As we landed at Bucharest the thing that struck me the most from the air was the lack of street lights or even lights at the airport. The airport was dark, like after a brownout. Little did I realize that this is normal for most of Romania. Once out of the airport and into the taxi, we found a 20 year old Peugot, with torn upholstery and a sticky gear shift. The ride to the 4 star Bucharesti Hotel took 30 minutes and once again we found that the large lobby of the hotel was lit by a 60 watt bulb. Upstairs, the hallways were dark and brooding and it is no wonder that Bram Stocker used Transylvania as the setting for his book Dracula. The tourist brochure in the hotel had one interesting fact - middle class Romanians make $200/month.
On our 8 hour car ride up north from Bucharest to Bistrita we passed many people walking their cows on a leash. Less fortunate people would be sitting by the road counting the fleas on their skin or the ants on the ground. It was difficult to tell at a distance. The villages we passed had no tractors - all farming was done by hand; the kids were all barefoot and since it was Monday, I assume they were not attending school.
Car rides in Romania are indeed an adventure. When one orders a taxi one has to request that the driver use headlights at night and not just parking lights. Reason: so as not to use up the bulb.
The hotel we stayed at was a 3 star hotel called Coroana de Aur. The bed was a double bed, but since they do not have fitted sheets and they do not have flat double sheets, they take 2 twin size flat sheets and overlay one on the other to create a bed sheet. The good news is the room had a bathroom and TV. The one interesting show was "Who wants to be a Billionaire?" The top prize was 1 billion lei, which is about $35,000. The toilet paper was the sandpaper type - the kind used in Israel 35 years ago.
On the first day we spent in Bistrita we visited the shul and the Jewish community office and the Jewish cemetery. There are no Jews left in Bistrita (4,000 were wiped out in the Holocaust), so a non-Jew runs the Jewish community office of Bistrita. He has the keys to the shul and has the book of where everyone is buried in the cemetery. The shul is locked all year long, and is in a general state of disrepair. The cemetery has hundreds of tombstones, many of them unreadable after the many years exposed to the elements. The worse is that many years ago, people would be buried as 'David ben Shlomo' or 'Ester bat Chaim' with no family name mentioned - either in Hebrew or in English. In addition the lettering is so washed away that one can barely make out first names. So the only way to find a specific tombstone is to know in advance its exact location. When I die, I want the name Nussbacher in Hebrew and English and in 1/4 inch deep carved letters.
On the second day we went to the municipality and got a birth certificate for my father. I asked my father why did he want it, since it is not worth anything and he certainly can't hope to get any Romanian social security payments. He didn't have a good answer, but my wife Sharon explained it best. The entire Jewish population and existence in Bistrita has been wiped out and this birth certificate proves that he was born there and there were once Jews living there.
Later on we went to visit my fathers old house. We went inside and walked around and spoke to the current tenants. Since my fathers sister had sold the house to them after the war, they were not antagonistic and were actually quite friendly. As usual, no lights on and everything quite dark.
Another thing we did was use an Internet cafe to check the news of Israel. It cost 10,000 lei for an hour, which is about 30 cents. The connection was slow but it was amazing to see the number of kids there after school using their 10,000 lei notes to buy an hour of connect time.
We walked around the shuk, and finally found milk. There is no pasteurized milk, but in this store we found bottles of milk. They were recycled Coca Cola bottles, with the label still on, rinsed out, and filled with room temperature milk with small pieces of undigested wheat and barley floating inside for good measure. When ordering coffee in Romania one has to specify "with milk" in order to get a small tub of white liquid chemicals to add to your coffee.
We walked throughout Bistrita and saw the homes, shops and parks. One can see that at one time the place was nice and was kept up. But I term Romania the "Land that Time Forgot". The benches and steps and general city infrastructure is falling apart after 50 years of no investment or improvement.
There is a Robert Frost poem called "The Road Not Taken". My father, after the war realized that he had no future in Romania, and left the only city he knew and traveled across the world to New York to start his life all over again at age 18 after having lost his parents, two sisters and only brother. Had he stayed in Bistrita life for me and my children would have turned out very different. Our children don't realize how fortunate they are to have grown up in a Western society where they know no want.