I met several wonderful people and had interesting conversations. It was my pleasure to explain to very entertaining staff of Interbelic how one makes a proper Harvey Wallbanger, which ultimately turned out fantastic.
And, of course, prietenii mei, we lived like rockstars in a porn flick.
Here’s a brief 4 minute glimpse into the depravity and debauchery which raged for over six hours.
About the Video Quality: It was dark. I was being pushed. Alcohol was raining down on me. I had already been drinking for several hours when this particular incident took place. And the video was captured using Cycorder on my iPhone.
Here’s a travel tip for you longer-term straini: don’t have packages sent to you in Romania.
Your first surprise will be to learn that the Romanian Post Office does not deliver packages to you. Spoiled western, how dare you expect service. How silly of you to think that merely because the package contains your address, it might therefore actually be intend to arrive at the inscribed location.
You will instead get a slice of dead tree with a hand-scrawled note, perhaps legible if you squint carefully with your head cocked to one side like a curious dog after a pepper spray attack, which announces that a package has been received.
Just not received by you.
It’s not because they postal carrier stopped by your house to deliver the package and found you not at home, as you might believe. It’s simply that Poşta Romana could not be bothered to try in the first place.
The notification will indicate the date you are allowed to retrieve the package. In that past, showing up one a different day might result in you being unable to obtain your package.
Never mind that you might be away from your apartment because you went to the seaside. Never mind that perhaps you have business obligations scheduled for the particular day assigned to you.
Feeling sick? A tad forgetful? Twisted your ankle? Detained by police for questioning after a particularly colorful evening out on the town? No excuses. The notice clearly stated the date you were permitted to come to the post office.
Granted, the locals have begun a campaign to convince me that change has come to Romania and, perhaps, these days you’re given a 3 day grace period before the package is return to whence it came. One person claims a week, which is not entirely unreasonable, if true.
Mind you, showing up on the prescribed day (or shortly thereafter) during regular post office business hours is not advised. Rather, the paper alert slipped into your mailbox will let you know what hours of the day you will be allow entrance.
So, mark your calendars and set your alarm clocks.
In the recent past, the window of opportunity to collect packages was typically a scant handful of hours, but recent paradigm shifts in customer service have vastly expanded available service hours to almost a full eight.
This gives you plenty of time to sneak out of the office or ditch school in order to travel to the post office and find out if your package still available.
For those of you receive packages outside of Bucureşti, I recommend going as early as possible. In all the other Romanian cities wherein I’ve received packages from the outside world, you are often met by bitter employees working at a snail’s pace.
Typically, they’ll attempt to batter you with a confusing stream of paperwork and identification checks. Often, you must deal with one or more of their colleagues as the staff enjoy a good game of monkey-in-the-middle as much as the next bureaucrat.
Keep your patience, stranger. For what lies next is the fearsome Customs Officer who will glower at you with disdain, tear your carton asunder, and rifle through its contents hoping to damage whatever it can. When this ritual ends, they will point to one or more objects which require a dubious tax for which they issue no receipt whatsoever.
Congratulations, you’ve just bought the post office staff dinner.
Ah, but in the shiny happy sophisticated magnificently glorious beacon of ubermodernity, the capital metropolis of Bucureşti, you will more than likely will not have to subject yourself to unnecessary customs harassment.
However, don’t expect to go to the post office just down the block from where you live. That would be entirely too easy. Too convenient. Too logical.
No, no.
Check your package notification for the welcome news that you will be required to fight your way across town to some distant post office located somewhere you’ve never been before, so you can enjoy the adventure of becoming lost in the city.
But the best news of all is the pick-up depot has been carefully chosen to exist in a strategic location. A neighborhood famously awaiting your presence with open arms, straine.
Just before returning to live in Romania again for a spell, I engaged in a rare activity: watching television.
It’s an uncommon pastime for me, as I tend to relegate habitual TV to the mindless. I don’t even own one of those infernal contraptions. Nonetheless, on this particular occasion, I managed to find myself in front of the idiot box when something very creative grabbed my full attention.
What a clever advertisement.
The rich visual treatment was in National Geographic documentary style: exotic locations, ethnic garb, facial diversity. The audio track using a live orchestra to set a mysterious mood, introduce excitement by drum beat, and build a miniature epic crescendo. Well-cast voice over with a compelling script presenting the intriguing proposition.
