I feel like I spent sufficient time in the city as a tourist to make deep connections with the city and lifestyle. My preconceptions of Romanian poverty, low economic development, potential for language difficulties and strange encounters with a different culture were dashed into oblivion.
Cluj, as it is more commonly referred to locally, is a vibrant metropolitan city with a highly educated population and growing economy and seemed far more familiar than I expected.
The cool factor ranked high too in a city with tens of thousands of university students. Cluj was designated the European Youth Capital in Cluj did not seem nearly as foreign as I expected a city in Romania would be.
There was no difficulty in meeting people fluent in English and Romanian was surprisingly easy to read compared to my travels in Czech Republic and Poland. I pieced together a video of photos and video to share my perceptions of Cluj, Romania in a way that I cannot convey in a dozen photographs strung together around my words in a regular post. This is amateur video production with no narration or soundtrack, except for the ambient sounds present in the video clips.
I even included a video clip riding on the bus where my finger obscures part of the picture frame. Get past the first 30 seconds of video and the quality improves. The video is long at 20 minutes. Since only a few dozen people will probably ever care to see my video about Cluj, my real objective in this video was stringing together enough images to show how familiar Cluj appeared to this tourist from the USA. The abundance of English seen around Cluj shows it is the primary second language, although I did meet a University librarian who was hoping I spoke French to allow her more facility in speaking with me.
