The Romanians are fiercely proud of their country, while also sharply disdaining its corruption, inability to function, inefficiencies, bureaucracy, etc. I have been asked too many times to count "Why did you come to Romania?" "Why Romania" "Why you would you come to this shit country?" Yet, at the same time, Romanians are proud of their food, their churches and monasteries, and their history. Most Romanians would leave if they could, at least to work for some time, and some who do leave claim they never want to come back, but inevitably, family ties or some sort of deep-seated love for their country brings them back.
The Austrians have a strange sort of nationalism. They have no fierce pride in their country. However, they are very stoltz about the Austrian way of life: hiking in the Alps in the summer, skiing often in the winter with a schikurs for the kiddies, summer vacations at lakes in another province, and 8 weeks of vacation a year to enjoy it all with. There is Austrian wine for spritzers, an Austrian beer with lunch, nice Austrian bio-friendly produced food for dinner. For formal wear, fashionable tracht is still acceptable, and some of the most expensive shops in town are not the sleek Italian clothing stores, but the mode dirndl kleid gown shops.
The Romanians don't seem to have such an endearing love for their country's folk wear, perhaps since in the Austrian mindset, the rural farm life is a pastoral fantasy more than anything, while, for Romanians, the rural "old" way of life is still a reality outside of the cities. In some parts of the country, people in the villages will still wear folk clothing doing day to day activities. The sleek Italian clothing stores are without a doubt more sought after. "Being Romanian" for people who are poor means drinking tuica and Romanian beer while listening to Romanian modern folk music (well, richer people do this, too). However, Romanians with means seem to prefer getting out of the country if at all possible, while the Alpine happy Austrians prefer group hikes through their native mountains.
The Austrians and Romanians do share one cornerstone of their culture: FOOD. Celebrations, getting together, family time all involves eating, preferably pork and very likely something pickled as well. Pofta buna and Mahlzeit!
2 comments:
To be strictly correct:
Romanians are proud of a largely false propaganda construct of their history, in which they are all good and true but sadly victims of foreign intrigue, the Holocaust (in which we know that Romanian willingly took part) never happened, and communism was of course something none of them participated in.
Romanians are not sufficiently proud of their nation to figure out that throweing trash in rivers is a bad thing or to try and preserve their built heritage, nor so disdainful of corruption that they don't all give bribes when needed and take them whenever possible.
I have come to the conclusion that, for whatever reason, Romanians are like the Native Americans who went to pieces when taken from their land and thrown into a reservation. Of course, Romanians are supposed to be living in their own land. However almost all that is worthwhile there - the architecture, peasant land use, etc - actually traces back to the Saxons and Hungarians. So, yes, they are in a reservation, and they - lazy opportunists - are trashing it.
Admittedly the Austrians will tend to pretend that Hitler was German and Beethoven Austrian. But, overall, they have dealt with those issues tolerably well.
But I know which of the two counties offers civilisation as we know it!
ahhahahahah
It is true that, particularly with nature, they like to brag about their mountains and the natural beauty of the carpathians, but see no correlation between this belief and the complete wrongness of throwing their trash in rivers or in huge plastic piles in pine forests. I think I am the only person who, on trains, grimaces at the sight of open fields totally strewn with plastic bags and litter. Do many of them just look completely by it???
The Romanian concept of history is a topic unto itself as I find while I read old books published in the 70s and every single Romanian author defiantly begins their history books with a comprehensive history of the Geto-Dacians and the Romans and the native Romanians, etc. I met a grad student the other day who vehemently denied that Romanian monasticism might have influenced by Bulgarians- it was a purely Romanian development.
On the other side, though, Rachel met a Hungarian woman who literally denied knowledge of the existence of Romania with Transylvania, and called Bucharest a city "just a few kilometers from our border." Very central European....
Post a Comment