Category: General

I send weekly emails to my friends and family back home. Sometimes I am going to post them here. They have been edited to ensure that certain private details never see the light of day!

At some point starting with the beginning of Spring in Bucharest, the Rapture commenced.

In certain strands of Christology the Rapture is an Endtimes event, where the Chosen of God will ascend to Heaven and the Damned will live out their time on Earth (or, Hell on Earth). No longer a believer in such things, I was surprised, then, to find that the Rapture is real and is a slow, piecemeal process. It is slowly raising up the good Romanian Orthodox people of Bucharest, and leaving many of us uncertain as to whether we will be next, or whether we will not…

Now, I can already imagine many of you will be saying “But why do you believe this?” (as well as “Are you on drugs?” with a subset thinking “Where can I can a similar substance back home?”). Worry not; this is an entirely evidence-based position. I have seen the signs.

The signs being large amounts of discarded clothing on the pavement and fences of my (almost) daily running route along Matei Basarab and Bulevard Unirii. Almost every day there are random shoes in the middle of the sidewalk, cardigans and jerseys strewn on benches or fences, and sometimes whole suits of clothes just stranded in the middle of the road. These are obviously the remnants of the clothing worn from by the Chosen, who upon discovering they are ascending to Heaven, start to discard the detritus of their Earthly lives. I had entertained the idea that perhaps the Rapture renders people immaterial, thus leaving their clothes behind by default, but that would suggest some people wander the streets of my neighbourhood only in their shoes, and a) I’ve not noticed that and b) that is a disturbing thought I do not want to entertain.

Now, I have not heard reports of similar evidence coming out of other nations (although I have heard of similar signs being found in other parts of Bucharest) so I have to assume that there is something special about Romanian Orthodoxy. Either they are the only Christians to have got it right, at which point the Pope is going to be very, very embarrassed, or Romania is a kind of testbed for the coming Endtimes. Perhaps, even, Romania has been given control over the entire process.

Which makes sense. Traditional accounts of the Rapture indicate it happens instantaneously across the entire Earth, but here it is happening piecemeal from week to week. Given the bureaucratic nature of Romania, if the Rapture is being run out of a government or even religious office here, there will be a lot of paperwork before any given individual can be granted access to ascension.

Now, given the random nature of where the discarded items of the Chosen appear, I can only surmise that either they are not informed ahead of time what is going to happen, or some of the paperwork is a little obtuse about the how and when. Otherwise, why choose to ascend to Heaven outside the local Mega Image (a supermarket) rather than in the presence of your family? This would also explain the rather odd nature of what people shrug off as they are taken up; if you started to levitate without prior warning you’d probably try throwing a few things around to see if that stopped the process.

So, yes, the Rapture has started, and it is taking place in Bucharest. I can think of no other reason as to why items of clothing would be so casually discarded. I mean, it’s not as if alcohol is cheap here (although it really is); it’s all a (religious) mystery.

I send weekly emails to my friends and family back home. Sometimes I am going to post them here. They have been edited to ensure that certain private details never see the light of day!

I spent the weekend looking for the pits where they perform the child sacrifices.

I cannot state whether I found them, however.

Oosterbeek, the town in which I stayed the weekend, is a small village an hour’s journey by train from Amsterdam. I thought I had never been to the Netherland’s before, but it turns out that I technically did visit Amsterdam on the way to Latvia a few years ago. I had a four hour layover at the airport there, and seeing the layout of the shopping mall there reminded me that international travel can be very, very weird.

The reason for my trip to Oosterbeek was purely academic. I belong to the COST Action COMPACT. COST is a pan-European research funding agency, and COMPACT is one of the funded research programmes, in this case research into the COMParative Analysis of Conspiracy Theories.

Being a member of a COST Action in my very particular and special position as a researcher in Romania has been both a pleasure and also deeply hilarious. I represent Romania in the Action, being, as you all surely know, the most Romanian person in the world. I also get fully subsidised for all my COST-related activities, such as staying in fancy hotels in Oosterbeek, despite the fact that my stipend in Romania is not taxed. Basically, I am the reason why the EU is in crisis: rich Westerners living off of the backs of humble EU citizens.

But back to the child sacrifices!

The hotel in which I was staying was the Hotel de Bilderberg. If that name does not ring a bell with you, then I can only surmise that you have not been paying any attention to my research. Hotel de Bilderberg is ground zero for a swathe of New World Order/One World Government conspiracy theories, as the hotel is synonymous with the Bilderberg Group, an organisation that runs yearly meetings with the movers and shakers of society, all in order to set the agenda for the future.

