“What types of agricultural goods does your country export?” is not a typical ice breaker you’d use in conversation, but in rural Romania, where every square metre of land has been tilled for some purpose, it’s a serious question. And they expect an answer.
The relationship between people and land is more evident in Romania than any European country I’ve visited. Transylvanian roads are dotted with locals selling essentials such as eggs, turnips, faggots (bundles of sticks), home-made wines and cheeses, baskets and a products from every exploitable environmental resource. The land is their livelihood, their playground and sadly their rubbish tip.
While conservative with their consumption, Romanians seemed liberal with their wastage. Along the roadside, the fields are littered with plastic bags and bottles. Spectacular snow-capped mountains and forests are connected by rusted pipes than run across the landscape towards the giant cooling towers of industrial towns. Indeed the country has a run-down air about it: outside Bucharest the buildings appear exhausted and stained; high-density apartment blocks queue beside abandoned factories apparently waiting to collapse to make way for the next generation. Spurts of EU funding are visible: dual carriage ways connect major centres, although it is still common to share them with donkey-drawn carts carrying wood, manure or entire families.
Coming from western Europe, Romania appears insanely cheap. You can feast on a local dish of grilled chicken with ham and garlic potatoes, polenta and mountains of fresh bread, a few litres of Ursu (the local beer named after bears) for around £7 or 30 RON (Lei). The average Romanian wage for a worker in a city company we were told is something in the vicinity of 500 Euros, with the rest of the country receiving a lot less, but they survive because inflation is low and so is the cost of housing. But people are nervous about the shift to the Euro which they say will drive up the prices, like they did everywhere else.
The low wages are probably why Romania jammed with Romanian tourists - it’s just too expensive to travel elsewhere. The castle of Bran where the Royal family once lived and, supposedly, Vlad Dracul, teems with Romanian travellers and their families with the odd Spanish or French and even Australian (!) making up the minority of gawking, photo-carrying pilgrims. Nevertheless, always on the look out for a business opportunity, market owners sell their homogeneous wares in these areas hoping to entice tourists to buy tacky Dracula mugs and t-shirts, wooden swords and vampire teeth.
Doing business in Romania is a rather informal affair which might come as a surprise to unsuspecting westerners who expect contracts, offices or even business names. In Romania these commercial excesses are optional. The rental car dealer from which we hired our 4WDs (one of which wasn’t a 4WD) consisted of two gents in full denim with bad teeth in the car park. They were nice enough and didn’t try to con us, although at 250 Euros for each car, we knew they had the better end of the bargain.
The hostel in Bucharest, which we found only by luck since there was nothing external to indicate that we’d arrived, was a converted house or nunnery with only three rooms, each fitting eight people. Even the girl working at reception was forced to sleep in a plastic banana chair behind the desk. About to retire for the night, I passed her thinking that she was taking a rest,
“Feeling tired?”
“Yes, hopefully tonight I’ll be able to get some sleep”, she said and smiled as she then proceeded to prepare her make shift bed out of what I’d have felt uncomfortable on after one hour (even after a dip on some sun drenched beach, a margherita and a 15 minute massage).
Our attempts at speaking the local language were met with mixed reactions. According to our taxi driver in Bucharest, who thought it would be a riot to hear four foreigners stammering instructions in Romanian for quarter of an hour before revealing that he spoke English, told us that half the country spoke English to some degree. His claimed seemed rather dubious in our experience. In Brasov our linguistic repertoire was tested on numerous occasions - our local corner store consisted of a half-metre square hole in the wall and was run by a friendly lady in a grey apron with a profound patience for the warbling of foreigners. The fact that we couldn’t see what we wanted to buy thwarted our usual method of pointing and thrusting money in all directions however our pronunciation of lapte (milk) and pâinea (bread) must have been half close as both products were handed to us with efficiency.
I was impressed with the way Romanians were interested in the world beyond their borders. At a remote petrol station, the same guy who had inquired about the state of primary industry exports in Australia also informed me that he’d learned English from the television, and much of it from an Australian drama called McLeod’s Daughters, which was hugely popular in Romania. His lack of twang in his accent made me suspicious, but to his credit, his spoken English was good. I watched some Romanian television while there and can admit that I didn’t experience any of this osmotic effect with the exception of picking up that the word crap means carp and that fried crap is an infinitely entertaining item to read on a menu.
Romania is known to have the largest population of European bears roaming around the wilderness. We didn’t see any but we did see many dogs. There are hoards of them, everywhere. Our guide books reported that there were 200,000 stray dogs in the country, but it seemed like a gross exaggeration when we looked about. You’ll see dogs in the cities rummaging through bins for food, sleeping dogs, lone dogs simply sitting in a fields doing nothing or marauding packs. There are dogs of all breeds (although mostly of the mongrel variety) and sizes. The strange part was that most of them seemed healthy unlike their best friends who, in the rural areas, were weathered and bent from whatever struggle they’d endured throughout their lives. Perhaps it was a symbol that, even in a former impoverished Eastern block country, there are opportunities to be had by the tough and street-smart.
I’d go back to Romania in a second. Everyone was very nice to us, even the policemen who pulled us over for going 70 in a 50 zone (even though we were driving at the same speed as the lorry filled with turnips in front of us) and only gave us a warning despite our licences not being valid. And the country side, beyond the rubbish is in some areas untouched and pure. What really impressed upon me though is the air of optimism - it’s a country that is growing and having joined the EU last year, you get the feeling that the people suddenly feel part of a world that for so long seemed to be passing them by.
