What would my answer be? I told you before that I will not leave my country due to the views of Horia-Roman PATAPIEVICI on the subject. Not physically, at least. But, on the other hand:
1. Two of the most important blogs I own are in English, and are targeting mostly an English audience (you wouldn’t say that by looking at my traffic analysis, but still);
2. You can see on my Last FM profile that a lot of the singers I like are not Romanians;
3. Most of the movies I watch are not from Romania (I actually have a small phobia on watching Romanian movies due to the small budget, thus lack of quality);
4. My Google Reader application is filled with English feeds (I actually started adding some French sources too);
5. A lot of the things at supermarkets I buy are not from Romania;
6. Most of the electronics I have are out of this country;
7. As an Internet-geek, I use a lot of web sites outside Romania;

Still, I can say that:
1. All my relatives are Romanian;
2. My friends are Romanian;
3. Most of my workplaces I worked were filled with Romanians;
4. The persons I meet daily are (surprise, surprise!) Romanians;
5. I read mostly Romanian news;
6. The things I buy at the local marketplace are from Romanian persons (I wouldn’t call them peasants, but it’s not far from that);
7. Most of the time I speak, think and read in Romanian.

So, I would say that most people I’m surrounded with are from Romania, while a lot of the things I do, read and use are not Romanian-specific. It is a surprising fact to see things like this. I didn’t expect foreign customs, items and creations to be so important in my life. Writing this article was quite a discovery for me.

I decided to have a look today at some major job-searching web sites in Romania: BestJobs and eJobs. I looked for [MBA] keyword on all three. Here are the results:

and:

BestJobs had a total of 4,959 jobs, out of which 8 asked for an MBA; ratio MBA / total jobs: 0.16%
eJobs: 3,596 jobs in total – 5 of which asked for an MBA; ratio: 0.12%
__________
Total: 8,555 jobs in total – 13 jobs asking for MBA; Total ratio: 0.15% jobs requiring an MBA.

So, as of today, only about one or two jobs seen out of 1,000 on BestJobs and ejobs require MBAs.

Also, please note that “require” is a relative term: you have a plus by having an MBA, but I don’t remember seeing any job posting putting the “Mandatory” requirement. It would be nice to have it, not mandatory.

What should I learn from this?
a. Either jobs that require an MBA are not posted on BestJobs or eJobs;
b. Either Romanian jobs don’t really require MBAs.

But I still want to get one.

Contents of this blog post:
1. History of events
2. Implications into my life
3. What to do next?

Who was Nicolae STEINHARDT? See a page on Wikipedia for him, read some texts and see some photos on OrhodoxPhotos.com, if you speak Romanian there is also a blog on his texts.

1. History of events
The spring of 1999: I am in the yard of a high-school in Constanta, waiting for a regional contest for a subject in the curricula (if you were good at a specific subject, you could compete with fellow pupils from the County – “Olympiad” it was called). This was a few years I discovered Gala GALACTION, an Orthodox Christian writer I mostly admired for what it seemed to me was the closest resemblance to the Christian values. This implied a lot of fanatical/bigot values. I won’t get into too much details, but to me, at that time, Orthodoxy was merely a set of rules – living by those rules would make things right for me. If those rules meant breaking conventional wisdom – well, this is fine also. Gala GALACTION was the ultimate model in Orthodox life for me, nothing else ever existed.

So, I’m that yard, in a morning. I was talking with a girl I barely new, also from Navodari. She recommends me a Jew writer converted to Orthodoxy in the prison. He went through a lot of pain in the prison, the girl said, while he kept a lot of memories within himself. Later he wrote a journal, based on those memories. The person was Nicolae STEINHARDT, while his book was “Happiness Diary”. From this description I left with a poor impression. (Pain and torture in prison? Me to read a book on that?) But I had a very profound respect for her, so I decided to read the book.

It took me a while (more than a month, I think) to finish the projects I was involved (that meant mostly finishing to read some books), going to the high-school’s library, not finding the book, going again, nothing yet, going again. Finally the book was there, it was a bit old, pages were falling.

And I began reading. To my surprise, I really liked the writer’s style. Easy enough to understand most words, hard enough for me not to get any references (he often has mentions to I’ve-never-ever-heard-of-this-book-or-writer; and he has a lot of mentions like this), but most of all very intelligent book. Soon I was not reading the book, I was devouring it.