The Bilderberg Group is real, and had it’s first meeting at the Hotel de Bilderberg in the middle of last century. Set up by a local prince, the first meeting included such luminaries as Henry Kissinger amongst its founding members. It’s goal was to find a way to bring different nation states together in an informal setting, in order to work out their differences peacefully. The meeting was such a success that it was held the next year, and then the next year, and then made into an annual event. Former Bilderbergers include Margaret Thatcher (before she became PM), Bill Clinton, members of the Rothschild family, and the like. Getting invited to a Bilderberg Group meeting means you have made it in the political world (or someone thinks you are about to become very, very big).

The problem with the Bilderberg Group (well, one of them) is that their meetings, until relatively recently, were entirely secret and private. The meetings are not officially sanctioned by any governmental or intergovernmental body; every attendee goes there in their private capacity as a citizen interested in world affairs. Or, at least, that is what we are told. Of course, for a certain kind of person, this very much looks like a smokescreen; these “private” citizens with their connection to both politics and big business, are seen as representing elite interests, using the secrecy of a merely “private” meeting to subvert democratic norms.

People think it’s all a conspiracy.

Not just that, but given that it’s also “common knowledge” amongst conspiracy theorists of a certain stripe that said elites are paedophilic superpredators with Satanic interests, what goes on behind the closed doors of the various Bilderberg Group meetings are not just fancy dinners and the divvying up of financial assets. No, there are orgies, child sacrifices, and the communing with ancient gods whose names have been lost to time.

Thus my hunt for the sacrificial pits…

The Bilderberg Group never meets in the same hotel twice, so perhaps evidence of those early debauched acts has been slowly erased by successive renovations. Whatever the case, when Peter Knight (American Studies professor at Manchester) suggested that we hold a COST Action at the Hotel de Bilderberg, I knew that was a meeting I just had to attend. The chance to visit a site so tightly connected with a set of prominent conspiracy theories, and one of which I would bear no cost at all, could not be missed.

It was also overdetermined. A few months ago a fellow Romanian scholar of conspiracy theories contacted me and asked whether I would be willing to present a paper on Romanian conspiracy theories at the Bilderberg COST Action. Being the most Romanian person I know, I immediately said “Yes!” If I had not been a member of the COST Action they would have paid for me to come anyway. Admittedly, it did mean I had to write a paper on conspiracy theories in Romania, and present such a paper to an audience which would have at least one (other) Romanian in it. Given I am very much someone who is mostly into theory, being asked to talk about the history of a place where I can barely understand the local language was quite the challenge… Although it seems it is also one I overcame, given the warm reception to the paper itself, and the fact it is now going to be a chapter in an edited volume on conspiracy theories in former Eastern Bloc countries.

But enough vainglorious talk of academic work. What about those pits?

Well, in truth, I never did find them. But evidence of the Bilderberg Group is everywhere at the Hotel de Bilderberg. From photos of Henry Kissinger to his quotes emblazoned on walls, the Hotel de Bilderberg is trading on its early 20th Century fame.

Which probably also explains the dismal coffee they serve. But that is a matter for another time.

I send weekly emails to my friends and family back home. Sometimes I am going to post them here. They have been edited to ensure that certain private details never see the light of day!

And yes, this one refers to events which are several months old.

“How have you enjoyed Romania?” turns out to not be the easiest question to answer when moving through passport control. It’s not a matter of answering honestly (my answer would be “Yes”). Rather, it’s the fact that any answer is likely to get a weird response.

For example, the first time I left Romania (to attend a workshop in Venice a month after I arrived) the passport officer looked at me with a certain dismay on his face when I habitually (but honestly) “Yes.”

“Really?” he asked, looking at my passport a second time, presumably looking for evidence that I was engaged in criminal activities.

The second time, when I jetted off to keynote at the University of Padova in late 2016 (for I was always going to Italy back then), the passport officer’s response to my “Yes” was to say “You can’t have been here very long then.”

Needless to say, passport officers seem to have a very low opinion of their country (as do Romanian taxi drivers, from my experience).

Now, one cannot begrudge Romanians being surprised at Westerners not having a bad time here. But worrying about being able to leave the country and still come back makes going to the airport an exercise in an exercise in low-level anxiety.

For the record, I still say “Yes”, but now with an increasingly jaunty tone. I suspect I am not helping.

Pavements in Bucharest are treacherous, as my rather skinless knee can attest. I was running along Boulevard Decebel (named after the last Dacian king) when my foot decided that colliding with a slightly upraised cobblestone would be a grand idea. My body joined in the fun, deciding physics dictates that if motion has stopped with the left foot, that doesn’t mean the upper body should follow suit. Indeed, wouldn’t it be grand if the upper body kept moving forward, whilst arcing towards the ground?

My arms where having none of this, however. My hindbrain spurred itself into action (to the hindbrain all sudden capers like this are a bad idea), and directed that my arms must spring forward to arrest my fall.

Thus, in the space of just a few seconds I went from running to sliding to the realisation that I was on the ground. And there was pain.