If a person had never heard of Brand X or Brand Y, both of whom competed in manufacturing Product Z, nor had that person ever heard of seen that product before in their lives was asked to compare the primary products of the two brands, which product would they prefer?
This new Whopper Virgins campaign is an innovative evolution on a long tradition of direct comparative advertisements.
Burger King is adding their name to the history of advertising with Whopper Virgins by doing what’s not been seen before. Instead of trying to convince people to make a choice between products they know, the company makes a greater effort to actually seek out people who have never experienced, seen, heard of the brand, the product, or category. Total virgins.
The carefully-crafted aura of scientific explorers at the remote edges of rural humanity seeks to frame the advertised results as being untouched by influences, natural and pure. Hence, we’re to believe that all things being equal, people love the taste of the Whopper over McDonald’s Big Mac.
It’s not hard to believe. Mickey D’s slaps a minuscule disc of meat into a fryer. Yech! If nothing else, Burger King grills their bigger portion of ground beef over an actual flame to impart a little smokey char flavor while allow the fat to drip out. Whether you’re a burger fan or not, the difference should be clear.
But what Burger King attempts to say is that product knowledge and brand attachment are meaningless for taste. It’s an interesting pitch.
While it’s likely that the full, actual results probably do show most tested persons did indicate a preference for the Whopper, it’s also probable that we’ll never the finite details tabulating exactly how much of a difference there was. For example, it’s entirely possible that 40% chose Burger King, 35% chose McDonald’s, and 25% did not register any distinction.
One might go so far as to speculate the country folks were being polite in selecting the least worst food.
The masterful stroke of Crispin Porter + Bogusky, the creative agency behind the campaign, was to go the extra mile in filming a pseudo-documentary with “behind the scenes” action showing some character development, tactical planning, and a non-scientific cultural exchange of gastronomical diplomacy.
What’s the impact?
You feel like you’re watching trustworthy people conduct a fair test. You see rural farmers dressed in traditional clothing mystified by first sight of a product we’ve been conditioned to believe common.
You come to agree the unbiased results heavily indicate the Whopper is the decisive favorite. You feel good watching the epicurean ambassadors of America go off the beaten path to share one of our treasures with folks who’ve never had the opportunity.
And so you don’t feel they’re elitist, the film closes with the American team enamored with eating delicious food they‘ve never seen before made by the villagers.
A superbly executed comparative advertising campaign.
But that never stops hack writers from click whoring with made-up instacontroversies to stir up a bees nest over whether the ads are “exploiting indigenous people” as though the very phrasing had any relevant meaning whatsoever in this context.
These types of cranky nutjobs actually compare this to putting a gun to the head of starving people, a notion which would indicate the pundits are completely and utterly batshit insane. The drivel and nonsense spewing forth from their acidic reactionary tongues shows they’ve never been to the places shown or talked with the rural people shown.
All the people in the video work hard, love their lives, have plenty of food, and enjoyed the experience unlikely to come again in many of their lives. It seems clear to me some of the bizarre commentators haven’t ever visited the Hmong or been around farmers in Maramureş.
The thing is, my friends, is I generally expect overreaction by fringe elements out-of-touch with reality, usually because they care too much about rescuing others to bother getting their information right about the situation they cavalierly thrust themselves in the midst of.
What I’m not quite accustomed to yet is Romanian reaction.
It’s not that I’ve never seen chest-thumping national pride cause uneducated Romanian youths to lose all perspective over a joke before. Just you try approaching a sports bar in cartierul Astra la Braşov while wearing a Hungarian football jersey, waving a Turkish flag, proclaiming sarmale sucks, and gesturing provocatively in the crotchular vicinity, while urinating on a Dacia 1310.
But the supposedly educated marketing and advertising bloggers? Lemme tell ya, these guys are out to lunch.
These kids are totally out of sorts, jumping up and down like someone just called their favorite dollie ugly.
The original poster, Doru Panaitescu, starts off by stepping firmly in a big, steaming pile of cacat with a seething claim the video was shot in a Calaraşi village with a disproportionately high percentage of Roma inhabitants. Grabbing factoids from thin air, the racist implication clearly being that the hated ţigani are in some way to blame for inferred degradation of the mighty and honorable Romanian pride.
