Vama Veche

At the bus station a Gypsy wearing a bright colored yellow Armani sparkling t-shirt begged for change. I bought some food and water, before we had to jump on the next bus. I handed pieces of a meat filled pastry to my sister as a middle aged woman with a band-aid on her right arm made plans to pick up bread at the local “bucaterie.” Her telephone had different ringtones for different people. One was a local variation of the classic Nokia ring, another was a Romanian folk song, and for a very special person a samba rang with lyrics that said “¡alegria!” Out the window I watched women using sickles to clear brush from under trees in an office park. We drove passed train tracks that led over a bay to an abandoned resort with water on either side. We crossed over the canal that marries the Danube to the Black Sea. I noticed a shop that properly used an apostrophe... Bravo to Mr Gregory's Kebab.

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We got to Vama Veche, a chilled-out hippie beach town two kilometers from the Bulgarian border. A man offered us accommodation outside the bus stop, for 15 lei a day. We told him we’d come back. We walked to the beach. It was pristine. Nothing but sand and water. We put all of our bags underneath an umbrella. We looked for a place to stay. For only ten dollars per night per person we found a hotel that looked like a tree house.

The owner of the hotel introduced me to her black cat. “His name is Michael, after Michael Jackson.” The cat had arrived the day the pop singer had died. I asked if the cat could sing. “Yes, ♫ Meow / Meow / Meow ♫”

We spent the whole day on the beach. I thought about how crazy it was that the sun burns us. Are we not adjusted to the rays because we are inside all day. Are sunburns a reaction to our paleness? Or are we on some crazy planet where we aren't allowed to go outside anymore. Are we getting burned quicker because of a thinning ozone layer. Should I buy a stronger SPF?

At night we ate fresh fish from the Black Sea and caviar cut with mayonnaise. It was delicious, and I don’t normally eat fish. We split a bottle of rum in a half hour. We listened to the eclectic collection of songs that the bar on the beach played. Frank Sinatra, Neil Young, Aqua, lyrics that went “You'll take a ride through the strangers / Who don't understand how to feel / In the deathcar, we're alive / In the deathcar, we're alive.”

I walked down to the beach to ask the bartender who sang this song. A man sitting at the counter wouldn’t look at me as he said “Goran Bregovic.” He told me that I was stupid for not knowing the most famous Serbian singer of the last forty years. I thanked him, and wrote down the name so I could listen to the song in the future.

We drank plastic bottles of beer next the club that was playing dubstep earlier in the day, but was now playing the audio dialogue to Casino. We walked to our tree house before we passed out in the sand.

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We said goodbye to our bunk mate. He was hoping to hitchhike to Varna. We walked to have breakfast with a view of the sea. My eggs took a long time to come out, but when I got them there were pepper corns and and cilantro on the yolks to make them look like happy faces. I felt bad about devouring something so cute.

As I looked at the water, my sister asked me what I was thinking about. I said “I was wondering if The Bloods hate going to the ocean, because it is blue.”

I convinced my sister that today we should walk to Bulgaria.

We passed passed fields of red poppies and infant wheat stalks, before we got to the Bulgarian border. Since both countries joined the European Union, both border officials shared the same office. Romania stamps you out, Bulgaria stamps you in. It’s not the kind of job wear you can switch chairs.

We walked to a post that commemorated the 1949-era border. “S” in RSR, was scratched out, because Romania was no longer a Socialist Republic. Further into Bulgaria we saw the Bulgarian customs office. The outside looked like a 1960s drive-in theater, the inside looked like a bank. I wondered if nefarious things had ever happened in that building.

We walked to a duty-free shop with everything written in Cyrillic. I paid for a Coke in Romanian currency, and sat there taking in Bulgaria. When I was finished with the soda, we walked back to the border.

A bus with signs in Turkish stopped. Out stepped our bunk-mate from the night before. He wasn’t able to hitchhike in Vama Veche, so he took the bus to Mangalia There weren’t any buses there, so he traveled back to Constanta. He couldn’t find anyone who was traveling to Bulgaria, until he stumbled upon this bus heading to Istanbul. With all the back-tracking he finally made it back to where he started.
We wished him well and walked back to Romania.

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In two weeks this town would be inundated with thousands of college students. The laid-back comfort of the beach would turn into an all-out party. Where are people supposed to go if all they want is a beach, a beer, and a hammock?

There was graffiti on the wall of a modern hotel that said:

"I feel the rest of a spirit, that once made this place unique, But now that you came, with your hotels, your big cars, your money... ...so I leave."