Romania and tourism

There are so many tourists who are keen on visiting Romania. And they go there, love it, but encounter a lot of difficulties. Why is that? They come back and say, ‘no one speaks English’, we have to communicate through body language’. And then I wonder, how come no one speaks English, from what i know, this language is now compulsory in many schools, and has actually been like this for a lot of years. That means at least people in their 30s should have a good level of English. We hardly have any tours around our best places and they have to organise everything, but can’t ask for directions or anything.

There are no signs in English, people at the airport look at you like you were an alien if you speak another language that is not Romanian ( and that happened to me as well actually). Now, should i mention the grandmas who work in the train station in Bucharest? What are these people doing there? Airports, train stations, famous resorts? They should employ people who can speak at least one foreign language in such places.

Then we have the web. Festivals, concerts, everything is in Romanian. I saw that in Sibiu, in August, will be a festival of national traditions. The perfect event for people who go to visit Romania in order to find out more things about this unique culture. And then i suggest to one of my friends to go there. But he does some research and says he’ll have to skip Sibiu because he didn’t find anything on the internet about that so it probably doesn’t exist. It does, just that Romanians don’t want to promote it. Romanians are not particularly interested in such a festival, we are at least supposed to know our own culture. So why not write that in some other languages to attract some tourists?

Romanian phrasebook