February 29, 2004
Comparative Ethnology on the Playground
I spent an hour and a half with Alan at the Kisheleff Park playground this morning. It was a beautiful day, so the playground was pretty packed.
A couple of random observations.
One, while Romanians are relatively standoffish compared to Serbs, they are very friendly, pleasant and polite one-to-one in this sort of situation. To give just one of several examples: there was an older woman sitting on a bench nibbling on breadsticks. Alan walked over, picked up one of the breadsticks from the bag (it was on the bench next to her) and began nibbling on it too. I ran over and began to effusively apologize. The woman could not have been more pleasant and gracious... indeed, at one point I thought she was going to offer us the whole bag, and I had to pretend to even less Romanian than I have.
Two... there was a funny thing with the slides.
The park has two, but nobody was using them, because they were flooded. The slides are constructed so that each one has a slight dip at the bottom. The lowest point is not at the end of the slide, where the kid's butt will break contact, but 20 or 30 cm before that. (Whether this is deliberate or accidental I have no idea.) So, each slide had a pool of water a couple of cm deep sitting on it, and any kid using them would have gotten soaked pants.
Well, Alan wanted to climb up the slide anyhow. So, what the hell... I reached down with my hand and, splash, splash, started shoving the water over the end of the slide. It took about 30 seconds of scooping, and then there wasn't a puddle any more -- just a damp spot, which in a few minutes had dried in the sun. I got my hand a little muddy, no big deal.
So Alan used the slide, and pretty quickly all the other kids were using it too. But (I noticed) nobody was using the other slide. Because it still had the puddle.
So after half an hour or so, I went over to the other slide and, splash splash splash, hand-scooped the puddle off that one too. In ten minutes it was all dry and kids were using it as well.
Did I brush up against some important cultural difference here? Something about public and private, or the willingness of people to... do something... I don't know.
Or was I just being an officious busybody?
Posted by douglas at February 29, 2004 10:21 PMReminds me of a trip I took with my grandma in eastern Europe when I was 14. This was back in '92 just after the fall of communism. I want to say it _was_ in Romania, but I'm not sure enough to say that. We were travelling by train and it was very very hot. So we opened the windows.
The promptly fell shut. Aparently, the windows were designed to be opened, but not to STAY open. Over the next half and hour the various Americans on the train came up with all sorts of MacGuiver type solitions to keeping the windows open so they got some fresh air, from knitting yarn elaboratily entwined, to sticks in geometric paterns, to whatever. Point being someone made the effort to get the window to stay open so the cabinet got some fresh air and we didn't melt.
When going to the bathroom I passed cabinets filled with just natives, and in them the windows were all shut. Nobody had cared enough, or wanted to stand out, or work together, or possibly break a rule or taboo, or whatever it was the made the tourists work to find a way to keep the windows open.
Cultural disinclination to bother, some rule against open windows in trains, or just not carring about the heat? I can't say, but your story really gave me a flashback to that train.
Posted by: Mike Ralls at March 1, 2004 07:20 AMI remember we use the curtains to keep the train window open. Of course.. they get dirty. I think those windows are made to stay shut for safety reasons.
Have a nice day!
Happy Martisor Claudia!