Blog of Romania

Eliade’s novels fascinated me. I loved his way of describing the Bucharest between the World Wars. I hadn’t yet moved to Bucharest, I’d never seen the capital, but I knew for several years how some areas of the country’s biggest town. In the autumn of 2004, I was dissapointed: I got to the Basarab train station, I took the subway to Obor, and when I got out the image of the grey apartment buildings, as described by B.U.G. Mafia, hit me.

I had no way of knowing that one year later I’d be living in this crowd, living faster and faster. At that time, I was expecting that the first city of Romania to be different than the town I’d spent the first 20 years of my life in. But I wasn’t expecting all the buildings to look the same to me.

I got to the center, and the contract was weird to say the least. Carol Boulevard, full of buildings raised between the wars, wasn’t anything like I knew from Eliade. Dirty sidewalks, garbage on street corners, graffiti on all the walls, “Christian government!”, “Down with CeauÅŸescu!”. However, the next autumn I discovered Dacia Boulevard, Viitorului street from Lizeanu to PiaÅ£a GalaÅ£i, Vasile Lascăr, GriviÅ£ei and other dozens of small streets where you can find the architecture described by the writer.

Victoriei… a toast!

The most important boulevard in Bucharest, connecting the Arch of Triumph and the DîmboviÅ£a river, never looked like in Eliade’s descriptions. Not even in winter. The evening walks “to the boulevard” from the 30s, lit by lanters, maybe during a snow fall, passing by the fashionable locals of the time, with yellow lights, calm and tranquil… I can’t even imagine them. The walks in the Bucharest of Videanu, in 2007, are on crowded sidewalks, while trying to avoid the puddles and the heaps of garbage, while trying to bear the unceasing honks and the swearing of the car drivers.

“To swear like a sailor”, the phrase of Caragiale’s time, turned into “swearing like a cab driver”. Funnily enough, I’ve heard few cab drivers swearing - which I can’t say about the numerous drivers, hurrying like a certain black-robed character carrying a scythe was after them.

Calea GriviÅ£ei, back then a respectable area, is teeming with shady individuals with colorful skin or attitudes. Although the streets leading to GriviÅ£ei, between the train station and Dacia boulevard, are marvelous on a summer’s day, you wouldn’t dare set foot there after sunset.

[go to part 2]

Original post: here. (RO)
Alex is 23 and has been living in Bucharest for two years.

Click on the image to see the rest of the comic!

Bookcrossing has become an international phenomenon, but it doesn’t seem to work in Romania. Why? No one did a survey, but I can guess. Books are still expensive - at least in relation with the salaries. Internet use is still low, so even if someone finds a book, it probably won’t get registered. People are suspicious of free things (’what’s in it for me?’ is so very common…); the concept of a free book is difficult to understand for them, why would someone just give a book away? Mainly because of reason no. 1, most people are unwilling to permanently part with their books. So… here is where the story begins.

Schimb de Carti (Book Exchange) is a project started by Bookblog (a collective book reviews blog) and Gramos (couple Gigi and Ramona). Called Bookcrossing at first, it now has its own identity, because it was never linked directly to bookcrossing.com.

The concept is very simple: you come, you bring one or more books, you take one or more books home. After you read them, you bring them back and get more. The owner only loans his/her books, everybody gets to read stuff that’s not interesting enough to buy or too expensive or simply new to them. What started as a small get-together in Bucharest has now grown to dozens of people, 5 cities and 2 countries.

Dropping the numbers now, the things that draws me (and, I suppose, many of the participants) isn’t exactly the books. Yes, that is one of the reasons, but I already have too many books on my to be read list. So, what’s the thing then? The atmosphere. Cultural events are pretty far in between and they can be quite stuffy. Author sits in front and talks about his latest masterpiece, editor tries to make people buy as many copies as possible, the public listens then leaves. Schimb de Carti is populated with readers. You can meet people with the same literary tastes or you can try new things (with no strain on your wallet). When authors show up, it’s never like a book launch - friendly cup of tea or pint of beer would be a more appropriate description.

Meeting no. 8 was this December, with no. 9 coming up in January. We’re always happy to have visitors (Romanian or not!).

