Blog of Romania

Another interesting article from Michael Nork, Peace Corps volunteer in Lugoj.

‘Asta e viata’ (or, ’such is life’) is a typical saying in Romania. It seems to reflect a broad cultural outlook, perhaps left over from communism. In many ways it also reflects Romania’s current problem of an apathetic, disillusioned public. They know what their politicians are doing, but will it ever get any better? Many people I’ve talked to don’t seem to have any reason to think so.

Read the rest of the entry here.

An interesting blog entry from Mike Nork, about the Romanian Revolution in 1989.

On Friday of last week I went to a presentation given by Dorel Jurcovan, a man who had first-hand experience with the events of the Romanian Revolution. He talked a bit about life during the last days of communism and showed a video about the Revolution from 1990.

Read more on the original blog.

From Bukresh blog:
“John Squier and his partner went on an Eastern European car journey in 1985. These are pictures of Piata Unirii which was demolished a year later in 1986. They stayed at Hanul lui Manuc and the first picture in these series was taken from the window of room 113.”

Click on the link to get a glimpse of the Bucharest of 23 years ago.

Although traveler’s checks are widespread in the US, in Romania they’re almost unheard-of. Peace Corps Volunteer Mike had a little adventure with a Visa traveler’s check in Timisoara.

You can read the whole entry on his blog, here.

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.

Traveling through Romania to get to the airport in Bucharest and back again from there to my town were amazing traveler’s tales of endurance and fortitude, and an indication of how much trouble you can get into by being a “smart” traveler. I’ll tell you about it here, for those who love these stories about getting around in a still-developing country.

I left for the train at 11 p.m. the night of August 31. It’s not far to walk from my apartment, and I tried to pack light. I had cleverly figured out that I could get off the train at Chitila station at 4:30 a.m., and call a cab to take me the 8 kms to Baneasa Airport for my low-cost 7 a.m. Blue Air flight to Stuttgart. I already had bought the train ticket online to Munich from there. Oh, what a wise and experienced traveler I am! I couldn’t find any local Romanian who had made that direct connection from that train stop to the airport, but everyone agreed that this station is much closer than the main one in downtown Bucharest, where the connections are so bad that you have to spend the night in a hotel.

My schedule gave me 2 1/2 hours to get from the train to the airport, which seemed pretty safe to me. Everyone knows the taxi drivers in Buc are famous for ripping you off, especially when you want to get to an airport, so I got lists of the honest taxi companies, and even practiced calling them the day before, to be sure I could be understood (I even found a couple dispatchers who spoke English!), and that they would send a cab for me. Someone mentioned that the Chitila gara (station) is in a bad neighborhood, but that didn’t really bother me since I had it all figured out.

Well, I can tell you from experience NOT to do what I did.
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