The concept of paradox, the new ideas, were all great. I would then understand the world through these variables. But what really struck me at that time was:
A. The brand new emphasis put on emotions; A true Orthodox should always be smiling; (tell that to Galaction, who’s love for a military-style life was obvious, and who on most pictures I saw back then seemed so frowned) And while politeness rules should be a minimum in life (my life wasn’t ruled by those at the beginning), the Christian life is much more than that – you should be much better than polite: love, care, help etc.; (this was also new to my style) The Pharisees were all about dogma and rules, but Christ, according to Nicolae STEINHARDT, was more than that – he dared to change conventional wisdom; All-in-all, it was very likely that I should put things in order a lot on the emotional part and leave some rules apart;
B. There is a only a small reference in the “Happiness Diary” regarding Gala GALACTION:
English: “Also be blessed father Gala Galaction for finding – even as a balance pan with two or three faces, as it was – for some of his books, titles with an wonderful echo: Bells of the Neamt Monastery, Near the Water of Vodislava, The Chief Cornerstone, The Small Church in Razoare” (titles translated with the help of Wikipedia) – translated by me from:
Romanian: “Blagoslovit fie si parintele Gala Galaction ca a gasit – asa taler cu doua sau trei fete cum a fost – pentru unele din cartile sale titluri cu minunat ecou: Clopotele manastirii Neamtu, Langa apa Vodislavei, Piatra din capul unghiului, Bisericuta din razoare.”;
Now this can be understood easy or hard; (to me it’s so hard that even today I can’t really tell what it means) But due to the logical construction of the phrase one can easy see that it has negative implications; (“Although Gala GALACTION is …, God should still bless him”) This got me into an all-or-nothing thinking: either Nicolae STEINHARDT is right on this point, and life is really nothing on dogma, and is mostly on love, or Nicolae STEINHARDT is all wrong and Gala GALACTION is the right model for me; I worked on solving this very troubling mystery for me and within a few weeks Nicolae STEINHARDT was the new person leading my life, while Gala GALACTION would get very far from me; So far that even today one of the basic criteria on which I analyze a Christian is on this level – “Are you putting religion so high that you get to be dogmatic?”; I’m sorry to say this, but besides Nicolae STEINHARDT (who I only knew in writing) and, in some part, Horia-Roman PATAPIEVICI, no other person in this life is a relevant criteria in Orthodoxy; Putting the dogmatic filter upfront helps me clear things quite fast.

I reread The “Happiness Diary” in the summer of 2003. I reread it about two years after, in 2005. I was happy to see that I understand, as time went by, more and more of the references in the book. I was sad (for my part) to see that the percentage of what I knew compared to his knowledge is ridiculously small.

I also read two times (last time in the spring of 2007) “Through Giving You Shall Receive”, and that’s a very good book also.

I read once “Monologul polifonic” and “In the Manner of… Youths”, but they impressed me little.

2. Implications into my life
A. If you would have asked me in that spring of 1999, prior to the discovery of Nicolae STEINHARDT, when did my real Christian life begun, I would probably answer: in 1997; If you’d ask me now, I’d say that 1997-1999 were discovery years (the concept does not really apply to Orthodoxy; you can’t really discover God in two years; but this is how I see those years), while the period from that spring of 1999 and until today (11 years after) was mostly a time of what I perceive as Orthodoxy in my life;
B. How did things go after 1999 until today? I started loosening, more or less, most of the rules I made for myself; Right now I am tightening them a little (after more than 10 years!), but it’s still nowhere near what typical wisdom says on being a Christian; (things I do as a Christian are really atypical, from my perspective) See an analysis of the movie I love best – Le Notti di Cabiria – The best movie I’ve seen. The one movie I recommend seeing to anyone I know over 15 years of age. Go see it now! – and see for yourself if that’s an Orthodox perspective or not;
C. There are things that are easy to understand in Orthodoxy (“You shall not steal”), and there are things which are not simple; (ecumenical approach on religions) Whenever in doubt, my first thoughts go to Nicolae STEINHARDT;
D. I can say that I own only a few books: Nicolae STEINHARDT’s “Happiness Diary”, “Through Giving You Shall Receive”, “Nobleman articles” (I haven’t yet read this one), a few books by Horia-Roman PATAPIEVICI (to be completed with the whole collection, or at least the books I can understand), and a book on Psychology – “Essentials of Understanding Psychology” (by Robert S. Feldman); I have a few books more, but my plan is not to keep them after I finish reading them; So, I really own quite a few books, and three of them are by Nicolae STEINHARDT; (I plan for a few more with or on him)
E. I once saw a show on Realitatea TV with Stelian TANASE and Mircea DINESCU; Mircea DINESCU suggested that Nicolae STEINHARDT should be sanctified; Stelian TANASE (who knew Nicolae STEINHARDT in person) replied “I agree”; A lot of thinking from my part on that small dialogue.