Original post for BlogofRomania.
Jen is 23, born and raised in Bucharest, did completely different things in high-school, undergrad and postgrad, and now is involved in various internet things.

I’m doing some research on the Pulitzer Prize winners for foreign correspondence and I came across a very interesting atmosphere feature from the 1974 New York Times that mentions Romania (Rumania, at the time) among other countries in the Soviet Bloc that combined, in a surprising way for foreign correspondent Hedrick Smith, Western (bourgeois) elements, Moscovite rituals, and national idiosyncrasies. Some things sound so familiar:

“[…] Other little things convey a more relaxed, less severe lifestyle, like the American cola served in a local tavern in rural northeast Rumania or the famous Soviet Stolichnaya vodka, denied to Russian consumers for the sake of earning hard currency abroad, marketed in Bucharest.
—
In Bucharest, which sometimes has an unjust reputation as one of the most orthodox of East European capitals, a small, street-level art gallery near the conservative Central Army House offers a show of modern abstract art that would prompt many a Muscovite to worry that the character-building virtues of Socialist realism were being forgotten.

Op-art, pop-art, and other Rorschach-like paintings mingle with bright orange plastic mobiles in the globe, beaker and tube shapes of a modern laboratory. Patiently, a slender, dark-haired young woman in a belted sweater and flared corduroys explains derivations from Andy Warhol to less cosmopolitan Rumanians.
—
There are other images that evoke Russia itself, especially in the countryside. Bare-handed, bare-headed peasants in Rumania, caught by a surprisingly late spring snowstorm, haul pails of water by hand from village wells to their roadside homes. Everywhere clusters of peasants gather along country roads with bundles and boxes, hopefully waving at passing cars, no matter how full, anxious for a ride to the next town, their peasant patience exhausted by the long wait for the next tired bus […]”

I used to travel a lot on the kind of roads described above. We had (and to a certain extent it comes back to my mind whenever I drive in Romania) this superstition that if we saw a person carrying an empty bucket or a priest/monk waving for a ride, then we would have bad luck on our trip. Were we the only ones with such silly road rituals?

Original post: here.
Raluca is a 27-year-old PhD student, born and raised in the mountains of Romania, making sense of life in the swamps of hot Louisiana.

Just say the word education and you have guaranteed yourself my attention. I became interested in the problem of education in Romania because it caused me a lot of suffering in my schooling in Romania. But I did not suffer because I could not learn or had bad grades. Instead, school did not offer what I wanted and needed at that time. I am not the person to rebel against professors that give a lot of homework or who ask a bit more from their students.

My concern was that I did not get all the useful information and training through the programs offered in school. Sometimes I felt like I lost a day of my life because I had to go to school to meet the attendance requirement. Some of these days were usually in the first week of classes, last week(s) of classes of each semester, days before school breaks, days before and after a big celebration in my high-school (such as Freshmen Ball, Senior Prom, Halloween Party, Valentines Day). I don’t consider them useless, but these extracurricular activities should not require students to stop going to classes and professors to stop teaching their lessons because they did not have enough students.

But wasting time at school is one of the smaller problems that I have experienced in my education. The lack of interest in both students and professors about the general purpose of education is a more important problem. Most professors do not see their job as one of the most important jobs in a society; they are not aware of their responsibility to shape valuable citizens. Professors do not make their courses interesting enough for students to pay attention and show respect to the class, professor and material studied. Most of the times the incentive for studying is a good grade and not the knowledge.

And this brings me to one of the greatest problems of the education: plagiarism. In the presentation I made with Corina for the Romanian Conference at Columbia University we called it the CULT(URE) of PLAGIARISM. When you want to increase your grade in a course in high-school you usually had to submit a paper on a certain topic. Usually that paper was not the creation of the student, but a copy-paste version of some article from wikipedia and other web resources or an already made paper that you can find on websites like www.referat.ro.

At the end of high school we had to take a certification of English competence because I graduated from a profile that had English as an intensive study subject. So, we had to write a 2o page paper on a topic of our choice from the English culture. Guess where did all the information in most of my colleagues papers come from?
Plagiarism only trains unethical behavior and wastes the time of the student. He does not gain anything than a good grade for printing some information from the Internet. But that good grades does not serve him in the long run, but professors accept it the way it is.

