Spinning Words

I am not going to talk about the reasons why it is not cool to be Romanian. Either social, political or economical, these reasons are all in the news, read the newspapers if you want to find them out but I guess you already know them. I am going to talk, from my point of view, about why it is so amazingly great to be Romanian.

Our grandparents live in the countryside. Romania has one of the greatest countrysides where you can experience the simple life. That means that we drink water directly from the spring without purifying it with chemicals, we bring it out to the surface with the help of buckets and wells. We can walk barefoot on the soft dust and sleep in haystacks in out back yards. We know all the domestic animals without seeing them in the zoo. We know all the wild animals too, come on, who has never seen a fox while walking next to the wheat field on their way to the forest to pick blackberries? And if there is a power outage you find yourself with a great reason to carve a pumpkin lamp, Halloween all Summer long, yey!!!

Pumpkin Lamp

We even have the Romanian equivalent of Halloween, by the way, will talk about it when the time comes. We take our vegetables from our own garden too, and fruits from our orchard. We have and use  lot of medicinal plants. Got a headache? Just ask grandma what type of tea you should drink and she will come in a second with some dry plants and make you a cup of tea that doesn’t taste like anything coming out of a teabag. And these plants grow most of the time right under our noses. Ever going barbequing in the forest? Next time take 15 minutes to gather these plants, they work wonders sometimes!

We have some of the most beautiful Monasteries in the world, places not just for prayer but also cradles of culture and history. Stories and our country’s history are painted on the walls of these monuments in some of the most beautiful colors, one of which is unique in the world: Voronet Blue. Great places for meditation, soul searching and calming down.

We have a Royal Family, I think that is pretty cool and it says a lot about the country Romania used to be. Why the Family is not leading the country, well, that’s on the “uncool” list.

Horia Tecau

We had a double specialist tennis player as a flag-bearer at the 2012 Summer Olympics, 3 times Wimbledon finalist,  two times winner in Bucharest and many other great achievements. I am sorry, I couldn’t help myself. Hai Horia!

We have great wine and amazing cuisine. Every part of the country is different from this point of view. However, I am pretty sure that sarmale and mamaliga are the same everywhere (cabbage rolls and polenta) and also cheese and sower cream with polenta is a pretty national dish (MBS on short, it stands for mamaliga cu branza si smantana). Bring on the onion!!! And try papanasi for desert (cheese dumplings). We brew our own vodka and fruit brandy, of course they are not called like this and they don’t exactly taste the same as the ones you buy from the store, they are even better: tuica and visinata/afinata.

We have all four seasons, and we get the real deal out of each: windy Spring, extremely hot Summer days some with hurricanes others just perfect to lay on the beach, a beautiful colored Autumn with lots of chrysanthemums and a 3 month, sometimes-even-longer-minus-20-or-less-degrees Winter.

Vlad Ţepes

We have Dracula. Thank you Bram Stoker for writing it and Gary Oldman for impersonating the great vampire. Too bad it took an Irish guy to get the story so popular but the myth was born from real facts and it all started with the Order of the Dragon and a really cruel Romanian Voivode: Vlad Ţepes.

Ok, this post is already getting too long so I am going to stop and come back with a second part later, maybe even a third part. If you want to find out more things about why Romania is a cool country watch this. I am only going to write about what I find cool but I am pretty sure someone else discovered other great things about Romania as well.

Today in school we talked about “Invisible Norms in the Media” and we went through issues like stereotyping, nationalism, color, identity and dominance. And the teacher made us do a little exercise that consisted in describing our identity in 3 words that we think are the most important. We talked in groups so after a 10 minute chat with my colleagues we came up with some really interesting conclusions and we found out some things that wouldn’t have crossed our minds otherwise. And that made me think a bit about me and who I am and if the words I use to describe myself are the same as the ones people use to build their image on me. I said about myself that I am a Romanian girl who loves tennis. Two of these things can be eliminated, depending on the context, the first and most simple to eliminate: I am a girl. Well, it’s pretty obvious. It wasn’t like that when I was little and acting and looking like a boy but those days are long gone. Second: I am Romanian. Important detail now because I live in Sweden but back home I doubt I’d use this as the first thing to describe myself. The “I love tennis” part is the same everywhere. So I replaced girl with student but I couldn’t give up my nationality: a Romanian student who loves tennis. The truth is that when you present yourself to someone who asks you “What are you doing in Sweden?”, saying that you are a student changes a lot of things. I haven’t felt this difference here as much as I felt it in France where saying that you were a student, even if coming from Romania, was a way to avoid hitting nationality-based barriers. However, my student status is the best way to justify my presence in Stockholm, probably even better than, let’s say, the employee status that I’d have if I were working here. Of course I could go deeper into the discussion and say that outside the University circle I am just another immigrant and then I’d hit against a lot of issues mentioned at the beginning of this post. And I don’t want to talk about them.

Being Romanian is way cooler than the perception of the majority on this nationality, being a student again is great, especially when you are studying what you always wanted and loving tennis is going to be there for long, probably just like music and my cat but I couldn’t use 5 words to describe myself so I stuck with just one of my passions. Though I like fishing too… and reading on the beach… and coffee. And probably 7 years ago I would have described myself as a goth or metalhead or something else, who knows?

Another course finished another final paper turned in. I hope that music can be considered a form of transnational protest. Of course this meant a night of working hard and going to bed at 4 am just to wake up the second morning to finish it all up. I work better at night, as frustrating and time consuming as it is, I taught myself to work like that and I can’t break the habit. But after this came a week-end of rest and fun stuff like meeting friends and going out for coffee. Stockholm is beautiful, even in the rain. You just have to find a warm place behind a window where you can gather up with a bunch of nice persons and talk and laugh as much as you can. Or you can just watch buses going up and down the street. Autumn has finally taken over, and not that colored warm one but the wet chilly season that announces that Winter might be just around the corner. It is strange that at 5 pm when getting out of school it is already dark. Something inside me is saying that it is just a bit too soon but I will probably get used to that in a few weeks.

Today I came from school and after a while I realized that the landlords built a fire upstairs so the whole house smells like smoke. This gave the place a home-ish feeling, in the end I didn’t spend all my holidays in the countryside for nothing. If only that cat were around more often.

Also this week is the last week of the tennis season so this means that starting November 12 I am going to go on YouTube and review all the important matches of 2013 and wait impatiently for the end of December when the 2014 season starts. It is not going to be nice but I know I have some wonderful things to watch until then. Another thing: this time last year I was in London and that made me feel melancholic and made me miss it a lot.