{"id":12596,"date":"2013-10-08T17:15:37","date_gmt":"2013-10-08T16:15:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=12596"},"modified":"2013-10-08T19:38:28","modified_gmt":"2013-10-08T18:38:28","slug":"ruminations-on-romania-2-people-and-politics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=12596","title":{"rendered":"Ruminations on Romania (2): people and politics"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>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.<\/li>\n<li>\u00a0The population of the capital Bucharest is almost 2 million.\u00a0 There are now only 2,500 Jews and a mere two functioning synagogues in the capital.<\/li>\n<li>\u00a0Romanian is a Romance language like Italian, French and Spanish, so my sister Silvia &#8211; who speaks these three languages &#8211; was fascinated by the similarities and differences and surprised at how useful her Spanish was in Bucharest.<\/li>\n<li>\u00a0More people smoke in Romania than in the UK. Smoking is still allowed in caf\u00e9s and restaurants.<\/li>\n<li>\u00a0Our taxi drivers never seemed to know where the museums we wanted to visit were located and clearly had never heard of the Jewish Museum.\u00a0 It seems that they are used to dealing with business visitors only.<\/li>\n<li>\u00a0When 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.<\/li>\n<li>\u00a0The 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.<\/li>\n<li>\u00a0The 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).<\/li>\n<li>\u00a0We 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.<\/li>\n<li>\u00a0The economic growth rate is expected to be 2.2% for 2013.<\/li>\n<li>\u00a0The official unemployment rate is 7.5% but it was suggested to us that the real rate was more like 20%.<\/li>\n<li>\u00a0We had a two hour conversation with the president of one of the five national trade union centres in Romania.\u00a0 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).<\/li>\n<li>\u00a0We had a one hour conversation with Mircea, the brother of a Romanian friend of mine in London. Fascinatingly, his father was &#8220;a honest communist&#8221;, one who joined the party in the early 1920s and was imprisoned for his beliefs. Prior to the advent of\u00a0Ceausescu, he was an ambassador in Argentina, Turkey and China\/North Vietnam.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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. \u00a0The population of the capital Bucharest is almost 2 million.\u00a0 There are now only 2,500 Jews and a mere two functioning synagogues in the capital. \u00a0Romanian is a Romance language [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12596","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-my-life-thoughts","category-world-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12596","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12596"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12596\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12605,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12596\/revisions\/12605"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}