The professors that are most criticized are usually those who actually do something, and those who don’t do anything usually pass somewhat unseen. From my high-school experience, there were two professors severely criticized who did not deserve the words that were brought. One of them was a visiting professor we had for English who was a Peace Corps volunteer. He tried to implement to our class the principles under which he studied in US. He asked us to write papers in English that had to reflect individual experiences; no plagiarism allowed. Students actually had to use their brains and come up with two pages of writing in English and submit the paper before the deadline. First, he was criticized for making students work to much for a class like English. Second, he was “too strict” with the deadlines and did not accept late submissions without penalty … as this was a very wrong thing to do. And third, he was very strict with using materials which were not the product of the student and he failed the students who did not abide. All he wanted to do was to help students improve their English and respect their integrity but he was perceived as doing the wrong thing. At this point, I owe him a great deal of my success in the college writing courses.

The other severely criticized professor was my econ professor who tried to implement the programs of Junior Achievement as extracurricular activities to our econ class. But the time she invested in doing this was not appreciated and was considered a waste of time for the students. All her enthusiasm and all the knowledge from the program was not good enough for this “great” system of education we had.

Mainly, these are the things that bothered me in school. Of course, there are many more to be said about the problem of education in Romania and I promise to write more posts about it.

But, how can we solve the problem of education? Marian Stas has one solution.
I respect and support the initiative he started, which is called “Public School - The Real Deal”. The papers and articles he wrote are here, but all of them are in Romanian. In them, he actually comes with a viable solution to this problem and I have nothing else to say but “Go for it!”

Original post: here.
Diana is originally from Targu-Mures and has studied for a year at Lafayette College in Easton, PA, USA.

On November 1st I launched an invitation looking for people for a trip to Alba Iulia on December 1st. I had only seen the town through the car window, passing by to other destinations, so I wanted to visit it. During this month I managed to get together four friends, just as willing and ‘patriotic’, and we planned the trip. So, on the evening of November 30th I met up with Adina, Cami, Ionut, Dia and Daniela (who couldn’t come with us, even though she’d have wanted to), for a serving of courage in a cup of mulled wine or in a glass of beer.

Afterwards, we left for the train station. The train was waiting, the tickets had been bought in advance, everything was ready. However, we were less ready to travel for 4 hours in a freezing train. If the train to IaÅŸi is called The Hunger, this one for Sighetu Marmatiei should be The Cold. Without taking off any of our clothes, we bundled together with gloves, hats and scarves. Long live the Romanian Rail Transport Company which increases the price of the tickets every 3 months! We got to Alba Iulia at around 3 AM, all frozen, and when we saw the (admittedly little) snow, we started a little snowball fight to get warmer. Then we went, of course, into the joint next to the train station, to finish off all their coffee and tea.

In there, only people with bulging eyes or men sleeping on the tables, the specific fauna of the Romanian train station. We held our ground until some smart asses started getting too “friendly” with the girls. It was time to go before we lost our temper, and there was no point in tempting fate, anyway. The buses has started to run, so after we made a tour of the city with one (we fell asleep, what?), the second took us to the place we were aiming for - Cetate (the Citadel).

It was a beautiful morning. Dawn was breaking and the sky was blue. But it was so cold! So we quickly found a nice little warm bar, with decent people and which served mulled wine. Yes, I know, at 6 AM… but we’re not alcoholics. The wine did its job and we were all pleasantly relaxed. Until the hunger woke us up from the dream, that is. We remembered seeing a shaorma place in the bus station and we headed towards it.

After we drank and ate it was time for fun, right? We bought tricolor flags, we pinned flowers to our jackets, we entered the Cathedral (where I think I saw actor Horatiu Malaele!), we went to see the statues of Mihai Viteazul and of Avram Iancu, we talked to the county police (eh… girls and men in uniform!) and finally we stopped on the boulevard of the parade.

