad reputation in the fifteenth through twentieth centuries Western culture.  It would be like a Romanian saying George Washington was a zombie. It just goes to show that one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist.

Nancy's dream house in Romania

We've accomplished a lot in a week:  Since we arrived last Monday, I've worked out my teaching schedule with the department, and opened a Romanian bank account; Nancy has bought cell phones and found a place to live.
The apartment is Nancy's dream house!  It is what we would call a "mother-in-law" apartment attached to a larger house.  It has 4 rooms--2 bedrooms, living room and kitchen, one bath.  It was the original house built in the 1800s, but recently remodeled with new windows, new radiators, new water heater, Persian rugs throughout.
What makes it Nancy's dream house is the fact that it is in a large garden. Our dining table looks out on a large grape arbor, loaded with tasty grapes, and apple trees.  Around at the back of the house are more fruit trees, apple, pear, cherry, and vegetable gardens with broccoli, potatos, celeriac, broccoli, cabbage, tomatoes, peppers.  And chickens!  The back corner of the back yard has a chicken coop and we get fresh eggs every week.
Another thing that makes it Nancy's dream house, is that it is as good as an internsive home stay.  The cute little grandparents in the big house come talk to us in Romanian every day.  Nancy and Cami have already gotten Romanian cooking lessons, and they hosted us for grilled meats and grilled vegetables in their backyard.