Mar
8
Despre generatia celor cu cheia de gat
March 8, 2007 |
How was living in Romania 15-20 years ago? What were the movies we saw? The most precious thing was the key from our apartment that allowed us to get in when our parents were still working: it was a gift for us, a sign of liberty but it was also a big responsability (I remember that it appeared often in my dreams that I have lost the key and that my parents got very very upset).
Looking for some Romanian recipes I have found this article: Despre generatia celor cu cheia de gat . It made me remember lots of things from my childhood: how we learned to count in English with funny songs based on the soap opera Dallas that we had to see entirely, as there wasn’t anything else on TV. I remembered that we did not have TV or DVD, we have some cheap projectors that we used to see on the wall slides of the most popular romanian stories (Mama lui Stefan cel Mare, Harap Alb, etc.). I remembered the biscuits I used to eat, actually two days ago I’ve payed for a Eugenia, in a romanian shop here in Barcelona one euro (with this in Romania I can buy 30). I remembered the biscuits Poieni, full of chocolate. And I remember the Brifcor, the romanian grandfather of Fanta.
I also remembered (smiling) that we did not call each other. In that period there were two phone numbers on the same line so if you picked up the phone at the same time with the person that was on the same line with you, you could talk for free. You could also hear conversations if you picked up the phone when the other was talking, but that’s another story. The idea is that the best friends were always on the same line. I remember that my best friend and I used to pick up the phone at 9 o’clock in the morning to talk for two hours or so (we were living in the same building, she was on the first floor and I was living on the third floor, but it was free, so it was fun).
I remember that we only had one slide in town, and it was always so busy that we had to find other solutions: the staircase was the first one that we thought of: the bad part of it is that we used to tear up our trousers very easily and then our parents got upset, of course. Then we had the edge of a bridge but we found the same problem. The only workaround for this was going to the edge of the bridge after school, when all the kids were out and make them wish to go there and tear up their trousers. Two or three days later the edge was so smooth that we did not tear up our trousers again. The staircase is also smooth due to that.
A very nice article for those who lived their childhood during the dictatorship and in the years that followed Ceausescu’s death. I guess we all can identify ourselves with at least one sentence from the article. I don’t know exactly who wrote it, but congratulations, a really nice thing you did.
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Hey I just read the article. Really good! I remember the games we used to play back then, my mom shouting from the window to get back inside and me ignoring her. I also remember coming back from school and pretending to eat, throwing away the “ciorba” in the toilet so that my mother would think I ate it :)