Q8: "[...] what is the election coverage like in Romania? [...]"

Aliza asks, "I know we had talked about this before you left, but what is the election coverage like in Romania? What do Romanians think of President-elect Obama?(also, sorry to hear your baggage got lost...probably because I accompanied you to get your visa)."

It's been somewhat difficult to directly gauge Romanian coverage of the U.S. election, since my vocabulary consists of roughly 30 words. But I asked Kim's pentalingual* friend, Silvia, about the coverage of the presidential race and election. Some interesting things she said:

- On Nov. 5, most news shows mentioned the results of the election, but Romanians generally don't care much about presidential elections, since they have little faith in their government. (A recent poll supposedly found that only 9% of Romanians trust the government as an institution.)

- The international students, and especially the French students, were much more excited about the election than the Romanian students were.

Since the election wasn't decided until around 6 a.m. on Wednesday here, newspapers printed the results on Thursday, with a few giving Obama above-the-fold, front-page treatment.

Romania's satirical weekly comes out on Wednesdays, however, so they jumped the gun to avoid being a week late. They picked the political winner correctly, but politically incorrectly:




Here's what I can glean from an online Romanian-English dictionary:

Headline: "A new feature film about the colored White House: Afro-american beauty"

Bubble on right: "Mr. President, rumor has it that your grandmother died. My condolences. So, if our grandma also dies, can I become President?"

Middle bubble: "You ate the rainbow, boss, so you get to pledge yourself to the "Glow-worm Sea". Now, with a glow-worm afro-american, with her neither so panicked." [I clearly mistranslated a lot of this. "Licuriciul Mare" literally means Glow-worm Sea, but it's an idiom I can't figure out. Anyone have a clue?]

Bubble on right: "I understand very well why we are going through hard, economic contraction. Problems with the lion. I know this. America is here to help! Even my father had trouble with the lion! It ate three business partners!"

Text on bottom: "Important people of short-to-medium stature rush to present their offerings in front of the new Grand Chief of the USA's GDP."

Yup.

* Silvia is conversational in Romanian, English, French, Spanish, and Italian. (She's at Cuza for a Master's degree in Letters.)

p.s. Thanks for your concern about my luggage, Aliza. I finally received it last night -- seven days and one hour after I arrived in Romania.