This aint no upwardly mobile freeway...

...despite what the name might suggest! The town-planners were obviously on a coffee break when somebody thought up "Street of the prosperous", although I must say that it actually looks more attractive with the blossom on the trees, and probably beats my street hands down, even without bitumen. If you look closely enough you can make out the rugs hanging over the fence (apparently this is part of the big Spring Clean, just in time for [Orthodox] Easter, which is on Sunday).

I have been meaning to take a picture of this for ages but not dared until today - this is a local "insurance broker's", parked outside McDonalds! He's obviously very confident about the quality of his product as he's swanned off and left the door to his "office" open.

Money matters

Credit crunch, economic slump, company lay-offs, falling house prices, pouvoir d'achat, and banks going bust mean that this is not a good time for anyone financially.

Money-wise it was a (personally speaking) disastrous time to move to Romania. The country's entry into the European Union and the steady increase in foreign investment had created a wave of euphoria throughout the land which saw flats in major towns changing hands for higher prices than in Paris or Vienna. Even here in Buzău, flats in run down concrete blocks with dodgy lifts and even dodgier décor were being sold for in excess of 130 000€. I myself feel this figure is insane because the amenities available are nowhere near the standard of a provincial town in France (where you could expect to pay the same price) and you'd still have to contend with other inconveniences such as stray dogs and dirt roads. Luckily the situation is calming a little, but rent remains high – up to 1000€ a month here whilst in Bucharest it is double or triple that.

Quite how Romanian people can afford such prices is beyond me. Renault workers in Piteşti went on strike last year to obtain the princely sum of 300€/month. You'd need three salaries just to cover the rent! Even professional salaries seem incompatible with the cost of living, with an accountant earning around 14 000€ annually. The taxation system also means that lower earners are even worse off. Everybody pays a whopping 16% income tax! If you're a factory worker, that's 48€ of your 300€ gone before you've got it home. (Some of the other problems, like people holding down multiple jobs and widespread corruption seem to be easier to comprehend in this light).

The attitude of Romanians towards Westerners is rather a strange one; it is assumed that you have money to burn. This does not necessarily mean you will be taken advantage of, although I was ripped off by a taxi driver yesterday, but you will undoubtedly differ in opinion as to how money should be spent. I was recently ambushed by an insurance saleswoman who tried to sign me up for some life insurance. In Britain or France they wouldn't have looked twice at a 26 year old in jeans and trainers but here I was being given the hard sell. Having explained the formalities, we discussed how much I'd hypothetically like to pay each month. The default amount was already on the screen but "100 €, is too little" she told me, "for you, 150€ is no problem". Err??? My earnings have taken a nosedive recently (I'm paid by the hour for English training, which is not a priority for companies trying to keep their overheads down) but even before moving to Romania this would have been about 10% of my take home pay. Even in spite of the communication barrier, I felt quite speechless. That's an enormous amount to just "find" from somewhere and in the current economic climate I would not be able to do it. How much did she think I made?

What people spend their money on is vastly different though. Numero uno has to be a flash car, preferably a 4x4. This would come way ahead of fixing up the house or taking a foreign holiday. Many Westerners would spend money on the garden but nobody even has a garden here. Restaurants are often empty, there's no cinema, not many bars and cafés and I haven't been tempted by one single garment since I arrived (except on a trip to Bucharest). When they do go out at night, they're not drinking because they have to drive their flash car home. It seems that the trappings of a Western life come at the expense of a Westerner's lifestyle.

The reason that I have been giving values in €uros is not just because it's now my default value for calculations, it's also the Romanian one too. The currency is used for property, cars (even second-hand) and contracts for services, and everyone can convert values into Euros easily (as I write this the exchange rate is about 4.3 RON, Romanian New Lei, to the €uro). People are very optimistic about entering the €uro zone, which they expect to do in 2014 (I think it will take longer).

However, whilst high end goods and services are calculated in €uro (but often paid for in RON), cheaper items are calculated in the local currency. At the market, a kilo of spuds costs 1 RON (around 20p or 0.23€), meaning that change for anything less than one RON becomes fiddly. At the supermarket the price is often rounded up or down, at least to the nearest tenth of a RON or 10 bani. I'm still coming to grips with the fact that coins are more or less worthless here, and that it is important to always have a good stock of 1RON notes because nobody ever has any change.

