One thing I'll say about Romanians is that I noticed they distrust each other, or they are just not friendly towards each other. For example I've noticed how the immigrant community acts and while other communities opt to stay together, mingle and be friendly with each others, Romanians abroad don't give a hoot about other Romanians, they are willing to integrate into the local culture as fast as possible and forget about other Romanians.
I'm Romanian. This seems like a harsh generalization, but I can see how it might look like that from the outside.
How about this alternative that's always been true for me and well.. probably everyone: people spend more time with like-minded people, be they foreigners or not. Why? I don't really need to answer that, right? :)
So what does that mean? Well it means that you integrate easily into like-minded communities. If you're a foreigner then it's very probable that you're the odd one out and the community is composed of mostly natives.
I have lots of Romanian friends with whom I spend most of my time with, but I'm convinced that it's mostly due to the fact that we're like-minded. If I overhear a Romanian on the street do I instantly feel a need to talk to him? No, but I don't instinctively distance myself from him either.
This distrust was actively cultivated during communist times - if you would speak your thoughts to the wrong person, you would be made to disappear in the middle of the night by the secret police. The kink is that you didn't know who the "wrong person" was - brothers would snitch on brothers, sons on fathers, co-workers on each other. So you couldn't trust anybody.
This slowly changes with the generation change - younger generations didn't live through this paranoid system, so they don't understand the fear and the reservations - but the change will take another 20 - 40 years IMHO.
While I agree that romanians integrate easily into the local culture (especially when the local culture is italian, french, belgian or spanish) I don't fully agree that romanians distrust each other completely :D. There are 3 classes of romanian immigrants that don't mix with each other:
1.The engineers, medical workers (doctors & assistants) and programmers: These are the silent romanians, one barely notices. 2.Construction workers and other low paid workers: These are the generic romanians and 3. The romanian gipsy group composed of organized beggars, pimps, prostitutes and thiefs = the bad romanians. When I hear someone talking romanian outside of romania, I try to classify him, and if he belongs to 3, I stay as far away as posible.
As a Romanian myself, yes you are mostly right. But another thing to notice is that most of the Romanians that leave the country aren't well... the cream of the society so to speak :).
That's not an accurate view, brain drain is a real problem for Romania. While the phenomenon of Romanian manual labourers crowding Spain and Italy is well known, and oh so stereotyped by local media, there's a lot of emigration of highly trained (or soon to be highly trained) engineers and researchers to Western Europe and the US. But these people tend to be cosmopolitan and blend in extremely well, so they don't raise awareness of Romanians among foreigners.
And precisely this is the second focus of the campaign: raising awareness that there are a lot of emigrated high-achieving Romanians, quietly blending in.
