Post written by Andreea, a United Planet team member.

There is no place like home. Though I have traveled and seen many amazing places over the past few years, nothing compares to the beauty and warmth of my country, Romania. I am positive I will never feel for another place the way I do for Romania, having been born and raised there. This is the place where I heard my first childhood story, where I rode my first bike, and of course where my family, my parents are.
Until the age of ten, life as I knew it was dictated by the orders of Ceausescu’s communist regime. I was old enough to witness Romania’s own 1989 Revolution and the fall of communism. I remember when the Romanians woke up, an act reinforced by the national song, Destapta-te Romane (“Wake Up Romanian”). But even those first ten years, between the grey buildings in Bucharest and the scarce resources of food, were good years for me.
Though a banana was a rare thing, and meat far more rare, I always had a park to play in or the mountains and the Black Sea to escape to during vacations. I personally was more blessed because I wore glasses, which, according to the regime’s unwritten social guidelines, meant I could not participate in the parades that the communist party was preparing for Ceausescu. Therefore, I did not have to spend hours in the sun with hundreds of children at my side, preparing a dance routine to honor Romania’s leader.
The first thing that changed after the revolution was that the city became more colorful. The entire country began to look brighter, from the people’s clothes to big billboards on the streets. We adopted color television and watched it continuously at first. All of the sudden there was nonstop news about current world events, instead of three-hour programs devoted to Ceausescu. Nowadays our living conditions and rights are the same as in other democratic countries. We will never forget Ceausescu’s regime. This man had the “greatest” idea of all: to build a replica of a Chinese building—the biggest in the world—for him to live in alone with his family. Casa Poporului (“People’s House”) is the second biggest building in the world after the Pentagon. The building lies in the center of Bucharest, though nowadays it serves as an administrative building for the government.
I will never forget my childhood and those beautiful hiking places that can only be found on Carpathian Mountains. And I will never forget to tell you, my beloved Romania, “Happy Birthday” on the first of December.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, December 4th, 2008 at 4:55 pm and is filed under local culture, Team Stories, United Planet. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.