Friday Night in Budapest

From Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, and Slovenia

Friday night proper began at a hole-in-the-wall, rock 'n' roll brick cellar pub called Kőkorsó, the sort of place where I feel most comfortable. It was quite small. Three forms of entertainment intersected there: 1) table football, 2) singing along to Red Hot Chili Peppers songs strummed on a guitar somebody had brought in, and 3) drinking. The bar was frequented mostly by students, though there were a couple of old guys wandering around (a glimpse into my own future—that is, if I live to be that old), one of whom took over guitar-strumming duties at the end of the night accompanied by a chorus of rosy-faced drunk kids.

The table football action was furious. One young woman there was the best table football player I've ever seen (though I haven't exactly studied the sport). She always played offense. Before taking a shot she toyed with the ball a little in order to line it up perfectly. Sometimes she rapped the side of the table gently with her palm in order to shake the ball into precisely the right position. This was usually followed by a quick tap of the ball to one side (no doubt to get around the defender) followed by a thunderous WACK! The ball moved so fast that the shot was invisible to the human eye; only the sound of the ball rolling around inside the table indicated its successful transit to the back of the net.

Nonetheless, I managed to beat her and her teammate twice. Perhaps she let me win.

I got into a great conversation with two students there; only got the name of one of them, Gergo, a typically tall Hungarian fellow. At last I got to ask questions about Hungary and being Hungarian. Gergo and his friend, a blond college girl, made music recommendations. They even produced a list of folk artists I should check out. They raved about a great summer music festival on Lake Balaton; I would love to check this out, especially as it has a heavy emphasis on electronic music.

They acknowledged that the Hungarian pop music scene is not that developed, something I had thought might be the case after studying their music charts for a year or two (though I am fond of Zséda's "És megindul a föld").

Gergo's friend recommended a sort of cider-like drink that had a wine-like quality to it; the result was served in a pint glass and looked and tasted like a berry cider. They could not explain to me what this was in English (maybe half cider, half white wine?), so I must leave things this vague. In any case it was tasty, but all sweet drinks invite disaster later, so I am glad the bar ran out of the stuff, forcing me to switch to four or five beers instead.

The three of us headed to a disco bar across from the Nyugati Train Station. The DJ stuck to a party theme. Songs played included:

ABBA - Dancing Queen
Bryan Adams - Summer of 69
The Doors - Break on Through (to the Other Side)
Joan Jett and the Blackhearts - I Love Rock and Roll
John Paul Young - Love is in the Air (I love this little-known [in America] song and was surprised to hear it there)
Katrina and the Waves - Walking on Sunshine

Gergo's friend, who earlier had warned us of the dangers of switching from wine to beer (before she indulged in wine followed by beer), ran off to get some McDonald's food to absorb some of the alcohol. After a while it was clear she had vanished. A concerned Gergo checked up on her via his cell phone and found out she was safe with her friends, who were keeping a watchful eye over her while she threw up on the streets of Budapest.

With Gergo's help I found my way back to the hostel. And that was my Friday night in Budapest.

Saturday I spent half the day recovering, though I did manage to check out the charming Ethnographic Museum.

From Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, and Slovenia

Romanian Basketball

I wanted to write an article about American basketball players in Romania, but my potential interview subjects apparently became shy and failed to return my SMSs and emails when I returned to Cluj Napoca specifically to interview them. That's OK; I enjoyed myself in Cluj anyway. The weather was sunnier and "springier" than it had been during my last visit with Cristina, and my past experience there allowed me to waste no time locating the best places for a coffee or a beer. But it was also a bit of a drag being on my own, and no reporter enjoys being jilted.

In lieu of what would have been a wonderful article, I will state more vaguely in this blog that many Americans are playing basketball in Romania. A woman basketball player from Iasi estimated that there are about five American men on each city team in Romania (there are 16 Division A teams in the country). The pay is quite good. Basketball is held in high regard in Romania, and teams that make money tend to spend it luring Americans to play for them.

Romanian basketball could be viewed as a sort of minor league baseball experience. Some players hone their skills before returning to America to play in the NBA; others not of that caliber enjoy a comfortable living playing the sport in Europe.

A former Romanian-born Cluj Napoca player, Gheorghe Mureşan, enjoyed success as a basketball player in the NBA in the United States. He is tied with one other player as being the tallest man to play in the NBA, but that gift of height also contributed to some serious medical issues which required surgery to address.

