Romania, part I (intro):

I know I promised to write this months ago, but maybe the distance helped me a bit. I want to write about Transylvania.

In Transylvania, I saw what I love about central and eastern Europe, something I haven't been able to explain to my mother no matter how hard I've tried. The mix of cultures, the way cultures coexist without losing their distinctness is evidenced here. The settlers were Romanian, Hungarian, and Saxon (the Saxons are ethnically German, though their culture is distinct from that of their kinsmen to the west). The Hungarians live in northwest Transylvania and many of them pursue a way of life that Hungarians from Hungary come over to see. The ethnic Hungarians who live in Romania live how all Hungarians lived 100 years ago. They originally lived in central Transylvania, but the Saxons are mostly gone, now; they left after the fall of Communism when they were permitted to leave. Though these people had been gone from Germany for generations, the German government fought Ceausescu to allow them to return to Germany and a few of them were able to leave under his regime. The rest mostly left after 1989. The Romanians live everywhere else. Each group has its own characteristic style of archictecture; the Saxons lived in fortified churches with Gothic spires pointing up jaggedly into the sky (Vlad the Impaler was a Saxon), the Romanians have rounded churches in the eastern style, the Hungarians have Gothic-style cathedrals but did not fortify them.

Transylvania is somewhere that cultures can coexist reasonably peacefully. Sure there is both a Hungarian National Theatre and a Romanian National Theatre in the university town of Cluj, population less than 100,000. The Hungarians do sort of look down on the Romanians, but they don't kill them.

Romania is poor, though I don't think it's the same level of poverty that travellers see in India. A few Roma children begged for food from us, but most of the children looked well fed and wore weather-appropriate clothing. You would see more beggars in a reasonably sized American city. The farmland is reasonably fertile and if it is stil plowed by horse and human labor, a farm does provide enough to feed a family. Living in rural Romania would be hard work. I was motivated to donate money to Romanian charities when I came back, but I didn't feel the same overwhelming sense of guilt that I've heard Americans talk about feeling in sub-Saharan Africa and India.

Still, though, seeing a little boy with his shoes worn through is heart-wrenching. We were eating outside in a restaurant in Cluj, when a beautiful little girl came up to us. She said something, but saw we couldn't understand, se she pointed to the food on the table. I couldn't eat, so I offered her mine, but she wanted something with meat, so T gave away her food and I gave T mine. She sat on the curb and shared the food with a little boy a couple of years younger than her. I don't know if we did the right thing, chosing to give only food and not money.

More to follow...