December 14, 2004
Europe glows
... is the title of a recent Zeit-magazine article about the borders of Europe and how to define what is Europe and what not. The article is interesting in its own right but I really like the photo that came with it. It shows Europe at night - glowing. You can pick out single cities easily enough. You can see the borders of the Alps by the chain of lights gracing its northern slopes.
And you can pick out the shape of Romania. Because it's a black region in the sea of lights.
See for yourself:
UPDATE A friend of mine once said that in Serbia, everybody has a persecution complex. In Romania, everybody has an inferiority complex. It's an oversimplification but there is some truth to it.
How else could readers of this blog react like this? I mean, isn't this picture amusing? As obviously photoshopped as it is? With the entire Republic of Ireland black? Almost all of Switzerland and Austria uninhabited? The region in Germany where I come from is also pitchblack, by the way. I mean, it's so clearly tampered with, didn't anybody see the irony in this? Sheesh.
Well, there could be a few explanations for this:
A.) We romanians don't use electricity at all. We use torches and gas lamps to find our way in the dark.
B.) Maybe it was cloudy that day over Romania and that's why you can't see any lights. Ireland and Turkey are also in the dark and it could be for the same reason.
C.) Or those lights come from the holes in the ozone layer who let the light be reflected by the toxic fumes which hangs over the cities. And shows how polluted most of Europe is.
D.) Who cares. No pun intended.
Posted by: alex at December 14, 2004 04:56 PMYep, I like Alex's first explanation. Also, at night, we like to go out with torches and pitchforks to hunt down shameless, inconsiderate and rude foreigners with unfounded airs of superiority. In this "dark country" of Europe I also learnt never to draw my information from just one source. So feast your eyes on this NASA map, darling ! http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap990516.html
I guess it must have been a clearer night !
Tschuss!
Wonder what the German mag is up to? No bias there.
Posted by: jake at December 14, 2004 08:15 PMAre we touchy or what?!
BUT these guys have their reason to be paranoid by all comments implying Romania's inferiority. For a long while now foreigners have depicted us as this barbarians who sell our children and steal what ever we can get our hands on.
For Christ sake, even Larousse put a picture of a gypsy family in the Romanian section...
Posted by: Tina at December 14, 2004 10:58 PMThose images are deeply rooted in the west, unfortunately, but that’s going to chance with time. I was once reading a Romanian translation of “Foucault’s Pendulum”, printed under Biblioteca Italiana collection. That “Italiana” word on the cover must have caught the eye of the lady next to me, in a New Jersey commuter bus when she asks “Oh, you’re reading it in Italian?” You should have heard her say “Ahh” and see the look on her face when she heard the answer, it was quite amusing.
Posted by: Stefan at December 14, 2004 11:44 PMIf I were Irish, or a Frieslander, or an Extremaduran, I think I would also be annoyed. They look even emptier than Romania, which at least has a few lights below the belt of the mountains.
Perhaps it is a Zeit conspiracy against, um, the Irish-Frisian-Spanish-Romanian bloc. Darn IFSRB.
And Calabria is practically radioactive, it's glowing so bright! What (as they say) is up with that?
C.
Posted by: Carlos at December 15, 2004 12:15 AMWhen he first crossed the Romanian border, he was shocked as he always was. It was dark and entering Satu Mare he was surprised by how unlit the city was. It seemed to him almost foreboding, dark figures and clots of people moving in the shadowy darkness of the night.
He shook his head to clear his thinking, he realized that this was just a paranoid whisp passing across his brain. None of these people meant him harm and he would just have to adjust to the relative lack of light in these smaller Romanian cities. Later, he would be surprised to how well lit, how prosperous, how Western, and how bright Bistrita was. Different cities gave different feelings.
And yet, on the road out of Satu Mare to Baia Mare at about 11:30 p.m. he stopped by the side of the road and smiled to himself. In the prosperous West, it was called light pollution. It was a negative factor. But here, half-way between there and wherever, he could actually look up into a black inky sky and see the marvelous, almost fantastical, breath and depth of a billion stars in our Milky Way. It was almost a transcendental experience.
He had promised himself to write for Claudia and Doug a little essay on the various roads that he crossed and traveled along in Romania. Some were really quite good, amazingly good, but even the bad roads he enjoyed traveling because it was Romania. Without a doubt this road between Satu Mare and Baia Mare was bad. However, the road to Suecava was quite good. The road from Bacau through Ornesti and up across the Carpathians to Miercurea-Ciuc was wonderfully paved and a good drive.
What surprised him was the drive from Sighisoara to Sibiu was shockingly terrible. It was interesting however to see how the Hungarian language in signage and what was being spoken by the people had taken root since the new Romanian government gave this freedom to their Hungarian population. Nonetheless, though they may have been speaking Hungarian, and he questioned them deeply on this because it worried him, they still considered themselves to be first and primarily Romanian.
The road from Sibiu to Deva was good, as was Deva through Arad. What he considered to be the Arad road had been so completely rebuilt that he found it difficult to find a place to pull off and he longed for the time before when this road was terrible.
The truth was that it was not the West that looked down on Romania, rather everywhere he went, it was Romanians that looked down on Romania. He found this a particularly troubling cultural trait. He would argue with people the good points of Romania, the love of family, the pull of tradition, the help that everyone gave everyone else in the village or in the smaller cities. He remembered that Christmas gift giving was not a big deal in the Romania that he knew best. Rather, people would celebrate by going around from apartment to apartment and house to house caroling and joining in celebration with old people that were shut in and who so appreciated this thoughtful attention at Christmas. In some far away part of his mind he thought this was a far better way to celebrate the birth of Christ than in some stressful panic in gift giving and vain attempts to buy love or even affection.
Romania was a lovely country, full of wonderful people...he just couldn’t fine many Romanians to agree with this sensible proposition....lol
*************
Parenthetically, I should note that Carlos makes a good point about Ireland and Scotland...ain’t much light there either.
Best Wishes,
Traveller
Posted by: Traveller at December 15, 2004 02:19 AM"And you can pick out the shape of Romania. Because it's a black region in the sea of lights."
Thanks for being a supporter of Greater Romania, as the black region seems to extend well in Ukraine and Republic of Moldova.
Posted by: Tudor at December 15, 2004 09:01 AMWow ! Bravo ! Beautifully spinned !
Shall we agree to disagree? We obviously read your message wrong and you somehow saw an inferiority complex, when it was really just a reduced tolerance to cheekiness ....
And for Traveller ... the art of laughing at oneself is widely spread throughout Europe, so maybe you are not that well travelled after all. Live up to your nickname, get busy and put your walking boots on, mate !
Posted by: Arina at December 15, 2004 03:13 PM