Some quick and nasty facts about Romania :

-- Romania is situated in the vague region known as central-eastern Europe, north of Bulgaria , east of Serbia and Hungary , south of the Ukraine , and all other manner of places where bizarre Slavic languages are spoken. The population is around 23 million people, and the number of walnut trees and stray dogs is considerably higher. Geographically, it has mountains, plains, valleys, rivers, and plateaus, all roughly at the same percentage of distribution. The principal language is Romanian, which is somewhat surprising. Its chief exports include confusing metal parts, shoes, and inventive methods of corruption. The country prides itself on its laziness and its grammar boot camps. Romania was founded in 1862 by Lewis Carroll (later refounded by Franz Kafka), and seems to have a historical predilection to being invaded. There are gypsies. Romania was considered the Orient until the real Orient was discovered (and has now since been reabsorbed into the Orient as most of Romania appears to have been purchased by China .thereby making Turkey the new Pacific Rim ). The capital of Romania is Bucharest , Europe 's largest free-range kennel. It is currently under the presidency of Mistah Basescu, former mayor of Bucharest, who is very busy selling all of Romania to the seaside and being wildly popular among provincials (the photo above depicts him in his old role as transportation minister when he couldn't quite manage mastering his own Eminescu hairdo).

A Brief History of Romania : Historically, Romania was mostly Thracian, which then split into Dacians and Getaeans due to some disagreement over pottery. There was a cult of a God named Zalmoxis that Socrates really liked. It was the last province the Romans acquired, and the first they lost. There were free Dacians no one paid for. There were Costobocs in the north. There were Thracians in the south. There were also some Carps. The former Roman province of Dacia is now the name for the most popular brand of car, and works just as ineffectively. The Romans would have tried to conquer sooner had Julius Caesar not become a political pincushion. There were problems with Turks. There were more problems with Hungarians, but they weren't as bad. The Austrians were not so much of a problem at all, and they built stuff. Vlad Dracula ruled twice as a political precursor to Frank Zappa and truly fancied such things as pearl-headdresses, lavishing in Turkish prisons, and impaling undesirables. Romania was united by Prince Mihai the Brave, but only while he was alive, and not really all of it. Transylvania was given to Hungary , but Romania has it back now. Moldavia was ceded to Russia which was fine because it was already filled with Moldavians. King Carol II was far too flamboyant for even a Las Vegas lounge act. Antonescu said no to Hitler, but Hitler did what he wanted anyway. Romania was once under the control of a failed shoemaker who thought keeping people paranoid, poor, and hungry was the recipe for progressive national development. Transylvanians are hard-working hard drinkers (but slow thinkers), Banatians are euro-chic, Oltenians are quick speaking and lazy (and complete failures at scams), and Muntenians mistake their car horns for speech.

I am geographically convinced that the entire country of Romania would fit comfortably within the province of Quebec. With a population just a few million shy of Canada 's, the boost to the population might give us a shot at winning a nation-to-nation street brawl with our Yankee neighbours.

It would prove to be a hairy situation for a churlish gull like me, and the chances for my survival may have been as good as shitting through the eye of a needle without splashing the sides. I would be preceded, so my supervisor arranged, by some piece I had written on Foucault, translated into Romanian by strangers I may never know or trust. Since academia was my paying gig, it would be partially under those pretenses that I was going. I also tried to convince the strange UK lit-gauchos from Monkey Kettle magazine to Photoshop me something that resembled legitimate correspondent credentials, which they were cautiously considering (not that I had any reason that anyone in Romania would honour credentials of any kind). I was also applying through my own government for funds from a development branch so that their soft-hearted work would be done, giving me close to 10k to give lectures on democratic and economic reform to deaf or exasperated professors in Bucharest. Any and all excuses that would pad my trip would be welcome, and I sought to squeeze whatever funds I could from every available source. My fear was that I would end up, halfway through the trip, penniless, homeless, and dead drunk on the streets with the stray dogs and with no chance of getting back home while gypsies took turns making sales arrangements for my organs on the streets of Bucharest.

There was a lot a did not know about the country, although I had been tapping every available Romanian for the straight goods on everything from the high-kited abstractions of bureaupolitical structures down to the gritty-earth realities of running toilets and rabid dogs. My research would prove useless in many respects, since every one of my Romanian contacts in Canada gave widely contradictory information about everything I could possibly ask.Which then led me to believe that this was the basis of an iron logical law: There are no Romanians such that any Romanian knows anything about Romania . What kind of cultural carnival was I entering? Was the country indeed founded by Lewis Carroll? Would I be sentenced first and get the verdict later? The old communist holdover mentality makes the culture of misinformation a proud heritage, as is attempting to bribe ATMs.

