Andreea

A room with a view

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Jan 232007
 

Versiune în română

We’re back in California since last Tuesday. This time the trip seemed shorter than usual as I spent most of my time on the plane sleeping. We found San Francisco very sunny for this time of year. It usually rains a lot in January but it’s been sunny ever since we arrived. As we entered the apartment I realized what I missed the most about it while we were gone: the view from our living room window.

We moved into our current apartment about 4 years ago. We came to see the apartment late at night, after long and tiring hours of work. We were aware of the fact that the apartment had a view but frankly it was entirely lost on us. Those were the times when the economy was in bad shape and all we heard on the radio on the way to work was how another IT company is laying off 10000 people. What we cared about was that we would be saving $400/month in rent and that the building was rent controlled. We decided to move in. When the day of moving came we entered the apartment and got struck by the view. We wondered how tired we were from overworking not to notice it the first time? It’s the very first thing that catches the eye as one enters the room. And at night when the lights from downtown are on it’s equally beautiful. I’m in love with this view. When I’m feeling down I look out the window on the San Francisco downtown and it never fails to cheer me up. And every time I look I find some new detail that I didn’t notice before. I’ll surely miss it when we’ll return to Romania.

Forget Krispy Kreme

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Jan 092007
 

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And since we’re on the subject of food, look what I indulged myself with last evening. Papanasi, a traditional Romanian dessert, are fried cheese-filled pastries similar to doughnuts, served with a dollop of jam and sweetened sour cream. You can find them at many restaurants in Bucharest.

Would you like to eat something?

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Jan 022007
 

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I came up with a new business idea, to sell t-shirts and bumper stickers with the slogan “I survived the holiday season in Romania”. It was that bad, really 🙂 I’ve never seen so much food in my life. Romanians like to eat a lot on holidays, especially after a month of Christmas fasting. I was talking to a guy who lived in France for the last 20 years and he was in owe: “You come here, people seem poor. You go to visit them for some casual lunch or dinner and they set up a table like they’re throwing a wedding reception. I’ve never seen so much food, maybe except for US” he said. That’s the way it is in Romania. People like to feed their guests until they’re about to pop. On holidays it’s worse 🙂 Everyone cooks the traditional dishes. You get invited to ten meals in three days, and in every house you have to taste the cooking. The moment you enter the door you are asked “Would you like to eat something?” and no matter of the answer you will be served something even though you just ate two hours ago. You end up eating a lot more than you want. You have to do it, otherwise the hosts get upset. Nothing gets wasted or thrown away. And so I did eat a lot. Since I don’t cook the traditional dishes while I’m in California this was my occasion to try them and I didn’t refuse anything that was offered. I’ll probably have to diet when I return to California.

Traditional goodies

The dish considered the most traditional is sarmale, cabbage leaves stuffed with rice, meat and herbs usually served with sour cream and with mamaliga, a cornmeal similar to polenta (many of our neighbours like Serbia or Bulgaria have sarmale too but the serving with polenta is I believe truly Romanian)

The traditional drink is tuica, a strong brandy made of plums. If it’s twice distilled than we get the much stronger palinca (a term we can’t use anymore since it became a Hungarian brand)


Fresh wine made by Cris’ dad


Pickles


In the end some dessert, a traditional cake that people bake for Christmas or Easter called cozonac

How the EU stole Christmas :)

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Dec 202006
 

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The Christmas decorations in downtown Bucharest come in blue, white and yellow this year. Especially blue. First time I saw them I asked – without giving it much thought – why did they use blue? Christmas is supposed to be red and green. Last year the lights were mostly white and two years ago they were also white and blue. Is the city hall fixated on white and blue? My brother told me the lights are celebrating Romania’s entry into EU which will take place January 1, 2007. Duh. This year they have a reason for the blue 🙂 Afterwards I noticed that the decorations lining Magheru Boulevard, between Universitate Square and Romană Square, even display a round circle made of stars that has been the mark of the EU for so many years.

Yes, it’s true. Romania will join the EU starting January 1, 2007. It’s not my place to say if we’re ready for this step or not. Others have done it for me and the subject has been debated in great detail. From my part I hope that joining the EU will bring more political stability for my country, the pressure to accelerate the reforms, a raise in foreign investments and hopefully some curbing of the corruption that has engulfed Romania since the fall of the communism in 1989. I realize that these are all long term goals and that we might not see any changes for many years other than an increase in the freedom to travel and maybe an easiness in doing commerce. I guess the end goal – aside from political stability which to me will be the greatest achievement – will be economic growth for Romania and with it a raise in the standard of living of the population.

