hello, and welcome to a show called romania through their eyes! the reason for this show is a seeming contradiction in behavior between two groups of people in romania: the foreigners, and the romanians. the latter want to leave the country, they're looking for any opportunity to find a life somewhere else. the former are drawn to it. they want to visit it, they want to spend time here, and quite a few of them want to move here permanently. why is this going on? â i'm going to try and shed some light on the matter with this show. it's a series of interviews with foreigners, people who've spent a significant amount of time in the country, know it well, and want to share
their thoughts with me. â â i'm going to ask each person a standard set of questions. while they may be the same, their answers are going to be different, and may be surprise you. and who knows -- one can only pray -- they may also end up enlightening those currently running the country, and helping to focus their attention on issues of international relevance. i hope you'll enjoy the show, and join me for each new episode! today's interview is with tom lovelock. he's originally from the uk, but he came to romania by way of qatar. he moved to the country with his wife six months ago. right. my name is tom lovelock, i'm from the united kingdom, i'm 62 years old,
and we came here from qatar in the middle east, where we lived for five years, and we've been here for six months. â â we got here on august the 9th, 2010. we live in bucharest. we're not passing through, we're here to live permanently, because my wife is working in bucharest. i am retired. for over thirty years i've sold all sorts of cars in the uk. before that, i was a young policeman in london. i spent six and a half years as a policeman in london. which kind of gives you a good grounding. i went from policeman to car dealer... there probably isn't anybody in the whole world that would trust me. all i've got to add is estate agent or financial advisor to the list, and then i'm certainly going to hell. it's a lot different, obviously, from qatar in the middle east. for a start, we can walk out the door and get a beer.
and women don't walk around with veils and stuff like that... qatar is a very, very closed society. everybody used to say, oh, you lived in the middle east, it must be very glamorous. but (people from england enjoy this), it's like living in milton keynes, but without the interesting bits. everybody lives in a compound, you mix with the same people all the time, it just drives you crazy. we did it for five years. we came to romania because we wanted an european style of life, but without paying german or italian prices. romania suits us perfectly. it's got a good cost of living, we live well, we enjoy ourselves here, and i just like the place. we find it exhilarating, living in romania! we like the way of life -- me, because of my age, i'm sort of a child of the 60s and 70s in london,
everybody remembers about swinging london and stuff like that... as bucharest is at the moment, it reminds me very much of how things were in those days. okay, your city's a little bit crumbly, and it could do with a nice clean-up, a bit of a tidy-up, but it's an interesting, fun place to live. if i was 30 years younger, i'd have even more fun here, although i probably wouldn't be married for much longer if i did that -- you see what i mean... i just like the place. you can walk around, and you couldn't walk around in qatar, for instance, because with the heat, everybody goes by car, you can't walk anywhere. the area where we live [now], there's a tube station (a metro station) just down the road. we have shops, banks, cafes... everything we need is within walking distance.
when we go into the center of the town, it's four stops on the metro, and we're there. all these things haven't been part of our lives for many years, and it's just like living back in london, back in the old days. it's even almost as cheap, because the cost of living is (from our point of view), really, really, really good. you should probably put your prices up a little, but not much. we like the local markets, we like the local shops. the ladies in our local shop are teaching me how to speak romanian, because they shout at me when i don't actually say the right word. so i can say things like butter -- but i'm not going to say it now. i can say egg, and i can say bread, and i'm not going to say any of them now, but i can say them in the shops. we like living near herastrau park, because we go quite frequently to the lake.