The most perturbing thing of all is that the RON is a relatively new currency. It came into circulation in January 2005 and replaced the "old" lei (singular leu, meaning Lion) with 1 RON being equivalent to 10000 ROL. This aimed to bring purchasing power in line with that of Western European states. A nice idea, but as people effectively chose to adopt the €uro as a reference point at this time it would appear a little redundant. Also, most people still refer to the old values, meaning that you may be told that your cheese at the market costs 50 000. Even more confusing is the negation of the thousand when speaking, (so that the cheese would now be priced at 50) which always has me asking the seller the price about seven times, before trying to pay ten quid for a block of bland cheese.

At least they are more adaptable than the French. The Malteaser still converts EVERYTHING from €uros to Francs, as do most French people (they've only had 10 years to get used to it, after all!). My elderly relatives in Ireland converted to the Euro remarkably easily, and after 6 months, prices were no longer displayed in the two currencies. Needless to say that this is not the case in France; indeed if you go out into the country you'll find that the people in villages still talk about anciens francs, the value before the devaluation in 1969! I think this says a lot about people's will to change things. Although they're quick to defend the €uro in the face of les Anglais (Mutter, mutter, mutter, we are les britanniques and if I hear one more time about the "English" Prime Minister Gordon Brown I'll scream).

I think I'll just let someone else worry about the money for now. I quite like the idea of being a kept woman.

Our house, in the middle of our street

This is starting to be a habit. Maybe I will begin all my post with lines from popular 1980s pop-songs.

I LOVE THIS PICTURE.

Although neither of these realty gems is in fact mine.

If you've travelled any way outside the tourist loop of Bucharest-Brașov-Bran Castle you may well be familiar with the modern miracle that is the "gypsy palace" some of which may be occupied by a local "Bulibaşă", or as I prefer to call them, Gypsy Kings.

Whilst not typical of most Romanian dwellings, they do go to prove a certain number of things that I have been able to find out about Romanians attitudes to their houses.

For starters, just look how close together they are! If I'd had a decent plot of land like that, big enough to build two houses, I would have thought that it'd be nice to have a bit of space around it. You know, for a garden and what not. But like so many other Romanian houses I've seen, including my own, the building extends as close as possible to the garden fence and you're like to be able to see into your neighbours' property. In this one I reckon they could probably shake hands across the divide.

Yet although you'll not be able to swing a cat between the two houses, you'd have ample room to do so in the corridors. Don't ask me why but Romanians love their big corridors. We've had to stick a sofa in one of ours to try and use up the space. What do you do with a big hallway, otherwise? Answers on a postcard, please.

I'm presuming that the house on the left is unfinished because it is clearly far too sober for Romanian tastes. I'm not making any judgement about this, but the Romanians do love their bright colours! I mean, two such moderately sized homes, with neat and unimposing roofs couldn't possibly stand out unless you painted the windows a violent shade of mustard, could they? (Incidentally, the whole of the outside of our house is painted a similar hue).

So, I think you get the message about these houses (and other scaled down versions) being status symbols. Hence the big satellite dish and double garage, undoubtedly to hold an unyielding gas-guzzler to tower over the plebs in their knackered, old Dacias. Like I said, no judgement, but it does seem strange for me, coming from a background where ostentatiously displaying wealth is seen as vulgar or just plain 'being a chav', to be so eager to bow to the holy grail of avarice. But that's easy for me to say; I was sat at home in my nice warm living room waiting for my cooked dinner whilst watching the Blue Peter "Romanian Orphans Appeal" on telly not so many moons ago.

Inevitably, though, the downside to all this superficiality is the, well, superficiality. In the race to catch up, certain traits such as craftsmanship, attention to detail, and practicality seem to have been forgotten; you need only to look at the photos below to see where the workmanship has not come up to par.

For those of you in need of further elucidation, having been blinded by the décor, that is indeed an ideally placed TV aerial socket for functional kitchen use (i.e. above the kitchen sink), as well as a state of the art extractor fan unit, (a.k.a. a ruddy great hole in the wall revealing woefully insufficient insulation for any country, let alone one which suffers such extremes of temperature).If only the property market weren't so slack at the moment, I think I'm discovering a real talent for Estate Agentese. A.k.a.Bullshit.

As if that's not enough, all the interior walls are also made up of concrete breeze-blocks. Great in the event of an earthquake (Buzău is at the epicentre of Romanian seismic activity, apparently. Why did nobody tell me this before I moved here? At least they only have a bad tremor every thirty. Guess when the last one was….1977. Looks like they were waiting for me to arrive) but not so great if all you want to do is hang a few pictures.

