Owlspotting

On a trip to Cluj yesterday, my brother and I got stuck behind the behemoth below. It’s a Dodge, one of those 3500 RAM monsters that consumes enough gas to power a small African village. Romanians don’t own many such monsters (yet), but I bet many would love to. I also doubt that there are many Romanians that will yell in true American protest fashion “You took us to war” as the proud driver powers by.

The car was not only American made, it had an Arizona license plate. There are various possible scenarios here:

1. The sons of Scottsdale have discovered the horrific recently dug up streets of Cluj and have embarked on an off-road dare.
2. A Romanian immigrant ferries this monster home to show how good and large his… American life is.
3. A frustrated local businessmen orders something BIG to compensate for the perpetual smallness in his life.

Sara’s ever curious journalistic mind wondered a few days ago how Romanian women dress. That’s a tough one because you’d get numerous answers depending on whom you ask and what city you’re in. If you narrow this down to the younger demographic, many would be inclined to reply: “the majority goes for slutty and see-through. Which, some would gladly argue, is awesome because men like it and women like men to like it.”

Since that would be stereotyping Romanian women as being constantly on the prowl for rich old men with fancy cars (hmmmm) I decided the answer should lie within the more decent yet trendy realm. So I’ve asked Andressa to provide an answer and she did. She also provided a sample from her personal photo album.

There you go, a little more decency than you normally get at pools around the city (why are 15-year-olds topless?). And we have chosen decency today for selfish reasons–there are enough fat old men from Italy and Turkey flashing their cash and blabbering with excitement about how Romania is easy-pickens paradise.

Andressa says: “Most college girls choose jeans and sport shoes with a t-shirt showing their bellybutton during the day, and adult females usually wear a deux-piece or a skirt and a short sleeve blouse (very rarely you would see a lady in sports garments). I myself like sports outfits: t-shirts, short skirts / jeans and sandals.

In the urban areas, many young women wear skimpy outfits, many accessories and colorful make-up. I guess that is why they say Romanian girls are beautiful: they show a lot of skin. But that’s starting to change. Many famous international brands have boutiques in Bucharest now and that’s reflected in the everyday style of people: there are less and less differences between the way a Romanian woman dresses and a Western European one does.”

Iri and Monica were married yesterday and Romania shed tears of joy as it remebered love can conquer all. As Iri and Monica descended from their rented boat (big enough for a couple hundred people) for the lavish party thrown at Iri’s waterside mansion, thousands of Romanians remembered their own weddings. Those sunny Saturdays when they stepped out of their dirty Dacias in a pile of mud and headed for the corner restaurant where bored men with moustaches covered 80s tunes and drank foul smelling wine.

The wealth, the pomp, the pageantry, the stage carnival aspect of Iri and Monica’s wedding were just part of the “props of love” paradigm. They means nothing and had nothing to do with love, which is strong no matter how expensive the wine, the dress and no matter who sings at the wedding–be it your drunk uncle Costel or bands that don’t leave the house for less than $1,500-$2,000 a set.

On Saturday Romania lied to itself thinking it rediscovered love when it did little else than prove it’s a sucker for rich men rescuing young women from the abyss of the regular life. As Iri and Monica prepare for their next big event, the birth of their child, Romanians will struggle to keep up, putting together broken homes, looking to the stars, falling in love and making out in front of television sets replaying the happiness of the First Couple. As love takes over, people will stop smelling the crap we all stepped into when we entered Iri and Monica’s world.

Iri and Monica are Romania’s pair (as seen below in a picture from EvZ.ro). Their wedding was dubbed “The Wedding of the Century” and it was broadcast live on the B1 TV station, a network with national reach. The station showed the ceremony for about 5 hours in the afternoon and continued with an all night broadcast of the party. This is like broadcasting the funeral of Ronald Reagan or something, right? They must be important, right? Iri must be the guy who invented a cure for cancer, right? Oh wait, Monica will give birth to the Romanian savior, correct?

Wrong.

Irinel Columbeanu is a 49-year-old chubby man who made his fortunes in various business dealings after communism. One of his businesses is a modelling agency staffed my many (very young) girls eager to pose in front of all-terrain vehicles wearing a thong. He is by training an electrician and his first job was turning off the lights at an animal farm. Now he orders himself designer clothes, owns lake-front propriety and drives cars that have many zeroes in the price no matter the currency you use.

Monica Gabor is a 19-year-old slim woman who became famos by becoming Iri’s girlfriend when she was 18. She was a model at the agency and continues to be little more than a pretty face. She graduated from high school this summer and says she will go to college. Various articles have said she has had a rowdy life before meeting Iri. Those must have been some wild grade school years.

