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Anorak News | Borat’s Mud Sticks

Borat’s Mud Sticks

by | 14th, December 2006

“WE’RE leaving Borat’s village for a dream life in Britain.”

So says the Sun’s headline, a legend based on interviews with villagers living in Moroieni, Romania.

Those gipsies featured in the Borat movie are not local to Kazakhstan but Europeans who will able to legally live in this gilded land when their country joins the European Union on January 1.

Regular readers of Anorak will already have known that, and know too that the town featured in the movie was Glod.

So what is it: Glod or Moroieni? We imagine that very soon Romania will be full of places claiming to be Borat’s hometown.

Just as visitors to Cuba find it impossible to avoid stepping into a bar, hotel or cafe where Earnest Hemmingway did not enjoy a restorative mojito, visitors to Romania will see where Borat was born, wet nursed, graduated form college and wet nursed some more. They will then be shown the tennis racket Ilie NĂ£stase wielded on his way to defeat in the 1976 Wimbledon final and where The Cheeky Girls bought their first hotpants.

But reading on we learn that Glod is Romanian for “Mud” and that it is part of the greater Moroieni municipality.

And life is different there. Toilets are holes in the ground. Water is collected from standpipes or the stream. Transport is horse and cart.

It’s the kind of place many stressed-out British executives would call a retreat, a place to escape the daily hustle and grind of their own lives. In Glod you go to bed dog tired and wake up refreshed. In Glod you eat organic produce cooked on wood burning stove. In Glod you are at one with the earth, it being stuck to your Birkenstocks, clothes and hair. The British dream about living in somewhere like Glod.

But Glod is not for everyone. And local Dan Nelu wants to leave. “It’s my dream to work in Britain,” says he. “I want to go for one reason only – the money.”

Villager Stan Nino says he has four Romanian friends already working in London. He says the two working in restaurants earn £1,200 a month. For that money they are truly living it up, enjoying the delights of the public transport system, processed food and a communal bathroom.

But we cannot deter this army or workers with tales of how London is a city of contrasts, a larger version of Moroieni. The Sun says they have Britain “in their sights”. They and the Bulgarians are raring to go.

And we get the message. Rather then being a story about how the EU is bringing hope to many and creating wealth and opportunity, we are eyeing the Rogarians at the gates.

“So will there be another Eastern European exodus to these shores?” asks the Sun, claiming that 510,000 workers have arrived in Britain from Poland since 2004.

The paper concedes that it is impossible to know for sure. Just as it impossible to work out how many Britishers will move to Romania, to take advantage of the cheap property and land.

That’s the thing with the EU – it’s hard to keep an eye on everyone. Too much freedom of movement…



Posted: 14th, December 2006 | In: Tabloids Comment | TrackBack | Permalink