Word: romania
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...more people here. Imagine what that would have done. These are good people: craftsmen, programmers, doctors, chemists. They are all needed over there. You cannot rebuild the East German economy without them. Apart from that, over the same period we accommodated 175,000 resettlers of German origin from Poland, Romania and other East European countries...
Such bucolic tableaux, this one in Romania, are themselves reason enough for visiting Eastern Europe now that revolution has cut the barbed wire and the red tape that kept local citizens in and, in most cases, Westerners out. If there is a silver lining in the clouds that darkened the region for nearly a half-century, it is the fact that communist centralized planning never brought quite the mechanization of agriculture that is taken for granted in the West. This may not provide much comfort for the people of the bloc, but it has left a certain charm...
...getting to such Bruegelesque views, whether in Poland or Romania or elsewhere in Eastern Europe, can be a challenge. If communism created an attraction by making time stand still, it also left the region without an adequate tourism infrastructure. Country inns and small hotels are not unknown: in one little town in eastern Hungary, for instance, a hostelry offers a clean bed (toilet and bathroom down the corridor) for $6 a night. In the dining room, a Gypsy violinist helps compensate for the heavy meal. But such places are rare...
Accommodations are not the only thing in short supply. In the summer, restaurants, especially the better ones, are often booked days in advance. In Romania and Bulgaria, even a room at a hotel does not guarantee a visitor a seat in the hotel's restaurant. In Poland one may have to stand in line for barszcz (beet soup) and golabki (meat-filled rolled cabbage). In Prague if one hankers after crisp roast duck and three kinds of dumplings at a restaurant with a view of Hradcany Castle and the Vltava River, one must reserve several days ahead...
...take in a performance at what is possibly the best puppet theater in the world in Prague, and go to an opera in Budapest for about what it would cost for an intermission drink anywhere in the West. In Cluj, the capital of the medieval kingdom of Transylvania in Romania, three decades of Ceausescu misrule have emptied shops and condemned people to a dreary life in ill-lighted, poorly heated apartments. But the Ceausescu era did not kill the arts. At a recent Rachmaninoff concert performed by the Cluj Philharmonic Orchestra, the pianist was superb. Cost: less than...