This is the couple fascinating Romanians. The pair has been satirized in a song, featured in a weekly two-hour reality show that Monica owns, and as the coup-de-grace, married on live television. The ratings are strong and many Romanians love them for being in love–or so they say.

Age difference? That’s the media being gossipy. Wealth? No, we’re not watching because we want to know how the rich live. We watch because of the love. Shady business practices? Iri is a decent and succesful man. Stupid bimbo? You can’t say that about a girl who aced all her school tests.

The broadcast itself was an unwilling parody of today’s Romania. Astrologers, sexperts, psychologists, designers, priests, other couples–they all flocked to offer perspective and context. It’s as if this was the first marriage ever held on Earth and the populace needed to be briefed on how to go about making it work, getting God and the church on board and surviving the gossiping media.

“The Romanian people were expecting this wedding,” one of the five women doing the play by play said.

But why? Why does this couple command so much attention? Why has it hooked the country? Why are we so obsessed with it? They are not famous for something other than being famous and rich. They don’t even make moronic dance music. They don’t hold elected office. They don’t run hospitals and schools. They are not running for office. They are not even that beautiful. So why? Why Iri and Monica? Why the “Wedding of the Century”?

The answer, I believe, is that Iri and Monica are the seminal crossroads of everything that is regretable about Romanian society today. Let’s try a list:

1. Fascination with the rich. As it becomes more westernized Romania is developing the same kind of fascination other nations have for the lives of the rich. But few of the Romanian rich are movie or music stars (they are certainly no Jessica and Nick), which forces us to follow the lives of individuals who’ve made their fortune in all sorts of dubious businesses–this is somehow worse than a cross between “Growing up Gotti” and “The Simple Life.”
2. The dearth of cultural arbiters. Many Romanians don’t know which cultural goods have value and which don’t. Coming out of communism, our cultural gurus were old white males that rejected most of what was new in favor of the perenial value of goods such as 18th century literature or 1970s rock. The few places where one could go for guidance are restrictive, supposedly great just because they are “alternative.” But they carry much of the elitist attitude of the old white males. The mainstream needs a culture arbiter, too. In many countries this role is played by the media–both local and national, which here has lost all interest in selection as long as crap sells or brings ratings. Iri and Monica do both.
3. Vaguely pedophilic tendencies. The way Romania abuses its teenage girls has been called on numerous times. It’s not strictly a Romanian phenomenon that 15-year-old teens are dolled up and sexed up for television. But it is Romanian–or maybe Eastern European–that many of them become the lovers of wealthy businessmen or even worse, the currency these men use in their hotel lobby business deals. Certain men who are 30 and over don’t mind women who are 17–they actually welcome them. It’s hard not to feel like a family values Republican when you hear 40-year-old sweating bald men who own local gas stations saying that 16-year-olds make for hot pieces of ass.
4. The stay at home wife of the 21st century. Romania has never been through a feminist movement and if it’ll ever come to that we’re certainly taking an interesting route. It was “tradition” that women would stay home “la cratita” (next to the crock pot) while men would earn the salary. Women cook, men hunt. It was also common to hear of spousal abuse, beatings and statements proclaiming that men have no business cooking or cleaning. Strong shades of that still remain even among the brighter populace. But we’ve ushered in a new type of woman, one that continues to stay around the house, but one that doesn’t have to do anything but look pretty, trendy and be a good spender–this in turn would set the trend for us, the less independently wealthy. Again, nothing new in the world at large–the problem is we’ve again lost the middle ground. I’ve heard many smart women in Romania saying they hate women in general because they are a horrible species.
5. The power of populism. Look at our president–he is the “talk like you,” “dance with you” and “drink with you” type of dude. A George W. Bush figure. Decency, politeness, a polished discourse is elitism. We like the straight talkers. We would have hated Iri if he had made his money inventing some kind of heart pump and who knows what kind of device that wouldn’t have required his words to be [BEEP] censored on television. We like Iri because if we are smart like him and fudge the rules here and there, we could land a hot woman and bathe in money and still be one of the people; just a luckier one.

The clip below was on the evening news on a different station than the one broadcasting more than 12 hours of their wedding (which was apparently put together by 150 people). They are not the only one and they are not on premium cable either.

Let’s take a short break from Romania-themed posts. I was delighted to see that Tilly and the Wall released a video for “Bad Education,” the best song on their sophmore release “Bottoms of Barrels.” This is the song of the year for me and the video is pretty good. The song is about gender confusion and other assorted troubles.