This year’s decoration


Last year


Two years ago

In defense of SFMOMA

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Dec 072006
 

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Following a link from an architecture forum I found this article on Forbes about the world’s ugliest buildings. The article talks about how the list was conceived and what criterion was taken into consideration when choosing “the winners”, merely the price that it cost to end up with an ugly building. Still, I was surprised to see that the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art made the list. Most of the buildings on their list are indeed ugly but to my untrained eye the SFMOMA presence as a nominee is undeserved. Their argument is that “The building itself isn’t necessarily ugly. But for a museum, the architecture is inappropriate; it calls too much attention to its design and takes away from the art inside. It is a classic example of a signature building, and who wants to see art in a building like that?”, an argument which to me seems a bit shaky. I personally don’t mind seeing art in an signature building. Plus, except for the central skylight which was used by the architect Mario Botta to give the atrium a theatrical feel you don’t really feel the building while you are inside. The exhibition rooms are still rectangular spaces like in any other museum so the building doesn’t take anything away from the art inside. Not to talk about the fact that this argument can be used for many other famous buildings, for example the Guggenheim museums in NY and Bilbao or the Centre George Pompidou in Paris.

Go Scarlet Knights

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Nov 102006
 

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A few people asked me why there hasn’t been any posting on my blog lately. I guess somebody was reading my ramblings after all. The answer that I prefer is that it was a busy month and I couldn’t find the time to write. The other answer is that I need more self-discipline; I can be pretty lazy at times. I’ll try to behave from now on 🙂

Now back to the title and the topic I wanted to write about. I’ve lived in US for 10 years but I never became interested in American sports. I’ve never watched a baseball game, even though I lived in New Jersey and San Francisco both places where baseball is very popular. Basketball I like and I watched for a couple of years. I started doing it when I was working in Sacramento and the Kings were the standard lunch discussion topic. The peer pressure stopped when I left that job and I stopped watching the games. Football I’ve watched twice, the first being the “historic” Super Bowl with the “wardrobe malfunction”. We were stuck at Tahoe with a friend who wanted to watch it. The second time I watched a football game was last night when I saw the last half hour of the Louisville-Rutgers game. For those who don’t know that about me I went to Rutgers and that apparently makes me a Scarlet Knight. Every time I used to wear a Rutgers t-shit to work people would ask me “Are you a Scarlet Knight?” “No, I would say, I’m European so all I know about is soccer”. What I remember about the Knights was that while I was studying at Rutgers they always lost. It also used to bother me when they had a home game and the whole campus was blocked. I lived on campus and it was a pain to get home on a game day. Last week a friend asked us if we follow the Knights. We said no, why bother, they always loose. He said not this season, they’re winning. Last night he called to tell us that there’s a Rutgers game on ESPN. So I started watching and to my surprise I started liking it. The Knights won and apparently I was lucky enough to see another historical game. The Knights won their biggest game in history, or so the commentators said. Since I don’t know anything about football I don’t know what this victory means. But I’m glad that the Knights won. I liked it at Rutgers.

I took some crappy pictures of the TV to remember this historical win.

Trip to Yellowstone – Part 6 – Mammoth Hot Springs

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Oct 052006
 

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Next on our list of things to see in Yellowstone were the Mammoth Hot Springs in the northwest of the park. This one place was a winner too and I couldn’t believe it that this park keeps getting better and better. The hot springs are in fact tiers of cascading limestone terraces in beautiful colors. We left the car in a parking lot and took a walk around the boardwalk. I got really upset when halfway through the walk my camera battery went out. I had a replacement with me but it was securely stored in the car 🙁 which at this point was pretty far away. So I had to put up with not taking pictures which was really upsetting since the springs are a real stand out in a park full of spectacular views. After we finished seeing the hot springs we started on a hike on the Beaver Ponds Trail, a 5 mile loop passing through forests and little meadows and by some ponds good for spotting moose. We didn’t see any moose but the hike was nice. Back in Mammoth Village we saw a herd of elks and to make up for the terraces I took about 50 pictures of the elks. It was nearly sunset when we left Mammoth and I thought that the day had finished but I was wrong. On our way back to the town we passed by a large group of people sitting by the side of the road. We stopped and got out of the car to see what the commotion was about and we saw two little bear cubs playing under a tree. I was just thinking that the mother can’t be far when I heard someone saying “My god, she’s so big”. But I couldn’t see her. Where was she? Finally I noticed she was up in the tree under which the cubs were playing. And she was big indeed. If I ever needed proof that bears can climb trees, it’s all in the past now.

San Francisco on a Sunday afternoon

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Oct 022006
 

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We had a friend visiting from Chicago, a good friend that we meet a few times a year in the most unlikely places. We met him all over the world, in Madrid and in Venice, in Bucharest and in Germany, in Strasbourg and in Los Angeles. Currently he’s a visiting professor in Chicago and came to visit us in San Francisco for the weekend. He’s a fan of San Francisco and he visited us a few times before. And yesterday after having lunch at the Romanian Cultural Center in Hayward, Florin said he wants to go to Chinatown.