Economically, the place is in ruins, but a kind of mending ruins.That feeling the drug fiend has when he is painfully convalescing back to that state of bodily equilibrium again. High-ranking academic professionals here in Canada can make up to 100k a year, while in Romania , many of them live on less than 500 a month. That means double and triple-fisting jobs, bub, and it isn't uncommon to find your language & lit professor working the telemarketer or sex chat services on the side, just to make rent. People who had their arms stretched out in the hope of being embraced by the EU in 2007 were Inveterate Fools since the level of corruption did not cease after the Revolution, but rather intensified by going into hiding as the Constitution protected the old vanguard cronies by allowing them to keep their multiple power-positions in perpetuity. It was the spectre of Ceausescu still looming large, the Revenge of the Shoemaker as evidenced by that Pentagon-sized structure in Bucharest called the House of the People (made almost entirely out of native walnut paneling and scraps of ore pilfered from the Carpathians.and perhaps the bones of dissidents, as high as it is deep with its bunkers). And with the pervading stink of the alleged CIA prisons in the guilt-free outsourcing process Condy-girl Rice called "extraordinary rendition", the EU was a bit leery of extending its invitation to join the club. And it made too much sense to me.I picture the old Securitate employees, out of work for so long, with only "thumbscrew persuasion" and "knee-busting interrogation" as their only marketable skills on their CVs.It was not like they were going to get the handshake-up to work in some insurance mill (although possible, the more I think about the connection of those skills to the demands of such a wretched industry). A large unemployment base like that is only too itchy to get back to what it does best.and an opportunity with the Faustian US is too good to pass up. A constantly laid-off GM employee whose gift in this world is to assemble catalytic converters on an assembly line will take another job nearest to what is his or her ken, and not necessarily branch out to become a professional horticulturalist.

But I was not there to crack a big story by unearthing some Stalin-inspired "re-education centre" somewhere buried beneath a three-goat village at the foot of the mountains. I am a firm believer that certain people's problems are their own, and interference just leads to that rotten information export that stains more innocents than perpetrators. Sure, I was always in a state of incommunicable livid rage whenever I read more news about these prisons, be them in Romania, Gitmo, or on floating barges.and this inflamed further by the hustler rhetoric of a US administration that thought the problem of torture was just on the order of international semantics. What a cheap herring! You can't win an argument, just bicker about the terminology, and then claim some safe and cheap first-year undergrad absolute relativism. "Torture means something different to different people." Nice. I'm sure the Sade defense is inexhaustible, but I fail to see the role of semantics in someone being forcibly dunked in water to think he is drowning, or to be snarled at by a brace of slobbering-vicious dogs on a flimsy chain. I chalk this up to such political smooth-over rhetoric as employed by Stalin and Hitler. Oh, it's not a prison with no access to legal counsel.it's just a very long flight delay in a private, hyper-secured military-run airport. But what kind of wisdom can we expect from a government that has such a credit problem that its deficit rides at over 8 trillion? To fund what? Endless wars.the war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on fat, the war on gay marriage, the war on sex, the war on corporate taxation, the war on environmental blockades to oil drilling, the war on intelligence, the war on fiduciary responsibility, the war on floaters in the toilet.But enough of my hackle-raising proselytizing and polemicizing. It is better that we focus on the zoo gallery of Romanian politics (as my friend calls it).

Well, let's put the dimmer on that noise for now. The lids are all coming down, and it will take all my strength to keep the tangents clamped down.but that goes without saying, especially when dealing with a big, bald, scary, yelping 9o kilo man with an impeccable sense of timing. It also goes without saying that despite my predilection for long screeds, polemics, and double-barrel word-blasts, that I have most likely had much more Fun than you may ever know.

But it's all speculation until the surveillance photos are leaked to the public prints. By then, perhaps only shame or boredom will remain.

It is difficult to get Romanians to agree on anything, and that includes direct and simple information about their own country. They seem embroiled in that tactic of misinformation, from what I can gather, and perhaps the country would be more aptly named Wonderland. But, of course, any writer of any worth somehow gets claimed by the Romanians as a Romanian, never mind what the bowtie conservative deans in their dusty offices at Oxford would call a "reprehensible distortion and flagrant historical inaccuracy". Of course Ovid was Romanian and not just exiled there.who am I to argue when vampires are buying the beers? Kafka runs the bureaucracy, and Jerry Lewis space-mutants run the government. Sure.

So here we go.

It is called Casa Poporului. Everything inside is indeed guaranteed Romanian material except for some ivory. Unless there was a Romanian elephant I failed to witness. I can only presume a Romanian elephant would be very confused .