The Flying Romanian / Romanul Zburator

Before talking about other types of Romanians, let's talk about Romanians who stay and Romanians who leave their country. According to official numbers , Romania registered between 2007 and 2015 the 2 nd highest emigration growth rate after Syria ! Of course, Syria is at war, but Romania ? With a GDP growth of almost 7% last year – unthinkable in many of the more “stabilized” countries, people still leave, and in mass. I’ll try to get to that later on but let's see who are the Romanians leaving their country and how they relate to their country once they've left. I’ve tried a classification below according to their typical reaction: The Romanian who hates everything Romanian, admitting (reluctantly) they are Romanian (when forced to it), who don't even want to speak the language anymore. This is more of a historical type, like Cioran after WWII. The modern type still speak Romanian (when they have the occasion to do so). I call this category The Romanian ...

Given the period of the year we’re in, I thought I would write something about women and their rights (to equal pay). (Promise, I will come back to my list after that!) March is really “Women's month” in Romania. On March 1st, they are given "martisoare" (symbols of renewal, spring and caring), and on March 8th its' Mother's Day, celebrating all the mothers around the country (remember all those school pictures with standardized love poems underneath?). Well, when I arrived in France I realized that March 8th is actually Women's day, and even the International women rights' day. (Communists have transformed Women in Mothers..) And surprisingly enough, this was quite a shock. I mean, in those early years, I hadn't realized that I didn't have all the rights, or I should say, the same rights as those around me. Because the discriminating line was between rich and poor, it didn't really matter if you were a girl or a boy to me. Howeve...

« Chose promise, chose due » (whatever has been promised is now due to happen). This is a saying I like very much in French, as it is very close to my natural inclination. That is, I generally keep my promises. In this case, reviewing the 7 categories of Romanians I’ve identified until now as living in France (this list should be pretty much the same across Western Europe at least, but it’s not representative of Romania – which is a bit more complex than that – we’ll come to that later). So let’s start reviewing number 6, the most visible one generally: the Romanian beggar . I like this category because it is very diverse and full of surprises . Since I started paying attention, I counted at least 6 sub-categories until now. However I think the list won’t end here – maybe with some help from you guys. (Oh, and before beginning, I want to clarify something: When a non-Romanian says “Romanians”, actually meaning beggars , a Romanian would say “Tzigani”, actually meani...