Dragobetele kisses the girls

As I wrote before, on February 24, we celebrate Dragobete’s day, Romanian national day of love and friendship!

I wrote about “zburătorit” and about picking snowdrops:

So this time I want to write about customs of this day.

When boys were hugging the girls by surprise, it was supposed to take away their powers, so they said: “Your powers,\In my arms!” or “My fevers,\ On your bones!”. If the hugged girl had something fresh (grass, buds) in his shirt, the incantation had no effect upon her.

In the morning, people used to wear their holiday clothes, wash with spring water with a twig in it and say: “May my soul sprout and become young, like this twig.”

For having a good year, old people used to take care of the birds, including the “sky birds” and maidens used to pinch or walk on foot the boys they liked.

On this day, working is forbidden. It’s said that if you work, you’ll sing like all the birds. If you work the land, you’ll get sick of fevers.

All persons have to celebrate each year Dragobete’s day or else they will not be loved or love the whole year.

Girls used to wake up early in the morning, before the sunrise, and release the birds from their coops hopping that they will find their soul mate as fast as the birds.

It is good to clean the house so the good luck will come.

Everyone must have a mate in this day or else it will be a lonely year.

Dragobete is like a phantasm that comes out by stealth and kisses the girls so they will have good luck and to get married, that’s why on this day you may hear in all villages: “Dragobetele kisses the girls!”

The Romanian Government strikes again

The old woman with the smallest pension: 1 leu!

After the fast food tax and the state allowance for the children,  Romanian Government comes with another marvelous proposal, showing us one more time the desperate situation of the state treasury: they were thinking about taxing the pensions.

At first, it seemed like a good solution because all of the big countries have already this measure but we are talking about Romania.

Here, there are a lot of people who worked several years for a small pension, pension they can’t even enjoy it. Most of the retired people can’t afford to live from that pension, they still need the help from their child, at least the ones that are lucky enough to have children that can help them.

We are not going to talk about the retired people with huge pensions (there are not many of them), we are going to talk about most of them, the ones that have small pensions, the ones that have to share their money for food and medicine. There are retired people who don’t have money for warming the house, so they leave early in the morning and spend almost all day in a supermarket without buying something. There are people who worked a lot of years in bad or dangerous environments for having a better life after they retire and people with no contribution to the state with huge pension because they knew how to settle things in their favor. Knowing the right person and without having any shame for the people around you are the most important things.

Officially, the smallest pension is 350 lei (~ 85 EURO, 116 USD, as we speak) and the biggest one is 37.000 lei (~ 8.975 EURO, 12.210 USD)!!! For a poor country with even poorer citizens I think it’s a huge imbalance. Some journalists found the person with the real smallest pension: an old woman (82 years old) from the north of Romania, with a pension of 1 leu!!! For 1 leu you can buy one cheapest white bread. She is very old and far away from the capital so she can’t make a complaint to the Labor Minister.

So, why taking the money from the poor ones? Why don’t they cut the huge pensions and give a small piece to the ones they really need it? Well, it’s still a mystery!