Romanians and Greeks: Probably the most impulsive Europeans…
The morning’s weather was according to the mood of millions of Romanians all over the world. Cloudy, with a temperature lower than the normal one for this period of year. Most of the people were not smiling on the streets. In my office everyone behaved as if it never happened. But it did and it happen and it hurt them all. Romania lost 0-2 from Holland, last night. I spoke with many people since the morning, all of them are sad, their heart is broken and they don’t have mood for anything at all.
I watched the match too, after I had a very important “strategy meeting” with my brother, in a restaurant with nice food and even better service (yes, it exists, there are few of them, this one was MJU!). Cristian Chivu and his team mates really wanted to beat Holland and advance to the next round, but they could not. The result by the ones who don’t know… “they were tired”. No, as all the teams play once per 4 days, I don’t think that it has anything to do with tiredness. For me the problem was psychological, their legs had 1 ton weight each of them, as we say in Greek, from the pressure of a whole country on these people. Suddenly, while before the tournament none in Romania had demands by the players, after they had the chance to win and advance, they lost their minds, they started dreaming of winning the Cup itself. They started behaving like… Greeks!
Trust me, I have been in quite a few places, but only here in Romania I found the same impulsive character that the Greeks, we, have. We get enthusiastic out of nothing and then we get soooo disappointed again for no reason. For example, in 2004 Greece made the biggest surprise in sports history and won the Cup. After this, most of the Greeks (with the media first, as always) were saying that we will also win the Mondial Cup, Brazil etc. In the first game after we won the Cup, we lost from… Albania! And then we were not even qualified for the Mondial finals! So, automatically the heroes became… losers.
Same story in Romania, in EVERYTHING. Most of the people are ready to have the most contradicting feelings just in few seconds. In the domain of feelings and impulsiveness, sometimes I think that I am still back home, especially when I see every day endless people acting before thinking. So, all the madness before the game and the sadness after it here in Romania was exactly the same with what happened in Greece before playing against Sweden and after the game.
Why do I say all these? Not because I decided to… teach you psychology (I don’t have this kind of complexes). I simply want to describe to you the way that people think here (at least as I understand it myself for the majority of them) and I would please ask you to remember this when you will try to understand some news about the market, the economy, the profits of companies etc. Especially about the Real Estate Market and the new era that has risen, please keep in mind that people here get very easily enthusiastic (and this is one of the reasons why most of them got crazy and started asking ridiculously high prices) and you will also see them getting upset or very afraid in the next months, especially after the elections of November.
But for this new era we will talk more…
