Blog of Romania

We have the following piece of news in Evenimentul Zilei [The Event of the Day]: Chain accidents and dozens of crashed cars on the highways (here, in Romanian). Obviously, the geographical placement of Romania, a plot from the weather, the bad state of the highway etc. are at fault. I want to see somwhere, written down black on white, that the fault belongs to the Romanian race drivers. I want them put against a wall and see their heads banged against the asphalt until they learn that winter really isn’t like summer and that summer is not like a Formula 1 circuit and that size of the brain is in inverse proportion to the weight of the foot.

I am sick of hearing that no one, nowehere, never is guilty of anything. Only the government, the weather, the traitorous Westerners, the people who left to work abroad, the suckers who stayed and work here, all the saints in the calendar and whatever you want to add to the list. As long as it’s something absolutely generic. No one never is guilty, only the “bad guys”.

Being a poor boy living on the fringe of this pseudo-metropolis, I don’t know much. But I have driven in my life and every time I ran into a patch of fog, slowing down to admire it (what other reason could I have?), I was overtaken by all sorts of brave people driving at baffling speed. These are the idiots who cause accidents. Usually… But it’s not their fault… Poor them…

This time we were lucky. No one was harmed… But next time one of us might be the unlucky fellow to end up under a set of merciless wheels because of some cretins. And no one can make them civilized: not the law, not the police, not the government not the Holy Ghost. Maybe just the whip.

Original post: here (RO).
Dan is a 27 year-old from Bucharest who lives to read, write, take phots and discover the new and the old.

I could hardly get my bags into the bus: a 19-kg backpack, another 2 not-so-very-light handbags and uRMa’s cat carrier. I put my backpack on a chair and the carrier on another one.

‘What do you have there? A little kitty?’ the lady sitting opposite to me asked.
‘Yes, it’s my cat.’

She looked again.

‘Aww, she’s so nice! Isn’t she cold?’
‘Well, hope not :) We’ll be home in a minute, anyway.’
‘Where are you from?’
‘Baia Mare.’
‘Oh, that’s so far away. Did she like the train ride?’
‘No, not exactly. But I gave her some pills and she slept most of the time.’
‘:)) Really?’
‘Yes :)’
‘Where are you getting off?’
‘At the next stop.’
‘Well, you’d better put you backpack back on, cause we’re almost there. And let me help you with the carrier.’
‘No, you don’t have to. I can do it, really.’
‘No, no, no. I want to help you.’
‘Gee, thank you very much.’
‘:)’

She carried the carrier for me right to the entrance to my block, tough she lived some blocks away and she had to go back. It was damn nice of her to help me. Yeah, Bucharest is still full of surprises :)

Image credit.

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.

Like his homologue from other large cities in the country, the Bucharest bus-man (or trolleybus, or subway, or tram) is always rushing to get somewhere, it doesn’t matter where, maybe at the market, maybe at a concert, maybe at a play (by the way, most theaters in Bucharest were sold out), maybe at a movie (to come in several minutes after it begins), maybe to bow to the ottomans, maybe for a date with death.

However, people in Bucharest seem more in a hurry than anyone else in Romania. Some news! When the bus starts to approach the station, they start bustling about. I have a hunch that one of them sacrifices himself and keeps guard, perched up on a pole to give the signal. All of a sudden, they start swarming towards the direction the bus is coming from, thus forcing the driver to stop half a block away. Suddenly, the grandmas and grandpas who minutes before inspired compassion with their slouching shoulders - making you stop and think about how your own life will end - find renewed energy, like they’d just finished high school, and sprint to the bus, to make sure they get a seat. No matter how narrow the space, someone *will* squeeze in between you and the door, perhaps with the aid of your brand-new shoes.

Chronologically gifted citizens

I understand that we are (we always were) a hungry nation, but I don’t know the explanation for this elderly shopping fever. Our older fellow citizens (or chronologically gifted, as I found in a dictionary of politically correct terms) use up their last energy resources to struggle through a whole metropolis in the search of an egg with the correct price. It figures - they get free transportation, people give them their seats (because they stare at you pleading-insistently, with the curse ready and handy), all they need is to find that miraculous, mythical area where the egg is 25 bani cheaper than in the shop downstairs.

How do I say this without being labeled as a well-meaning individual…? In Romania, today’s elderly people (65 - 80 years old) live in exactly the future they made for themselves. They wallowed in the houses of the bourgeoisie and of the Romanian cultural elite, paying very small rent to the state. Through their lack of involvement, they supported the totalitarian regime and its hostility to any trace of merit or performance. They kept quiet, they “protested” by stealing, bribing and telling jokes (is this called “resistance through culture”?), while others (Polish, Hungarians) were dying in jails or in street fights against the Russian oppressors. I admit, we did have our resistance, but it was too isolated to lead to political reform. So we need not be surprised that their ideal in life is now an egg 25 bani cheaper.
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Yesterday, while I was in traffic, I saw a gesture I liked and which impressed me. It was cold, the traffic was jammed. A taxi driver next to me honked at a freezing old lady who was waiting for a tram which wasn’t coming any time now, since it was also caught in the traffic jam, and took her in his cab (since they were going the same way) without asking for money. I thought I was a beautiful gesture, which should be admired. There still is hope for some taxi drivers.

Original post: here (RO).
Radu is a 24-years-old engineer in Bucharest.

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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You might know this: cab drivers in Bucharest won’t let you wear your seatbelt. The second they smell your intention to reach for the buckle, they go “hey, you don’t need that”. A logical person may ask “hmm yeah but isn’t it illegal to drive around without it?” I’ve tried this a number of times and the answer is always “not in a taxi”. Now my first question is: when was this amendment voted? I mean, I know we have many senators with cab driver brains, but still, is this official?

I’m writing this because last night I had to take a cab and choice was very limited, so my ride had this ugly, old weirdo gipsy driver. When I pulled the seatbelt, he just grabbed my hand, and with a whiny voice started complaining about how everybody insists on the stupid belt. I did manage to fasten it, though, and ignored the guy’s desperate grabs and complaints. Still it felt pretty disgusting.
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