There is Bucharest and then there is Romania.  The two are vastly different.  We live three hours outside Bucharest on the southern plains where horse carts are still in common use and every Saturday people gather at a market to buy livestock, grain, saddles and shoot the breeze.  I tell my Romanian friends in Bucharest that I appreciate those things and they laugh at me, embarrassed that Romania is still so ‘backward.’  Bucharest has its charms, but compared to other Eastern European cities like Budapest or Warsaw, it’s not Romania‘s gem or greatest attraction.  Romania‘s strength is the abiding culture of the rural people, its love of the arts and culture, and its marvelous natural beauty (and, for now, it’s much cheaper than the rest of Europe!). 

In the 7 months that we’ve lived here with our three children (ages 6 and under), we have been continually surprised by the open doors and hearths.  It might be because we’re American.  Romania has one of the highest approval ratings of America; we joke they give higher ratings of America than Americans give themselves.  And we also put in a little effort to learn the language so we can greet and offer a hearty thank you.  Either way, we are always surprised by hospitable strangers.  For example, we pulled up to roman fortress in ruins by the Danube River.  Construction was underway to make it an official tourist site, but for now, you can just walk all over it.  A construction worker saw us, noticed we spoke English, and made a quick phone call.  A 50-something lady on a bike road up five minutes later and offered to give us a tour.  She was a local who was informed about the notable history of the place, including the fact it housed the first christian church in history north of the Danube (the foundation of the church was still visible at these ruins called Suceadava).  When the tour was over she said she had to rush home to get her bread out of her coal oven.  Would we like to join her?  Of course!  We walked down the street and into her lush vegetable garden that consumed her entire yard (very common in Romania).  In the back was a small shack with a fire pit where she pushed the coal off a pot and lifted out several loaves of bread.  We sat on stools and broke off pieces of the bread as she proudly told us the history of her family, including that her daughter was now a doctor and lived in Bucharest.  We left amazed.  Did that just happen?  We’ve been all over Europe (I’ve lived in various countries in Europe over the course of 7 years), but we’ve never received a welcome like that in a home so vastly different from our own.  I have other similar stories to tell of hospitality and being sent home with bottles of homemade brandy and crates of homegrown vegetables, which they insist we take.  These are a gracious, welcoming people.

We enjoy the arts and culture and, while Romania is a poorer country, they continue to pursue the arts with the passion of generations past.  The Universities and cities have an overabundance of professional PhD musicians, so amazing (cheap!) concerts are common.  Even in our small town, one of the first things that got refurbished as the economy picked up was the theater.  It might be surrounded by old homes with rusty tin roofs, but it is a glorious piece of architecture that everyone is proud of.  One day, my husband and I attended a concert by a professional violinist that gave us the history of his Stradivarius before serenading us for an hour with piano accompaniment.  Two opera singers recently came to town and performed.  These are all free, because otherwise people couldn’t afford to go.  In larger cities there are opera companies, philharmonics and theaters all with fabulous professionals doing incredible concerts for SO cheap ($15 for best seat on the house, for example).  Bucharest, of course, is no exception and Cluj-Napoca is renowned for its art scene.  We’ve enjoyed this aspect of Romania‘s priorities because we can expose our children to the arts for much cheaper than in the United States.  Any visitor to Romania could take in a couple operas and orchestra concerts and it would hardly dent their budget.  

What I’ve enjoyed most in Romania, aside from the people, is learning more about its history and its context in greater European history.  I’ve seen Trajan’s Column in Rome.  It didn’t mean anything to me until I came to ‘Dacia’ and cities like Alba Iulia and learned more about the outer reaches of the Roman empire which are found in Romania.  I now have a greater understanding and appreciation for the Roman ruins I’ve seen in southern France, Croatia and, of course, Italy.  Visiting the Saxon villages and fortified churches of Transylvania and learning about the impact the Reformation had in this area for centuries, I have a greater appreciation for what I learned and saw when we visited Lutherstadt Wittenberg in Germany when we lived there for 3.5 years.  Driving down the rural lanes, I also notice that every village, nearly without fail, has a WWI monument listing those lost from the village in the Great War.  This part of Europe was transformed as much by that war as the pocked fields and forests of Verdun, which I have visited.  When I visit Peles castle, built by German artisans and so similar to the numerous castles I’ve visited in Germany, I learned how Romania‘s first king was German.  Why would that be?  When I found out, I had a greater appreciation for the workings of governments and monarchies across Europe in the late 1800s. 

And when we visited Sighetu and Elie Wiesel’s house, up north near the border of Ukraine, we were blown away by learning how even this far corner of Europe was no stranger to deportations and the holocaust.  We saw the train lines that took the Jews hundreds of miles to Auschwitz to be exterminated.  It’s one thing to visit Auschwitz.  It’s another to visit a town hundreds of miles away that was emptied of its Jewish population because they were all killed in Auschwitz.  Of course, I haven’t mentioned Ceaușescu or communism.  You know why?  That’s just a small blip in Romania‘s history that in no way frames the entire context for a country.  There’s so much more here than that.