Bucharest and Transylvania

I went to Romania for about a week to report a story on the secret police files.

I saw a lot of files.

Each folder is for a person whom the Romanian secret police were watching. It was strange to be in the archive and think that a much larger archive exists in China with a file somewhere, most certainly, about me.

I didn't see much of Bucharest. I ate in a couple of restaurants, and had the same dish in both: a slightly sour chicken and sausage stew served with a mound of polenta with a fried egg over the top.

Then I flew to a town called Cluj in the heart of Transylvania. I went to visit an old gold mining village there.

There are a lot of haystacks in rural Romania.

I had been in an even more remote part of Romania a year or so earlier to write about an overzealous priest who killed a schizophrenic nun by crucifying her in a botched exorcism. I had hired a Mercedes Benz in Bucharest to drive me close to the Moldovan border. We ended up in an area that looked like 19th century Europe.

The roads were all dirt and grass tracks and the Mercedes got stuck in some boggy ground at dusk. We kept asking passing ox carts to pull us out, but of course none could. My interpreter eventually hiked off to find a guy in a neighboring village who owned a tractor. He arrived late at night and we were finally on our way. It had taken about eight hours to get out of the mud.

This time, I visited a place called Rosia Montana, where the Romans mined gold in the second century A.D. The mines are dead today but a bunch of businessmen want to start them up again.