Today, Mureşan is retired from the NBA. Now he appears in a frequently-run Romanian television ad for Vodafone in which he performs a karaoke version of a Crazy Loop song before Dan Bălan, the Crazy Looper himself, arrives on the scene to help him out (video below).



Since I was unable to write this article, I toss out the idea of writing about American basketball players in Eastern Europe to any other would-be reporters who wish to tackle it. Odds are that if you are from a major city, there is somebody from that city playing basketball in an unlikely European country (like Romania). It could make for a good local newspaper feature--if you can get the player to return your messages after you arrive to interview them. :-P

Dating Budapest

From Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, and Slovenia

Sometimes you don't click on the first date. When that happens there is usually not a second date. After my first full day in Budapest I felt ready to give up and move on to a smaller city. I felt lonely and lost. I had been targeted by scam artists. And to compound my unhappiness, yesterday morning I realized that I had shampooed with conditioner, which is the sort of thing that happens when you go shopping for supplies in a country where you don't speak the language. But I kept telling myself that I must not have given the city a fair chance. Everyone talks glowingly about Budapest, so what's wrong with me?

I have found the magic. Last night I stopped by a cool movie-themed bar full of hipster, artist types, and so finally I enjoyed a couple half liters of Budapest beer. The women con artists I wrote about are still working their poison in the shopping district (two different pairs tried ensnaring me as I walked through last night; or maybe I am just irresistible to female duos in that particular part of town), but get just a few blocks away from that tourist trap and you find the awesome Budapest your friends told you about, the one you read about in the travel section of the New York Times, the one Lonely Planet claimed was, "More cosmopolitan than Prague, more romantic than Warsaw and more beautiful than both."

To literally top it off, the city is being blanketed with beautiful snow. The flakes fall outside the window of Caffe Break Kft., a cozy wi-fi enabled joint with 1960s newspaper pages pasted on its walls. A CD of acoustic versions of current pop hits plays in the background.

I sometimes gaze at a city's celebrated architecture and say, "So what?" It's the people that make a place great, not the pretty bridges. A small town like Timisoara, Romania may not be gorgeous, but it is very friendly; a more glamorous city can be beautiful but emotionally cold. Where would you rather be?

But now I see the appeal of a gorgeous city. As I gazed at the Parliament building from halfway across the Chain Bridge today I felt as if I were walking past an earth-sized version of a Whistler landscape. A beautiful city inspires you. It puts an extra spring in your step as you explore it. This translates to a more positive frame of mind. Soon you're ready to write a novel, or at least tidy up a freelance article and scribble a travel blog entry.

Three dates with a person in order to decide whether you are compatible with that individual is probably two too many, but on my third full day in Budapest I feel like the city and I are finally clicking. I even found shampoo.

Budapest: Almost a Great Story

From Ukraine and Romania

I'm at the Red Bus Hostel in Budapest. There is hardly a soul here. The room of four beds is mine alone for the moment. My former roomie, a quiet Chinese girl who has been winding her way through Central Europe, left this morning. She gave me all sorts of pills to help me with my coughing, presumably because she didn't want to be kept awake by it. So I have Chinese cold medication and cough drops. She also gave me something that I think is for acid reflux, but I am not sure. Since I haven't been drinking lately, I tried it hoping for a buzz.

I said to her, "I know what you're up to with all your travels! You're a drug dealer!"

I was half-right. After she departed I found, on my bed, a shrink-wrapped copy of the Bhagavad-Gita. In fact, I am quite interested in reading it. Perhaps I will be more enlightened after the next few train trips I take. Often times the things I say are mistaken for sarcasm. Really, I am interested.

In fact, I envy people of faith. They wear an extra layer of armor that atheists must do without. I wrote recently about the stress of dealing with ne'er do wells at a Cluj Napoca autogara. I always assume religious people are better able to face that sort of stuff. Most religion seems to say, "Don't worry; everything will work out in the end." And usually, things do. Oh ye of little faith, indeed.

Last night I was targeted for a different sort of scam than any I've described before; something much more sophisticated than a mere selling of a pick-pocketed cell phone, and with far greater potential for terror. This scam is so excellent because it involves an entire cast of cons, each of whom must be excellent playing their role. Mine is "almost" a great story because unfortunately for you, dear reader, I was suspicious enough to walk away from what was unfolding. Had I fallen for it I would have had a much more interesting story to tell, something along the lines of this one.