none of these things we've seen for years. in the middle east, the water we see is the persian gulf. and it just looks like a sea, with sand -- because we got a lot sand [there]. i like the metro. i like the metro a lot, because i used to travel all the time, when i was younger, in london, you always went by what we called the tube, and i missed the tube, because traveling and driving through bucharest you've got to be crazy to try and do it. i don't know why you don't get a lot of road rage. in the uk we get a lot of road rage. nobody seems to have road rage here -- probably because everybody, when they're driving, is too busy on their phone, or drinking a cup of coffee, or talking to the guy in the car next door, to actually get angry about anything, which is probably why you get so many traffic jams. i had a guy drive me somewhere this morning, and he was drinking a cup of coffee, smoking a cigarette,
on his mobile phone, and reading a map, while we're going along some road at 80 km/h. so, stop doing that, because sooner or later, the cigarette's going to go out, you're going to spill the coffee, or you're going to crash the car, which is the worst thing you can possibly do. also, you're probably going to run over a dog if you're not looking out the window, because there's a lot of them wandering around the place. when we got here, there were two things everybody said were going to happen as soon as we got to romania. first of all, you're going to get ripped off by a taxi driver at otopeni airport. the guy was fantastic. he forgot to charge us half the fare, waited for us for about half an hour because we went to the wrong hotel, didn't put the meterâ on, and far from ripping us off, we had to put some more money in his pocket,
because he wanted to drive away with the equivalent of about 5 euros for nearly 2 hours of his time. â â there's a few hoods that hang around at baneasa [airport]. you can tell these guys, because they jump on you. they're dressed the same as the security guards at baneasa airport. avoid them, because they try and strong-arm you into the back of some beat up old thing, and they go wherever you don't want to go, and then they'll try to... but apart from that, they're easy to spot. but otopeni [taxi drivers], they're great people. i recommend them, personally. â â the other thing they told us was [about] the wild dogs. the first time we walked out of the hotel room we were worried about the wild dogs. but they weren't wild, they were all asleep. you've got the wild sleeping dogs of bucharest, and these guys are just hanging around,
the place, getting fatter, 'cause everybody feeds them. so those two stories -- we just kicked them straight out the window. we traveled all around europe, and because we were coming from the middle east and were going to live in what we thought was a cold country, as we traveled around europe, we divested ourselves of all our hot-weather clothes. we threw away our shorts, our t-shirts, sandals, threw them all away. when we got here, we got off the plane wearing sweaters, boots and jeans, and it's 35 degrees temperature. so we had to go down to baneasa [mall] and spend a fortune buying loads of hot-weather clothes again, then it got cold again. thank you... there are some interesting things. in bucharest, in the town center, if you spent some money cleaning up the
buildings... you know the arc de triomphe -- you claim it's a foot higher than the real one, they're they're telling you it's not. but all these other buildings you got, clean them up, because they would look gorgeous, they would absolutely look fantastic. they're just all grimy and horrible now, even the flats, just clean them up, you'll be amazed at the difference you make. fill in, spend the money on the streets. the place is beautiful. herastrau park in the fall, in the autumn, it made new englandâ â look drab, it really did. it was fantastic! it looked great in the snow. it's a good tourist thing. everybody would like to think that vlad dracula actually was born in the house where you're dining, but he can't have been born in 80 places at once. he can't have lived absolutely everywhere. for a start, he's not supposed to have lived. we think he's one of the undead. it turns out, not only is he not
undead, but he's been born 85 times, all around transilvania. everybody's got a relative that knew him. or an uncle, or an auntie, that he was related to. okay... push it, but you're pushing it a bit too far. it's like the germans saying that everybody used to know hitler, that "he wasn't a bad bloke when we knew him". but he was, he really was, honestly. now that's why the second world war broke out. a friend of mine did eight years research on why the second world war broke out. what was the main reason? after eight years research, it turns out that hitler was a right bastard, and that was it. that's the only reason... you're going to have to do a lot of editing there, aren't you? â â there's a certain sort of macho image that romanian guys like to give -- like your security guards.
who work for the security companies, with all the paramilitary gear that they all wear, with the big nightsticks, and the big boots, and they're all glaring at people every time you walk past them. the fact of the matter is that they're just private security guards, they can't do anything to you. alright, they can stop you if you climb over the fence or something, they might be able to stop you, but there's nothing they can do, so what is with all the tough guy gear? landscape gardening is the big coming thing in romania. believe me, all the rich people here think they need they don't. but nevertheless you can charge them for a new garden. they have to have somewhere for the security guy to stand, so they need a garden. like everybody else, no one likes your government. sorry about that folks, but nobody likes them. mind you,
we don't like our government much, either. but you need to do something about your government. when they collect taxes, they're supposed to spend them on running the country, not on new mercedes benz and and leather jackets. maybe you should ask them about that at your next election. â â we were driving through bucharest the other day, and all of sudden, [we saw] a great big huge convoy of black bmws and mercedes goes flying by us. i don't know if it was the president, or the prime minister, â â or whoever. wherever he was going, he made me late, and i think i'm more important than him. so i don't like being late. you could do with a bit more forceful [attitude] than okay, you can't get anything done, this is romania... what can you do... of course you can do it! that's why you got the vote! that's why you're in the european union!
