BODIES IN BUILDINGS ……..

The great thing about going to Romania is that the history is so much more interesting than anything you will find in the USA. In Florida a “historical” building is any brick building built before 1920. Typically these places have a palque outside describing how Herb Hatfield Broadbottom III built the house in 1901 to commemorate the consturction of a new railroad in the county. The yanks love these places and they’re a gold mine for psychics and other quacks who love to exploit the gullible with tales of how Broadbotooms spectre can still be seen smoking his pipe on the porch each July 4th. Whilst in Romania I didn’t see any “haunted tours” advertised or any quacks masquerading as mediums or history buffs, I did however see plenty of real historical sites.

Curtea de Arges Cathedral makes the oldest bulidings in St Augustine look like a McDonalds drive through. It was finished in 1526 around the time Christopher Columbus would have been celebrating 25 years since he discovered a hurricane swept inhospitable patch of land that initially at least he thought was India.  Anyway the Cathedral is fascinating to look at with plenty of Eastern style icons and enough gold in it to make the 1984 US Olympic team envious.  Apparently the fellow who built it lacked inspiration and prayed to God who told him that in order to make the church he needed to sacrifice something valuable into its walls. This being the 16th century the chap in question, Mr Mesterul Manoli figured that meant one of the architects loved ones should be bricked into the walls and they decided that the next day at breakfast whoever showed up first would be sealed into the brickwork. Sadly he forgot to mention this to Mrs Manoli and so it must have come as quite a surprise to her when she awoke early the next day to find that dinner with the Popescu’s was cancelled and that she was to spend the rest of her life listening to the sound of hammering ! Either way a plaque marks the site were the poor old girl was shoved and what for her was a site of indescribable horror is today just a nice spot to get your photo taken.  

 Another great location for getting some lovely snaps is Rasnov castle. It is located halfway between the historic cities of Bran and Brasov in Transylvania.  It is not so much a castle as a small walled city and very little remains of the actual castle part but if you like cobbled streets, old carts and great views then this is Romania’s answer to San Giminiano in Italy. It was built in the 12th century according to legend although the precise dates are about as cloudy as pint of real Ale in an Irish pub. In the central square there is a deep well which was constructed during a siege of the city. Apparently the locals were having some issues with some troublesome Turks, presumably Galatassary fans and having captured a few sent them to work on the well.   Once the well was complete somebody decided it would be a great idea to throw the men down the well. Not exactly the “thank you” the men were expecting but perhaps something useful to bear in mind when trying to combat modern day soccer hooligans. I can’t imagine that the rotting corpses did much to for the purity of the drinking supply but presumably the rest of the Turks got the message and the siege was soon over.  This whole business of shoving people into construction sites was obviously popular in Romania at this time and on your way out of the castle you’re directed to view the skeletal remains of another bloke believed to be Hungarian who was found sandwiched in one of the floors. Another corpse lovely ! Every home should have one.

Draculas “real” castle

Romania and the EU

During my second week of treatment we drove to the real Draculas castle which is mostly rubble on a hill.  On arrival we had to climb literally thousands of crumbling steps to reach the top of a hillside and then negotiate a less than secure looking wooden bridge to the castle itself. Given the inaccessibility of the site it must have been pretty difficult for Draculas opponents to try and mount any kind of offensive against him. On the flip side it must have been a pain in the arse for him whenever he wanted to go grocery shopping !

The journey from Pitesti to the castle was slow because of an abundance of gypsies and peasants riding along on their horse drawn carts on the road. It was much like the end of “Fiddler on the Roof,” except at least Tevye’s cart had some actual seats on it.  Well anyway there are two types of cart pullers, Peasants who are Romanian village people (YMCA) and gypsies who are dark skinned but to the untrained eye (me) they all look the same. 

 

According to my Romanian companions these folks don’t really use money they trade vegetables or wood or other commodities and live like people did in England about 500 years ago or in Yorkshire about 25 years ago.  However one of the conditions of Romania joining the EU was that horse drawn carts be banned from the roads. Now this may sound like a great idea to Roman Prodi and Neil Kinnock in leafy Brussels but half the population live this way and no one has suggested how they should live their lives going forward or provided them with cars, gasoline, jobs or currency.