My story is as follows. While wandering about on my own last night, two blond women, probably in their mid-30s, saw me, shouted something to me in Hungarian, and then switched to English when I told them I spoke English. They asked me for directions to "an Irish Pub" (you know you've been pigeon-holed in a foreign country if women ask you about Irish pubs, but I am admittedly fond of such places). I told them I thought I had seen one in the vicinity called the Guinness Pub or some such thing, but I was not sure being new in town myself. They were friendly and told me they were visiting from the Lake Balaton region of Hungary for a few days.

They asked where I was headed that evening. I told them I was looking for dinner. They invited me to join them. Thinking this a bit odd ("instant friends" usually set off alarm bells in my head) I declined. They expressed disappointment, then pointed in a particular direction they were headed saying they had found a good pub on the Lonely Planet map I had shown them. So they headed off that way, and I went in the opposite direction thinking, "Strange, strange," but not sure why I thought it was so strange.

Being lost and confused, I circled the block. Sure enough, like an idiot, I wound up at exactly the same place I had met the two women before. And who should come strolling down the same street from the same direction I first saw them coming from but the same two women. They had not gone to that Irish pub after all; they were walking a loop.

At first I was embarrassed, so I waved at them and laughed. "How funny! We run into each other in exactly the same way we did just minutes before! Haha!" They laughed back (actually they impersonated my laugh, because unfortunately I have a horrible laugh).

I went back to the hostel, then Googled for Budapest scams, and lo and behold all became clear. As the link I provided above demonstrates (here it is again), this is how the trick is done (the guy in the link tells it beautifully, but if you want the short version, what happens after you say yes to the women is you wind up in a restaurant, bar, or strip club where the final bill winds up being phenomenally and inexplicably high; you hand over a lot of cash; in some cases you get marched to an ATM by somebody with a gun and hand over more cash; and you realize at some point later on that the women were in on it from the get-go and had deliberately brought you to that place with that outcome in mind). The U.S. Embassy in Budapest has a list of establishments implicated in this scam.

It is fortunate also that I love my girlfriend, because that added an additional cautionary voice in the back of my head which said, "I wouldn't 'do anything' with these two, but my girlfriend would be—to use her perfect words—'quite PISSED, actually' if she knew I went off drinking with a couple of Hungarian women anyway, and that would make me feel guilty, so why bother?"

Since my story was merely "almost great," I have included a great photo of some men moving a statue of a guy on a horse taken later that night.

International Women's Day/Lost in Transition

It's International Women's Day, so women all over Timisoara are carrying flowers offered to them by the city's most chivalrous men. At the train ticket office today one older gentleman came down expressly to hand a flower to one of the young ticket salespeople. A college student bearing two roses for some lucky recipients at the Tequila Club just ran past the window of the cafe from which I am writing this. Ah, here come two more guys, one with five roses and the other with one rose.

Weather is sunny, with temperatures somewhere between cool and cold as spring jousts with winter for supremacy.

There are two types of travel stress. One is the "rush to the airport while worrying that you left your passport at the hotel" type. The other is the "I have been vegetating in the same smallish city for the past five days and I need to get outta here" variety.

Timisoara, and the country of Romania as a whole, have been wonderful, but after five days in this city--and over a month in this country--it's time to bid "La revedere" and head for new pastures. Tonight I go to Budapest. The trip by train will be a mere 5 hours; cost of a ticket was about $30. There's a time zone change, so I will be an hour closer to Cristina. :-)

Last activities here are to enjoy a small lunch, drink a final beer (or two) at my favorite little wi-fi enabled cafe, head to the Gara de Nord, mail a package (hopefully) from the post office there (said to be the only one in the city that handles international mailings), and then await my train.

Travel days are always strange; counting down the minutes I have left in the city I am about to leave while contemplating a city I have never seen before leaves me feeling lost between places. It will be a pleasure to wake up in a Budapest hostel tomorrow morning with my attention undivided.

I'm feeling sentimental, but I look forward to visiting some new (to me) countries in the coming weeks. These will likely include Croatia and certainly Serbia, where I am meeting up with a talented band I will be writing an article about, along the same vein as the Gorchitza piece that ran in the Kyiv Post.

