Quick quiz on Romania

Problem
You have been to Romania, or not been to Romania. How well do you know it. (If you don't know Romania at all, never mind, the answers to the quiz are at the end. Most of the answers were in my previous posts on Romania.)

Quick Quiz on Romania

1 How do you spell the name of the country, Romania, Rumania, Roumania, all of the above, currently Romania, the country prefers Romania?
2 What is the capital? Bucharest, Brasov or Cluj?
3 How is Bucharest spelled and pronounced in Romania?
4 What is the horse shoe shaped mountain range called? Alps or Carpathians?
5 Who is Romania associated with, Dracula or Frankenstein?
6 Who wrote the story of Dracula? Bram Stoker or Mary Shelley?
7 Name a nobel prize winner from Romania connected with WWII and the Holocaust, whose childhood home is a museum in the north of the country.
8 Name a prize winning gymnast from Romania.
9 Name a musician whose house is a museum in Romania near Brasov.
10 Is the most popular tourist site in Bucharest a palace a Parliament building or both?

Answers
1 ROMANIA. R o u m a n i a or R o u m a n i e if you are looking for the nostalgic and humorous song in Yiddish by American immigrants (and Eartha Kitt) about Roumania they had left and the national dish which was renamed Pastrami. Americans have used the spelling Rumania. Romania post WWII wants everybody to use Romania which reflects the origins of the name, meaning people from Rome.
2 BUCHAREST.
3 It sounds like Book -a -r e s h ti. The S has a comma underneath which tells you to renounce it like SH.
4 Carpathians.
5 Dracula.
6 Bram Stoker. Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein.
7 Elie Wiesel.
8 Nadia Comaneci.
9 George Eonescu.
10 Both a parliament building, second largest in the world after the Pentagon, and the former dictator's palace.

Your results
10 out of 10. Well done.
1-9 - do the quiz again. You'll eventually get it right.

Flights to Romania and Europe

To fly to these countries check the national and budget airlines:
http://www.aeroflot.com/ru-en (Russian)
www.bulgaria-air.co.uk/
ryanair.com
https://www.cheapflights.co.uk/find-flights/to-Ukraine

If Cyrillic is too hard, try Romania which used the Latin alphabet.
www.tarom.ro (Budget airline to Romania.)


Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker. I have several more posts with pictures on Romania, Bucharest and other countries worldwide, and a quiz on the USA, more stories and quizzes to come. If you are linked to a tourist board, please send me information and updates. Please bookmark and share links to your favourite posts.

Remembering Three World-Famous Romanians: Dracula; Eli Wiesel; Nadia Comaneci

Dracula's Castle, Castelul (Romanian for Castle) Bran. Picture author Kye Thayer from Wikipedia. Walkway of castle interior.

Problem
I was going to Romania and could not think of a single Romanian.

Answer
I started to check landmarks, lists of Romanians, too many and mostly not known to me. But I know three.
1 Dracula - major landmark, Dracula's castle.
2 Eli Wiesel, Nobel Prize winner. See the Jewish Museum in Bucharest, the capital of Romania.
3 Nadia, the darling of the Olympics.

Stories
1 The real life story of any leader and any war can be harrowing but Dracula's was worse than most. However, we have inherited beautiful buildings and castles from kings, tyrants and dictators which are now available for everybody to admire form the outside, and enjoy the inside and be free lo leave and move on geographically and mentally and physically back to the current century. The good old days? When were they? Maybe before the war. Not during the war, except for the small proportion who survived.

2 In London my family was delivered a copy of a free A5 magazine My local PINNER news, May 2017, issue 36. It is delivered every month.

The magazine features the story of a Romanian survivor of Auschwitz. Leslie Kleinman, (the surname is German for small man) was imprisoned in Auschwitz camp in Poland aged 15 and lost his mother and six younger siblings on arrival and when he was released April 23 he learned that he had also recently lost his older sister. Despite that, he has lived another 72 years and reached the age of 87.

On Holocaust Memorial Day, April 23rd, he told an audience of 350 people about his experiences. The event organiser quoted the words of another, well known Romanian survivor, Elie Wiesel, "Anyone who listens to a witness becomes a witness."

Translating the Hebrew, Yom Hashoah, yom is Hebrew for day, ha is the, shoah is the Holocaust.

More on
www.mynewsmag.co.uk

I then went on to research Romanian born Elie Wiesel who lived from 1928-2016 and was also a survivor of Auschwitz because at the age of 15 on the day he was admitted another prisoner warned him to claim to be an adult in order to survive the gassing of children.