The Romanians however are taking the same kind of approach to the new laws that the police in Wexford, Ireland took when I was younger to licensing laws and basically not complying with them whatsoever. It was the same in the airport when I arrived. Under the EU smoking in public places here has been banned and the first thing you see when stepping off  the plane is a massive 12ft by 12ft sign that says “EU rules. No smoking in airport” However the people who greet you from the plane, the passport control employees and the baggage handlers were without exception chain smoking in the immediate proximity of the sign.

There are some people who have benefited from the revised laws here even if they are not even remotely being enforced. Typically it was very hard to be a lawyer and took a lot of years of working your way up, networking and corruption and the dentists wife has struggled to get a job as a lawyer since finishing college 4 years ago. Suddenly she has found herself on a level pegging with all the old pros because in order to keep their jobs they have to be re-trained in the EU laws and let’s just say they are not doing so well with that whilst she has suddenly been inundated with job interviews because she was forward thinking enough to study European law.

She wants to move to the USA one day because she feels that her children won’t have much of a future in Romania. I suggested to her that Romania would probably change pretty quickly since it was now part of the EU and that currently their country was going to a transitional period. “We have been going through a transition for 17 years already and not much has changed,” she retorted.  She went on to explain that in real terms people like her father who works at the Dacia car plant earned far more money under Ceacescu than they do under the companies new owners Renault. I had assumed that the French company would have paid the employees better than the company had when it was nationally owned but I suppose I was naive enough to think that within the EU all things would be equal. Romania and Bulgaria are experiencing the new EU where some are more equal than others !

“Russian dancing in Romania”

So after 5 days of hardcore drilling, scraping and reconstruction the dentist mercifully decided it was time to get away from the office for a bit and have a little fun. He and some other dentists in Romania communicate regularly on an internet forum and every so often they meet up for a weekend at a resort near Draculas castle. It just so happened that my second weekend in Romanian coincided with their latest trip. I felt a little uneasy about going to a holiday camp with 40 people that not only were strangers to me and who probably didn’t speak English but were also dentists. “Don’t worry,” said Dr Savu “Dorin is coming.”

Dorin the x-ray guy had become a regular fixture during my week in Pitesti as he tended to be the driver when we needed to go anywhere and he and I had gotten closer as the week went on. On arriving at the Vila Bran resort we were about to get a lot closer. “Here’s your room,” said the hotel representative to Dorin and I. We looked at around at the orange 70’s decor and everything looked quite adequate except for the fact that the two “single” beds were side by side and actually about one millimetre apart with a shared blanket ! Dorin looked uncannily like Dracula now I just had to hope he didn’t bite.

The Vila Bran resort is a great location to visit as you can play pool, tennis, go hang gliding etc etc. The meals are all catered in the restaurant in the resort and every night there is a party with free wine and vodka. It is on a mountain opposite the one where Draculas castle is. We had dinner at a long table of 40 Romanian dentists. After dinner the waiters ushered us outside where there was a bonfire burning and some locals were playing the guitar and singing. Directly behind the bonfire was a spectacular view of Draculas castle. Anyway after that we went to the party and I met some Romanian dentists. We talked about politics and football in a mixture of English, French, Italian, Russian, Romanian, German and basically any other language that had necessary words when we reached a conversational stalemate.

The second night after dinner some traditional Romanian folk dancers came into the restaurant and did a little gig. Unfortunately they decided they had to have audience participation and due to being sat at the end of the table nearest to them I was pulled out of the crowd and made to dance. The Romanian dance was something akin to Riverdance. I was wearing my chunky trainers so I wasn’t exactly dressed for it and aside from that I had no clue what to do. Humiliated by my experience I knew that I would have to salvage some pride for England and my opportunity came a little later at the party. After several rounds of Romanian folk dancing one of my new found friends Ilian (pronounced Eileen as in “Come on Eileen”) decided the demonstrate some “Cos-sacking” or Russian dancing. You know the kind ? Bent knees and kicking forward or kicking your leg behind you back and touching your toes with your hands ? The problem was that Eileen was completely crap at Russian dancing. At this point with memories of “Fiddler on the Roof” in mind I decided to make my move. I ushered the Romanian out of the way and gave a demonstration of true Russian dancing. Apparently I am pretty good at this and everybody formed a circle and clapped whilst singing “di,di, di,di,di,di,di” The song went on and on and on but I felt compelled to continue until finally I was about to die from exhaustion and the song finally finished. I immediately bolted for the door and went outside to catch my breathe after 15 minutes of relentless high kicks with arms folded.