Saturday Night Fever in Timişoara

From Ukraine and Romania

When I travel alone, I find it hard to motivate myself to visit clubs despite my long-running obsession with European pop and dance music. Well, on Saturday night I ditched the introverted me and had myself a proper night out.

Things did not begin promisingly. I walked to the center of town in order to check out a club called Vanilla, but the fancy clothes of the patrons outside discouraged me from attempting entry. I have a general aversion to clubs where the patrons appear to be more concerned about fashion than about the music.

I wasn't really feeling it right then, and very nearly returned to my pensiune. But since the student campus area was on the way back "home" anyway, I decided to swing by the many bars and clubs there to see if anything looked promising.

At about 11:30 PM I climbed the stairs to Q Club. Q Club, located on the top floor of a two-floor (three floors by American measurements) building, was a modest-sized venue with a medium-sized dancefloor. I suspect that in a former life it was used as office space. During this early part of the night the DJs primarily focused on Romanian house songs. Although there was a decent-sized crowd there, most patrons at that point were apparently not drunk enough to brave the dancefloor, so they chilled out on the lounge furniture instead. This allowed one to enjoy the psychedelic laser lights crawling all over the floor.

When the DJ dropped Jay Ko's catchy hit "One," many clubbers stood up and danced by their chairs. Then, a swing-dancing couple took the dancefloor proper. The floodgates were opened. Half an hour later I counted about 40 people on the dancefloor, which is a good-sized crowd for an intimate venue like this one. The DJs shook things up with a multitude of Romanian house hits, including Nick Kamarera's "Reason for Love" (incidentally, Kamarera got his start in Timişoara) and Tom Boxer's "Morena (My Love)" (which got the patrons singing along). Non-Romanian tracks followed, including a mashup of Lady Gaga's "LoveGame" (uh, there was lots of "love" that night) with Madonna's "Celebration." Sander Van Doorn's "Close My Eyes," which features the vocals of Robbie Williams, tore the place to shreds.

Dress was casual, though some girls trashed it up a bit, and there were quite a few young women in stiletto boots. I never considered myself a fetishist, but I like the stiletto boots. I think I'll buy a pair for my girlfriend.

I enjoyed myself immensely, but I decided to move on to the Happy Beer and Steak House. An exclamation of "WTF?" is acceptable. One walks through the small restaurant area, descends some stairs, opens a door, and strolls into an enormous room packed wall-to-wall with people and smoke. The lights are all on; there's no darkness to hide in. It's an unlikely place to find a good dance party, but there it was. The DJs there (photo above) played a ton of good tracks, focusing it seemed on Romanian pop, including Puya's "Change," and Guess Who's "Locul Potrivit."* Coat check consisted of an enormous mountain of jackets piled in front of the DJ equipment.

A guy walked up to me saying he had made a bet with a friend; the friend bet I was from the UK. I'm from America, so the friend lost. I joined that group's table and became engrossed in good, drunken conversation. I took many photos there and emailed the best to my new friends today.

I don't remember when I got back to the pensiune, or even how, which is one measure of a successful night out (the other measure being sleeping in until 2 PM, to the annoyance of the pensiune manager who had made breakfast for me at 9). Oh, regarding blacking out while wandering around a foreign country—this is an incredibly stupid thing to do. If you are as recklessly idiotic as I was in this regard, remember to carry only cash with you when you go out—leave the credit cards and passport back at the pensiune!

Anyway, good times!


* "Locul Potrivit" is a real work of genius, and the video is worth viewing on YouTube even if you don't know any Romanian. The song quirkily addresses the history of Romania since the 1989 revolution, and was released in time for the 20th anniversary of that revolution.

From Ukraine and Romania

"Dangers and Annoyances"

Travelers to foreign countries must learn to distinguish between potential friends and con artists. I sincerely believe that in Romania for every one person with ill-intent towards outsiders there are at least a hundred people who would be delighted to be a real friend to you (and another hundred who would never want to be your friend, but only for the same reasons you don't have a lot of friends in your own country).

