Financial learnings of the Great Britain for make benefit glorious nation of Romania

Greetings from Bucharest Otopeni airport. I’ve been in Romania for a few days, teaching how to account for complex financial instruments that to a large extent don’t yet exist in this country to a small group of appreciative, motivated and generally pleasant people.

I am fond of Romania. The Economist newspaper recently fairly described it as a charming and spirited place. These are the last couple of weeks of Romania being in Europe but not in the EU, as 1 January heralds what I hope will be a real new start for this poor but potential-laden country.

If you sneer at the idea of Bucharest, first look at the town around you. If you live in Wigan, your home does not measure up to Bucharest in terms of charm, prettiness and things to do. It’s also unlikely that your neighbours are as nice. Here are some things about Romania that I find interesting:

• “Cold Mountain” was filmed here. To be fair, so was much of “Borat”. Much of the Romanian countryside is remarkably beautiful.
• The people from Borat’s village are much miffed at being misled about the eventual film. They are each speaking in Romanian in the film, which is odd as Borat himself speaks semi-disguised Czech.
• The price of land around Bucharest has gone up by a factor of about 20 in the last few years.
• A few years ago, I failed to take advantage of an investment opportunity to buy land in Bucharest.
• The language is surprisingly easy to understand, being that it’s the closest surviving language to Latin. As almost all the TV’s in English with Romanian subtitles, just about everybody has enough English to communicate and they’re happy to.
• The people are distinctly Latin in temperament. They have little of the sullenness and arsyness that so characterises many Slavic countries.
• Ceausescu’s “securitate” had a reputation for being the most brutal of the communist secret police. They’d have to be; getting Romanians to obey anything, including traffic signals, would require some measure of brutality even today.
• The currency is the new leu (lion in English). The old leu was hyperinflationary, meaning that an average hotel meal could easily set you back over a million. There were 50,000 to the pound. Last year, they launched the new leu. This confusingly knocked off four zeros instead of a vastly more intuitive three or six. New sparkly indestructible Australian style plastic bank notes were issued, to replace the sparkly plastic indestructible bank notes that had only very recently been introduced.
• People still speak in terms of the old leu. When somebody asks for 26,000 lei, they really mean 2.6 lei. Generally, I meet this confusion by stuffing the equivalent of a 50 pound note in their hands and wait for a total surprise about how much change I get. To date, I’ve never been short changed, despite it seeming that I haven’t the first clue of what the money means. (I have a habit of checking afterwards when I have time). I fear that the same would not be true of taxi drivers and street hawkers in England.

At airport security, the same rules apply here as in the UK; with our recent paranoia that small bottles of water may be an immediate threat to life. In the UK, there are always the plastic boxes the other side of security that contain a querulous and petty little collection of nail files, small nail scissors and the occasional corkscrew. I just saw a similar collection here, except that it was augmented by flick knives, Swiss army knives and, most amusingly, a foot long wooden mallet with metal spikes at the end of it. This didn’t fit in the plastic box, so had been left on top of it, within easy reach of anybody else who had just passed through security. I can only imagine the argument that would have ensued as this was confiscated; presumably from an irate chef. It would not have been out of context to see hand guns and assault rifles in there as well.

In Russia, I’d find all of this truly scary. Somehow here in Romania, it’s funny and oddly charming. As the Economist said, it’s a charming and spirited place.