Expat In Romania

Last year at Easter I heard a poem whose every line was so full of meaning that I didn't want to forget it. I Googled it and then bookmarked it with the intention of sharing. It's been a while, but the day has come.  It's partly in keeping with the theme of my previous post and partly to do with the new year, whose quick arrival makes it feel as if 2012 was about a week long. I'm only going to say two things by way of intro: The poem is much more beautiful and poignant in Romanian, and now there's an English translation.  We die...as if tomorrow It's so sad to ponder that someday, maybe even tomorrow, the trees in the alley where you now see them will remain merry, and in the meantime we'll decay So much sun, Lord, so much sun, in this world after we are gone cavalcades of seasons and of rain with dawns to cool it all again... And this grass will sprout again,  and the moon will set the anew,  in awe, over the water ...

I don't think there's any disclaimer that forces me to blog only about Romania, though inevitably, whatever I do write is somehow connected to living here. A couple of weeks ago, I watched an amazing TED talk given by Benjamin Zander, an orchestra conductor. At the end of the talk, he recounts the story of a lady he'd met, a concentration camp survivor. She told him that on the train to Auschwitz, she'd gotten mad at her younger brother for forgetting his shoes. She said something a typical big sister might say, "you're so stupid, can't you keep your things together?" Unfortunately her little brother didn't survive and that was the last thing she said to him. When finally freed, she made a vow that she wouldn't say anything that couldn't stand as the last thing she'd say. I loved the talk for many reasons, but that little story at the end really stayed with me. I've often thought about it, intrinsically, mostly after an argumen...

It's incredibly easy to get sidetracked when you're trying to analyze the psyche, especially when you're talking about group psychology -in itself a loaded discussion where the lines between fact, generalization, and stereotype are as blurry as they get. Yet, this is what I have to work with, because with each page of Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning I was able to find parallels between his arguments and the mentality pervasive in the life of Romanians. His concept, logotherapy , is aimed at individuals not at groups, and yet, much of its tenets are based on his observations of prisoner mentality in Nazi concentration camps, where he himself was imprisoned during the Second World War. Is it really fair to compare Romania and Romanians to Nazi death camps and their inmates? It depends if we're talking pre or post 1989. Even so I know it's dramatic, but without belittling what a concentration camp was, fifty years of imprisonment in one's own co...

There are tricks to anything we do. Whether it's a specific trick of the trade or a nifty way of extracting a cork from a bottle , it's always about simplifying something that seems difficult. I've already written about hustling, and about trying, and doing, because there's not enough of it here in Romania. At the same time I realize that if you don't know how to hustle and you're not used to being persistent every time you try something, you're not going to be doing much. And that's fine. Not everyone has that pitbull personality, I sure as hell don't. I force myself to do almost everything I do, like writing this post. I was about to take a break today, but forced myself to sit here and type instead. Now I'm glad I did because it's going a lot better than when the page was a blank, white space. Another thing that's not always fun is my job. We're not a big company with an endless Google AdWords budget, and trust me, when you'r...