Going back in time.
Romania, as you may be aware, has suddenly been transfixed by political shenanigans. As I mentioned a couple of months ago, the previous government fell and was replaced by one led by a man named...
View ArticlePodcast recommendation on Rosia Montana
This is a good podcast from the BBC about the Rosia Montana gold mine controversy http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/docarchive#playepisode9Seems pretty fair and even handed to me. I think Eugen...
View ArticleDark secrets of Romania's 20th century
Today seems to be "serious international media cover some of the hidden shit in 20th century Romania" day.Here's Al Jazeerah on the Securitate and its cover up in the wake of the fall of the Ceausescu...
View ArticleRacism and the Occupation
Something I wrote yesterday in another place. This has nothing to do with Romania or Transylvania or anything else. It's just at the top of my mind. I do not use the word racist lightly. I have...
View ArticleMore elections
There's a parliamentary election this weekend in Romania. It'll be rubbish. There is nobody I would trust in Romanian politics, and all of the parties are basically a bunch of corrupt self-obsessed...
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What appearing on Adevarul can do for an otherwise moribund blog...
(Yesterday, for those who are not aware, a post I wrote last year about how the Romanian education system fails to really help kids who do not speak Romanian as a first language to speak Romanian well,...
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Stepping back
OK. This has got a bit out of control. I have now made Adevarul's front page and I am getting contacted by journalists, people thanking me or otherwise being very nice, and others who are sending what...
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Sigh of relief
It seems like the bulk of the attention has blown over and I can now go back to the normal barren desert of this blog, occasionally frequented by tumbleweed. Some interesting things came out of my...
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Emigration - the flip side of the coin
It's been a week of bile and attempted humour about immigration. Specifically Romanians and Bulgarians coming to Britain They are apparently lined up in their hundreds of thousands, possibly...
View ArticleHard ideas in simple language
Explaining complex ideas in the thousand most common words in English. It's not easy. But here you can try http://splasho.com/upgoer5/Here's my effort:Some people live here. They have been living here...
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Nothing to see
Romania this week has been rocked by scandalous and shocking internet & media based inter-ethnic conflict. Or so we are told.Regional flag in Neamt. Somehow not so scandalousWhat actually has...
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Flogging a dead horse
Spot the differenceBritain is in crisis mode with shock and disgust being expounded in equal measure, over the fact that a large amount of cheap meat products (burgers, frozen lasagnes, etc) have been...
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Imaginary horses
A bit of road where horses are actually bannedYesterday I read a number of articles in the British press stating, without doubt, that a new law in Romania had been introduced banning horse (and donkey)...
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Who are the Székely? (2)
Some time ago (by which it seems I mean 7 years. 7 bloody years!) I wrote a post entitled "Who are the Szekely?", which was an attempt to fill in a bit of the back story of the Székely people who...
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Emigration (brief reprise)
There's a weird new thing connected to emigration. Let's call it voluntary superficial auto-Magyarisation. It works like this:Under the new Hungarian constitution, people who can prove Hungarian...
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Notes from the new front line
The flag debate drags on and on and ...Political capital is made by both sides in perpetuating it. Easy to whip Romanians into a fury over this treacherous irredentist piece of cloth, and easy to whip...
View ArticleDon't tell me...
I've been away for two weeks, and am currently writing from an airport on my way home. Please tell me this flag bollocks has blown over?It hasn't has it?Can we form two new countries - an autonomous...
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The beauty of traffic
Ha Long Bay. You know the oneI've been in Vietnam for the last two weeks, my third visit in the last three years. It's a great place, with nice people, some really wonderful sights (this time I went...
View ArticleGood riddance
Predictably there's a lot of bleating about how one shouldn't speak ill of the dead, or a plea for some decorum in the response to what effectively is the death of an old, senile woman. But Thatcher...
View ArticleFire and Traffic interface excitement
A small coda to my recent post on Vietnamese traffic. While in Danang, on a couple of occasions I sat at a riverside bar and watched as they tested this flame-throwing dragon out. Now it has...
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