Happy Easter Romanians, wherever you are!

Paşte Fericit! Frohe Ostern! Joyeuses Pâques! Srećan Uskrs! Bona Pasqua! Páscoa Feliz! Kaló Páskha! Kellemes Húsvéti Ünnepeket! S prazdinkom Pasxi! God Påske!

That’s because the 23 languages accepted by the European Commission felt under our hands. Thanks god it’s only the languages. Yeah, I know, many of the above languages aren’t EU’s, but it’s enough, I guess, for all Romanians from abroad. By the way, more than 90% of the Romanian newspapers and magazines on the internet are written in a strange language, to which you have to mentally add diacritical marks in order to read it correct. Otherwise you can take “face” as “daughter,” “Easter” as “pasta,” etc. Almost all official documents, even those issued by Romanian Parliament and the Justice Courts are written in the same way. Romanian literacy in electronic text editing is a scarce resource nowadays.

But let’s see where we are…

The people are on the streets, markets, and hypermarkets. God knows where they are rushing, and why they buy everything’s on sale.

The good old and brand new prime minister is fighting with the president, being prepared to make an alliance with whoever promises some help for that. Aside, he’s fighting to maintain the tax for imported second-hand cars, which can lead to less money for Renault (indigenous producer!!!) and his own affairs (almost all his money come from importing new cars), whether in his property or not. He says that isn’t good to transform Romania in a junkyard. As if one can compare a 100,000 km Mercedes from Germany, which is still a car, with a 250,000 km “tin can” Dacia, which should be named rather motorized wagon. There are herds of Dacia, all over the place. As if Romania isn’t already a junkyard for cheap, plastic textiles, or every other merchandise not allowed by civilized countries, but “good for us.”

The legislative flock is occupied striving against the same president who’s the nightmare of the prime minister. In this time, all the awkward laws and norms from Europe seems to have found the best place to be enforced: Romania.

The media in its turn is occupied with the political war, crisis or whatever the journalists call it. Each newspaper or TV channel points the finger against the personal enemy of the owner, who becomes for weeks “the first public enemy.” To be more attractive, it envelops the finger in the outstanding deeds of the local or international stars. Recently the limousine of an idiotic character was bumped in an intersection in Bucharest, getting a media coverage bigger than all other traffic news of the week.

The education minister wants to build campuses; the former one bought new vans to transport the children from isolated villages to school. And so, we have an overall investment progress. The education is doing well. So well that in many high schools the main occupation of teachers is exchanging pickles recipes, while the students pay for personal preparations, with the higher level of disinterest ever, most of them waiting just to get the hell out of the school. In colleges there is a more feverish activity: most of the undergrad students are hunting reasonable marks, involving in this effort the entire arsenal they can get: copying from the internet or from colleagues (at exams). There are many cases in which they can get the exams with money.

The health minister is the best. All he cares about is reforming. The reform goes so well that you should be happy if he gets alive from the hospital, with no more than one new infection, other that the hospitalization reason. The doctors are fleeing abroad, as well as the nurses. The older population spends days every month to get the “free” medicines, from which half they don’t even need. But it’s “free”!

And so on… But the people are happy here. They continue cracking the walls for getting nicer houses (most of them in blocks that one could expect to fall down every minute, without any earthquake help), they walk through the alley filled with human, feline and canine pooh, cross the street without taking in consideration the traffic light is red or green (the drivers don’t care either, so, why bother?) and, above all, they cherish the liberty. The liberty to bump into each other, to yell curses, and to get rid of things, all over the place: on the sidewalks, and on any cavity. They throw and stick paper napkins and handkerchiefs, chewing gum, plastic bags, food remains, flower sun seeds shells and all such unnecessary stuff. After that they spit. Satisfaction guaranteed!

But there’s a bright side every time. You can cross the border easier. The official statistics say that around 2,000,000 Romanians are abroad. Methinks that is a gross underestimation. From the village where my mother lives, even the priest fled in Spain. In every fifth house there’s at least one man or one woman gone in Spain or Italy. They are called “the strawberryers,” and probably there are six or more millions of them, not only for picking strawberries (that’s the origin of the name), but for other works too: studying, driving, building, cleaning, taking care of babies and grandmas, programming computers, etc. Happy Easter for all!