Tuesday started out beautiful. I woke up feeling fresh, showered, made a big breakfast, took my sweet time getting ready and went to my 9AM class in high spirits.
Somewhere over the next 6 hours or so, I started getting very hungry irritable. My roommate and I decided to go out for lunch with a classmate. Now something very annoying about Romania is that they don’t believe in splitting bills. You eat lunch with your friends, you get one nice fat bill at the end, and everyone starts calculating how much they owe (the life of broke students), who needs to pay whom how much, and all this unnecessary nonsense that wouldn’t happen if they simply just brought everyone their own bill!
Anyway…
So we’re done eating, and I ask the waitress to bring us three separate bills (I’ve had this request fulfilled twice in the past), and she declined. I explained to her that the last few times I asked for it, I got it, and she said OK.
She came back with the little book, and we opened it to find one receipt. Instantly I was extremely annoyed. Is she really too lazy to print two more receipts? She really wants us to go scavenging the little convenience stores for change to pay each other back?
There goes her tip!
Wait, that’s not sweet enough of a revenge.
I owed about 15 RON, equivalent to about $5 (yea, food is nice and cheap here!). After examining my wallet’s contents, I decided I was gonna have a little bit of fun be evil. I got out a 5 LEI bill, 1 LEI, and closed my wallet. I opened my penny pouch, emptied it clean, leaving behind a few loonies and toonies for when I next visit Canada. I suggested my friends do the same. At the end, the table looked a little something like this, except they were Romanian coins:
Lazy waitress came back and said, “Nu! Nu!”
“I don’t speak Romanian, sorry, this is all we have.”
“Nu, Nu (insert a whole lot of Romanian I didn’t understand).”
“I don’t understand you, sorry. I asked you to bring us separate receipts. Why aren’t you speaking english anymore?”
Yea, another thing: whenever you’re protesting something, they magically don’t speak English anymore.
More Romanian.
“I don’t understand.”
“Nu! Tu inteleg, tu inteleg!” Translation: “No! You do understand! You Understand!”
“I don’t inteleg actually, but I asked you to bring us separate receipts, it would’ve been so much easier than this.”
Leave it to Amal to rub things in in an ex-communist country where she is all alone.
She was talking angrily a mile a minute and I didn’t understand what she was saying but I got the gist of it, and basically what I think she said was, “Oh, so since I didn’t bring you your receipts you leave me all these coins?!”
“Da! Multumesc!” (Yes! Thank You!)
We got up, walked out, and I felt like I destroyed the woman. For the next half hour, as I walked off the smell of food and looked around random little shops, I kept thinking about how that woman must feel, and it made me feel powerful after weeks of being oppressed by rules that don’t make sense. Then I would feel a little guilty and think maybe I shouldn’t have done that. Then I would remember how she didn’t care about having us walk into shop after shop looking for change to break our money, and I would reassure myself that she deserved it. It was a back and forth battle between the voices in my head.
I told my brother about it later and he reassured me that sometimes stupid people need to be dealt with in stupid ways for them to understand the level of their sheer stupidity. I still kinda feel guilty here and there, but really, WHO CARES?!……
…..(Right?)
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