Bucharest?
A few days before leaving, someone at the hostel introduced themselves as: Vlad.
Is this a short for Vladimir? I asked with an innocent tone, to hopefully deflect any possible other interpertations. LOL was it wrong. Sure, they got the innocent question idea – however it turned out a bit of a harsh issue. An issue that, for Vlad, was the very question of Romanian uniqueness and interval from slavic languages, people and cultures.
Vald was keen to underline that regardless of whether his name was shortened from Vladimir – it has become it's own name, and Romanian as such.
This comes as part of other snippets and conversations I've had – when people seemed to have a bit of a slight against slavic connections in general and russians in particular. These are relatively young people who did not endure the so called communist period.
When I was in Cyprus, people talked about russian digital companies taking over – and people i happened to chat with, didn't feel entirely relaxed about that. More over, some expressed regret these aren't british companies – since in their eyes, being beholden to the brits is much preferable than to russians. Why do russians, seemingly, have such a negative rep?
Going back to Romania, where the term for Yes is Da – and everybody knows it is taken from russian – yet to hear someone saying Romanian should get into a more Latin kind of Yes, Si?