The Goat Milk and the Internet

These days I realized that from Bucharest, the center of our country, Romania, but not only from there, we see the country like from a plane. We can see the mountains, the rivers, the cities, the villages, the fields and everything is beautiful. That’s why the Romania seen from Bucharest can represent a postcard to be sent out to the world in order to create an image of a fascinating Romania. The profound Romania, the true Romania, the live Romania begins behind this postcard. It is the same as if you’d break the picture boundaries and enter into its atmosphere to feel, to live once with the ones in the picture. You begin to see what the Romania you imagined is really like, to see a Romania becoming more and more sensational with every step you take. Or, you can say that once you get passed the cold surface of the picture you are able to taste life, to breathe an air filled with reality and if you inhale deeply its effect may be amazing.

In Ceamurlia de Sus the people, most of them machidons (a minority in Romania which have Armenian ancestors), earn their living from animal breeding, sheep especially. Some have a dozen, some have a few hundred and the rich people, but they are few, have thousands. Politics has never been able to change anything around here. More than that, the only times politics affected this region were when the people came up here to refugee. They decide who is president, senator, deputy, mayor in Romania, but if you ask them they don’t know anything about it. Here, in Ceamurlia de Sus, you can meet the past and the present, centuries mix up, sheep breeding and cable television mix up, the goat milk and the Internet mix up. This is because each night they receive through the cable television the Romania we all know about. And they see it as a strange thing coming into their houses not through the chimney but through their TV sets. For them this Romania is a foreign movie in which the actors are foreign, and most of the time they are unknown!
Ceamurlia de Sus, the 23rd of June 2004