Romanian Summer Diary 3

Wednesday 18th July, The Anglo-Romanian Dream I.

The summer school is in full swing and truth is in the mouths of children, I’m told. The ten-year olds are pouring their hearts out to their British ‘Miss’. Crisps have been banned in school from September next and the cosmopolitan crisp connoisseurs are ready to take on the world and the offending school vending machines.

One of the older boys witnessed an accident. It’s almost a British journalist’s account: woman munching burger and speeding boy-racer collide on zebra crossing. ‘You call it roadkill?’ Someone had covered her face with a napkin. I remembered teaching Mid-Term Break, and the open box, and thinking this is how we too say our goodbyes, not sealing off our departed, simply treading carefully.

Cristina Pascu-Tulbure.

British-Romanian Connections has been operating in Romania since 1991, and each year Cristina organizes the summer schools staffed with young British volunteers. She says the fascination lies in watching British and Romanians alike teaching and learning, as well as seeing the yearly changes in attitudes, the vernacular, and the home-grown notion of what it is to have achieved the Romanian Dream. It’s a heady mix of old culture, second-hand Western ideals, slight embarrassment about one’s history, and variations on a theme of European unity. Cristina is in Romania with a party of girls from Wirral Grammar School.