On my first Rumanian Sunday I sat on the toilet in a third-rate Bucharest hotel peering through the window at an open-air movie featuring John Wayne as cop. On my last Rumanian Sunday I sat in a country inn watching a television western featuring Clint Eastwood as good tough guy.

In between I saw little of such capitalist decadence. While Bucharest is a fashionable metropolis, the northeastern province of Moldavia, just a night train ride away, is another world.