Friendships with people who live in the places you visit are the most precious currency any traveler can have. Friends allow you to see the world you are visiting with greater clarity. An hour of conversation with a Romanian will reveal more truths about their country than 20 hours of reading about it. Unfortunately, the potential friends and well-wishers are often as shy as I am, and so in the coffee houses and bars you visit their potential camaraderie often goes undetected. But those who wish ill are often out in the open, loudly working their poison. They are an unpleasantly high-profile minority who can greatly and unfairly spoil an impression of a place.

The time I spent at the autogara (intercity bus depot) in Cluj Napoca a few days ago was the most nerve-racking of my trip. I was driven there by a taxi driver who spent the entire time talking on his cell phone. As he pulled away from me I felt more abandoned than "dropped off." I surveyed a dozen or so buses parked on dusty asphalt, then wheeled my suitcase in the direction I presumed the ticket office was located.

When I arrived at the dilapidated station I saw that the number of gypsies there outnumbered the number of people awaiting the bus. Unfortunately, in this setting and context, the presence of gypsies is interchangeable with the presence of crime. That's how it is. I wish it were not so, but it is.

Train and bus stations throughout Europe are traditionally high-crime areas, but in recent years the Romanian ones, most impressively the Gara de Nord in Bucharest, have been cleaned up of most of their seedier elements. The Cluj autogare was therefore an unpleasant step backwards in time.

The first person to identify me as a potential source of income was a small girl who rushed up to me and began her rambling speech. The rambling speech is the traditional tactic of the beggar child. It sounds more like a chant or magical incantation than it does normal speech, no doubt on account of it being so thoroughly rehearsed. It is delivered in a monotone without an ounce of feeling. Usually it goes on until you interrupt it. If you pretend to ignore the child for five minutes the child will drone on for five minutes. It's creepy.

I told her "Nu" and walked away from her, but sensing I was a hot commodity she followed me around. In Romania, particularly in "captive audience" environments like bus or train stations, the pan-handlers do not usually take "Nu" for an answer, nor "Stop," nor the Romanian for "Go away."

I sought a place to buy tickets. Seeing that I was on the hunt for something, the girl pointed to various rooms and opened doors for me in order to (ostensibly) assist. She likely expected a hand-out for her efforts, but I did not pay her anything because I did not request her help, and her presence was making me more nervous, not less.

One might laugh here, since I am describing an adorable gypsy girl. But the reality was she was working for the adult gypsies also in the area, and her goal was to extract money from me. One way to extract money is to pick a pocket, something children are at an ideal height to do, and when you are traveling from one city to the next you must carry everything pick-pocketable along, including passport and credit cards. So, the presence of several small gypsy children running around, following you, reciting their rambling speeches, and so on forces you to occupy your brain with the question: "Is my wallet still there?" You ask yourself this repeatedly. You'd rather not have your attention divided like that. In fact, in my confusion I asked a woman at the information window when the bus to Sighisoara was leaving, and was alarmed to hear that it did not leave until the evening (online I had seen it was leaving at 12:30 PM), only to realize after I had walked over to the adjoining Autogara B (which promised an earlier departure) that I had meant to ask about Timisoara, not Sighisoara. That's the sort of mistake you make when you are nervous.

Why be nervous? Because I discovered while in Kiev and later Romania that losing your debit card can be a disaster. Without it I had no easy means of accessing cash in cities where cash is still the primary method of payment. Most banks refused to give me cash on my other credit card because there is an expectation that one have a pin number whenever one uses a credit card, and I either do not have one for my credit card (since pins on credit cards are not requested in the United States, and using a "regular" credit card at an ATM invites steep fees); or I do have one, but Bank of America won't tell it to me for security reasons.* Thanks to Bank of America's many failures, I had to limp along for a month before I received a replacement card.

That was how life was without a debit card, but at least I had another card to fall back on, plus one (and only one) bank in Romania that was willing, after a complicated 15 minute process, to give me cash from it. But imagine losing all your cards. I promise you this: if you lose your wallet in a foreign country, do not believe the television ads that show the stranded traveling couple being rescued by their bank. The fact is, you will be well and truly fucked.

Eventually the girl gave up. A boy took her place. He began his incantation. I told him "Nu" as well, and eventually he left me in order to drone to the woman beside me instead.

The main tactic of the bus station panhandlers is to parade every type of pathetic person in front of you in order to earn sympathy money. Once the children give up, women approach you, some carrying babies in their arms. Watery-eyed old men then totter up, emphasizing their frailness with each wobbly step. Somebody on crutches inevitably comes along after that, taking two hops before extending a hand for cash, followed by two more hops to the next person and another arm extension.

