I’m always looking out for the perfect article to describe Romania and this is it, courtesy of Gandul. Back in January of this year, it snowed. Considering that we’re in the northern hemisphere and that January is in the middle of winter, snowfalls are quite ordinary. It snowed particularly hard in Romania’s southeast, especially in and around Braila, which it has every single year that … Continue reading Throw Transport down the well!
On Sunday morning, one Romanian soldier was killed and five others were injured in Afghanistan. I suppose that’s a “normal” piece of news, as soldiers do die while on missions in hostile countries, including some 23 total Romanians (1990-present) but the more I thought about it, the stranger this became. First, Duane Butcher, the charge d’affairs at the American Embassy in Bucharest (the head diplomat … Continue reading Kak Obichna
Last night I had the misfortune of reading this poorly written and edited piece in Adevarul, an article that includes misspellings and is mostly just a rehash of a government report plus a couple of long quotes from two people in Cluj. The “meat” of the piece however is that a handful of political cronies from the Emil Boc (national) government received plum assignments at … Continue reading Robert Mugabescu
Unfortunately, I’m going to have to largely skip over an important issue to discuss an even more important issue. Today I set out to write a follow-up article about the Bunicuta de Aur, our new Finance Minister Ioana Petrescu, who gave a lengthy on camera interview with the media outlet Adevarul yesterday. During the interview, she revealed that the upcoming increase of 7 eurocents (~40 … Continue reading A Tangled Web
Gosh, I sure picked the right year to learn Russian! Last night, I saw Russian news channel L!feNews report that the Transnistrian KGB shot down a Ukrainian drone (literally bezpilotnik or “without pilot”). Since then I’ve seen several other Russian-language media outlets reporting the same thing. Unfortunately, scaremongering Ukrainian news sources (in Russian) have been showing pictures of unmanned drones similar to the kind that … Continue reading KGB shoots down a Ukrainian drone
All Things Romania 