PREJUDICES AND JUDGEMENTS ABOUT ROMANIA (part 1)

By Alessia Calderalo García- "My name is Alessia Calderalo García and I am from Madrid; I studied Journalism and now I am completing my studies with a Master degree in Social Communication. I have decided to study in Romania because I wanted to explore new places and new cultures, so I took the list of places where I could go on Erasmus and chose the furthest and most exotic place..”.

Sometimes I wonder if it is in our nature to make statements about things we don’t really know... People feel the urge to have opinions about everything, even if those opinions are sometimes blatant and based on nothing. I guess it is a human thing and we cannot help talking about things we ignore, and that is why prejudices are all around ourselves, everywhere and anyhow.

A country like Romania, with many immigrants to other countries, was not going to escape from this judgemental international glance.Fortunately, prejudices about Romani people, poverty or Transylvania’s creepy landscapes are soon replaced by comments about how many beautiful cities there are, how very intelligent and polyglots Romanian people are and how very fun and vivid Bucharest is.

In the moment people have the chance to visit this country, they quickly forget that this was supposed to be a poor country full of thieves, old houses about to crash down and incomprehensible words that had nothing to do with other Romance languages.

Moreover, Budapest has often taken the place of Bucharest when asking what is the capital of Romania, and Dracula is almost everything people abroad know about Romania, ignoring who Vlad Tepes was and, above all, how far from the Romanian folklore Bram Stoker’s tale really is.

A very important aspect is that Romanians themselves never think about the huge steps made in these last few years, about the long development process a country needs before considering itself competitive and most certainly, they seem indifferent as regards education and languages.

…Because Romania is, from the western point of view, a huge gold mine full of ambitious people who really fight for learning, who had very well built ideas and who speak at least three languages quite well, while just a some of us, the so-called “Western Europeans” speak one foreign language besides their mother language….(to be continued)