We started in North Beach with a cappuccino at Caffe Greco, one of the best places for coffee in the city. From there we walked to City Lights Bookstore and browsed the shelves a bit while waiting for friends from Santa Cruz to join us. City Lights is an enjoyable little bookstore, a “San Francisco literary landmark”, famous for being the hangout place for the beat poets in the 50s’. From there we took Grant Avenue, the main tourist avenue through Chinatown. Grant is a mixture of cheap souvenir shops – selling everything from slippers and “Escape from Alcatraz” t-shirts to pottery and oversized sculptures of Mao – restaurants, banks, the occasional tea parlor, Chinese markets, clothes stores and any other kind of business you can think of. It’s a crowded street full of color and sounds and smells, burned incense and fish odor at the same time. We entered a small bakery to buy some rice cakes and our friend started chatting up the cute girl at the counter. On the walls they had some pictures of Clinton visiting the place. “Did you kiss president Clinton when he was here?”. The girl started to giggle. “No kiss. Only Monica kiss”. “Who’s Monica? Is she Monica?” and he pointed to a 60 year old lady also behind the counter. The girl started giggling harder and we had to drag our friend out, otherwise he would go on forever. We also stopped at a tea place and bought milk tea with tapioca, a tasty drink that is the latest rage in the Bay Area as I heard on NPR. We walked the eight blocks to the entrance and stopped for a drink at Cafe de la Presse on the corner of Grant and Bush. To our surprise the waiter started to chat with us in Romanian. He was French but he had lived in Bucharest for three years. He had an accent but in general his Romanian was outstanding, way better than my French. We had some wine and chatted about the state of the world and about our future plans and eventually we left and started to look for a place with live music. After entering a few places we ended up at Jazz at Pearl’s in North Beach. I’ve never been there before, I remember we tried once but it was full and they turned us away. This time it wasn’t crowded, after all it was Sunday evening and people had to work the next day. The Johnny Nocturne Band was playing and they sounded very good. There was a lady next to us who was cheering louder than everyone else and later we found out that she was a jazz singer too. The band invited her to play a song with them. During the break we told her we like old jazz and later she sang Honeysuckle Rose, an old song that Cris and I knew. We thought that was very nice of her. We returned home around midnight.

Trip to Yellowstone – Part 5 – Grand Teton

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Sep 282006
 

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Next day we went to Grand Teton, a national park located south of Yellowstone. We drove for almost 100 miles. It wasn’t the best day to visit Grand Teton, since it was hazy and one can barely distinguish the silhouettes of the beautiful mountains that are the attraction of the park. Probably the Teton range looked better in the early morning, but our friends got up late and with all the driving we got to the park at around 1 PM. We drove to Jenny Lake in the south of the park, took a boat to the western shore of the lake and hiked a small trail to the Hidden Falls and to a panorama point called Inspiration Point from where we could see the entire Jenny Lake at our feet. All around this area there were signs advising people that bears are in the area: do not try to feed them – who would be crazy enough to try that? – don’t leave your backpack lying around etc. The hike was pretty, even though a bit crowded with people. On our way back through Yellowstone we passed a sign marking “Continental Divide” which I had no idea what it was but later found out – thanks to wikipedia – that it is “a line of elevated terrain which forms a border between two watersheds such that water falling on one side of the line eventually travels to one ocean or body of water, and water on the other side travels to another, generally on the opposite side of the continent”. In this case the Continental Divide separates the watersheds of the Pacific Ocean from those of the Atlantic or Arctic Oceans.

For dinner we decided not to eat in the park like we did the previous days but go to West Yellowstone. At Alin’s insistence we choose a pizza place. I’m not a big fan of pizza so I ordered macaroni and cheese, comfort food for the soul 🙂 In the menu the m&c; of Wild West Pizzeria of West Yellowstone was advertised as “world renowned”. I don’t know if it is really world renowned but it was very good and it reminded me of a dish that we eat in Romania. I have to say that this was the first time that I ate macaroni and cheese which must be a record of some kind since I’ve been living in US for 10 years and m&c; is pretty popular here. They used to serve it in Intel’s cafeteria from time to time but I never had the curiosity of trying it.

Trip to Yellowstone – Part 4 – Canyon Country

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Sep 252006
 

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On our second day in the park we went to see the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone. The impressive sheer drop and the canyon’s yellowed walls made for amazing views. We spent the entire day circling the canyon, stopping at different points of belvedere along the north and the south rims, admiring the two waterfalls – the Lower and the Upper Fall formed by the Yellowstone River – and doing short but steep hikes along the two rims. All in all it was a lovely day.

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