3. What to do next?
The “Happiness Diary” by Nicolae STEINHARDT is more than a book on religion. It’s a book on the condition of the human spirit. You may find it useful even if you understand it via a non-orthodox perspective. Thus, I recommend you to read two books by Nicolae STEINHARDT: the “Happiness Diary” and “Through Giving You Shall Receive”.

You can support Polirom‘s Publishing house initiative for publishing the entire series of works by Nicolae STEINHARDT by buying right from them.

That’s simple, I can give you two solutions for that:
1. Contact that online store via email and tell them you have a problem with the warranty of a product; See the response time, the way they handle the situation, the solution they offer to you; You’ll get a glimpse on what’s behind that store before you use it; You can use a fake e-mail for this;
2. Ask the store owner for a less-than-usual solution; I personally asked two online stores for this: I wanted to gradually buy all the components from that online store, they should keep them for a 6 weeks tops, and when I get all those components, they should assembly my PC; One store was reluctant and answered my query after about two weeks, the other one answered fast and agreed to my request (it was a computer worth about 5-600 Euros and the store was not the cheapest in town).

Both solution can fail: the owners of those stores can lie to you and only claim that they will solve the warranty and only claim that they will help you (pretend that they are in fact trustworthy when they’re not). But in most cases, I think that these are good solutions to find out how the employees of an online store will treat you.

Oh, and you can also just ask for this information from other sources (from real friends to virtual communities), you don’t really have to find out this on your own.

How do you feel about this blog post of mine?

Contents
1. With whom do I compare Marius BURCUS?
2. History of knowing about him?
3. Why do I say Marius BURCUS is the best dentist I’ve known? (and more than this, he’s a professional)
4. What I would do better?
5. What do others feel about him (in Romanian language)?
6. How to contact?

1. With whom do I compare Marius BURCUS?
The basis of comparison in the dentist world is rather small – I can only compare it with a few dentists I’ve visited in the past three years (two) and with another on with whom I’ve had contact with (one). It’s thus helpful to have the opinions of other persons that speak about this dentist. Also, if I extend the the “dentist” world to the “medicine service” the range is much broader. I will only say that Marius BURCUS is the best dentist I’ve known, but I have seen persons providing professional services in other fields of medicine also. Also, you might want to use some perhaps-existent campaigns in your country where you can visit a lot of dentists for a free check-up. But generally speaking, you don’t want too many tests on your teeth before picking the right dentist. There’s little margin for error.

2. History of knowing about him?
My visits to dentists in general begun in the childhood, continued until I was about 12, then comes a long long period of time when I saw no dentist.

Finally, I’ve made a one-time visit to a dentist in the summer of 2005, in the last year of college. I had a small problem which was solved by filling (I had a small cavity behind two upper central incisors). I was terribly scared and I don’t think that the dentist used anesthetics. The sound of the high-speed dental handpiece was a killer, and I associated this sound with the lack of comfort I’ve had during the operation itself. Visits like these make you want to care a lot more on your teeth (so you do prevention, instead of later fixing things).

Now begins a period in which I’m looking for a dentist, and can’t find any relevant information on what a good dentist is (my best friends in Bucharest were in Bucharest just since college, and information on the Internet about dentists was scarce and questionable). In May 2006 I visit another dentist for a free check up of my teeth and he leaves me a poor impression. I contact a dentist I knew from a forum where I was very active, but things don’t evolve. Then it happens. A person I valued posts a forum post on the Internet about a dentist in Bucharest. I go “Wow!”, contact the forum guy immediately, get the contact data and … I wait. Finally, I go to the dentist a few months later.

I go, I tell him I’m scared of pain, I haven’t been to a dentist for more than two years, but I do a relatively good personal hygiene for the teeth (actually, it’s hard for me to see where I can improve on that). He sprays a little anesthetic for me not to feel the pain of the injection (he would not repeat this in the days to come, but it was fine), he then makes an injection (after a while I can’t speak normally – whatever “normally” is). He goes for the lower first molar from the right. Things advance for a bit to another teeth, and soon I’m able to see a nerve (he makes a joke to the dental assistant – “Wow! What a specimen we have in here!”; And the dental assistant was actually looking; Until he explains me it’s a joke, I took it seriously and I was actually thinking “Hmm, so I do have good nerves!”). For the next session I go to make a radiography, and he continues working on those teeth. Since the very first operation lead to a relatively big thing (we got to the nerve, two teeth were involved), I was feeling uncomfortable with the process itself (I’ve had a lot more bad teeth to go), but things got better from there.

