Expat In Romania

This story has been in development for some time, but it's actually more interesting to write about it now that I can link it to a few more elements. Elements like 'Aha!-ness' for example. There is a particular place in my neighbourhood that I walk by daily, and I can't help noticing that the two flags (EU and Romania) hanging over the main entrance are faded, dirty, wrapped around their respective poles, and in such a sad state overall that I'm willing to bet they haven't been changed since the day they were put up. At first, I was like "whatever, typical". Then I realized something -actually, two things: 1. I accepted it, and 2. It didn't make any sense. Part of the reason I was looking forward to moving here is that this is a country where people are more concerned with life than with trivial shit like getting fortune cookies at the end of a meal in a 24/7 Chinese restaurant. That's to say, I'm not exactly anal about most things,...

Believe me, this will tie in with Romania and the everyday situation of people who live here as real Romanians. This brief aside is just to show I'm no longer to be considered a real Romanian: After ordering a beer (insert Ciuc product placement), I thought I'd check google maps, in case I was missing something in the area. I noticed the place had wi-fi, but that it was secured so I asked the waiter for the password. "Murfatlar" he responded, but when he said it it sounded like complete nonsense and I couldnt figure out what letters he just spoke. "What?" "Murfatlar, like the wine" "Sorry, I can't hear or something, what's the name of it?" In my head I was like, wtf are you sayin, bro. "MUR-Fatlar" He, was getting aggravated. "Umm..ok, so how do you spell that" "You're not Romanian, are you?" "Well, yeah I am..." "No you're not." "I mean, it's been a ...

A couple of weeks before leaving Toronto, I shipped six boxes, mostly clothes, books, and some random items - I really wasn't that concerned, I may have mentioned that. They finally came last week and there was some comic relief involved (as there should be). On the way to my sister's, where the boxes were delivered, I was getting all excited thinking how I would unpack everything and make my place feel more like home. My excitement quickly turned to disappointment when I only found two boxes. One was my monitor and I was really glad it made it, it's sweeet and the other was a box full of baby cereal and household items my sister had insisted were really hard to find here, so I wasn't that enthused about it - like I'm going to die without ziploc bags. I would die without my books though, so I called the number on the packing slip to find out wtf is up. It was late Saturday night so there was no reply, but on Sunday morning I got a call. "You called late S...

Wow, lots can happen in a week. The time flew but it feels like a long time ago I was on the hunt for an apartment and still just settling in. I ended up finding a place through another real estate agency, the first guys weren't interested after the 3 apartments they showed me. It makes sense, I don't know why they get in on this gig to begin with. The place I found is big, 5 mins walk from work, and a very pleasant 20 minute walk  to the city center. I'm happy, not much more to say about it, but I did find out that the walls are very thin and now I'm well acquainted with the neighbours... A funny thing happened at work: An invoice came from the National Radio Center (something like that), the fee was about $30 and the only explanation was something vague that the payment was required by law. Nobody in the office could really explain it, except apparently during the Ceausescu regime a law existed where everyone who owned a radio or TV set had to pay this tax. Fair e...

Like other things one does here in Romania, renting an apartment is different than how we do in Canada. There, you look through all kinds of classified media and get in touch with the landlords of the interesting looking spots, go check em out, and then you pick the one you like. Makes sense... Here, you search online and get in touch with the Real Estate agency that 'owns' the listings and then meet with the respective real estate agents to look over the offers. Technically, it sounds more convenient, and I guess it can be. But real estate agents don't really care much for the measly 50% of 1st month commission compared to a purchase commission, so it's not like the service is out of this world. Secondly, it feels like there's an unnecessary party in the process because they're not doing anything that requires expertise or specialized training. When it comes down to it, I'm okay to call around and find my own spot, no reason to complicate things -but thi...

There's absolutely no point to walking around with foreign currency in your wallet when you don't have to. A) It's useless and b)exactly. As a result, I decided it was time to make my first "official" act in Romania and took a trip to the bank. I picked Banca Transilvania because my western-ness thinks it's cool to have a bank named Transylvania while my Romanian-ness insisted I go for a Romanian bank -pro patria and all that. The teller who helped me was young, very poised and very green eyed so I knew it wasn't going to be too unpleasant. The convo went something like this (but in Romanian): "Hi, I'd like to open a bank account." "A personal or business account?" The way you say "personal" here is something like 'physical person' "Physical person please, it's for me." "Sure, your ID Card please" "I don't have one..." She'd maintained a very neutral tone until now...

I had great difficulties spelling out my email to a real estate agent. The thing with Romanian is that it's a very phonetic language (unlike English), so when it comes to reading you just do it without bothering about pronunciation because the way a word is spelled is the pronunciation. Take the word "audible" in English, for example. In Romanian it reads as"Ow-dee-bleh" (with the 'ow' part like the ow from 'how'.) In English you have to form a sound with the 'au', then with the 'di' (which can easily be a 'di' as in Lady Di), then finally the 'e' at the end is silent and phonetically useless; a big no-no with vowels in Romanian. You would think this makes Romanian ABCs easy, but they're really not...there are no rules for spelling things out apparently and I took full advantage by saying some of the letters phonetically (A is 'Ah') and others in English -like the 'eL' and ...