Reprimanded someone yesterday evening for parking on the pavement, meaning that I had to take a detour around his car and on to a busy road. His reply?
“Cand primaria imi da locul de parcare o sa parchez regulamentar. Pana atunci, parchez unde vreau.”
(When the council gives me a parking place I’ll park legally. Until then I’ll park where I like).
Brilliant logic. It is a bit like saying “when somebody gives me loads of money I will stop robbing banks.”
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Hey, Jeroen is our new friend
Welcome Jeroen, enjoy your stay! You’re gonna find here all kind of opinions, from expats and civilized Romanians to communists (that would be me).
Obviously people don’t have where to park in Bucharest and they have to improvise, do whatever they can. I’m not defending those who own a car even if sometimes they should leave it home and learn to walk but they really don’t have where to park.
And on the other hand pedestrians are more versatile than cars, it’s easier for a pedestrian to go around a car than for a car to park where there’s no pedestrians walking.
This is Bucharest, a city whose infrastructural limits are way overstreched. And there’s nothing to do about it lol
What you need is Amsterdammertjes! http://www.huis-stijl.nl/upload/stockfoto/huisstijl-stockfoto-F1133.jpg
Such thinking does not exist here, logic has long been replaced by one’s fists, tricks (mistook for “one’s being smart” in Romania) and ego, as the source of the former two. Earlier this year, I was walking on the pavement (well, sort of going in circles around cars), when I saw this situation: a driver was just parking his big offroad vehicle in front of a gate (like in “right in front of the gate”, no tiny place left for those living there to go in or out of their house). An old lady living there was lucky enough to try to go out that very moment and shouted at the idiot to move away. Plenty of disgust and tiresome on his face, Mr. No Brains moved 20 cm. to the back.
Talking Scandinavia, some 3 years back, after crossing Norway in a rented car and returning home, the colleague that drove it got mad when getting billed twice: one for overstaying his parking time in Oslo and second for driving well past the speed limit somewhere near Bergen. His answers: “well, I might have left the car for more than the 60 minutes I paid, but come on, it was only for 10 or 20 minutes”, respectively “the speed limit was 50 or 60 there, I couldn’t have driven too much faster than that”. More precisely, Romanians’ answer to their own fault is that everything is or should be of little to no relevance. Except for themselves.
Your sum up of that small incident is very interesting and probably an anthropological explanation would make some light into that kind of behaviour. A majority of the urban population in this country is formed by first or second generation town dwellers that still carry with them a heavy cultural baggage formed over centuries in a feudal or near tribal rural environment. In the isolated rural settlements, where most of the population used to live not very long ago, land and nature’s products from wood to game were seen as belonging to everyone. That impression was also maintained during the communism with its ideology of common ownership of everything. That image of the world is now transposed in situations like your incident with parking a car wherever they want.
Love it! Can you imagine? I often think of doing such things. And a test case like this is exactly what we need here. But, but, I just can’t imagine a Romanian judge having the same amount of common sense. Scandanavia is the civilised world.
there was a trial somewhere (scandinavia?) where a pedestrian walked over a car parked wrong and caused damaged – he was given the right to walk across that car