LAVINIA ZAINEA

Cultural Stereotypes


       The other evening I had dinner with a group of Portuguese actors who came to Bucharest for the theatre festival. A friend of mine was acting as their guide and she decided to take them to a typical Romanian restaurant somewhere in the old centre of the city. The place was indeed very colourful, the music was extremely loud, and for the most part it consisted of Italian songs from the 80s and Greek songs from the 60s. At a certain point, one of the actors asked me whether his ears were deceiving him or the song we were all listening to was a somewhat modern take on the music from Zorba the Greek. I admitted that that was the case indeed, but that Romanians were happy people and that they were probably playing it for the entertainment value. I used a somewhat different argument regarding the Italian songs: I told them Romanians felt closer to the Italian culture. This came back to haunt me when the waiter brought the wrong kind of food than the one that was ordered: the actor looked straight at me, smiled and said that indeed the waiter did seem Italian. I laughed somewhat ill at ease and savoured the food I had ordered, a seafood selection that appeared to be a specialty of the restaurant, apparently typical of Romanian cuisine.
     I found the restaurant tacky, the food bad, and the music grating on the ears, but still I felt the need to defend it in front of the others. I pretended to like the food, to care for the music, to be somewhat in the know about the reasons everything was the way it was. I spoke Portuguese with the actors, and the waiter smiled at me in confidence: ‘They’re foreigners, they’ll like it’, he said, referring to our version of seafood and red wine. It was then that I realized I was without a doubt Romanian: I hated both the food and the wine. But I must have had some foreign blood in me, too: the one I hated most of all was the waiter.