Back home and manele

I was anxious to show Melissa around and take her to all my favourite places. I called Cristi and we decided to go to Complex, the student centre, with plenty of bars and clubs. Since I’m leaving Romania soon, I wanted to experience a "Manele" night, and besides, Melissa likes Serbian "Turbo folk". I also wanted to introduce her to Nelu, but he hurt his leg playing football, which prompted her to refer to him as "Gimpy" the entire night. Ehn...maybe it was better than he didn't go!

Manele is basically traditional Romanian folk songs set to techno music. I have some Bulgarian manele ("Chowda") that I love. I was pumped for a night of the same. First, we started off with some traditional Romanian dance songs, which I mistakenly thought were manele. I liked them so much that I called Nelu and said "Hi! Guess what! I found a way to stay in Romania!" "Really? How?" "I’m going to be a professional manele singer!" We laughed because we both know I can’t sing.

Then the real manele started. It was horrible! I debated asking the DJ to play some O-Zone instead. However, the dance floor was packed with "manele boys" and "manele girls". I couldn’t dance to this stuff! We enjoyed making fun of them and we all decided to leave.