I moved to Bucharest in 82. It was difficult in the beginning, until I made some connections. But my family was from the countryside, so they would supply all the food. Once my father slaughtered a calf. It was forbidden to do that. I saw people going to prison for that (I used to work as a nurse at the Jilava prison hospital). In the middle of the night, my father called a man who was into that sort of thing, a man he trusted. My father was a carpenter and had a little workshop. We covered the windows with blankets, so that no light could be seen from outside, and they slaughtered the calf, sliced it into pieces and prepared in just one night, in a few hours. He threw the calf skin 15-20 km away, also that night. You couldn?t put off that sort of thing, it could have been dangerous. A neighbor might tell on you, and you got into trouble. My husband and I had arrived a day before, and we left for Bucharest in the middle of the night. At 4.30 in the morning a policeman made a sign for us to stop the car. We got numb with fear. Our part of the calf (for my father had divided it into all his children) was in the back, covered by other staff, among which two strings of garlic. We pulled over and the policeman asked us to give him a lift; he just wanted to get to work, nothing else. We freaked out when we saw him coming out of the shrubbery on the side of the road. When he was about to get in the car my husband told him to make some room for himself in the back, because we had visited our parents and they had given us some garlic. Nothing happened eventually but we had really been afraid.

The others would get by as they could; with help from their parents, from their relatives in the countryside, or through connections. Then, there were the queues; the ration was insufficient anyway. There were things that weren?t rationed, but you could rarely get to buy them, unless you had some connections. They would only sell a part of the merchandize in the shop, the rest was sold under the table. People had to make ends meet. (Inf. CM 40, nurse) (E. I. A., 16)

An example of luxury food in those times was the bananas. My mother would buy them green and let them ripen in a paper on the wardrobe. We used to eat them green as they were as we didn?t have enough patience for them to ripen. They didn?t taste good, but we ate them just as well. (I. I., 56)

In winter, every time you bought oranges, or in spring, every time you bought tomatoes and cucumbers, you also had to buy carnations (one carnation for each kilo) (O. U., 82)

I used to stand 4 hours in a queue in Piata Amzei at the Crevedia store. There were 4 shop assistants, so there were 4 queues. You also bought 4 chicken, they were called the Petreus brothers, because they were so small. (V. C., 150)

If you really wanted to buy something special for your children, then you had to make a deal with the traders who bought things from abroad. One time, when I was travelling from Predeal to Bucharest by the international train from Budapest, I spent almost all my money on Coca-Cola and Chinese chocolate, from which I would give small portions to my children. We finished the first Coca-Cola bottle in 2-3 months, drop by drop. Long afterwards, we would look at the empty Coca-Cola bottle on the balcony as at something precious. (M. B., 73)