The parade started at 12, with Furdui Iancu and two others singing ‘Noi suntem romani’ (’We are Romanians’). The military fanfare followed, and then the county police, Military Academy students etc. Around 200 soldiers, but no military vehicles. Good enough, considering they almost canceled the parade in Bucharest.

The parade of the national clothing followed, a true procession of horses, carriages and people dressed up in traditional clothes specific to the areas they were from, each with musical instruments and traditional Romanian dances. A wealth of sound and color, to try to chase the cold away.

We were really stiff and stuck to the guarding rail after two hours and standing still. In the end we left for a warmer spot. We ended up in a self-service restaurant where they had warm bad wine and a coffee to match. It didn’t matter; it had to be warm to enable us to think further. The hunger was making itself felt again and the cold and tiredness were probably having the same effect, so we left towards a pizza place in the same bus station. We spent the rest of the day there, with pizza, beer and coffee, until it was time to leave for the train station.

The train was at 6 PM. We took the bus in the wrong direction again, we circled the city and we got to the train station exactly on time. Round-trip tickets are a godsend, they save you so much hassle. Run after the train, get into different wagons, call each other on the mobile - the usual stuff for us. We stopped exactly in the compartment where the ticket collectors were sharing their loot and we respectfully asked them to do it someplace else.

This time we were lucky: the train to Galati has so much heat you could think it was free. It was suffocating, but this didn’t stop us from falling asleep immediately and dozing happily all the way to Timisoara. We woke up in the train station, on the verge of being thrown out by the employees who thought we were homeless. The trip ended in the same Irish pub, after a walk with the flags around town for people to feel the event. One last good night beer and we left.

As we were exiting, a question brought us back to earth:
- Did Romania play, by any chance?
- No, it was December 1st! :((

Original post: here.
Richie is 28 years old, from Timisoara, and works in the tourism industry. He has a lot of hobbies and too little time for them.

Click on the image to see the rest of the comic!

After the revolution, the primary school curriculum hanged on to a (guaranteed-A) subject, called something like “manual labor.” Girls were separated from boys and had to learn how to knit, sew, cook and other girly stuff (thank god we didn’t have to weed corn or potatoes in the fields, like previous generations did).

In one particular class I will remember as long as I live, the funny old “labor” teacher, with her smiling eyes behind the retro geek glasses, asked us to bring several ingredients and “cherries in alcohol” to make a special recipe of cookies. My parents didn’t keep cherries in alcohol at the time (they are proficient now in preparing the drink), hence I had a bunch of colleagues volunteering to bring some for me. To my excitement, the next day I ended up having too many. After rolling several such spiked cherries in some cocoa mixture to make little candy balls, I thought I should try to see how they tasted. Mmm mmm, they were quite yummy. So yummy that I indulged with a few more. Wow, why did she wear two pairs of glasses now? A second later I blacked out, girls shouting around my table.

The teacher didn’t understand at the beginning, but she saw the guilty pits on my table and soon figured it out. She was baffled. So baffled she was laughing. She splashed some water on my face and laid me on the desk. I was quite tiny and skinny at age 11. I woke up feeling dizzy, hearing the teacher, “But why, mommy?” She would call all of us “mommy.” I soon found out that I was technically drunk. From five cherries. Later on, I felt sorry for the history professor who had to taste candies from all of the girls. We insisted, although we weren’t really washing our hands properly. He became unusually upbeat that day.

Original post: here.
Raluca is a 27-year-old PhD student, born and raised in the mountains of Romania, making sense of life in the swamps of hot Louisiana.

Post office 1

Me: “Hello, I would like to send a package to Belgium. Is this the right desk?”
PO worker no. 1: “You can’t send packages from here, only letters.”
Me: “And where can I post the package from?”
POW 1: “I don’t know.”
Me: ?!
POW: 2: “Ask someone in the back.”
Me: “Thank you for your help and for being so kind.”
POW 1: “You’re welcome.”

Post office 1, in the back

Me: “Hello, I would like to send a package to Belgium.”
POW 3: “Not from here. You have to go to post office no. 41.”
Me: “Where is that?”
POW 3: “On Banu Manta street.”
Me: “Where is that?”
POW 3: “It’s the street with the city hall.”
Me: Okay… (?!)
Another customer: (gives directions)
Me: “Thank you.”

