I had always assumed that Romania was the cheapest place in Europe, which is a damn good reason for living there (other reasons are that they’re friendly, honest, loyal, multilingual, flexible, fun-loving and great to work with). (more…)
Tag: romania
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My Pulitzer Prize
I published an article on Huffington Post on January 1st 2014 called Thank You Romania and it went viral. Over 11,000 people liked it on Facebook and everyone I met in Romania seemed to have seen it. Apparently it was just what was needed in Romania – a positive article to balance all the scaremongering by the British tabloids about the „Romanian immigrant invasion’. By now, almost two months later, everyone knows that story is a joke but for Romanians a bitter taste remains; it’s hard for them to accept that they’re disliked – even hated – in the UK.
When Formula AS, a leading Romanian weekly newspaper, asked me to do an interview based on my brief analysis of the British tabloids in my Thank You Romania, I jumped at the chance. (more…)
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Very Simple & Incredibly Complicated
We recently celebrated the launch of Castle Craig’s new Romanian website by having dinner at a fish restaurant in Bucharest called Happy Fish. I had the dorada. (more…)
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When is a Village not a Village?
At school we used to trade in jokes and most of these went under certain themes. The Irish were stupid (“what do you do if an Irishman throws a hand grenade at you? Pull out the pin and throw it back.”), the French were smelly, the Germans cruel and the Italians cowardly (“How many gears in an Italian tank? Five: One forward and four reverse”). It was many years before I realised that most of Europe told jokes about us Scots being tight fisted. (more…)
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Watching TV
I’m sitting in front of 4 flat screen TVs, only one of which has the sound on – KISS TV – filling the canteen with the sound of rap and soft porn images. Next to KISS is Realitatea, a Romanian news channel, where sound isn’t needed: so far I have learned there is a big meeting going on in Brussels about “the pact that stabilised Europe” (I’ll believe that one when I see it). They have several crawler texts on the screen one of which contains financial information and share listings, another one with “urgent” news updates. (more…)
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3 Romanian Film Directors
This video was found in our archives, translated into Romanian and published in Jurnal National (click here).If you want to see the video without reading all this text, go to the end of this article (scroll down).
The Story Behind the Video:
The ending of the year (2011) seems to be a month of nostalgia, particularly in Romania where the media are wallowing in a sea of memories based on unanswered questions about the 1989 revolution. Searching for answers gives editors pages of material (the biblical phrase “old wine in new bottles” springs to mind) and characters like Petre Roman, Romania’s first post revolutionary PM, get wheeled onto TV chat shows to discuss their memories of Communism. (more…)
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Swedes Sue Romanians Over the Name Ice Hotel
Getting to Romania’s Ice Hotel involves a hair-raising ride in a cable car to a frozen lake two thousand metres above sea level. Every December the family who run it cut blocks of ice from the frozen lake, bind them together with a mortar made of snow and water and build a small hotel that lasts until May. They also construct an ice chapel complete with a kitsch sculpture of the last supper and a frozen Jesus on the cross. (more…)
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How to Prepare for an Earthquake
This article was also published in Romanian on contributors.ro
I have just walked away from a really annoying talk show on one of Romania’s news channels with a feeling of déjà vu. Every time there is a natural disaster somewhere in the world the news channels quickly dig up politicians, experts and indignant journalists who proceed to blame each other for not doing anything to prepare Bucharest for the coming quake. None of this intense media scrutiny will translate into policy, political will, or anything that will make a difference.
Now Japan dominates the TV news. This time last year it was the Chilean quake and ProTV did a rather good campaign about how well prepared the Chileans were for their quake. In Chile the people who invest in a building are forever responsible for its structural integrity, whereas in Romania scores of people (in other words nobody) are responsible for construction standards. Nothing came of this and building standards in this country remain overly complex and completely unenforced, and nobody knows if the buildings that have gone up in the last 20 years will withstand the next big quake. (more…)
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The Romanian Second Hand Scam
This article was also published in Romanian on contributors.ro (worth looking at for the intelligence of the comments).When my brother Moona moved to Portugal and started to build an eco house out of mud, stone and straw he soon realized he needed a nasty, polluting diesel van (a small sacrifice he was willing to make on behalf of the environment). We were discussing the issue when driving towards Edinburgh, our home town, and we agreed that the cheapest place to buy a van was Belgium. Both of us had worked in Romania in the 1990s and we recalled armies of people traveling to Belgium and Germany to buy cheap second hand vehicles. The idea of buying a cheap car in UK – let alone Scotland – didn’t even enter our minds. (more…)