3 ms·

Look at this, for the non Romanians, Romania is the fish looking country in the SE quadrant of the map: https://i.redd.it/5wyzzv7kbfb01.jpg https://i.redd.it/5w

by pbalau 8y ago

Look at this, for the non Romanians, Romania is the fish looking country in the SE quadrant of the map: https://i.redd.it/5wyzzv7kbfb01.jpg https://i.redd.it/5wyzzv7kbfb01.jpg Some years ago, before I left, using the Transilvania Highway to get anywhere, it took longer to get to the highway than it took to drive the entire length of the highway.

ido 8y ago
Before moving to Europe in 2005, my impression of former-communist countries was that they were all poor/backwards: this was the only context you would have ever hear about them growing up in Israel in the late 80s/90s. Furthermore the majority of my extended family left the Soviet Union in the 90s but my grandparents came over long before that (fraternal in the 1930s and maternal in the 40s right after WW2). Neither the old nor new arrivals ever talked about their former homelands in a positive way. To my surprise many former communist countries/cities neighbouring Austria & Germany (I lived in the former for 8 years and in the latter for 5) actually seemed more or less the same as their western counterparts, or least the parts of them that I visited (Prague, Brno, Cracow, to a lesser extent Budapest, Ljubljana & Bratislava). I therefor assumed the supposed backwardness was mostly just propaganda. But reading the above makes me think that the closer approximation to the truth is that even European (i.e. not central-asian former soviet republics) former-communist countries vary a lot & can't be that simply pigeon-holed.
- Tsubasachan 8y ago
  Some countries in Eastern Europe are relative success stories. Slovenia, Croatia, Poland to name some. Others are sliding into back into dictatorship and economic failure.
  - ido 8y ago
    Yep. I think it seems highly correlated to geography: the closest they are to "old EU" states in central/Western Europe the more successful they seem to be. See Slovenia & Czech Rep vs Bulgaria.

by pbalau 8y ago

ido 8y ago

Before moving to Europe in 2005, my impression of former-communist countries was that they were all poor/backwards: this was the only context you would have ever hear about them growing up in Israel in the late 80s/90s. Furthermore the majority of my extended family left the Soviet Union in the 90s but my grandparents came over long before that (fraternal in the 1930s and maternal in the 40s right after WW2). Neither the old nor new arrivals ever talked about their former homelands in a positive way. To my surprise many former communist countries/cities neighbouring Austria & Germany (I lived in the former for 8 years and in the latter for 5) actually seemed more or less the same as their western counterparts, or least the parts of them that I visited (Prague, Brno, Cracow, to a lesser extent Budapest, Ljubljana & Bratislava). I therefor assumed the supposed backwardness was mostly just propaganda. But reading the above makes me think that the closer approximation to the truth is that even European (i.e. not central-asian former soviet republics) former-communist countries vary a lot & can't be that simply pigeon-holed.

Tsubasachan 8y ago
Some countries in Eastern Europe are relative success stories. Slovenia, Croatia, Poland to name some. Others are sliding into back into dictatorship and economic failure.
- ido 8y ago
  Yep. I think it seems highly correlated to geography: the closest they are to "old EU" states in central/Western Europe the more successful they seem to be. See Slovenia & Czech Rep vs Bulgaria.