Hogwash!
Of course, he’s later corrected by the simple fact that the Whopper Virgins video featured “Transylvanian farmers” from Maramureş, just as Burger King truthfully stated all along. Sorry, Vadim Tudor, there was no grand conspiracy to inflect harm on overly nationalistic Romanian youth. No secret filming locations to undermine national confidence. No need to get one’s patriotic BVDs all in a twisted bunch.
The piece at Marketeer continues with efforts to bolster the self-importance of Romania, while dismissing Thailand as nothing more than a jungle and Greenland as some kind of ice cube. The author goes out of his way to belittle the other countries by somehow insulting their natural terrain, although CP+B and BK never made any such innuendo.
I love Romania but let’s get real, people.
In the commercial, the specific countries were essentially irrelevant to the point they tried to make, so much so that Romania is not even verbally mentioned, whereas the insecure writer at Marketeer somehow feels the need to awkwardly claim Romania is superior because it has… history. Does he mean to say Thailand and Greenland do not have history?
The blog spouts more drivel about the village with apparently too many ethnic minorities, even though it’s irrelevant. Then, there’s brief, non-academic generalities about fast food. And then half-hearted, mealy-mouthed, suggested about a possible protest demonstration, as if that will do anything other than point out the absurdity of participants.
It’s nearly laughable, really, except there’s a small bundle of like-minded folks egging each other on in the comments with inflamed reactions such as labeling this advertising as “cultural rape” and a few raised fists shouting for some kind of boycott initiative.
If these people represented the future of business professionalism, then Romania would be a joke.
One typical comment, from Misha, expressed disdain that mighty and glorious Romania be included in an American television commercial that also showed Thailand and Greenland. She’s upset about jungles and glaciers, you see. Her only conclusion is that since she is from Transylvania and does not recognize a Transylvanian accent in the video, therefore Americans suck.
That’s teachin’ em, Einstein.
Someone else thinks “we” should buy Burger King an atlas. It’s a little hard to grasp the deep intellectualism of this proposal, but I gather the idea is to show BK a map so they can learn where Romania is… even though they were obviously already here.
And then you have silly ideas like threatening to send emails to Burger King with a link to the “World Without Romania” beer commercial on YouTube, as if the corporate executives watching video on their iPhones will be driven to tears and buy lots of Ursus afterward.
No matter that the video was clearly produced only to create brand loyalty among Romanian nationalists in the first place, by appealing to insecure desires for recognition and exploiting a sense of lacking self-identity. The rest of world outside of Romania basically never saw it.
Why do these people decide to feel insulted? You’d have to make a very strong effort to feel slighted by the commercial.
Don’t worry, children, you can always get together with your angsty teen friends to make a video response. But it’s your own fault if you ultimately end up taking a really funny concept and creating it in a way that pretty much sucks.
Since that didn’t work out too well, if you promise to stop crying and sniffling then I’ll let you make fun of rural cowboys in Texas. That’s sure to perk you right up and make you feel you “got even” with someone. Although I do hope won’t mind when I laugh right along with you. Afterall, there’s nothing for a mature person to feel insulted over.
Quit your hypersensitive bitching and bellyaching. If you’d shut your pie hole long enough to catch your breath and stop hyperventilating, you might remember that none of this is about you. Or about Romania. It’s only a televsion ad. Aimed at American audiences. About selecting a hamburger. And making that choice because some people living in far away rural places who have no idea what a burger is might choose the same burger the advertiser wants you to buy.
I suppose there will come a time when perhaps a few of those people will realize how silly their reaction was. Hopefully those poor fools will change their perspective and come around to a more nuanced understanding of life around them and their place in the universe.
Anyone can say something stupid when they don’t think about issues before speaking. A great many people have done so. Just not me.
In the broader picture, I tend to see wisdom in some of the comments posted to an advertising blog I read, where the more enlightened thoughts were about how overly defensive reactions of the few can mar what is ultimately a creative way of showing those differences that makes us all the same.
Citizen leaders reminded the media that Wednesday’s embarrassing overreaction by the government was a manufactured crisis when none existed, using a handful of masked provocateurs — possibly planted — as a weak excused to attack thousands of peaceful Bulgarians exercising their constitutional rights, injuring an unknown number of persons, and imprisoning nearly 200.
