I remember sitting in a Washington, DC coffee shop a few days prior to my departure for Romania and chatting with a journalist friend who has visited the country a few years back.
“So what is it like, Romania?”
I asked with a mixture of excitement and trepidation.
“Well… You know those paintings of the four horsemen of the apocalypse? You know, with the plague, pestilence, famine and war? It”s like that, but with more stray dogs.”
I wept for approximately three hours of my flight to Bucharest. What eventually helped stem the tide was a potent combination of reminding myself that I was only going over for a trial period of two months and innumerable miniature bottles of alcohol.
I landed in the pin-neat Otopeni airport and, after being collected by the sweetly shy company driver, was driven to my hotel. Immediately, I was pleasantly surprised by the view outside the car window.
Sure, it wasn”t much to look at – slightly ramshackle apartment blocks, small roadside restaurants, billboards – but it was no different from similar roads in many European cities. In fact, the road into Florence is, if anything, even grimmer, while not having the benefit of being as blissfully short.
Upon arrival into the city I was understandably disoriented, but something struck me immediately: there were no horsemen of the apocalypse, no dirt, no glaring poverty. I couldn”t see a single stray dog. As my days in Romania unfolded, I began to learn just how wrong my journalist friend has been. Sure, I did eventually see quite a few ill-tempered and undeniably mangy dogs and the poverty did, eventually, become obvious, yet despite it all Bucharest was a vibrant, growing city.
My opinion of Romania only improved as I traveled outside the capital – I was discovering a place of amazing natural beauty and variety, a country whose people showed endless kindness to strangers, a nation whose landmarks moved even the most experienced of travelers.
As I found more and more to love about Romania, I became more and more angry: to the rest of the world this beautiful, exciting place was still nothing but a backwards, impoverished hellhole.
As I watched Croatia and Macedonia become tourist hotspots and as Prague and Budapest joined Paris and Rome as major destination cities, all that was known about Romania in the West were the same stray dogs and abandoned children. Romania must be a country with the worst PR in the world.
All of my anger resurfaced today, as I read about the Polish Plumber. It is a charming and enlightening story of how a country managed to turn a xenophobic stereotype into a brilliant PR move.
Poland played on the fears of the cheap labor from Eastern Europe, which for the French took the form of a theoretical “Polish plumber” who was going to enter France and steal French jobs with his willingness to do more work for less money.
The Polish Plumber was one of the major reasons France voted “no” to EU expansion and the term encapsulated the fears of Western Europeans.
In response to this blatant xenophobia, Polish government started a tourism advertising campaign aimed at the French market, in which a sexy, blond beefcake of a plumber smiles seductively from posters with a background of Polish sites. “I”m staying in Poland”, says the plumber, ”come on over”. This brilliant advertising coup managed to elicit thousands of email apologies from the French, as well as a formal apology from the French government, who rushed to assure Poland of France”s respect and undying friendship.
Furthermore, Poland suddenly became a hot news item, and, as a final coup, an article in a popular American on-line magazine, Slate, lauded Krakow as a cheaper and, possibly, more attractive alternative to Paris.
The same magazine not so long ago also published a series of articles on Romania.
Their focus? The abandoned children, the crazed ex-communists and the stifling poverty. Infuriatingly, the article was actually filled with blatant lies.
Some of the gems included the statement that the streets were filled with exhaust-spewing Dacias (Romania is a major importer of foreign vehicles and clunky old Dacias are well on their way to becoming as rare as dodos) and that the Bucharest Mall stands perpetually empty (Hello?!).
Romania reminds me of a shy, but hardworking and talented employee who gets passed over for a raise time and again in favor of colleagues more adept at self-promotion.
The time has come for Romania to demand the right kind of attention from the world. Countries need PR no less than movie stars or corporations. Romanians love their children no less that any other people, its cities are as ancient and beautiful as many tourist destinations in the rest of Europe, and its nature is some of the most magnificent in the world. Isn”t it time that the rest of the world knew this too?
Lola Gusman is an U.S. attorney working for the Marco Group in Bucharest. She has lived in Romania for three years.