Te iubesc România!

I’m there since October and I felt in love with Bucharest and Romania. At the beginning, I was more like “Oh God What I’m doing there?”, “Why did I choose Romania to do my EVS?”. There were too much things that I didn’t like and still don’t like as the corruption, the no-respect for the nature, some cultural aspects of the personality and so on. But well, time passes and I learnt to cope with, to try to understand why Romania is like that. During these months, I also saw other sides of Romania and its inhabitants, that I want to share with you:

1. The Romanians have always a smile for you when you ask them for the direction and some information or in every situations (not like in France).
2. I always have the feeling to be welcome there and to be appreciated for what I am really.
3. I like Bucharest and its eclectic architecture. You can see old buildings just next to modern one, sometimes old building are mixed with a modern one. Bucharest just breaks all the theory about how a city is built.
4. Romanian mountains are just awesome. I only saw the Bucegi Mountains but the landscape that they offer us are just amazing and wordless.
5. I think that Romanian people are the only ones can come to you in the metro when you are in a very sad mood and tell you “Don’t cry” with a huge and communicative smile.
6. You can go to some gypsy concerts and having fun there.
7. Romanians like traditions and celebrate them with enthoutiasm. I don’t like Christmas but I think it was the first time since a moment that I really enjoyed this period. Or during the 1rst of March, they celebrate the celebration of Spring, where women receive small gifts with red and white threads.
8. Romania is in the Balkans closed to awesome countries with awesome people like Bulgaria, Turkey, Hungary, Ukraine, Bosnia and Herzegovina …
9. When you are walking in the street, you are just in the mood “time to reflect” and you don’t pay so much attention on what comes around you. By inadvertence, you go into someone. This person instead of telling you be careful, just tell you it brings “noroc” (luck).
10. When you are waiting in the metro for a friend, you can meet an old Romanian man telling you a French poem “La Seine” of Jacques Prévert, that you learnt in the primary school but you are unable to remember one sentence of it.

I wrote 10 reasons but I’m quite sure there are some other reasons that I forget or I will find out. Because Romania is always continuously surprising me.

Furthermore, since I began my studies I lived in different places, like Angers, Wernigerode or Charleroi. But that’s the first time that I feel like being home. Maybe it’s the EVS effect, yet I believe that it’s only one factor, one reason.

Through this article, I don’t want to say that Romania is perfect. Far from there, there are a lot of things that I’m still recalcitrant with. As I wrote before corruption, their ways of dealing with the environment, but also among others the omnipresent of the Orthodox Church.

Te iubesc România!

P.S. : I’d like to add something about clichés about Romania but I didn’t know how to introduce it in my article. So I will add a small P.S. . Before coming there or even when I came back from Bucharest to my hometown for the Christmas Break. I heard a lot of wrong and hurting comments about Roma community or Romanian people. People didn’t really understand why I decided to come to Romania to do my EVS there, why I decided to move there for nearly one year. I heard sentences like “Tell them that in France there is no work there”, “If you want to see some gipsies, you don’t have to go so far away” or “Did you come back by chariot? “. I just want to invite you to come there and to discover this country and its people. And not only for visiting, because the only comments that you are going to say are “it’s cheap” or “internet is pretty fast”. Romania is much more than these stupid, non-sense, wrong clichés like France is much than Baguette, Fromage and Vin. You will always feel welcome and important there, whereas in France we’ll just ignore, look down on them, and asking ourselves why there are there. Maybe next time, we will meet us, you will ask me how awesome Romania is and not how strange it is or which stupid idea you had to come there. My P.S. is finished.