All these people kept coming out asking me to come back in but I was bloody knackered although I concealed my exhaustion from them as they all praised my “incredible stamina.” Anyway I sat down and decided that I would keep a low profile for the rest of the night when suddenly I heard a familiar rift. The opening notes of the BeeGees “Saturday night fever” My foot started to tap and next thing I knew some kind of disco fever had overcome me and I burst back onto the dance area one hand on hip the other hand with one finger raised in the air in classic John Travolta style. The crowd were joyous. Thereafter the karaoke began and given that I was the best English speaker and all the songs were in English I was asked to sing Aha “Take on Me” Everybody was impressed that I could hit the high notes so they set me a new challenge Bon Jovi’s “It’s my Life” followed by Guns N Roses “Sweet child of mine” and Gloria Gaynors “I will survive.” When these people want you to dance or sing you have to really work for it.

The night ended with an encore of Russian dancing. They made me do it all again except this time they formed a high kicking circle around me. It was at this moment in time that I glanced around at 40 drunk Romanian dentists and thought to mysef “How the bloody hell did I end up here ?” I have never even met 40 dentists before let alone lead a dance class for 40 Romanian ones in the shadow of Draculas castle.

Up to this point I had been a bit isolated as Romanians aren’t all that social. If you know them they are friendly but they don’t reach out to strangers unless you have an ice breaker. This was the king of ice breakers. The cool thing is that I got about 20 business cards from dentists afterwards several of whom offered to undercut my current dentist by 50% if I need any more work done and I think we have every city from Timosara to Constanta covered if my family and I ever want to take a trip to Romania and stay with someone for free.

The dental work was my reason for coming to Romania but I have a cunning plan that will more than offset the future cost of any dental treatment. I am going to cash in on my new found talents and release the worlds first “Traditional Russian military Dancing Fitness Video : For Beginners” I am going to ride this gravy train all the way back to Brasov.

Dental Treatment

After a hair raising few days in Romania it was finally time for me to go to the dentist for something other than food or entertainment.I was a little upset to discover that I need 7 root canals as opposed to 1 or 2 I had been expecting and I was even more upset to discover that my bloody teeth had felt the need to develop 4 or 5 canals on each and every root. The dentist was let me just say much nicer and more considerate than any medical professional I have ever dealt with before. The old dentist in England used to give me an anaesthetic injection and then within seconds start drilling away long before it had taken effect. I would walk home 15 minutes later and suddenly find that my face was going numb. The US dentist wasn’t much better and so Romania was the first time I actually had the opportunity to have my teeth drilled without feeling the pain. Sadly though as a recent study showed people with ginger hair are more susceptible to pain. (we are also apparently more like cavemen then other modern humans but that is a story for another day) Whilst he dispensed the anaesthetic freely and liberally at my command it didn’t work all of the time. In fact it was rather odd in that he would be giving me a root canal and in 3 canals I would feel nothing but in the other I would feel a pain greater than any ever encountered by humankind before. Luckily his assistant Gina was very good at eye contact.

When you have your mouth forced open with a blue plastic sheet draped over it to isolate one of your back teeth from saliva it is a little hard to communicate. To overcome this I developed a series of eye movements to communicate comfort, displeasure, fear and pain.A blink meant I was OK. A glance at Gina meant I felt a little discomfort. One raised eyebrow and a glare meant “That bleeding well hurt.” She was much more attentive than your usual Essex girl pony tailed dental assistant. For a start she seemed to know almost as much about dental work as the actual dentist and for another thing she would dab your forehead with a damp towel to calm your troubled brow or adjust your chair frequently to prevent you getting cramped. All in all she was like the angel of mercy in the sad and dark world of people who have crappy teeth. My teeth were pretty buggered, well all of the back ones anyway and all in all I needed no less than 15 crowns. The cost in the US would have been equivalent a months share earnings for Dick Cheney from haliburton but in Romania it workd out to about $200 dollars per crown. The root canals and everything else were priced in addition to that but for a fraction of the cost I was getting much better treatment and the best was yet to come.

