BUCHAREST, Romania (AP) -- Romanian lovers have gone lunatic. For Valentine's Day, sweethearts are giving each other plots of land on the moon.
"Chocolates get eaten. Flowers wilt in three days. The crystal glass gets dusty and then breaks. But the moon is forever," said Adi Dragan, who's pitching the idea as the ultimate romantic gift -- and donating the proceeds to his wife's foundation for the physically disabled.
Dragan, 31, a former advertising executive, is authorized by the U.S.-based Lunar Embassy to sell 177-acre parcels of moon land for $49, half the average monthly salary in Romania.
The extraterrestrial real estate business took off in 1996, when Lunar Embassy founder Dennis Hope, a Nevada entrepreneur, claimed to have found a loophole in the 1967 U.N. Outer Space Treaty that lets him legally sell pieces of the moon.
The moon has sold well in Europe, even though few if any buyers can ever hope to set foot on their land.
Dragan said he's been swamped by phone calls to his Bucharest apartment, which doubles as his office. So far, he says, he's sold several dozen plots.
"People have been asking me if their property is next to an American star's, like Madonna," said Dragan, whose been in the business since December. "Romanians are worried that someone else may already have bought the rights to their property."
Armando Dima, a 30-year-old Bucharest businessman, bought some lunar real estate for his fiancee.
"There is a saying in Romania that says, 'I would give you the moon in heaven,' and I wanted to do this literally," he said.
"When we marry, it's good to have property," he whispered, stepping out of earshot of his girlfriend to preserve the Valentine Day's surprise.
Land on the moon captures the imagination of many Romanians because they're romantic by nature, and because they yearn to own property and express their originality after decades of communism.
More poignant is the reason Dragan decided to go into the lunar business: to help his wife's foundation, Audaces Dominus Juvat, which translates to "God helps the brave."
Eleonora Dragan, 34, was paralyzed from the waist down eight years ago after a ladder fell at her workplace, crushing one of her vertebrae.
"Romanian women have a hard life," she said. "So when they receive a flower or a lot of land on the moon, they are happy to be compared to a beautiful object."
Dragan can't yet afford a proper office or even advertising. But the lunar business has made a splash in the Romanian media, and as a gesture of goodwill, Hope gave Dragan larger plots of land to sell.
"When we went to register the foundation, they thought I was crazy," Dragan said. "The clerks crossed themselves."
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