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.
Occasional thinkers
The newspaper Gandul (”The Thought”) gave me several surprises over time, samples of demagogy and make-believe compassion. I mean a title such as “The retrocession of the nationalized building throws thousands on the street” (or “For Christmas, thousands of old people will be thrown on the street”). I’ve written about it before: they had not 5 years, like the law says, but 50 years to build/buy a house. Again, Gandul used this opportunity to emphasize that the current tenants invested millions in modernizing (?) or improving the (stolen!) buildings and that the owners should give them back the money for this! At this moment, my brain took a break, my rachidian bulb and spine took over and my eyes searched for a bat or a lawn mower to chase the editorial office of said newspaper around their headquarters. How many neurons had to die to give birth to such ineptitude - compensation for the illegal tenants from the owner (or descendents, like they’d been on a vacation until now!) who was dispossessed half a century ago and thrown out of his home with only the clothes on his back?! But I stop here.
Original post: here (RO).
Cristian Sirb is 32 and lives in Bucharest.