The dentist had explained he would give me metal crowns with a ceramic cover for $200 bucks a pop. The dentist in the US had offered metal crowns with NO ceramic cover for $1000 a pop. However great as ceramic covers are nothing beats pure Hollywood style pure ceramic crowns that go for around $3000 each in L.A.

Would you believe that the technician who was to make the crowns had just one some kind of European “Crown maker of the year” contest and had been given free materials to make pure ceramic crowns for his next client on the provision that the client (that would be me) agreed to have the teeth photographed for display at a dental expo in Bucharest ? Well whether you choose to believe me or not that is exactly what happened ! The technician himself was rather an odd looking fellow. He seemd like your stereotypical bohemian artist. Everyone referred to him as “The master”. This concerned me just a little having grown up watching “Doctor Who” but Dr Savu assured me he was a master of his craft rather than a master of evil. He like everyone else took one look at my mercury riddled teeth and said “So you have come from an English dentist ?”

Apparently we English folks are well known in Europe for our metal fillings. Not any more. Now I have twinkiling ivories that Liberace would love to get his hands on.

The dental work was lengthy and Dr Savu and Gina spent many an hour gaping into my cake hole during the two weeks I was there but when all was said and done I was delighted with their handywork and they were delighted with my newly found ability to speak fluent Romanian after having hours upon end to decipher their dialect whilst lyeing on my back with very little else to do but learn. It was funny actually because for the first few days I had no idea what they were saying but by the end of two weeks I could understand at least 60% of what they were saying which was a surprise to them especially when they started talking about me and I explained that I knew what they were saying. They weren’t saying anything bad but all the same it seem to take them by surprise. Anyway dental work is dental work is dental work and I can’t wait to visit my dentist here and say “ha ha pal ! 20% of the price you wanted for far better work !”

Romania part three : A weekend in Pitesti

Now I may be alone in this but I don’t recall ever being taken out for lunch by my dentist in the US or for that matter by the old NHS dentist in the UK.    Dr Savu takes the view that his patients should be treated as friends and indeed I was treated as such during my time there beginning with lunch at an old ship themed restaurant in Pitesti. The Dracula looking xray guy and his fiancee tagged along and it didn’t cost me a penny. In fact he wouldn’t let me pay for anything outside of the dental office. It was a nice change from the last dentist in Cocoa Beach who charged you per cubic square of air you breathed whilst in his surgery.I got to sample some Romanian cuisine in the restaurant that appeared to be entirely constructed of whicker. Polenta is a favourite national dish and is kind of a like a heap of bread soaked in eggs, sour milk and some sort of yellow slime and of course covered in a thick layer of cheese. I ate it but to be honest I don’t think I will ever order it again.

Dinner was much better as I got invited to the dentists apartment and his fiancee with a little help from their parents prepared another traditional meal of meat, cabbage and rice that was much more to my liking. In the USA at my “customer service” orientated job we’re told to “go out of our way to please.” In Romania that means more than not telling pissey customers to bugger off. In Romania you go to the dentist and you’re made to feel like the long lost relative returning to feast on the fattened calf.  It was fantastic.

The best thing about Romanians is that they are the antithesis of Americans. In the USA everybody is friendly, smiling and warm but don’t ever think about showing up at someones house unnanounced. Forget making a joke at someones expense and don’t ever ever ever ask a friend for help outside of work hours.  If you ever find yourself spontaneously combusting in Florida don’t bother to buzz your neighbour and ask them to bring over their fire extinguisher because they are only going to tell you that they are busy waiting for the guy who is coming to install their new wood floor.

In Romania it’s the complete opposite. People at first seem shy and avoid eye contact and only speak to you if they have to however once you get to know them you feel as if you have known them all of your life. In England it takes at least ten years to make a lifelong friend, in the USA it takes at least fourteen reincarnation cycles over the course of five hundred years but in Romania all it takes is one drink and an hour of talk in pidgeon French and you are set for life.

Saturday night was party night at the Guinness pub and a young Doctor named Dragos gave us all a lesson in how to act like a loveable drunk by doing some kind of dance ritual that was like a cross between morris dancing and techno. Moby would have been proud. It was quite refreshing to see that Romanians go to the pub to have fun.  Americans are purely functional people and only go to the pub for one of two reasons : a) because they are alcoholics or b) to find someone to spend the night with. Happily married and preferring soft drinks to liquor I fit into neither of these categories and therefore my visits to US bars have been about as frequent as they would be to bars if I lived in Mecca. Romania on the other hand had a pub atmosphere much more like in England except with a few less obese men with ill fitting jeans playing darts and a bit more Rod Stewart on the Jukebox.