Post office 2

POW 4: “What do you want?”
Me: “Oh hi. I would like to send a package.”
POW 4: “Where?”
Me: “To Belgium.”
POW 4: “Not this desk. Go to the back.”
Me: “Thank you.”

Post office 2, in the back

POW 5: “What do you want?”
Me: “Oh hi. I would like to send a package to Belgium.”
POW 5: “Do you have it wrapped?”
Me: “No, I was hoping that I could buy a box or something from you. It’s not big, it’s just a… ”
POW 5: “This is not a box shop. You should send it in a big envelope, if it’s not big.”
Me: “I thought about it, but it’s too big for an envelope.”
POW 5: “Is it is heavier than 2 kilos?”
Me: “No…”
POW 5: “Well then, send it in a big envelope.”
Me: “Okay, how much is an envelope?”
POW 5: “We don’t have envelopes.”
Me: *aghast*
POW 5: “We ran out of envelopes.”
Me: “And are you sorry?”
POW 5: “What?”
Me: “Are you sorry?”
POW 5: “Why would I be sorry?”
Me: “Because you ran out of envelopes.”
POW 5: “I guess I am, why?”
Me: “Because you didn’t say that you were sorry that you didn’t have envelopes.”
POW 5: ???

(Did I mention that I was once almost arrested for smashing the glass door of a post office?)

Original post: here.
Bogdan is a 32-year old translator who loves cats, björks, and cold, rainy days.

I often talk to Dragos about his website, Metropotam. And, of course, Dragos tells me every time: “You’re not in our target; you’re not an urban animal!” And every time I wonder: am I really not?

For two years I lived only at night, from club to club, or three nights in a row in the same disco. At night, all the cats are black and all your fantasies become reality if you wait long enough and if the others drink enough alcohol. Everyone turns into someone else and the dark hides us from the ones who judge us. We are what we want to be or what we are afraid to accept we are.

Go around Bucharest at 2-3 AM. Start from Iancului and go along Pache Protopopescu: you’ll see the “girls” waving at you from the corner of Matasari Street (if you’re a man, alone in the car). You can stop and talk to them, but I advise you not to linger… the legend says it’s not safe to get any closer.

Keep going until Rosetti. Stop at the shaorma shop on the corner and, while you’re eating, listen to the immortal stories of those who stop to order something. I’m sure you’ll hear all sorts of thing, from how hot the female population of the city is to the idiots at football teams Steaua/Dinamo/Rapid, depending on their preference.

The journey continues through the centre of the city: turn right at Universitate and go slow. On the right, in front of the Intercontinental hotel, you might see the Matasari girls who got to a higher stage of evolution. If they aren’t there, you might see a large group of men you’ll recognize from as distance as foreigners: they talk loudly, they gesticulate and laugh a lot (considering how little Romanians laugh, this is a clear sign that they aren’t from this country).

Go further and you get to Piata Romana. Pass by Everest, where… friends meet. The place is pretty crowded for this late hour, but usually you pass by quickly, make a left turn and go on Victoriei (I’m not very sure you’re allowed, but there aren’t any policemen anyway so, WTF, live on the edge :) )

Assuming you didn’t have the bad luck of being pulled over by the police, go further on Victoriei, past Green Hours and B1TV’s headquarters, past the Palace of the Phones and get to Cotton Club. You feel like it’s been there forever, but go on and turn right, towards Regie. It’s only 3 AM and the nightlife is still at its peak there. Make a few phone calls and set up a date for something sweet: a giant crepe, right after the U dorms?

After this, everyone writes their own story.

Ever since I set foot here for the first time, I fell in love with Bucharest. With the constant movement, with the new people you meet, with the liveliness (go to any other town at 3 AM and you’ll understand).

But I love Bucharest the most at night, driving or on foot. A walk like the one I just described made me come back to Bucharest three years ago, when I realized that I’d been missing it for two years.

Original post: here.
Bobby Voicu is 29 years old and works in the online industry. He loves to travel and is preparing for a trip around the world.