Well, today is Dragobete, a holiday that kinda, sorta exists in Romania (and RM) and kinda not. If you read the English-language link above, you’ll get a nice clean story about how it’s sorta, kinda the local equivalent of Valentine’s Day and that Dragobete was the son of an important character in Romanian folklore. All that is true but, as my wife constantly educates me, … Continue reading Dragobete
Following up on my post A Refreshing Drink of Sweet Water Juice, I thought I’d explore some other common words in the Romanian language which have a number of common variants. When I first moved to Cluj-Napoca and I’d go to the grocery store, the clerk would ask me if I wanted a punga. This is probably the most universal word in Romanian for “bag”, … Continue reading The Net Bag Mini Sack Pack
All the recent events over in Crimea put me in a somber mood, my thoughts turning to that strange old aristocrat Lord Alfred Tennyson and his poem The Charge of the Light Brigade about pointless and foolish deaths on that peninsula 150 years ago. Although thousands of soldiers from Russia and Britain suffered horribly, the Treaty of Paris at the end of that war lead … Continue reading WOTD: Baraj
If you’re like me and you’re trying to learn Romanian by watching the news, you can sometimes get stymied by the (seemingly) hundreds of acronyms that the media uses here. For the past week or so I’ve been keeping a list of the ones I’ve seen. For your own elucidation, here they are in alphabetical order: ANAF – The government agency in charge of collecting … Continue reading Media Acronyms
I’ve realized over the years that I keep writing about gypsies, a race of people that few “outsiders” ever want to bother to understand. The gypsies are just there, usually bothersome, and the most compassionate outsiders just want them to “integrate” and be like everyone else. One of the reasons they won’t “be like everyone else” is precisely because they have so many of their … Continue reading Word of the Day: Stabor
All Things Romania 