In June of 2009, my family had decided to visit Romania for the rest of the summer to see our friends and relatives. And although I was happy with reuniting everybody again, on my agenda for the time I had there were numerous social experiments to perform, of course including my cousin, mom, grandma, and aunt as victims of this little plan.
The perfect day came to do this, when my great cousin had invited us to his new apartment to celebrate his moving in. The apartment was in downtown Timisoara, close enough to my grandmother's house to walk there. With this knowledge, several hours before the actual party, my cousin and I had prepared ourselves in full gypsy attire, not missing a brilliant detail; hair braided perfectly so that there would be a gap for my ear, with red ribbon in the braid, a long flowing gypsy skirt, a man's dress shirt, tied at the waist, and long gold coin earrings. As we got ready, we decided that we were in fact the bride and groom of a gypsy wedding, and that I was the daughter of a rich gypsy.
Thus we began our trek to my great cousin's house, my aunt at a distance to take pictures and record the glorious moment, my grandmother looking at us with only a slightly mocking smile, and my mom, tagging along claiming to be our "indentured servant." The beauty of dressing this way on this particular evening was that downtown Timisoara was sure to be teeming with people and their questioning, hateful, or amused expressions.
As we made our way through, no worse for wear of the glares we were getting from "respectable Romanian citizens" who would have absolutely NOTHING, to do with such corrupt behavior such as the gypsy culture, we made it to my great cousin's house, being followed by only one young gypsy beggar, asking us if we could lend a fellow brother some money.
No comments:
Post a Comment