Romania trip report, part 1

I'm not in the habit of blogging about my holidays, but because I was a little off the beaten track this year, and I want to record my feelings whilst they're still fresh, I am going to make this an exception.

aviva_m's parents have been wanting to take her to their native Romania for years, and I've been interested in seeing the places they and, in some cases, their ancestors, came from. (I've never yet been to any of the places my ancestors hailed from, though aviva_m and I might before long go for a weekend in Hanover—the only place in western Europe from which I have any ancestry (my father's mother's mother's father)).

Romania seems largely to be at present a holiday destination mostly for its own nationals; I only heard two British voices the whole time I was there (and not that many other English-speaking ones).

The country was, of course, part of the communist bloc until 1990, and only joined the EU relatively recently, and it shows signs of being a little backwards in attitudes and developments compared to other European countries. For example, from time to time when driving between cities, we would pass horses and carts on the road, and one time also a man transporting firewood by bicycle. There's also no motorway, and not even any bypasses, on the road leading north from Bucharest towards Braşov.

(It was also an unusual sight for us, but commonplace in Wallachia, to see large storks' nests perched on top of lamp-posts in the countryside.)

Regarding attitudes, we were slightly shocked to see a heavily pregnant woman smoking, and just about every taxi driver we used spoke on, or consulted the satnav of, his handheld mobile whilst driving; at least one taxi driver also had put the fold-forward rear seat of his car back into place in such a way as to prevent his passengers putting on seatbelts.

We got the impression corruption is endemic in Romania, and the EU struggles to stamp it out.

Politically, we noticed graffitti everywhere reading "Basarabia e România" (Bessarabia is Romania), Bessarabia being a region formerly part of Romania and currently constituting most of Moldavia and a small part of the Ukraine. I have no idea what Bessarabians feel how this; at any rate, I strongly suspect it ain't going to happen.

The Danube Delta

We started off our holiday with a boat trip in the Danube delta. This reminded me very much of the Florida Everglades, which I visited twenty-six years ago... but without the alligators. At places in the delta there are pelican colonies; it was astonishing to see flocks of birds in the sky and then realise they're much larger, and much further off, than one might have thought, and that all the distant dots are pelicans.

Also in the delta were Lipovan villages: the descendants of Russian religious refugees who came to the area in the eighteenth century. <gets distracted reading about Old Believers>

To be continued...