I had a great time and they called a cab (which I didn’t have to pay for ! Awesome !) to take me back to my hotel and all was right in the world until I realised I had left my wallett on the back seat of the car. I started making my way back to the cab in a pathetic Denholm Elliot sort of “excuse me if I beg your pardon” kind of way but before I could get the taxi drivers attention he hit the gas. It was at this point that I wondered why the hell I had decided to read the British Foreign Office Web site and take their suggestion to heart that I should leave no cash or credit cards in the hotel room. In theory that sounds like a smart idea but the one tiny flaw with that notion is that after you have had a few beers you are rather prone to leaving your wallett with all of the aforementioned in it in a wheelbarrow sized Romanian taxi. As the red and yellow car sped away I started to panic. I had no money. I had no means of contacting the outside world. Was this it for me ? Would I have to start a new life with the street children of Bucharest roaming the sewers and begging for scraps of food from the well fed rat population ? No. I was not ready to give up yet.

 Summoning some kind of inner strength that the world had not seen since I went head to head with the other fat kids in 12th grade 200 metres race I bolted down the road. Now I have already described how dangerous it is to drive on Romanian roads so as you can imagine sprinting down the centre of the road waving your arms above your head is not exactly the safest way to get around the city. Luckily there are frequent traffic lights in Pitesti and the cabbie kept getting caught at them all. Unluckily for me every time I almost caught up to him the light changed green and he raced off again. I kept yelling “Pocim ! Pocim!” which is Czech for “Stop.” At the time it seemed like a good idea as it was the only east European word I could think of that was remotely appropriate. In hindsight I doubt anyone within a thousand miles of Pitesti can speak Czech.

I was starting to feel a bit like the guy who loses in the film “Chariots of Fire” as my target got further and further away when a beaten up old communist era minivan pulled up beside me. “Get in” yelled the driver who looked like your stereotypical James Bond film Russian henchman. Typically I don’t hitch rides with such people but this was an emergency. “Follow that taxi” I said as I jumped in the vehicle. We ploughed through the traffic trying to catch up to the taxi driver who had gained an unfair edge in the time it had taken for our pit stop. Bizarrely it soon emerged that the only English words known to my driver were “get” and “in” as used in our initial introduction. Presumably he is a kidnapper but on this night he was a hero. Sadly though we lost the taxi after a pack of dogs stumbled out in front of us. These wild dogs are everywhere in Romania since the communists made no provisions for peoples pets when they knocked down all the old houses and put everyone in flats.  The government were doing a pretty good job of exterminating them until Bridget Bardot paid the them about $10 million dollars as a bribe to protect the four legged fiends.

“Bloody Bridget Bardot” I said under my breath as our doomed mission came to a halt back at my hotel. In our absence quite a crowd had gathered of witnesses and nosey people who had presumably seen my Frank the Tank impression and wondered what the hell was going on. By the grace of God and without one word of English being understood by any of them somehow they managed to ascertain what had happened and even more remarkably track down the cabbie by phone and have him return the wallett. For the record on returning it he explained that a customer had found it on the back seat and surrendered it to him. Aside from the credit cards I also had cash in it that I later discovered was equivalent to about 2 months wages for the average Romanian worker. I wondered how many English or American people would have honestly handed over a lost stash of cash so easily. Lukcily I wasn’t in either of those countries though I was in Romania land of lousy food but great great people.