You might think that Auckland is fairly battered by storms, but that’s nothing compared to Bucharest. Despite yearly winters, in which banks of snow reach several metres in height, and sudden springs where the temperature jumps a good 12 to 17 degrees in the space of a few days, Bucharest’s drains cannot cope with water. Any water. Especially not the melting snow. Rather, the water sits there and slowly degrades the roads, the pavements, and the houses.

Which leads to raised cobblestones and running accidents.

Now, the problem with being forty is that the body doesn’t heal like it did. Before I went away (literally the night before) I stubbed my toe in what a police report would doubtlessly describe as a “violent manner.” That lead to several weeks of walking very awkwardly, and when the toe healed I was left with a knee which ached as I walked because, well, I had been walking awkwardly with that leg and thus I had sprained the muscles around my kneecap. So, after a month of not running, what did I do? Fall over and hurt the other knee.

Expect to find me, on my return, with somewhat fewer limbs than I started. I’m obviously not able to be responsible for the requisite set of two arms and two legs anymore.

So, why am I at the airport? To visit Sofia for the fourth time in order to collect my visa, of course. It’s a one night trip, with what promises to be a ten minute meeting at 9am tomorrow morning. The thought of the trip is less exciting than it is… Boring? It’s not that Sofia is dull city to visit; far from it. However I’ve done all the things a tourist need do in Sofia, so the fact my flight leaves at 8pm means I’m not entirely sure how I will spend my day. Presumably it will be in some cafe, as I get on with the work that needs doing. I have at least three presentations to prepare and it turns out they do not write themselves.

Still, Sofia has seen some great brainstorming on my part; I came up with the idea that eventually became my highest prestige paper (published in Synthese) at a vegan restaurant in Sofia. I cracked how to parse talk of keeping secrets in a cafe there just a month ago. Thus, I have high hopes that tomorrow will be replete with exciting work. In fact, it kind of needs to be, because tomorrow it will be raining, and I don’t fancy wandering the streets of Sofia in the pouring rain with this rather damaged knee.

International travel. It can be so so glamorous.

…in which the world don’t move to the beat of just one drum…

Watch it here:

I send weekly emails to my friends and family back home. Sometimes I am going to post them here. They have been edited to ensure that certain private details never see the light of day!

“Your blood pressure is excellent,” the doctor told me. Then, slowly turning to look knowingly into my eyes, she said “It’s truly excellent.”

I felt I had to say something, something to acknowledge the “truly excellent” state of my cardiovascular system.

“Thanks” I said.

I knew immediately that I had blown it. I should have led with something about my diet (all plants all the time), or the fact I run (an activity that I do not actually enjoy, I should add; I only do it out of some weird duty to future me and their health). I could have talked about how not driving means I get to walk everywhere, or the benefits of have spent most of my life living beside the sea. Almost anything would have been a more meaningful contribution than “Thanks.”

Or I could have invented some rationale for the supreme pressure of my bloods. She knew nothing of me, and would probably never see me again. I could have told tales of scaling the Southern Alps using only my teeth, or how those of us descended from the Merovingian dynasty have characteristically good hearts. I was the only deep sea driver who didn’t need to get acclimatised before descended 50,000 fathoms; the first person to parasail in the upper atmosphere without a suit.

Instead, I said “Thanks.”

The why of my mundane response is, of course, obvious; my excellent blood pressure not the result of careful work but, rather, something that just happens to be the case (and vis also the product of certain genetic luck). In that moment I wasn’t sure how I was meant to respond to compliments about something I had never gone out of my way to achieve. Indeed, I was reminded of the time someone complimented me on my curls; my immediate response was to say “Thanks; I grew them myself.”

Now, those of you concerned for my well-being will doubtlessly be asking “But why were you seeing a doctor in the first place?” The answer, as always in Romania, is bureaucratic. To get my residency permit I needed to be given a clear bill of health, and a medical certificate from Aotearoa New Zealand apparently would not cut it.

When I last applied for a residency permit I was taken to the University of Bucharest’s medical clinic (which are called “cabinets”) where after five minutes of Iulia (the administrator of the ICUB) talking with the GP I was given a medical certificate. At no point did the doctor talk to me, and I’m fairly sure she didn’t even look at me; despite the fact the meeting was all about my health (and the potential for me to being new and exotic diseases into Romania), I was the one person who didn’t need to be there. So, I was surprised that my new GP (who I suspect, and hope, I will never see again[1]) was so keen to give me the once over. Especially since the entire consultation was unnecessary; after being congratulated on being in such fine health I was sent downstairs to fetch the already filled out medical certificate.

It was fated that I was going to get a clean bill of health no matter the state of my heart (and its associated blood pressures).

On the drive back to the NEC I wondered what would have happened had the doctor found something wrong with me. Would the certificate have been revoked? Would they hush up my frail state? Would I simply disappear into the Romanian medical system, never to be heard of again?

