Expat eye: “whenever there’s an international furor, Romania is dragged into it”

Newsroom 07/04/2018 | 11:30

In our monthly look at life in Bucharest and Romania through the eyes of a foreigner, BR’s resident expat considers the role of the country in the latest international political scandal, and (being British) can’t pass up an occasion to talk about the weather.

 

By Debbie Stowe

I moved to Bucharest five years before its EU accession. Back then, Romania was desperate to integrate into the European business scene. Well, it got its wish! Just this week, for example, it came to light that the highest profile British consulting firm of the moment has done business locally.

What a pity that the company in question is Cambridge Analytica, the shady operators accused of harvesting our Facebook data to help put the US – and its nuclear codes – into the hands of an unhinged reality TV buffoon, and send the UK crashing out of the EU and back to the dark ages, among other misdeeds.

Yes, sadly it seems that whenever there’s an international furor, Romania is dragged into it. There were Romanians named in the Panama Papers of 2016, and even the horsemeat scandal of 2013 was blamed (unfairly, it turned out) on local abattoirs.

Cambridge Analytica is (allegedly) pro-Trump, pro-Putin and pro-Brexit. So have a guess which players on the Romanian political scene it might favor. Goodness, it’s only the PSD! Who would have thought it? The dodgy outfit that has (allegedly) had a tentacle in all the major adverse international electoral outcomes of recent years is (allegedly) on the payroll of the PSD!

But let’s look at the positives. This is a story of modernization and economic advancement. Where once the best crooked local politicians could do was low-tech electoral fraud like bussing country folk around to vote in multiple jurisdictions, or implementing laborious procedures so members of the diaspora queued for hours without being able to cast a ballot, now the shenanigans are far more sophisticated.

And while Romania once considered itself a minnow on the international stage, now it stands proudly alongside major countries such as the US and (for now) the UK, queuing up to pay companies like Cambridge Analytica for access to our data, so it can make everything worse. Every cloud has a silver lining…

 

Cold comfort

On the topic of weather, it’s hard to have a conversation these days without mentioning the Bucharest climate, which seems to have undergone more changes in the last few weeks than the Trump administration.

I flew back to the UK before Christmas, smugly thinking that I’d be escaping the bitter Eastern European winter for the milder climes of England – only for Britain to freeze while friends back in Bucharest were sauntering around in t-shirts in 15 degrees.

Then the “beast from the east” delivered playing field-leveling blizzards across the continent, courtesy of Siberia (those Russians, again!).

Just when I was getting used to the frost, the temperature shot up, and I was left carrying around all the winter gear, feeling guilty that I hadn’t put sun cream on the children. And then another volte face: just when I was about to put the winter clothes away for another year, the snowstorms were back and Bucharest was once again under a thick white blanket – which soon became a thick brown blanket thanks to the traffic pollution.

Here it’s not just the low temperatures and slippery surfaces that we have to worry about, though. “Atentie, cade tencuiala!” signs around the place warn of the treacherous icicles that form on the edge of buildings, which, once the days become a little warmer, start to melt and then plunge to the pavements below. If you’ve done much walking in Bucharest in winter, you’ve likely seen these icicles, or even just large clumps of snow and ice, plummet to the ground ahead of you, or over the road. Find yourself in the wrong place at the wrong time, and it could be fatal.

Fortunately, at the time of writing, the weather is set to warm up this week. But a week is a long time in the life cycle of the Romanian climate at the moment. You might be reading this while lolling on the grass in Herastrau – or snowed in at home.

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