Romania and Bulgaria

This post is dedicated to my Bulgarian friend and former roommate, Denitsa, who left the States  for her sweet homeland this September. I thought it was fitting to post it after the big NYT hit in my previous post, which includes Bulgaria as well.

A while ago I said that here you can tell what influences Romanian cuisine has by the ethnic-food stores where you can find the stuff we eat. Such as feta cheese and fish roe in Greek and Middle Eastern stores, and meat specialties in Russian stores.

The most intriguing discovery for me was that national differences are a lot less distinct than we like to think they are back home. In Europe, with so many different countries and ethnicities squished together, differences are paramount and we like to look at those a lot more than at similarities. Not only we are different, we are unique, mind you.

Far away from home though, all these differences melt away and the similarities surface like a hidden essence. The first time I thought about this was when I took classes with two Middle Eastern professors. There was an incredible air of familiarity about them. The funniest part was when one of them brought various objects to class to demonstrate how, even when we see the same thing, we call it different ways and focus on different details. Among those objects was her Turkish coffee pot. We only saw them for a few seconds and then she covered them quickly with a scarf. No one else in the classroom guesses what that was except for me. And I have no personal merit in this, of course. I recognized it because Romanians brew their coffee in this kind of pot, thanks to the several hundred years of tango with the Turks in trying to keep them at bay. The Lebanese store behind my building (where I am known as the crazy feta cheese woman)  sells the same kind of coffee pots you can buy in Romania.

The funnier revelation about these similarities came when I had a Bulgarian roommate. She overheard my phone conversations in Romanian and once in a while would tell me, “oh, we have that word, too!” That kept happening a number of times until we thought we should start a list with these words. We had a blast doing that.  In about three months, she could figure out what I was talking about.

The frosting on the cake was when I was trying to explain her how we are out of hot water for two-three weeks in the summer in Bucharest for something stupid called “revizie” (which would be “overhaul” in English). For my two American readers, heating and hot water are, for the most part, centralized in Romania. A lot of people installed their own apartment heating systems, but the big system is still in place. Huge swaths of the city are connected to the same heating plant (or several of them in big cities), which closes down for this annual overhaul, although we all think the management and staff are just lazy and prefer to have no work to do for two weeks. No one believes this overhaul involves as much as tightening one screw. Well, turns out Bulgarians have their “revizie,” too 😀 That totally cracked me up. I thought OK, it makes sense we share a lot of words since a good part of the Romanian vocabulary is of Slavic origin (60% if my memory is correct); the language’s structure is Latin, though. But I didn’t expect them to have the dreaded “revizie.” But, since both countries were communist it makes sense that we share the same stupid legacy of that regime, too.

So anyway, many conversations later, we came to the conclusion that we were actually from the same country. We just happened to speak two different languages.