Trampelling Over Tourists

Tourists.

I've heard Brasov described as a touristy place, and I tend to agree. It's normal to see people walking around with cameras and guidebooks, and testing their memorized Romanian phrases on passersby (my favorite is when they approach me, and we both struggle through directions in Romanian before realizing English would be easier). Since one of the favorite tourist sites (Mt. Tampa) is accessed from my street, I run into several tourists every day.

Another reason I think of it as touristy is that Brasov is a fairly lively place, yet the people who fill out the town in the evening are not students. In order to "go out" in the center you've got to have the money to pay for a good time. This is because the scene revolves mostly around bars and restaurants. With the exception of the theatre, there is no venue in the centre for culture. The (good) cinemas are at the edge of town, the opera is a good 15 minutes away, and the symphony has performances only on Thursdays. My impression is that people head home in the evenings, and that this is where the fun is to be had. So, the people I see are the tourists and businesspeople.

But after my trip to Budapest over Easter, I have a completely different perception of what a tourist is. The thing is, most American tourists don't make it as far east as Romania. A lot of people seem to think that going to Budapest fulfills the "doing Eastern Europe" adventure. And a lot of tourists just aren't interested in Romania. As it turns out, this is a blessing for people like me who have a new found disgust for large numbers of tourists.

Budapest was literally crawling with tourists. Apparently all the Hungarians hid away for Easter, because as I walked the streets of the city I more often heard people speaking English, Spanish, Italian, French, German, Dutch than people speaking Hungarian (a.k.a. people speaking a language I don't recognize while not carrying a camera or a guidebook). Every single person had a camera, most of them fairly big cameras. In the other hand, a guidebook. It was obnoxious, and I felt ashamed. This is why I don't have a lot of Budapest pictures and why we walked around aimlessly while the guidebook was locked safely in the hostel.

Budapest was also filled with market stalls selling everything from, well, everything to everything. Let me explain. Over the weekend the Budapest Wine Festival was held. It was outdoor and basically entailed taking your glass around to different stalls to taste any Hungarian wine you desire. Understanding and appreciating Hungarian wine is apparently very hip is today's Budapest. Sadly though, the wine festival was overrun with loud, drunk tourists stumbling around trying to find the cheapest glass of wine.

Down the street from there was the Easter market, which was a comprehensive collection of traditional Hungarian trinkets, pottery, clothing, jewelry, palinka, honey, food, and even furniture. Everything was of a very high quality, to the extent that I felt absorbed by it, a feeling I haven't yet felt in Romania. By absorbed I mean that it was all so full of life and pretty that I kind of wandered from one stall to the next thinking how much I wanted everything and looking at everything that caught my eye. A marketing dream come true.

We happened upon a photo exhibit in a park. It was called "100 Faces of Transylvania," and included photos from a photo contest. Being outside, it was free, and people were clamoring around it to find their favorites. My photo doesn't do its popularity justice - I intentionally tried to get one without people.

Another random stand we happened upon was a box office for the Budapest Spring Festival. Taking place over the second half of March, it was a performing arts festival, with everything from symphony concerts to operas, West Side Story to the Blind Boys of Alabama, and for the lucky ones, Hungarian folk music. The festival events were spread across the city's finest venues. I wanted to take Gordon to his first opera, but the show that worked out for us was called "Metamorphosis." When we bought the tickets, we didn't know what that meant or where the Palace of Arts was; we just knew that we spent $6 each on tickets in the first row of the third balcony. It turned out to be a concert for the Hungarian folk group "Meta," along with the various ensembles that members of Meta have played with. So the evening was filled with not only Hungarian folk music, but also a folk/jazz fusion, Transylvanian folk songs, Irish trad., and something called "HeavyMeta." The venue turned out to be down the Danube from the center, and apparently a millennium project. The building was ridiculous. From the inside, the closest comparison I can make is to the Scottish Parliament building. I can't attempt a description and I didn't have my camera, so just look at this: http://www.danubiusmagazin.hu/magazin/tortenelem/mupa.jpg

After we left town, the Budapest Fringe Festival took up another two days. So, culture in your face. It's hard to escape. Meanwhile, we must not forget the tourists.

Since I got back to Brasov, it's been interesting for me to consider the lack of both here. Well, do have tourists (it's not that I was imagining them before, after all). But they are Romanian tourists, and British tourists, and usually Spanish tourists. They come in small groups. They are not American college juniors studying abroad. They are not old American men traveling with their buddies. And they do not outnumber the locals.

Still, the locals shy away from coming out to play. This weekend, our new American Culture Club put on its first event. This club started basically because there's no American culture to be found in town. This contrasts with other cultures - we have the French Alliance and the German...place, which put on events and offer language classes. Our first ACC event was a Multicultural Film Forum, in which we played and discussed four films over two days. The kids (meaning students, about eight of them) worked really hard to publicize the event - they put up posters all around town, visited all the high schools and spoke to their English teachers and the students, passed out fliers between classes at the university, and invited their teachers, friends, and classmates. Yet on Friday our audience consisted of 5 "independent" people whom none of us knew, one American Studies professor, two friends, and 5 boyfriends of the students putting on the event.

My Romanian colleagues and students explained this limited turnout by telling me that people in Brasov are not accustomed to cultural events like this. Especially not free ones. Someone said people are too lazy to come, some said the weekend is a bad time for such an event, some said evenings were a bad time, some said mornings were a bad time, some that afternoons were a bad time. Some said people are scared because the event was in English. But the general consensus was that people didn't come because they aren't accustomed to going to events like that. So, our mission to bring more "American culture" to town is not just a matter of bringing it, but also getting people to want it. And no, Hollywood movies at the cinema do not count as American culture.

Anyway, blah blah blah. Basically, in a place like Budapest where tourism is developed and where some sort of sophisticated culture is appreciated, everything costs more. Here, tourism is cheap. People spend less money. This idea of "culture" takes a different shape. For me, the price is appreciated, but I miss cosmopolitan life. I just hope our efforts over the next few months bring about some little change.