Protesters remain peaceful and, so far, there have been no outbreaks of violence by police. Government public relations spinsters claim their anti-riot guards will be restrained today, but continue to blame the people of Bulgaria for yesterday’s beatings.
Meanwhile, the Bulgarian parliament ignored the public redress for grievances and instead opted to focus on critical issues such as nationally banning children from being out in public after 8pm without a parent. Sorry, Detlev, you can’t play outside this summer. Teenagers are now banned from being out in public after 10pm without a parent. Sorry, Ana, no more dance clubs for you.
UPDATE: The 3,000-strong protest was carried out successfully and has ended. Participants waved flags and banners, demanded changes in government, and read the Bulgarian Constitution out loud as reaffirmation of their rights as citizens.
Last night in Riga, a protest calling for new government elections turned violent after police attacked Latvian demonstrators. After the attacks, police claimed a few drunk men as their reason for violent reaction against the general protest.
Today, in Bulgaria — right now — the expected protest in Sofia has suddenly turned bloody as the Bulgarian government apparently manufactured a bomb threat to generate pretense for an attack on students and farmers.
UPDATE: The Bulgarian government is pretending the bomb threat came “from the internet” which is the thinnest of all possible veils. (Frankly, it’s an unmitigated crock of shit to be treated with the utmost skepticism and disdain. An evident lie.)
Using this alleged threat as an excuse to quash political demonstrations, the government ordered riot police to assault Bulgarian citizens in broad day light. Chemical tear gas mortars, nightstick batons as clubs, people slathered in red blood.
UPDATE 2: Demanding changes to the government and justice for the people ignored by parliament thousands of demonstrators resisted brutal, pre-emptive clashes by police for hours. And other protestors fought back, attacking police barricades and riot squads in retaliation.
Even after 70 arrests, hundreds of people maintained their presence on the parliamentary steps, despite the government crackdown, while large groups cut-off from the main area took their protest to the streets.
By evening, police continued to disrupt major streets and intersections, such as Tsarigradsko Shosse or Levski as the protest continued. After dark, reports indicate protesters have completed their demonstration and are voluntarily returning home.
UPDATE 3: With the protest completed, Bulgarian officials have fired up the spin machine to twist the perception of worldwide media. Mihail Mikov, the Interior Minister, spouts euphemisms of “moderate force” to describe the police beatings. He then goes on to blame students, farmers, and environmentalists as responsible for everything.
A classic script from the playbook of former-Communist parties: abject disregard for the rights of citizens, take any actions necessary to cling to power.
FINAL UPDATE: A second protest has been scheduled for tomorrow, Thursday, 15 January 2009, until all imprisoned political demonstrators are released from detention by authorities.
A student was murdered in Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria. After a lack of action to protect the University area from such crimes, students previously protested the government but were essentially ignored by the government who dismissed the demonstrations as child’s play.
Farmers in Bulgaria have been pushing the government to obtain special EU funding, which collapsed under the weight of corruption within the government. As the Bulgarian farmers gathered from around the country into Sofia to protest government failure, the parliament simply recessed and fled the capital so as not to confront those farmers.
That same day, another political rally was held to protect Bulgarian forests from expanded construction work and deforestation. However, those seeking a change in environmental policy were equally ignored by the Parliament who left Sofia rather than be present for the protests, further fueling dissatisfaction.
And now authorities are using an unconfirmed bomb threat as reason to beat Bulgarian citizens into submission for daring to criticize the powers that be.
Protest is a constitutional right in Bulgaria. Supposedly.
The Bulgarian Socialist Party is the reincarnation of the Soviet-era Communist party and has maintained virtual control over Bulgaria ever since the supposed democratization of the 1990s.
BSP is the equivalent of Romania’s PSD, the Social Democrat Party which is the euphemism of the Soviet-era Communist party in Romania (PCR) that has controlled most of the time since the 1989 revolution.
Is Romania watching our southern neighbors with any interest?
I believe Romanians should be contacting their politicians and demanding Bucureşti place pressure on Sofia to stop the violence against its people. The situation is too close to home, in a period where the situation could be reversed a year from now.
