Yay Boys!

31 March 2008

The masculine plural form in Romanian is "ei" pronounced "yay." I had a hell of a time remembering how to pronounce this, before I finally made the connection:
Yay, Boys!

The girl form, in case you're curious, is ele, pronounced "yelley" which, for some reason, I remember because of Melleficent from Sleeping beauty. Don't ask.

My comments about our being told not to talk to "ei", to the boys, has provoked some interesting responses. The most common among them being:
are you living in a Muslim country?

The answer to that is decidedly no, and is a response I find pretty amusing. I live in an Eastern Orthodox country. The pregnant pauses I get from that, or the "so?" that I've gotten from that, are also pretty amusing. Maybe a little scary.

People who are of the Eastern Orthodox religion are christian. They encompass the greeks, russians, christians living in turkey...

The Great Schism (one of) occurred in the 11th Century, during the 4th Great Crusade (one in which the Western Christians kind of sacked their Eastern Christian Counterparts in the name of God - needless to say, relations suffered). Please understand that this is a *vast* understatement of the actuality.

Now, as to the looking at men question...

the way I look at it, looking at men in Moldova is a lot like eating the fish in Moldova. Or like eating Tuna in the states. You never know what you're going to get.

You could be ordering a nice piece of Carp, or Crap, as it is called here. Or you could be ordering a fine fillet of mercury-filled poisonous Crap. Who is to know?

With the men here, if you smile at them, look them in the eye, perhaps they could just smile back, say hi. Or perhaps, they could take the smile as an invitation and start to follow you, bug you, grab you, or just generally give you crap. There's always the slight possibility it could become more dangerous than that.

The thing of it, folks, this is a fairly generic thing, and it's certainly not a Moldovan thing. We in America are fairly unusual in that we're all smiley and look people in the eye and whatnot.

This is something that I have personally experienced in Mexico, Peru, France, Italy, Spain... a few times in England and if I'm honest, more than a few times in the States. Machismo is machismo everywhere, and I've made no secret of my ever-present intimidation of men in packs.

The fact that American girls, by virtue of our exported Britney Spears culture, are seen as easy (and I do mean easy) targets, doesn't help.

For those of you who haven't seen it, google "american girl in Italy." There's a photograph (hanging up in Calo's restaurant) that most of you will have seen before, but that I think might help give a visual example of what's going on.