But then I realised that if it was determined that I would be in peak physical condition, maybe the doctor had lied to me. She had, after all, never shown me the results of the blood pressure test, and she had lingered when listening to my lungs. I thought that perhaps she was entranced by the slow, steady movement of them, but maybe she had heard some small murmur which indicated trouble to come.

Sitting in the back of the taxi, I could feel the pressure around my temples increasing. I felt sick. My legs no longer seemed capable of carrying my weight. My back had a curious ache. I stared blearily at the medical certificate in my hand, trying to decipher the doctor’s scrawl, but it was no good. Aside from the terrible handwriting it was also written in Romanian, and I had no idea what it said.

My mortality was imminent. I only had another sixty years to live.

What a waste.

1. Not because I did not like the GP, nor because I thought she was in anyway incompetent; I just hope I do not need any medical advice or services in the near future. And because if I happen to need some medical procedure, Romania’s health system is not exactly well-regarded. I mean, three years ago they had a crisis where it turned out that the medical supplies company that provided surgical grade bleach for hospitals (used to disinfect instruments) was watering down the bleach to the point that people were dying due to infections caused by inadequately disinfected surgical instruments…

I send weekly emails to my friends and family back home. Sometimes I am going to post them here. They have been edited to ensure that certain private details never see the light of day!

Spring has sprung.

That cliched phrase is one which does not make any obvious sense in Aotearoa; the signs of spring back home are subtle and gradual; the temperature rises, the sky looks bluer, and people start wearing shorts. But in Bucharest spring means that one day trees have no leaves, but the next day they do.

For those of us who have mostly lived with evergreens, winters in the northern hemisphere are stark. The grey skies combined with a general lack of foliage is alien and therefore disconcerting. But spring here is just as weird, because it is all too sudden. Part of that is due to climate change; it is not uncommon these days for Bucharest, as winter ends and spring begins, to see a change in temperature of ten or fifteen degrees in one day, something which did not happen even ten years ago. A decade ago spring was a slow process, but now Bucarestis (and, my extension, myself) live in a place where it is minus seven one day, and positive twelve the next.

But more startling than that are the aforementioned trees, because waking up to trees with leaves that had no leaves the previous day is weird, and makes you think you have slipped through time. Or, in my case, make you almost spill your coffee when looking out your kitchen window.

A word about coffee in Romania: it’s not very good.

Well, that’s four words, but they are considered and polite.

Unlike the coffee.

I spent a lot of time on my last trip being very snobbish about coffee, because coffee snobbery is one of our national sports (as is making fun of Australians, binge drinking, and ignoring systemic racism and sexism in our society). This time I decided to bite the bullet and not bring all my fancy coffee making equipment with me, including my hand coffee grinder. I now now consider to be a mistake, even though the only way to have rectified that mistake would have been to purchase extra luggage for the flight.

The issues are these: ground coffee here is a) not great and b) not all that fresh.

The first issue can be skirted. I could spend more and buy better coffee, although my experience of even the best ground coffee here pales in comparison to what we can buy at reasonable prices in supermarkets back home. My theory about coffee in Europe (including Italy) is that coffee roasters go for one flavour profile; either they roast for spiciness, or chocolate-iness, or smokiness, but never more than one flavour. Back home we like a coffee with a complex profile, and I think that is part of what makes our coffee so well-appreciated worldwide.

The second issue can also be skirted, but it requires a bit more work. A lot of goods which make it to supermarkets in Romania are at the tail end of their lifetime. Romania is a poor country; the average monthly wage is about €230 (I earn almost three times that, which makes me rich in Romanian terms but still impoverished as soon as I leave the country) and so, to keep the cost of foreign goods down (particularly food), some imports are end of runs and the like. An awful lot of the imported coffee is closer to its use-by date than you would expect, and this results in it being both a bit stale and probably means it has been transported across several borders before arriving in Romania (thus increasing the likelihood of it having been refrigerated several times over, dulling its taste).

Actually, there is a final note to this digression on coffee; cheap, no brand coffee grinds. I decided to test a bag of 5 lei (NZD1.80) coffee the other day. If coffee flavouring is the cousin to the taste of proper coffee, that particular bag of coffee was the distant cousin of a friend’s acquaintance to the taste of coffee flavouring. I somewhat marvelled at that bag of coffee, because someone had to have quite deliberately taken all the worst coffee beans they could find from a batch, then over roast them, then overgrind them (in order to burn the beans a second time) and then package said grinds in a bag. The effort required to produce such terrible coffee shows such a dedication to craft that I almost feel there should be some reward for the poor fool who—by dint of personal evil or corporate mandate—was responsible for my thinking “Well, the coffee’s bad but at least that tree is doing alright.”

It’s the little things.