Bucharest city tales: A Danish girl in Bucharest and her unexpected love for Romania

Columnist Eleonore af Schaumburg-Lippe writes in her weekly column about life as an expat in Romania. This week she tells about her first encounter with Romania and how she has unexpectedly ended up loving the country. I met a friend here in Romania a few days ago, somebody that I hadn’t seen for a long time. He looked at me, and said: you changed a lot. I answered: “Well, it is just the dress and makeup that is different and then I also got older,: but then he looked at me and said: “Since I am older than you I can tell you, it is more than that: You have grown up”. This made me reflect about my stay here in Bucharest. Living in Romania is sometimes like living in a movie, sometimes it is like a Godfather movie, and a country you would expect to find only in a movie. Other times it is like a fairytale, and you can’t comprehend how amazing life can be. When I moved to Bucharest, I found it all very exciting, and sometimes I had to pinch myself in the arm, to realize I was really here. Everything, and here I mean everything, felt new, it was frightening and adventureous at the same time. Crossing the street made me almost panic since I had never seen so many car lanes before, trying to cross the crossings when there was a bus, car and a tramway at the same place made me jump around like a headless chicken not knowing where to go. The language sounded like one long sentence without any breathing brakes, and I told myself I would never learn to understand it. Trying to buy something or participate in conversations was really frustrating since I couldn’t communicate, I remember feeling like a 2 year old who couldn’t speak yet. In the beginning I was always meeting friends (well I only knew one person when I got here) either in front of Hotel Intercontinental or the Athenaeum, the two pillars in Bucharest, where I could find my way to and from, since the streets seemed like an endless labyrinth, and I got lost many many times. I began to see the Athenaeum as my second home, and I attended several concerts there, almost every week. Quite quickly I began to meet a lot of people. Being a foreigner here of course affected the number of people that I meet and the events I participated in. I traveled a lot around the country. Seeing the wonderful and for me the very big country, where suddenly 8 hours traveling a car was nothing, and seeing street signs with '385 kilometers to Bucharest' was something new. I think that after 3 months I had taken more than 5,000 pictures. I was taking pictures of almost everything, trying to capture the moments and everything that was new in my life. After some months reality hit me, and it really hit me: I remember feeling extremely lonely, lonely to the bone. Not being close to my friends in Denmark was painful, it was like people didn’t understand me here and I felt like I had landed on Mars. But slowly things began to change. And after some months my life suddenly changed, moving its core from from Atheneum to Lipscani, where my expat life would begin, I was still going to a lot of events, but I had now made my first encounter with other expats, and began now to go to Lipscani several times a week, meeting friends and enjoying evenings out until late hours. But after a while it all got too superficial for me, and it didn’t bring me the same joy anymore. I pulled the plug and then I began to focus on what I would call the search for real values, something deeper, new places and a new focus. This opened up the doors to a more integrated life in Romania, where I would focus more on charity, trying to help others and I began to make Romanian friends, and I integrated more and found my path. One thing I learned was that Romanians live very much in the present time, something we talk about in Denmark, but don’t really comprehend, since by nature we plan. Coming to Romania really made me understand how it is to live in the now, adding a bit of my Danish planning though. So thank you to my Romanian friends and for the Romanians I have meet along the way for helping me integrate, many have followed my journey, and have indeed been very kind and helpful to me. In Romania I have meet the nicest people in the world, but I have also meet the opposite, mean people acting in a way that I didn’t think was possible. I had to accept that I was different here, and often taken for a tourist, and for many Romanians there is this underlining feeling that as an expat you will probably not stay forever in Romania, and this can affect your friendship and relations. But I learned to be patient, and I still use this strategy once in a while, when Romania becomes too much to handle, which happens to everybody, even Romanians living in Romania. Then I pull the plug and focus on new meanings among my loyal friends group of Romanians and expats. And now life is like a holiday that never ends.