Romania day One

Last time on “Dental Tourism in Romania” ….stunned by the cost of dental work in the USA I Googled my way to a cheaper alternative in Romania. Having survived the arduous journey from Florida I was now ready to be taken by the dentists fiancee and the radiologist to meet the big wig himself………We left the airport and drove for about an hour past block after block of concrete monstrosities. I don’t know what Ceacescu was thinking when he came up with the idea of destroying all the old buildings and turning the entire capital city into what looks like a derelict multi storey car park. As we got out of the city we passed through miles of flat open land with only the occasional church to brighten up the landscape. It was at around this point that I started to think of the movie “Hostel” Here I was in a car with two complete strangers, one a not unattractive girl and the other a suspicious looking dracula type character. They were talking in Romanian and whatever it was they were discussing was obviously very funny as they kept looking in the rear view mirror and laughing. I couldn’t help thinking that this would be a great place to dump a body. There were few cars and no houses for miles around. If I were going to dupe Americans into coming to Romania this is exactly where I would shot them, steal their credit cards and dump their body. I felt around in my back pack for any kind of improvised weapon I could find just in case my worst fears were realised. The best I could come up with was a toothbrush since airport security had confiscated my nun-chucks and blunderbuss. To my surprise and relief we finally reached the city of Pitesti without anyone having to stop the car to slit my throat. This wasn’t a scam after all. The dentist was legitimate. “Screw you people at work who thought I would get murdered here !” I muttered to myself.

We finally reached our destination and as most drivers do in Romania our driver stopped abruptly on the road and turned the car off. The commies never envisaged a society were people owned cars so they made absolutely no provisions for parking. It also would appear that nobody in Romania has ever felt there is a need for any kind of traffic laws. The road may be say 8 lanes wide but that doesn’t mean it’s 4 lanes going one way and 4 going the other. No that would be too English. It could be 7 lanes going one direction and 1 the other or 3 one way and 5 the other or any other combination you care to think of depending on the time of day and which direction most of the aggressive people are heading in at any one time. When people are finished driving they will park anywhere, on the road, across the doorway of shops, in bus stops or simply on top of the dead body of the pedestrian they just crushed to death by driving up onto the sidewalk.

The dentist office was just like any dentist office you might find in the USA. Same equipment, same smell, same decor but lower prices. The dentist himself came out to greet me with a warm smile and a hearty handshake. He seemed strangely familiar. I had seen his face before. Could it be ? No surely not. Yes it was him.

Tony Casales my old school friend was here in Romania masquerading as a dentist. There was no mistaking his chubby little face, big eyes and dark hair. No one had seen Tony in the last ten years since the whole incident with Deacons bed and the traffic light on the cricket field. Overcome by amazement I finally managed to utter a word “Tony ?” I said. The dentist paused thoughtfully. “Tony,” he said “now that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long long time.” Actually that is a complete lie he didn’t say anything and just looked a bit bewildered because he didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. In hindsight he probably didn’t even look much like Tony Casales but at that moment after 40 hours without sleep I guess I was grasping for straws. Thereafter we talked, joked and made xrays. I felt strangely at home. Everybody could speak very good English which was all the more remarkable given the book they had used to learn the language. In order to help me in Romania, Alana (the Fiancee) gave me an old book that was aimed at Romanians visiting London. It had what were supposed to be useful things that Romanians could say when in England. Section one of the book was titled “Visiting London.” I assumed there would be some useful tit bits in here that I could use to get by like “where is the toilet ?” or “how much is the bus” but alas no.

This book was obviously written by the same numb-skull who designed post war Bucharest. The very first “useful” comment in the book was a question that translates as follows …… “I say sir is the elderly gentleman in the doorway Dr Johnson.” It then had the probable reply you should expect from the savvy Brit “No my good man. That gentleman in the doorway is the famous English playwright Sir Alec.” I read this and wondered in what situation ANY of this would ever be useful. In order to use this you would have to firstly know a Dr Johnson secondly to spot someone who looked uncannily like him standing in a doorway and thirdly for that person to be a well known playwright. It occurred to me that if you were so well acquainted with so many English folks then you probably wouldn’t need a Romanian/English translation book in the first place and either way even if you did, would you really give a damn who the old git in the doorway was when having used this stupid book during your entire trip you would have had the most miserable experience ever since it was the most useless book ever written ? Before long though language barriers would be the least of my problems.

DENTAL TOURSIM PART ONE: AND SO IT BEGINS.