This kind of music wouldn’t catch on in Romania, where we’re much more likely to listen to electronic music, pathetic pop and dance bands called Chicanos that sing in Spanish about the broken hearts and the envious caballeros in the ghettos. Yes, half of the Romanian towns feature LA-like barios, while the rest are Eastern European takes on the Bronx. Examples will soon follow…

So yes, I need some Tilly and the Wall.

Let’s continue answering questions about the glorious land of Romania and its even more glorious culture. Andrew asked:

What bits of American pop culture (TV shows, musicians) are surprisingly popular — if any?

>>> Here’s a response from Jo, who blogs here.

“Most surprising success, for me, is the Pimp My Ride type of TV show. I mean, Romania is a country with a (one) national car: the antic, famous, totally outdated Dacia (maybe Cristi adds a photo of a 1310 model, the most popular). Despite recent enhancement (the state owned company was bought by Renault, who gave Dacia a radical makeover, which is equally popular and outrageusly expensive), the streets are still dominated by the old model. The idea of pimping a Dacia meant putting a Mercedes sign in front, fluorescent lights inside, bright green police vests on the front chairs and, of course, a CD hanging from the mirror, to fight radars.

Suddenly, now, everyone is watching Pimp My Ride and keeping their cars in repair shops to add useless features and to turn them into orange street monsters. Average salary is 230 USD.”

>>> Here’s a response from Karla, who has also recently returned home after a few years in Germany:

“Depending on how you define ‘surprisingly popular,’ I’d say:

– The 4th of July: every year we are reminded by all Romanian media channels that the US celebrates its independence and every year we send all Americans and their president warm greetings and thoughts of eternal friendship.

– Valentine’s Day: we would have our own “Lovers’ Day” ten days later, but February 14th has become widely popular.

– Ghetto hip-hop: a friend of mine has a son, who listens to Romanian hip hop bands singing about Romanian ghetto life. Now, that same friend has been in the States and has returned with a totally new take on the concept of “ghetto”… but I guess the bad-boy-ghetto-gangsta-man-look appeals to the Romanian crowd too.

Everything else that comes to my mind is shifting away even more from your question of ‘pop culture’ and moves toward other cultural bits that we have imported from the US. But that’s a slightly different story.”

>>> Here’s a response from Dudu, my brother, who consumes (read “downloads”) a whole lot of American culture:

“I guess I could say my favorite TV shows, and a most of my friends share the same opinion, would be Lost, Desperate Housewives, Nip/Tuck, The O.C. and a series I really enjoy is Entourage. In Romania we could say that from all of these shows, Lost and Desperate Housewives have gathered the most viewers. Great story lines, complex characters, ‘pizdos’ [let’s say it means ‘awesome’] actors; that’s what we enjoy.”

I graduated from “Colegiul National Alexandru Papiu Ilarian” in 1999. It became Colegiul National (National College) the month I graduated. Before it was just known as “Liceul (High school) Alexandru Papiu Ilarian,” or simpler, Papiu. It’s still a high school despite its fancy name. Most of my family went there and my cousin is the most recent graduate as of a couple weeks back.

Papiu has been around for almost 90 years and has constantly been regarded as one of the top high schools in Mures county. Many people still call it the best but I haven’t done enough reporting to make that claim myself. I graduated with an emphasis in math and physics although I ended up in the class because I botched my entrance exam (I remember being sick and blowing my nose on the floor because I was a neanderthal-type 14-year-old who did not carry napkins around). The several areas of emphasis offered (computers, foreign languages, social sciences etc.) are mostly code words used to rank a dozen classes by importance. Math-physics was among the last and I was bad enough at both to find journalism as my personal salvation.

I had a good time at Papiu despite being nearly kicked out after my freshman year for setting a record number of missed classes. Contrary to what my professors believed, I was not spending time in bars drinking, doing drugs and buying sweets for cute 14-year-old girls. Still, it is true I spent too much time reading trash literature, including Sandra Brown and Sidney Sheldon. My other reading habits at the time consisted of science fiction and the oeuvre of A. E. van Vogt, Frank Herbert and Isaac Asimov.

I started a high school newspaper called the “Vocea Papiului” in my sophmore year and edited the thing for two years, which pushed me in the direction of journalism and allowed me to approach cute 16-year-old girls (major perk). Then, some forgetable hair styles later, I graduated.