so you can do all these things! you don't have to shrug your shoulders and go "oh, there's nothing we can do about it, it's them, it's us"... of course you can do something about it! if you're not getting paidâ â enough money, you can go on strike. if you're being fooled around by the local people, because they're not clearing the street, then complain to someone, and keep complaining until he does it. and they will actually do it in the end. and make the people who get your money spend it on what they're supposed to be spending it. and not new houses up in pipera, and mercedez benz... although jaguars are okay, 'cause i used to work for jaguar. so you can spend it on jaguars, but not mercedes benz. â â what i don't like about a lot that goes on in this part of the world -- not just romania, but they get it in hungary, bulgaria, and other sorts of places, is that your authorities, and especially people like your police, they're not
working for the people, they're not doing what they're supposed to be doing, which is protecting you, and stopping your getting robbed in the streets, and stuff like that. you don't have a police force whose job it is to protect the government, or keep the government in power. it's not their job. their job is to walk around the streets making sure people don't steal your car, and your wallet, and making you feel safe, and you should remember that, and you should go out and remind people that that's what they should be doing. your police force could do with nicer uniforms. nobody's joining the police force here because they get a smart uniform which attracts the girls. the guys are all walking around in polyester. and they need new cars as well. i mean, have you seen the little tiny police cars? everybody else is driving around in bmws, and these guys are trying to chase around in diesel dacias, and it's not going to work, believe me, it will not work.
but they do have guns, which i suppose makes up a little bit of the difference. yeah, i suppose if you come and live here, obviously you do your research before you come here. most of the blogs and things are free, they'll tell you how much you should be paying to rent an apartment, but the thing to do when you get here is to just take it easy. don't walk around with your hand on your wallet, thinking you're in a foreign country. all of the stories that you read in a lot of the magazines, they're just not true. it's just a normal european country, everybody's just trying to get by, nobody is going to pick your pocket every time you're going to get on the metro, or walk across piata victoria, it's just not going to happen, no more than it's going to happen in any other city in the world. so just get off the plane, don't worry about the cab driver, they've all got the price of the cab written on the side of the door, if you don't like
the price, then don't get in the thing. catch a bus, they're only across the street. nobody here is looking to rip you off, the way people say they're to rip you off, except the government, obviously, because they're ripping everybody off. and i going to get deported for this? one of the things i didn't like is that you get pounced on by your own countrymen in this country. â â british guys, ex-patriots, the americans probably get it, the canadians [too]. "oh, come to the expat bar, or come to the british pub..." they'll go to these places, all mix together, and these guys, the first thing they'll do, is rip you off for money, because they're all trying to sell you finance packages, or pension packages, or persuade you that you need a british advisor, otherwise you'll never find your way around romania. it's like you've got a labrador and a white stick.
they think you're blind. in this day and age, even i at 62, can get on the internet, and find out where my local police station is, where the post office is, where i can go and rent a house, where i have to register because i'm a uk citizen. all these things you can find out for yourselves, you don't have to give some guy 350 euros to get your car registered, you can go down to rar and do it yourself. it's easy. so when you go to these places, don't give anybody any money. alternatively, you do the job and get money off them. at least you get the satisfaction of putting the money in your pocket. another good idea is [to] get yourself a good lawyer, a decent lawyer. it's the paperwork -- it's not so much the legal side of it -- there's a lot of paperwork in this country, and they know the paperwork, and what you're supposed to sign. so if you get a decent lawyer, you can
always find me, or get on the website, and i will tell you who are good lawyers, but don't go to the people in the english pubs, because they will rip you off. get yourself a decent lawyer, because they give you good advice and tell you which form to fill out so as things get done. and us guys, when we come here, instead of just turning up and just joining in and doing what everybody else does, we should show our best. if you're going to come over and do business in romania, don't turn up and just start ripping people off, or open up some daft internet company, or financial services company, or some idiotic thing which is just there to line your pockets at other people's expense. come here and put something in. contribute! show these people, show romania how we like to do things, because that's how they like to do things as well. people will trust you if you trust them. if you just turn up and start complaining
about everything, and roaming about the place going "i'll only shop at carrefour", or stuff like that, then you're never going to find out about romania -- same as we know guys who never know anything about qatar. i know people who've lived in qatar, on the same compound, for five years, and the only time they've actually been in the city is to drive down to carrefour, and down to the same shop, and come back again. they've never actually bothered to go into the bazaars, or the souqs, or anything like that. they don't speak a word of arabic, they never mix with anybody, and every year you can actually time to the date -- they all turn up for the same quiz night, the same parties, the same new year's celebrations, same people, all there. the "in crowd", and they know nothing about the country that they're living in. find out about the country you're living in. it's not different from the country you used to live in, it's the same. you know, everybody's got
to be somewhere, you just happen to be in romania. that's all there is to it. you don't feel any different, your skin doesn't turn another color, you don't turn green, or grow stalks out your head when you turn up, you're just some place else. and be normal. do what you normally would do. and let go of my cat! my cat is annoying some lady here, i'll put that in there, and he'll appear on camera in just a little bit, his name is peter, he's from arabia, so he's a muslim. okay, here you go... alright, this is peter the cat, he came with us from arabia, and he cost me 1,500 euros to get him here. he flew here via amsterdam. i don't know if he had a layover or not in amsterdam. i wish i'd have flown via amsterdam myself. i've been there, it's a nice place. â don't go to the irish pubs! why are there 27 irish pubs in bucharest? there aren't 27 irish pubs in dublin!
