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.
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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.
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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.