Welcome to the Mild East

Do you remember the first half of the Nineties? No, I am not talking about grunge or the Internet bubble, or even the Spice Girls. Rather, I want you to cast your mind back to the early influx of expatriates into Eastern Europe, storming the former Warsaw Pact nations like Spanish Conquistadors. The aspiring Hemingways of Prague, the hard as nails businessmen set on conquering Russia”s kill-or-be-killed market, the romantics and hopefuls-with-a-head-for-business of Budapest – the tales of their adventures rang across the West and gave birth to more than one literary sensation.

And then there was Bucharest. Moscow may have had more bullets and gangsters, but nothing could beat the expat experience in Bucharest for sheer Wild East value. The brave souls who alighted on the nearly deserted tarmac of Otopeni airport to make their fortunes in this strange land could brag to their less adventurous friends about the shortages of hot water and electricity and the empty shelves of the grocery stores.

Oh sure, the Western expats in Romania enjoyed the untapped business opportunities and the insanely cheap cost of living. But I am pretty sure that what they really liked was the chance to feel like cowboys – weathering hardship of an unwelcoming new land on a quest for fortune and freedom from the stifling banality of the West.

Most of the cowboys are still here. They are older, though often not much wiser, but the Wild East of their youth is gone. Bucharest of today is a capital of a country poised to join the European Union, and it shows. Its brightly lit streets are filled with the emissaries of western business, eager to cater to the booming new market and deals are made in many of the new restaurants and trendy clubs.

Bucharest of today is a better, albeit more expensive, place to live than it was ten years ago. Yet, when speaking to the frontier old-timers, one cannot help but notice a certain sense of loss and frustration that their own special corner of the universe has been corrupted by the evil forces of capitalism. Sure, they will not openly lament the improvements in the economy, but they do seem to feel that something, some indelible spirit of the place is near to being lost.

I heard similar sentiments being expressed when I returned to New York last summer. “New York is just not the same”, I heard over and over again from the certain type of a downtown dweller. “It”s become Disneyland”, lamented the enlightened. “It has lost all of its spirit, all of its excitement” was the common refrain.

Every time I heard those comments I wanted to scream. I remembered stories told by friends who lived in New York in the Seventies and Eighties and for whom every trip to the grocery store could have ended in disaster – robbery, assault, death – and who feared for their children every time they stepped out the door. And I thought of wanting to raise my own, as yet unborn, children in the city and being eternally grateful that I might be able to send them off to school with fear of nothing more than a mean bully. Of course, I knew that New York has lost some of its gritty, but exciting edge, but lamenting its loss speaks of profound selfishness.

The situation in Bucharest is not quite the same. After all, the skyrocketing cost of living means that some of its poorest denizens are left behind. Yet, it is also a sign of a growing economy, one, which will continue to create more jobs and opportunities for Romanians and not just expats and foreign investors.

Today, as I drove past a building site and saw that it will become a Novotel my heart filled with joy – more big, Western-style hotels mean more big, Western-style business. Some of the new office towers may be ugly – the one on Charles De Gaulle looks like a hulking Death Star – yet within them they conceal the working gears of successful market economy.

These sentiments, I know, are anathema to Western liberals like myself. Big Western business is bad: it destroys local culture and replaces fromage with cheeseburgers, it underpays the local workers, so that the foreign conglomerates can get rich, and it pollutes the clear skies with the noxious fumes of its factories. Yet, I think that in a country like Romania, burdened as it has been with the worst model of communism, big business is exactly what is needed. It will bring about more jobs, more stability and will open the jewel that is Romania to the rest of the world.

Perhaps next time I have visitors from abroad we will take the new highway to a five-star hotel in the Danube Delta that I will book online. My friends will envy the clothes I have bought in the Plaza Romania mall and admire the lush green fields stretching on either side of the road. When we arrive, we shall watch the sun set over the majestic Danube and then toast each other with tuica in the hotel bar. Welcome to the Mild East!

Lola Gusman is an U.S. attorney working for the Marco Group in Bucharest. She has lived in Romania for three years.