Primii care s-au bucurat de zapada au fost, bineinteles, copiii

As eagerly awaited as Christmas itself (but not, of course, as eagerly awaited as the highlight of Christmas: The Economist’s Double Issue), it’s time once again to play Romanian TV News Christmas Bingo.

You know the deal.

As all Romanian media outlets follow the same formula when reporting news and events, you can usually guess exactly what cliches they will use at certain times. Christmas is one, hence Romanian TV News Christmas Bingo.

Try it.

Over Christmas and New Year, tune in to the news every now and then and tick off these cliches/scenarios as they get rolled out:

Pensiunile se pregatesc pentru turisti. There will be a report from a pension in a village somewhere (probably Maramures) where there will be much talk of preparing for the arrival of turistii.

In (insert name of village here) pregatirile pentru Craciun sunt in toi.

Turistii (when they arrive) will be interviewed in front of a masa belsugata and will say how wonderful it all is.

There will then be a report from a border crossing point, as Romanians working abroad come home for Christmas. Bonus points for spotting the phrase:

Masinile Romanilor din strainatate sunt supraincarcate cu cadouri pentru cei dragi de acasa.

On Christmas Day itself, the news of the birth of Isus Hristos will be reported as if it were just that: news.

Some brave souls will – whatever the weather – take a Christmas Day walk on the pier in Constanta, by the casino. A Pro TV camera and reporter will be there to greet them. (This exact scenario will be repeated again on New Year’s Day).

Early in the afternoon on Christmas Day, you should expect a report from the Vatican. The following words will be used:

Papa Benedict a vorbit despre (whatever he talks about) si a zis si cateva cuvinte in limba romana (cue Pope saying Craciun fericit). Again, this exact scenario will be repeated on New Year’s Day, except the Pope will say La multi ani.

Boxing Day the action moves to the ski resorts. Zapada (if of course it arrives) will be numai buna de ski. Iubitorii de sporturile de iarna au luat cu asalt statiuniile de pe Valea Prahovei.

In the days running up to New Year’s Eve, there will be reports on how much a night out in Bucharest’s clubs will cost you. There will be much use of the word ‘inedite‘ to describe the ‘surprize‘ being prepared by cele mai luxoase cluburile Bucurestene. Cue interview with manager club who will tell us how his/her club is preparing ceva nemaivazut in Romania.

On New Year’s Day, there will then be footage of tineri dancing in one of the clubs featured the day before.

The prize for ticking off all of the above is a fortnight’s self-catering holiday in the North Korean gulag. Good luck.

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On a serious note, we are depressingly certain that there will be a number of news stories from hospitals on New Year’s Day, as once again the most cretinous members of the population cause yet more serious injury with fireworks and firecrackers.

And, if you have noticed the similarities of this post with that of our Easter Bingo competition, then we are guilty as charged.

Don’t blame us: blame the Romanian TV news channels.

Why do we do it?

Why do we watch questionable talk shows on questionable television channels (in this case Antena 3) knowing how loaded the content is, how subjective the guests are and – to all intents and purposes – knowing exactly what will be said.

Last night the subject was a report that had been run by Al Jazeera (watch it below) about Romania organising Nicolae Ceausescu-themed tours of places where the former Romanian dictator was born, lived and killed. As we have more than a passing interest in tourism in these parts, we watched it.

We should have known better.

Antena 3′s headline (which ran across the bottom of the screen) was the ludicrous: ‘Elena Udrea cheltuie bani publici sa-l popularizeze pe Ceausescu‘ (Elena Udrea is spending public money to make Ceausescu popular).

If you watch the report, listen out for the great line: ‘Ceausescu’s nephew, who has turned his uncle’s home into a shrine, wants nothing to do with the commercialisation of the former leader…‘

Anyway, back to Udrea. As much as we are out of character in leaping to her defence, it needs to be said that she isn’t spending public money to ‘make Ceausescu popular.’ She is spending public money on organising and then promoting a Ceausescu-themed tour which will be sold to a small niche of visitors which happens to like that sort of thing. (And believe us, such a niche exists).

Though we haven’t taken the tour ourselves (neither has anyone: it barely exists as an idea) we doubt it will be used as an attempt to popularize Ceausescu or to rehabilitate him. No, it is simply a niche tour for a niche market.

For – dare we ask – why shouldn’t Romania organise Ceausescu tours? Really, what is the problem? To us it reeks of hypocrisy and – for want of a better word – snobism. We want tourists, appears to be the message, but only a certain kind of tourist doing certain things, such as telling us how lovely our countryside is, how fantastic the Bukovina monasteries are and how we have the most beautiful women in the world. That is the kind of tourist certain people in Romania appear to want.

Radu Tudor, the presenter of last night’s show, said that it makes him sad that ‘the only thing Udrea can find in Romania to promote is Ceausescu, when there are so many wonderful things.’

