Back in Bucharest

Deja vu. Sitting in the cab stuck in Bucharest traffic, I mused. If America's cities are grids created by robots, Bucharest is a maze designed by a schizophrenic on Quaaludes. No two intersections are the same- some are so complicated even the natives are often left stranded in some piece of no-man-land, forlornly looking for a way back into the mainstream. The idea of the cross-roads does not seem to have arrived here yet. There is no parking control at all, so every pavement is an impenetrable jumble of cars. Often people have to jump over bumpers and walk on walls and lawns to walk along the street. Some are so jammed you just can't go down them. Then you have to walk in the road itself. I already have a bruise from being hit by someones wing mirror.

If I were to sum up the attitude of Romanians in one word it would be 'un-cooperative'. Today I bought an optical mouse and a mousemat. In London, a five minute transaction at most, probably a few seconds. The first question the girl at the desk (not really even a proper checkout) asked me was "Can you give me your name?". I said "Is that necessary? I just want to buy this mouse." Her next question really floored me. "Can I see your passport?" I refused. Looking disappointed, she reluctantly took the items and started writing serial numbers and various codes from the packaging onto a large format invoice. I asked her why. "Surely you need an invoice?" I said no, strangely I didn't. Finally, after some minutes of concentrated writing, she'd got all the info down. She asked me for payment, and I produced my debit card. I wasn't expecting problems as I could see the debit card paypoint machine right in front of me. Her face registered disgust- "Why didn't you tell me you want to pay with a credit card?" Yes, I should have known that this was going to cause mayhem (by telepathy presumably). She threw down the invoice and got out a different form, and the process started again. Eventually, I gave her the card, and the whole messy business came to an end.

It seemed as I sat sweltering in the enormous traffic jam that is Bucharest that there wasn't really any actual work going on in this city- just hundreds of thousands of people milling about avoiding having to buy anything because life is just too short to grind out transactions with a Romanian shop assistant. Earlier I had wandered across an enormous wasteland in front of the mirthfully named Peoples Palace built by the late Mr Ceausescu. Mirthful because the whole thing is surrounded by enormous concrete and chain-link barriers like US embassies have, and no matter how far I walked (far!) there was no public entrance. Its a very ugly building, a pallid pastiche of classical features and Soviet plebeian blandness, on an absolutely enormous scale. When a building is that large, and yet still completely fails to impress, you know the architect was uniquely pedestrian. I seem to remember hearing that Mr Ceausescu had a hand in the design... brings to mind Hitler and Speer, but without the grandeur.

The mixture of influences here is tantalising. There is a mediterraenean loucheness, but without the romantic quality that the Spanish and the Italians bring to it. There is the brutal and inflexible taint of the Turks. There is the emphatic and aggressive proletarian aspect contributed by the Russians. Also detectable is a seemingly home-grown tentativeness and bewilderment which interferes constantly with the basic tasks of life. I threw the hotel reception desk into a tiz yesterday morning by asking for a taxi. This morning, the taxi I ordered was handed off to a couple of fat EU officials as I stood waiting to get into it by the concierge. I asked him why he didn't ask the driver if he was here for a particular person, and he looked at me like I had just insulted his mother. Get me to New York PLEASE! New Yorkers may be loud and in-your-face but a straightforward question tends to get a straightforward answer. Here, the desire to obfuscate and dissemble constantly conflicts with the desire to piss off and insult, in a heady mix of uselessness.

Good luck to Donald Trump and his billion bucks. He may well rue trying to build something here.