Car

Despite the state of the roads and the driving conditions, we all need to get from place to place. Ema and I decided that we needed a car. We didn?t want to keep our baby out in the cold to wait for a bus. And when and if a bus finally comes, because they don?t follow a punctual schedule like in Western countries, it is often too crowded with no seats and people pushing for space. I didn?t feel safe taking Maya in taxis either. Taxi drivers seem to take a lot of risks. I like to feel in control, driving the care myself, even if it is a city with a lot of traffic, unpredictable drivers and bad road conditions.

We decided that we would buy a used Daewoo Cielo. It?s a Korean car. It was hard for me to communicate through the language barrier with people selling their cars. Ema made many telephone calls and there were a lot of men selling cars who were very rude to her.

The market for a used car in Romania is really inflated. Most people can?t really afford a new car, except maybe a Dacia, the Romanian made car. So, many second hand cars are brought into Romania to sell from Western Europe, especially Germany. After a middleman buys a car from someone in Western Europe it is often sold to another or even more intermediaries before it makes it to you. Each one of them wants to make a profit, so the price is pushed higher than in Western Europe for a used car and much higher than in America for a used car since higher taxes and other costs are added on to cars in Europe. Still, if you can?t afford a new car, and you need a car, then you will buy a used car, even if the price is inflated. It?s getting easier to get a loan from the bank to finance a new car; until a few years ago the banks here didn?t even offer these type of consumer services for loans. Another problem is that people recently started using the Euro currency as the basis for large purchases such as real-estate and cars because Romanian is preparing to enter into the European Union in 2007 and because it is now more valuable than the U.S. Dollar. However, people aren?t converting the value of prices in dollars into the equivalent in Euros. They are just putting the symbol for Euros in front of the price value in dollars, but 4000 Euros is almost a thousand dollars more than 4000 dollars!

There are also a lot of luxury cars on the road in Bucharest both new and second hand. Ema says that many Romanians will live in a one room apartment so that they can save enough money to buy a Mercedes, just so it looks like to others that they are high class. It is a class conscious society, which proves that socialism and communism can?t wipe out  economic classes because people will always want more and better standards of living, and you can?t have the concept of upward mobility with out class distinctions.