About two years ago I started having a really bad toothache. The cause of the pain was one of my wisdom teeth and to make matters worse pieces of it kept breaking off from time to time. After years of butchery from English dentists I had developed a fear of dentistry and that coupled with rumours of extortionate prices at US dentists had deterred me from seeking the help I needed. I thought that eventually the problem tooth would just fall out or something and that would be that but one day in a Cocoa Beach hotel I woke to find that half my face had swollen up. The tooth had now ruptured and the infection had spread to my whole head. I had no choice. It was time to visit the dentist.The dentist was a nice enough guy similar to Mr Rogers of PBS kids and having extracted the offending tooth he explained that if I had left it any longer I probably would have kicked the bucket. Just to make me feel even better he explained that most of my teeth were pretty much buggered and that to fix them would cost around $20 grand. “Jolly good” I said. I didn’t want him to realise that I was thinking about jumping out of the nearest window so I shook his hand and left wondering how I was going to explain this one to the old lady who up until now had absolutely no idea that I had so much as a touch of plaque.I started up the engine of my rental car popped in a cd of Abba’s greatest hits and hit the road. I started trying to imagine how Indiana Jones or Han Solo would handle this situation. On the one hand I had no money but on the other hand I had to come up with $20 grand or die. For some unknown the theme music of Dr Zhivago came into my mind. Nice tune but what could it mean ? What was the messgae behind it ? Well Zhivago was a Doctor and Doctors are kind of like dentists and he is Russian ! Yes Russian ! Not American ! Russian Doctors are cheaper than American ones ! I wanted to jump for joy at my Eureka breakthrough but given that the road was surrounded by alligator infested swamps that wouldn’t have been a good idea as one slip of the wheel would have turned me into gator bait. Nevertheless I had found a solution and it was called dental tourism.OK so you would think that from there I would have made my plans and immediately and found a dentist overseas but no, this is me we are talking about here and I had decided to

bury my head in the sand for a while. Sadly I couldn’t live in denial forever and the rest of my teeth started to rapidly disintegrate and before long I realised the time had come to make the dream a reality. I set about looking for “dental toursim” on Google. I read a few horror stories about how dentists in Mexico were unregulated and how one woman went to Tijuana to get a root canal but she went to a quack and came back as a hybrid of a human and a bottle nosed dolphin. Not good. Africa would probably be cheap but maybe a tad risky so I decided on Europe and started to Google cheap European dentists. Immediately I hit gold in Hungary. Unbeknown to me Budapest had become a Mecca for Englishmen with dodgey teeth and although the prices were far less than in the USA they were still a little out of my range so I started to consider other European options. Azerbaijan, Albania and Ukraine didn’t yield any results but then I had a thought: Romania. This country was pretty poor and cheap and yet had just joined the EU which would surely mean they must have some kind of dental standards right ? Bingo. The next thing I knew I was exchanging emails with a chap named Dr Savu of Pitesti and within a week I was on a flight to Bucharest. Well actually first I flew to Atlanta and then NYC because we had some free flights from this Wendys promo when we rummaged through the trash but anyway that’s another story.

The flight to Romania was with Hungarian airline Malev. I read online beforehand that Malev had been voted Eastern Europes best airline with the highest levels of customer service. The thing that was refreshing about it was that the customer service wasn’t all that great. If you asked for an extra drink they tried to force a smile but it was insincere but so much better than the fake “Have a nice day” BS I am used to in the USA. Of course someone is going to be pissed off if you keep asking for extra drinks on the plane and nothing is more insulting than people pretending they’re happy to be at your beck and call when they’re not. These Hungarians were as nice as you could be without being false. That’s all I can ask for. That aside the food was delicious. It didn’t even taste like airplane food it was as if Gordon Ramsey had just whipped it up in a full service restaurant. The best thing about the flight was that I was sat next to a deaf Israeli girl who could only talk Hebrew. This allowed me to be completely anti social for the whole 9 hour flight. I hate small talk so this was bliss.

It was quite an awe inspiring moment when the clouds that had obscured our view from NYC to Europe finally dispersed just as the Carpathian mountains of Transylvania came into view. I had never realised that Romania had so many spectacular looking mountains or for that matter so much snow. I didn’t get long to appreciate the view before the pilot began his descent and next thing I knew we were unloading at Bucharest airport. The first thing we saw on exiting the plane was a hug sign that said “EU policy allows No smoking in the airport.” Standing immediately in front of the sign were three passport control agents all of whom were smoking. “I like the attitude of these people” I thought to myself. I let some “0% commission” exchange bureau completely rip me off and then as the crowds dispersed I saw a young woman holding a sign across the lobby. It said “Dr Savu”. This was it. I had come this far and now there was no turning back. I was about to put my life into the hands of two complete starngers. This girl and her buddy who looked like count Dracula. My Romanian odyseey was about to begin.