If you aren't moved by pity, perhaps capitalism will convince you to part with your cash. In this vein you are offered flowers and cheap plastic knick-knacks (the red/yellow/blue Romanian flag color-scheme ballpoint pens have been a staple for several years now). If you want something a bit more exciting than a key chain, perhaps you will be tempted by a stolen cell phone. Who was the cell phone stolen from? Someone like yourself, no doubt.

If you don't worship material things, perhaps you are a person of God and will be moved by religion. Panhandlers come by selling icons of saints printed like baseball cards, and little crosses. They carry fake identification claiming they are official representatives of such and such a monastery, but as one man explained on a train trip I took from Iasi to Baia Mare, if I am moved to buy religious artifacts, wouldn't I just get thee to one of Romania's many monasteries in person in order to ensure that my cash winds up in the right hands?

The overall effect of all this is to wear down the traveler who awaits his or her bus or train. I suspect at some point many people break down and hand out money out of sheer exhaustion. Perhaps they hope they might buy some peace and quiet this way. That would be a mistake; from my observations people who hand out cash are generally identified as open ATM machines, and so they get hit again.

But worse than all of these circus-like distractions is the omnipresent worst-case scenario: that somebody will simply pick your pocket. It is emotionally exhausting--even physically exhausting as your heart pounds in double-time--keeping track of each and every person around you and their proximity to your pocketbook. The Cluj autogara has no visible police presence, so it is up to you to be your own officer. As if you don't already have enough on your mind while you travel.

After everything I described above had occurred, a gypsy guy in a track outfit and carrying a sports bag walked up to me and immediately addressed me in English.

"Hey, there! Where are you going?" he asked me.

The fact is, nobody who walks right up to you in a bus or train station speaking English is going to be your friend in any country. I am reminded of the exquisitely menacing scene in the Hurt Locker where an Iraqi guy with dubious intentions strolls up to an American soldier and says, "Hey, you American? You surf?" (Or maybe it was, "You play basketball?" I don't have the movie at my fingertips to reference right now, but the point is the same.)

"Where are you going?" I asked him. I wanted to be sure his design was not to follow me to my destination.

"Why do you ask me that?" he said, illogically, since he felt it was perfectly OK to ask me that.

I stared at him blankly.

"Are you afraid here?" he asked me.

I did not tell him I was, because that would be a stupid thing to admit. So I grunted a "Nu" and wheeled my luggage away from him.

He looked very unhappy after that, in the same way that two gypsies who physically grappled with a friend of mine in Constanta many years ago in order, they said, to--I am not making this up--test the durability of American fabrics fired dark parting glances at me after I yelled at them to get the hell away.

It turned out the track suit guy was a paying bus rider. For all I know he was a completely sincere, nice person. For a while I even felt a little bit guilty. But then the following things occurred to me:

1) Bus and train stations everywhere are often populated with criminals and pickpockets.

2) If I lose my credit cards I am fucked. And losing my computer would be like losing everything in my apartment and my cell phone at once; no more easy Skype conversations with my girlfriend in the U.S. In short, if you are a traveler in a foreign country, you have much more to lose than a native does.

3) People who walk up to you speaking English right away and fishing for information about you are, 99% of the time, up to no good. The other 1% are stupid idiots.

4) Gypsies in train stations who begin speaking English to you have racially profiled you just as much as--you might fear in your too-sensitive heart--you have racially profiled them, only their objective is to extract money from you, either by guilting you, exhausting you, or even physically stealing it from you, whereas your objective is merely to be left alone.

But before you become a completely withdrawn asshole (which would defeat the purpose of travel), remember what I said in opening: most people out there want to be your friend, and friends are the best things life can offer you. Go out and make some. But if your spidey-sense tells you "Danger," there's probably a good, deep-seated evolutionary reason for that to be the case. You owe it to your ancestors who survived to procreate before you to listen to that gift.


*This is a very long story that would require a multi-page digression. The short version is, Bank of America shot down about ten different methods of solving my problem, each time for security reasons they said were in place to protect me. And VISA-911 was useless; for example, they refused to send me emergency cash because I had changed my address in the previous three months.