- The population of Romania is around 20 million. There are two significant ethnic minorities: Hungarians and Roma. Less than 8,000 Jews remain in the country.
- The population of the capital Bucharest is almost 2 million. There are now only 2,500 Jews and a mere two functioning synagogues in the capital.
- Romanian is a Romance language like Italian, French and Spanish, so my sister Silvia – who speaks these three languages – was fascinated by the similarities and differences and surprised at how useful her Spanish was in Bucharest.
- More people smoke in Romania than in the UK. Smoking is still allowed in cafés and restaurants.
- Our taxi drivers never seemed to know where the museums we wanted to visit were located and clearly had never heard of the Jewish Museum. It seems that they are used to dealing with business visitors only.
- When we went to the cinema, we found the audience quite irritating because there was rustling of food, lots of talking, speaking on mobiles, and laughter at inappropriate times.
- The current President of Romania is Traian Basescu who will complete his second term next year when he will have to step down. He is a controversial figure and has twice been the subject of a referendum seeking (unsuccessfully) to force him to resign.
- The current prime Minister of Romania is Victor Ponta who is in permanent conflict with President Basescu. He is leader of the Social Democratic Party and young (in his 30s).
- We were told that the vast majority of Romanian politicians do not go into politics for ideological reasons but for the power and the money. Certainly, independent observers rank Romania as one of the most corrupt countries in Europe.
- The economic growth rate is expected to be 2.2% for 2013.
- The official unemployment rate is 7.5% but it was suggested to us that the real rate was more like 20%.
- We had a two hour conversation with the president of one of the five national trade union centres in Romania. Dumitru Costin heads the Blocul National Sindical (BNS) which has around 350,000 members out of the approximately 2.25 million trade union members in the country (a unionisation rate of around half of the working population of about 4.5 million).
- We had a one hour conversation with Mircea, the brother of a Romanian friend of mine in London. Fascinatingly, his father was “a honest communist”, one who joined the party in the early 1920s and was imprisoned for his beliefs. Prior to the advent of Ceausescu, he was an ambassador in Argentina, Turkey and China/North Vietnam.
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