No, Ceausescu not the only thing she has found to promote. It is one of many things. All Udrea is doing is appealing to a certain market that is interested in such things. As there is a niche for these things, why mot milk it?

There are tours of Nazi bunkers in Berlin. Why? Because there is a market for them.

Honestly, as magnificent as they are, not everyone loves Maramures and the bloody monasteries. (A point we have made before).

If you don’t like Ceausescu tours, don’t take one.

At least by the time it reopens the fossils will be even older

We got a wonderful, unexpected Christmas present a fortnight ago, when we saw this article on the website of Romanian daily newspaper Gandul, announcing with much fanfare that Bucharest’s Grigore Antipa Museum of Natural History would soon, finally, be reopening its doors after a long and expensive refit.

(Similar articles have appeared before, like this one, back in September, which claimed the museum was reopening in November).

Alas the article – like those before it – is, according to the chap at the museum the Bucharest In Your Pocket researcher spoke to this morning, not entirely accurate.

‘The article is not true,’ we got told this morning. ‘The museum is not reopening early in 2011. Call back in August.’

We wonder if the museum’s renovation – it has been ongoing since the beginning of 2009 – will be worth the wait?

Foreign journalists should be banned from reporting anything that does not make Romania look like a modern, successful country.

Absurd?

Yes, but reading through the lines of some other blog posts this weekend, that is exactly what some people have been suggesting in the wake of this story about witchcraft becoming a formal, taxable profession, a story that has been picked up by thousands of newspapers and news aggregators.

Why? Because it is a colourful, well illustrated, harmless story. Any newspaper editor who didn’t run it was a fool: this is the kind of general interest thing people want to read. That it may not be the kind of story Romanians want the world to read is their problem.

Not a word of the story is incorrect.

Romania has indeed just introduced a new fiscal code that legitimises witchcraft by taxing the income of witches. (We wonder if the witches saw the law coming?). Romania is without question a highly superstitious country. One of the first questions you will be asked by Romanians is what is your star sign. (As we have said before, the fact that Mrs. Bucharest Life has never asked us our star sign is not unconnected to the fact that she is Mrs. Bucharest Life). The Romanian presidential election campaign of 2009 was indeed a bizarro-world affair dominated by mystics and purple flames. We wrote about it here.

So if the facts are correct, what is there to be offended by other than the story itself? That ignorant foreign journalists are compounding western stereotypes of Romania with this kind of story and should be prevented from doing so?

Alas, yes.

At this stage it should be pointed out that the journalist who filed this story (the AP’s Alison Mutler) is no ignorant foreigner. No foreign journalist has lived in Romania as long as Mutler, none understand the country as well and none speak such flawless Romanian.

Anyway, we have two points to make:

1. As we said only last week, Romanians (and their apologists) should stop giving a damn about what other people think. It doesn’t matter;

2. If Romania wants to make the foreign press for other reasons, then it should give the foreign press something to write about.

If Romania really wants to make an impact then there a number of ways it can do so. Build the fastest railway in the world, build a metro line in record time, build motorways, install proper sewerage in all villages and do away with rural poverty… There is no end of potential infrastructure projects that – if carried out – would guarantee Romania friendly headlines. Even something slightly less ambitious, such as Warsaw’s new Copernicus Science Centre would get a glossy, positive headline.

Meantime, however, Romanians (and others) simply need to realise that just as they like to read colourful stories about this and that, so does the rest of the world. Colourful stories sell newspapers.

Get over it.

They are at it again.

Not a week after moaning about Romania’s exclusion from some meaningless lists, part of the country’s media has itself all in a tizzy about how many tourists visited Bulgaria in the first half of last year compared with Romania. This article claims that over three million people visited Bulgaria in the first half of last year, while just 600,000 (of which the majority were business travellers) made it to Romania during the same period.

Now, call us cynical, but we are highly suspicious of the statistics cited by Money.ro. Though we doubt not their claim of using stats from the Romanian Institute of Statistics (INS), they do not make the data available, nor do they state exactly what the methodology was, nor what their definition of foreign visitor is. (Nor – for that matter – are we told if the figure of three million tourists for Bulgaria is derived using the same definition of foreign tourist).

The INS itself defines a foreign visitor as ‘a person who travels to a country not his or her own, nor his or her place of residence, with the intention of staying less than 12 months.’ Unfortunately, the INS has yet to make its data for 2010 available on its website to the general public, and nobodies like us.

But the 2009 is available, and for that year as a whole almost eight million foreign tourists visited Romania. For just 600,000 to have arrived in the first six months of last year, something has gone seriously wrong.

Or maybe the figures being quoted refer just to tourists on organised trips?

We would like to know. Until then, we think the Money.ro story is to be handled with care.