The remarkable parts of his story included the account he wrote of his time in Auschwitz, which he never intended to publish, at least not for ten years. In 1954, until as a newspaper journalist he interviewed the famous Catholic writer Francois Mauriac, who had been awarded the Nobel prize for literature two years earlier, in 1952. Wiesel listened as Mauriac repeatedly talked about the suffering of Jesus. Wiesel finally burst out with the complaint that children had died less than ten years ago, he had seen it with his own eyes, and nobody talked about their suffering.

Mauriac followed Wiesel out and told him to write about what he witnessed.  Eli Wiesel did what Mauriac suggested. His first book's title was changed to the simpler one word Night. Mauriac wrote a forward to the book.

Over the course of the rest of his life Wiesel wrote numerous books and a play, published posthumously (after death). His words are inscribed on a Holocaust museum in the USA. He was awarded the Nobel prize.

After researching Eli Wiesel, I turned to the next famous person on my list, an active person, in sport.

3 I could not remember the name of a famous Romanian Olympic winner but I was sure there had to be one. Were they all Russians? I recalled the name Olga Korbut. I looked her up and found an article which also mentioned Olga, who came from Belorussia, and Nadia Comăneci, who was Romanian born and was representing Romania.

Nadia Comăneci

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Nadia Comăneci
Nadia Comăneci at the 1976 Olympics
Personal information
Full name	Nadia Elena Comăneci
Nickname(s)	Nadia
Country represented	Romania
Born	November 12, 1961 (age 55) Onești, Romania[1]
Height	5 ft 3.5 in (1.61 m)[1]
Discipline	Women's artistic gymnastics
Gym	National Training Center
Former coach(es)	Béla Károlyi Márta Károlyi
Choreographer	Geza Pozsar
Eponymous skills	Comăneci salto (uneven bars)
Retired	1984 (official)
Medal record[hide] International gymnastics competitions Representing  Romania Olympic Games 1976 Montréal All-Around 1976 Montréal Uneven Bars 1976 Montréal Balance Beam 1980 Moscow Balance Beam 1980 Moscow Floor Exercise 1976 Montréal Team 1980 Moscow Team 1980 Moscow All-Around 1976 Montréal Floor Exercise World Championships 1978 Strasbourg Balance Beam 1979 Ft. Worth Team 1978 Strasbourg Team 1978 Strasbourg Vault European Championships 1975 Skien All-Around 1975 Skien Uneven Bars 1975 Skien Balance Beam 1975 Skien Vault 1977 Prague All-Around 1977 Prague Uneven Bars 1979 Copenhagen All-Around 1979 Copenhagen Vault 1979 Copenhagen Floor Exercise 1975 Skien Floor Exercise 1977 Prague Vault 1979 Copenhagen Balance Beam Summer Universiade 1981 Bucharest Team 1981 Bucharest All-Around 1981 Bucharest Uneven Bars 1981 Bucharest Vault 1981 Bucharest Floor Exercise

Nadia Elena Comăneci (Romanian pronunciation: [ˈnadi.a koməˈnet͡ʃʲ] ( listen); born November 12, 1961) is a RomanianOlympic gold medalist who, at the age of 14, became the first gymnast to be awarded a perfect score of 10.0 in the Olympic games during the 1976 Olympics in Montreal.^[2] She would eventually go on to receive six more perfect 10s in Montreal as well as three gold medals. Four years later, she won two gold medals at the 1980 Olympics in Moscow. She won a total of nine Olympic medals and four World Championship medals during her career.

Comăneci is one of the world's best-known gymnasts and is credited with popularizing the sport around the globe.^[3] In 2000, she was named as one of the Athletes of the 20th Century by the Laureus World Sports Academy.^[4] She has lived in the United States since 1989 and is married to American Olympic champion.

That's an amazing, impressive list. Not just once, but year after year of dedication.

If you should get into a conversation about Romanian history with somebody from Romania, somebody in Romania, or somebody who is interested in Romania, you have three world-famous Romanians you can talk about.

If you learned English and Latin at school as I did, you will find many Romanian words sound familiar. You can learn Romanian, which is similar to Italian - the name Romanian gives you a clue, from DuoLingo.

www.duolingo.com

Conclusion
You and I know already know, or can easily get to know about, three world-famous Romanians. If and when we visit Romania we can fly into Bucharest where we ca visit the Jewish Museum and take a side trip to Dracula's Castle.

Author of picture of Dracula's Castle, in Romanian Castelul (castle) Bran, is Florin 73m.From Wikipedia.

Author

Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker. I have several more posts on Romanian travel sights and learning Romanian.

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