When I visited Papiu yesterday I decided it was time to take the camera along for the ride. The building is in a horrible shape with almost everything falling apart, which is the fate of many old Romanian institutions with any kind of reputation, where the little money available is spent on crap such as a protective fence around the courtyard.

Welcome to Papiu, the chosen educational establishment of snobs from along the Mures valley. I hope you’ll enjoy this photographic tribute.

Welcome. This is the front of the building and yes, that is the statue of Mr. Papiu outfront, a man who aided revolutions, cultural development and jurisprudence. And yes, we did have to do essays on him. At least I had to.

Students over the years have said the large and (largely) dark hallways make Papiu look like a prison. The fence they built in the late 1990s around the courtyard to prevent students from jumping to skip classes only helps fuel that comparison.

My cousin says they are fixing up the girls’ bathroom. The truth is the tiles taken off the walls and the doors yanked from the stalls are the only ones to have been damaged for reconstruction purposes. The rest has looked creepy for a while.

There are about 1,000 students in this high school every year. Every 50 minutes, most of them come out here for “pauza” (break). There is a 20-minute break in mid-day. Before the days of the fence, students would leave the courtyard to go get food, smoke or just cut the next few classes. Many great soccer memories were built out here.

The boys locker room next to the gym has been a scary sight for the decade I have known Papiu. We rarely did more in there than wash our smelly arm pits after gym class. This room was so awful we prefered to change in the classroom.

Here’s a shot of the gym. We only used it when the gym teacher forced us to stay inside for basketball. We preferred the courtyard for soccer no matter the weather.

The closer you are to the teachers’ lounge and the amphitheater the better classrooms tend to look. Here is the classroom that my brother and my cousin studied in. The single student benches are a recent addition–my brother says they weren’t there when he graduated in 2003.

My classroom was removed from the central hub of the building and has thus always been smaller and dingier. Days spent at that blackboard in math class still give me occasional nightmares.

Some classrooms have relatively newer benches, but I found this relic in my old classroom. I used to sit in one of these. Notice the scribbles inside the bench–that’s generations worth of wisdom. People loved these benches because they had a solid piece of wood on the front and teachers couldn’t see what you were doing underneath. Think cheating more than anything else.

The posts made over the last few days originated in my hometown of Targu Mures (also called Targu-Mures, Tirgu Mures and more recently Tirgu-Mures; the latter is the spelling used by city officials). This Transylvanian town is the place I was born and the city I lived in until I went off to college. My family still lives here.

Some Targu Mures trivia (if you’re that curious, you can learn more about it from Wikipedia or by asking about it in the comments section):

— The settlement is about 700 years-old but carries its current name since the early 1600s.
— About 150,000 people live here. Population is almost evenly split between Romanians and Hungarians. Hungarians were the majority ethnic group for many years.
— This ethnic division was the background for clashes in the spring of 1990, a gruesome moment in the history of the city, when Romanians and Hungarians performed serious street fighting moves on each other. A few people died, hundreds were injured. Many later scored jobs dispersing spontaneous demonstrations with random acts of violence (that’s me putting a lighter touch on people taking bats to the head).
— The city has a soccer team, ASA, that in less than two decades managed to go from the first league down to the fourth. It spent the bulk of this spiral of doom in the second league. Today it is a horrid team.
— When communism fell in 1989, the city had at least six movie theaters. Now it has only two, both are single-screen.
— Aside from the ethnic strife incident Targu Mures is known to other Romanians for making photo-processing chemicals and leather garments; both those industries are just about dead. The city also used to make 1980s-style entertainment centers dubbed ElectroMures. Their gray amplifier would look sleek even by today’s standards.
— The city also boasts a decent theater scene in both Romanian and Hungarian languages.
— Medical care in this city is also well regarded. The local medical school recently celebrated 60 years. My old high school is closing in on 90 (as you’ll see in a future post, the building does look its age).
— Beginning last year it began playing host to a four-day long musical festival, Peninsula (Felsziget) a smaller sister to the better known Hungarian festival in Sziget. This year’s hostilities will be chronicled on this blog next week.

Below is a picture from the City website — the building in the middle is the theater.

Yes, you’ve heard right. Air conditioning is making steady inroads in Romania, but there are relics of the olden days before we got all Westernized and shit. The sight of an old Dacia brings to mind not only our national obsession with opening the windows to create a breeze, but it also displays our artistry when it comes to curing smelly feet.

The wonderful citizens in this car are performing an act of what some of us would call “taranie,” or as the literal translation would have it, “peasantism.” Not every second car comes with a pair of feet hanging out the window, but when one carries them, there is a strong possibility it will be an old-school Dacia.