For the coming weeks, I’ve had a lot of fillings done, some even to the third molars (wisdom teeth). When possible, the dentist made more than one filling in one day. I’ve never experienced pain, none whatsoever. I always felt comfortable. I never felt that I wasted my time.

3. Why do I say Marius BURCUS is the best dentist I’ve known? (and more than this, he’s a professional)
1. He had a very kind, attentive and followed each of my requests. He talked slowly, in a low voice. He answered to each of my questions in detail. He told me things that I didn’t care about, but made me feel important. He smiled, and I felt that he cares about me as a patient. Very polite person.
2. He was wise. When I came with the request: “I’m afraid of pain. Kill me with anesthetics, but don’t make me feel any pain”, he used anesthetics even for the preparatory anesthetics injection. But at the very next meeting he “forgot” about that. So he first paced with my feelings, and followed my wishes, then he changed them for the best choice. He didn’t argue, he tricked me. Beautiful.
3. He made jokes. OK, some of the jokes might be dentist jokes (so funny just in a context), but nevertheless he tried to make a pleasant atmosphere.
4. He didn’t rip me off. “You don’t have to pay me today, you can pay me a bit later. If possible, I will combine the price of two operations into one, so I won’t charge the price of two operations, but a larger, and cheaper one. I will always charge you with the smaller operation, not the larger one, when possible”. This seemed to be the pricing philosophy of mr. BURCUS. What I can say is that I’m very satisfied with this.
5. I felt no pain. I don’t know how he did this, but my one and only concern (other than the teeth problems themselves) was solved. This was nothing like my past experiences with dentists.
6. If someone would describe a programmer’s work without having any idea on what the programmer does, he would say: that programmer types all day, he gets paid and he works intensively. It’s the basic thing which any programmer should do (so, he would analyze the programmer’s work from what he should do, not how well he does it). You can’t really tell whether the programs he writes are good, excellent or poor. The situation is similar with my dentist: I can say that he uses the right equipment, and that I’ve had no problems so far with the work the dentist has done to me. But I can’t really evaluate the work he has done for me professionally (has he used the right tools? has he treated me correctly? could he have done it better? I can’t say; I was very satisfied with his work, though, and felt it was all fine).

4. What I would do better?
1. I would do a little manual, with instructions on: what toothpaste/dental floss/mouth water to buy, how to use these things, what are the precaution I must take not to hurt the teeth, what are some general advices on tooth care, some tricks & tips that I will value much higher than general advice found on the Internet, for example;
2. I would call if I’m late.

5. What do others feel about him (in Romanian language)?
I’ve found out about the dentist by reading this topic on the XF Forum (it’s in Romanian): “La dentist” (“to the dentist” – Romanian also). More specifically, I’ve read this blog post of whiskas (a Romanian forumist): “Stomatolog care rulez” (“A dentist that rules” – in Romanian). whiskas also wrote this forum post (Romanian). I’ve contacted whiskas, and he gave me some details. I then visited the dentist and wrote a forum post (Romanian) myself. Finally, another person (Marius ’95) visits the dentist and writes this post of “Dentist Review” (Romanian). These are all pretty good ways to find more things on other people’s perceptions on the dentist. The topic itself is quite useful for knowing more things on teeth problems and solutions.

6. How to contact?
You can contact Blue Clinic, and ask for Marius BURCUS. Marius BURCUS works also on a different clinic near Constantin Brancoveanu, but I don’t have the contact data for this one, and I can’t recommend it since I haven’t been there. You can ask the dentist for this other clinic, if you like to.
Blue Clinic’s contact data:
(close to Calea Dorobantilor) 15 Brazilia st, District 1, 07000, Bucharest. Map of Blue Clinic on Salut Bucuresti web site.
Phone: (+4) 021-231.23.75
External link on cabinetedentare.ro.
You can say you found out about Marius BURCUS as a result of a recommendation of Radu OBADA (whiskas on XF Forum).

Would you like to add something valuable new to my words in here? Do you have a personal experience with Marius BURCUS? Post it below.