Good thing Hello aren't coming until next month then.

la petite anglaise

Catherine Sanderson, aka petite anglaise, has become my new idol this last week. Her brilliant blog has had me engrossed for several reasons, which I'm about to come to, even if I'm terribly jealous of her fantastic gift she has for prose and annoyed about the fact that she's done it all first.
By checking out http://www.petiteanglaise.com/ , which I recommend to anyone, you'll soon be embroiled in the sagas of her (sometimes deeply complicated) personal life. Bridget Jones-esque (I'm sure she's sick of this particular comparison), and surprisingly candid, she has built such a rapport with her followers that thousands of people probably now feel, as I do, that they know her. The success speaks for itself as she is now a published author, firstly of her 'memoirs' and there is also an upcoming novel in the pipeline.
Before she underwent the drastic transformation from bored mum/secretary to postmodern representation of nouvelle célébrité, "petite"'s posts had a somewhat different emphasis. There she was, night after night,in her Paris appartment, waiting for her long-term Frog partner (appropriately nicknamed "Mr Frog") to return home, having put their little "tadpole" to bed. She pines for the hedonistic days of her first few years in Paris which sit in stark contrast to the metro-boulot-dodo she now exists through. She tells us what it is really like for a "little English woman" amongst all these French people - and I fully concur. They are hypochodriacs, obsessed with their bottoms and women can be very cold to other women (no offence to any froggies reading this, not least my own Monsieur Grenouille). But why did she have to write down all of these well observed and timely anecdotes before I got to get my stories out?
I had this idea that my blog would be the Romanian equivalent. Immitation is the most sincere form of flattery, hence my pseudonym, englezoaica. Yet somehow the comic events don't flow as they did when I first arrived in France. I don't understand enough of the language/culture to recognise these little "quirks" and I don't have other expat friends to compare notes with (whilst simultaneously cackling like drains).
Thinking about it, perhaps the real problem lies in the fact that this blog is making me nostalgic for my life back in France. So until that passes, there may be future indulgence of past stories that belittle the French.
Pas de problème, I hear you cry???

I have arrived

Just like pulling off a plaster, it's best to get it over and done with!
Sitting round in my empty flat in France, just waiting to be able to get on that plane and jet off to....er....Buzau, was doing my head in a bit.
So, not location numero uno for your hols, but now I'm finally here I have to say it is pretty fab!
As yet I have no photos to upload (the slight lack of a camera being the main handicap in this affair) but when I do I will not only be able to regale people with my interesting stories, but also illustrate them.
So, until I have suitable material for your eyes, here are some snippets to whet your appetites;
1. I see horses and carts on my street on a daily basis
2. When we moved into the house there was no electricity
3. I have already been bitten by a stray dog and approached for money by children
4. In my first two weeks here I have successfully negotiated getting home insurance, transferred money and bought stamps (the last being the most difficult) in Romanian
5. I had my first Romanian clubbing experience, complete with gypsy music. It was fantastic!

And for all you sceptics, five things that buck the stereotypical view of Romania;
1. Most things in the supermarkets are just as expensive as in Western Europe
2. There are two brand new shopping malls within walking distance, selling the same goods as back home.
3. My internet connection is faster here than it was in France.
4. All my neighbours are very friendly and surprisingly generous
5. It's not that cold - been above 0°C eveyday since I've been here

Craciun plăcut din România (even though I'm off to France and then UK for the holidays as of tomorrow)

In the run-up to thinking about packing...

With just weeks to go before I embark on my new life, preperations for the move are surprisingly tardy. Even rather elementary requirements, i.e. a place to live in our new country, have, as yet, been unfulfilled. But we remain blindly and naively hopeful that everything "will be alright".
This is not the first time I've upped sticks to a different European state but I can say with all honesty that the fears about this move are altogether different. People delight in regaling their stories (rarely first-hand) of rabid dogs, bare-footed orphans and blatant and widespread corruption, not to mention vampires. Before moving to France I was worried I'd be made to eat calf's brains (which I now know are delicious, of course!).
Occasionally people have spoken of the beauty of Romania (which I can attest to) but they are often sceptical as to whether this extends far enough down the Carpathians to the town of Buzău, which will be my home for the next three (or so) years. In response to this, I must say that esthetically-pleasing town-planning may not have been high on the list of priorities for the party big-wigs back in the day, but that living for three years respectively in Sheffield and in northern France does teach you to look beyond the surface.
However, the real sticking point is likely to be the isolation. I've been grappling with the Romanian language now for eight months. Although I'm making progress, I am nowhere near the level I had in French before crossing the channel five years ago, and will not be accompanied, like I was then, by other like-minded but equally clueless Brits for moral support, trips round Carrefour and drinks in the pub afterwards.
I will have my boyfriend, I suppose, who, despite being French, is pretty nice to have around most of the time.
And if he's really getting on my nerves, maybe I'll adopt one of those stray dogs....