everybody goes to irish pubs. open some other sort of bar. go to a romania bar! go to a romanian restaurant! why would you want to come all this way to live in another country, and then end up drinking guinness, talking to some bloke about football, in an english or an irish pub? why would you want to do that? you've wasted your money! you might as well have stayed at home. apart from the fact that beer's about a third â â of the price... but apart from that, there's no reason to do it. there's no reason why you would want to do it. i know a guy who's a colleague of my wife's. i'm not going to mention his name... no, i'm definitely going to mention it, because he'll watch this, but the guy never goes out anywhere. he never turns up for anything. he knows nothing about anybody, and he just sits there. when i spoke to him, he said "i don't like romania". i said, what don't you like? he says, "the dogs bark at night". i said, move your bedroom or shut the window. â â
and he said, "yeah, i can't stand it. the dogs bark at night, and the streets are dirty." well, so what... "and i can't drive my car around 'cause there's potholes..." i said, did you not read a book, did you not get on the internet, did you not find out about the country you're going to live in before you hopped on a plane, or in your case, in your car, and drove here? just find out about the place, and then you're not going to be surprised. i mean, if you don't like the roads here, try the roads in qatar, which disappear. it rains every three years, and then the road is gone. they have to put another road up, because they just lay the road on the sand, and when it rains, water goes under the road, â â you got no road! you think the roads are bad here, try somewhere like ethiopia. i worked there for a while as well. i mean, there are no roads. if you want to get around anywhere safely, go by helicopter, 'cause that's the
only way you're going to get around. so don't do these things. just turn up, get off your plane, and live a normal life. and you'll get on just fine. absolutely. and when you go in, you'll ask people, and they will tell you, they'll advise you, they will help you. they won't particularly try and rip you off, no more than anybody else would try and rip you off, and you'll enjoy life here immensely, especially if you're young. this is a young person's country. what else should you do when you come to live in romania? if you're under 30, i would actually buy yourself a pair of blinkers, because the women here are hot! believe me, they are! these are the best looking women in europe, bar none, including italy, and i've been to italy a lot as well. they are fantastic -- they are fantastic-looking people! so if you're under 30, you are going to have a good time if you come to live here. but you will end up with a large extended family in about 3 months.
and remember, all these girls have got brothers and fathers. well they do, don't they? i can't think of any other reason why you wouldn't come to live in romania, really. â i think it's a fantastic place, i really, really -- we've grown to like it, it's like being young again, it really is. and the prices, everything is right. you've got to integrate and live in with it, and become part of the country you're living in. you've got your british friends, but we've got --- since we've lived here, we've had people come to visit us from scotland, we've had people come to visit from canada, from qatar, somebody's going to come and see us from nepal. we know people all over the world. we've got friends in mexico. when you work in the circuits we
work in, you know people all over the world. and you've got things like skype and facebook. nowadays, everybody's a neighbor. everybody sort of lives next door, you don't need to think "i'm in a foreign country", johnny-foreigner, and all the rest of it, because it's just not so anymore. the only barrier is the language barrier and romanian's a pretty easy language. if you speak a little italian, or a little spanish, or any kind of romance language, then you'll get on just fine learning romanian. it's pretty easy to pick up. and if not, do what the british thing, just shout at them in english, that always works. â well, it does, doesn't it? an englishman just shouts at people, and everybody speaks english. you shout long enough, and everybody speaks english. you just keep shouting louder and louder and louder, and they go, "oh, alright." that's how it's done... we know this for a fact. that's why we -- did you know we had an empire?
did romania have an empire? no. we had an empire. it was because we went 'round shouting at people. that's how you get an empire. just turn up and yell a lot. okay. did you enjoy the show? do let me know what you think in the comments below. and please, take a few seconds to like it or fave it or share it with your friends. show me that you want to watch it, and i'll be glad to get to work on more interesting interviews. â thank you, till next time!
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