The sweet irony in this picture is that the license plate says the car is from Sibiu country. The city of Sibiu has been designated the European Capital of Culture of 2007.

How does this pastoral scene look in motion? Check out the video below:

In soccer crazy Europe we say the game is not a matter of life and death–it’s more important than that.

The saying doesn’t only apply to the Romanian national team trying to make the World Cup or our pathetic club teams struggling to save face on the European scene–this also applies to 6-on-6 backyard games where there is nothing at stake but the manly pride of players. A young Romanian male playing with his friends is not just kicking it around for exercise; he plays for a moment of glory and heroism, hoping his lousy job and fashion-unconscious haircut will be forgotten by the rest of the team. He plays to show he has balls–enough of them to pleasure a whole squadron of drooling 16-year-old girls, whom society has told that there is nothing weirdly creepy about being the love interest of men 25 and over.

Last night, my brother and I stood next to 10 men who felt more or less like the above. Battle runs thick through the Romanian veins and last night it pumped at full speed as rain was pouring and making every touch a struggle. For those who don’t understand–there is something very Herculean about braving the elements for the love of the game.

One summer night when I was a kid I stayed out late because the team from our block was playing some boys from a couple blocks away in a particularly charged encounter. It was raining, it was dark and the fight was won. My dad finally found me and hauled me home grabbing me by the ear. He administered me some slaps as we headed inside and left me in the hallway as he fumingly went to prepare a hot bath for his illness-defying-god-of-soccer son. I stood in front of the mirror, drenched and imagining I was Rocky being pounded by Apollo Creed (or Ivan Drago if you wish). There was no blood or bruises, but the wet hair sticking to my skull, the exhaustion and the eventual glory were close enough. “Adriaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaannnnnn,” I probably screamed at the mirror.

Last night was the first time in four (or is it five?) years that I found myself playing soccer on home soil. I was like a Major League Soccer transfer, an East Coast white guy from the suburbs who had spend his past couple of years playing with Americans of various skills and even worse, women! What kind of pussy was I? There I was on astroturf (which was locked inside a cage so the ball doesn’t fly to far), thinking of our Missouri based Church of Soccer, a Sunday morning endeavor that never got as intense as the hour spent with these local dudes. Back in the US, they thought I was spoiling the game because I kept score–they never understood how much I had lost as a player and a red-blooded Eastern European male the day I first passed upfield to a woman. On the field last night, I was apparently too relaxed for my team-mates, as if being five or six goals up was not enough. Players were screaming, yelling, shoving, shooting the damn ball from all angles probably imagining cameras flashing from all around the cage and scouts going “hell yeah!”

I felt as if I was wearing a T-shirt saying “This guy played in the US” and I didn’t know whether they would tackle me for that heresy or tackle me because, as someone who left to find the light, I wouldn’t understand know how hard it was to find a field to play on (yes, they pay a monthly fee to play in the cage on Sunday and Wednesday nights at 10 PM–about $300 for eight games).

But that was all in my head because I don’t think any of them knew who I was or how I ended up there. I was just the brother of a guy they knew, someone they wouldn’t pass to often enough because they didn’t know what he’d end up doing with the ball, someone who seemed to be taking it a bit to lightly in victory and they didn’t want to imagine that I could be smiling if we were 6 goals down.

The truth is I probably couldn’t have smiled if we were losing. I’m not that American.

Over the next few months Owlspotting will run a (hopefully) weekly feature where we’ll answer questions about Romania and Romanians. Sometimes the answers will be provided by me, sometimes by other Romanians, who will be introduced at the appropriate time.

Q: Do Romanians drink vodka tonic?

A: They try to do, and sometimes they are succesful. A good rule of thumb is to order the drink in a place that employs a bartender that does more than pour beer. Otherwise, the waitress will panic and pretend to forget about your drink for a few minutes. Then she’ll finally work up the courage to ask: “Ahm, sorry sir, how do you make that?”

And you’ll answer: “Well, pretty much like you make gin tonic. Pour vodka and then pour tonic.”

“Oh, great!” she’ll say happily.

Then she’ll panic again and ask how much vodka goes in a vodka tonic. Even with that question cleared up she will still have doubts. Last night for example, the waitress eventually brought me a glass with some vodka in it and a small bottle of tonic on the side. “Here,” she said. “You do it.”

Truth is that making it yourself might be the safest way to get the drink you want.

>>> Do you have a question? Ask a Romanian! Leave your questions in the comments section.