After being sick...

and stuck inside a studio apartment for an entirely beautiful and sunny weekend, I got to have class outside and eat free food and drink free wine with my classmates and professor!!! I'll tell you allllll about it later. Just needed to share some of my sunshine.

~Grace

Yes, some people still use a horse and buggy as their primary mode of transportation in Romania.

Romania, Romania, Romania…where to begin? I’ll be brief. Let’s do this by bullet point:

• Food: creamy, meaty, smelly, and always tasty
• Housing: tiny, tidy, smoky, and the oven is always occupied.
• People: joyful, thoughtful, prideful, and just plain full.
• Drink: homemade, strong, deserving of suspicion, and definitely illegal in the U.S. of A.

I was never hungry in Romania. Nor was I hungry for three or four days after my return. We finished a meal and Laura began asking us what we wanted for the next. In the breaks between meals (it was like the break after running your leg of a tag-team race), she would bring out slices of fresh oranges and a plate full of bite-sized cakes that you reached for again and again not against your will, but against your better judgment.

Christmas Eve comes and we bake in the kitchen all day preparing cakes and soups and salads with fresh homemade cream and mayonnaise, and lots and lots of garlic (I’m sure I still have some in my system, even now). I asked Laura as we were leaving things to chill in the refrigerator, “How are we going to get these things to your sister’s house for dinner?” To which Laura replied, “We are NOT taking these to her house! These are for us!” Oh?

At about 8 or 8:30 pm, we headed out of the house to have Christmas Eve dinner in the home of Laura’s brother and sister-in-law, which is where the big family dinner happened, and where I almost ate my way into my very own grave.

Upon arrival, the family members present asked Leanne (girlfriend from Australia) and I to sing a traditional English Christmas carol, so we sang Silent Night and everyone applauded and smiled and kissed us and herded us to the table, which was big and full of sliced ham, turkey, salami, bread, strawberries, ripe cherry tomatoes, bottles of campari (the most wicked of all alcoholic beverages), juice, white wine and only one bottle of water (fizzy). I’m thinking, “Well, good. These are all things that I like and won’t have to explain why I haven’t chosen to eat an item or two. “ But, just as I finished my second and final serving from this course, the host swept away what was left and planted a second course on the table. This time we were having what seemed to be egg rolls drenched in an oily-spicy-tomato kind of syrup/sauce. They were delectable. And then they were even better when they brought out the homemade heavy cream that you are supposed to dollop on top. At this point, I am beyond stuffed. No one says anything when I ask if there is going to be more. Leanne and I are trying not to gasp as the host heads to the kitchen to bring in a third course: Meat. Pork chops the size of both of your hands put together. Baked chicken wings, bratwurst the size of a child’s forearm. I’m thinking I might cry if I have to eat another bite, and then Laura seizes my plate in order to plop one of each in the center. I look at her pleadingly to put one or all three back on the serving platter. She insists.

Thank goodness she did not insist that I eat one of the big tomatoes that had been naturally cooking in a basin of highly acidic vinegar all day. I was curious, but not able to hold anything more! And just so you know, as the bottles of beverage were emptied with each course, pitchers filled with family recipe wine were brought out and the men kept watch so as to refill our glasses as we got within an inch of the bottoms. I’ve never been in such pain!

Family members wandered in and out of the house through the night, singing traditional songs as gifts to Leanne and I, sharing stories with their family in their native tongue, asking Laura and Florin about their English speaking guests, touting babies and young children…Finally, at two thirty in the morning, after another round of the first course, a digestive (more wine, but even stronger), and some dessert, we headed for home. First thing out of Laura’s mouth the next morning was “What will you eat?” Dear me! I think I said something like, “Only a cup of coffee this morning, please,” to which she reacted by scooping out a portion of salad and two big hunks of bread. I promise, one will never go hungry in Romania.

The pictures I posted previously are from the mountains of the Transylvania and Moldova regions of Romania. Beautiful, huh? Words cannot describe the awe that I experienced as we drove up and down the mountains, in and out of valleys, from views of snow glistening under the intense sunlight into the darkness of a deep crevice resembling the icy kingdom of the nemesis in Narnia. Truly incredible, you’ll need to see it to believe it.


hmmm, not so brief after all:)

thoughts on travel

Below are some thoughts that I am reluctant to forget and have to think again the next time I travel.

I think that 6 months is a good length of time, for myself, to insist on staying in a foreign country. I have come to several conclusions that I have heard in the past, but could only be made fact though personal experience. For starters, culture shock is real. Real enough to create an anxiety so heavy that will keep you indoors for hours or days at a time. So real, in fact, that it can happen over the span of weeks and months, coming in several stages.

My first experience with culture shock kept me locked in my single bedroom whilst my roommates were drinking wine and chomping on cheese in the kitchen just outside of my room in our Florence apartment (summer 2006). This time around, in Perugia, culture shock began with the initial sense of being overwhelmed by my incapacity to understand, hence sweeping me indoors, when my head says to turn around and do the opposite (My weary heart was the victor in the beginning of this conflict). It’s not just that every person speaks Italian, of which I only speak a bit, it’s that the ears hear languages that are as foreign as a rooster’s crow to someone who’s never lived outside of Manhattan: Arabic, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, French, German, Portuguese, Latvian, Czechoslovakian, Korean, Mongolian, Japanese, Chinese. And that list doesn’t include dialects found just right here in Italy, each region has it’s own nuances, insisting that I will never be like them, remaining forever a foreigner. Inside my head, that voice tells me that I am the only one who has ever felt this way and, well, if it were me (which it inevitably is), it would just catch the fastest plane back home to where everyone talks just like me and looks strangely at the Mexican restaurant proprietor when they say a simple “gracias.” Now I’m the fish treading foreign waters, trying to spit out “grazie” instead of “hey, thanks” when I’ve paid for my carefully executed frothy cappuccino. And yes, Italians stare too. Their eyes seem to say, “It’s not that hard, I don’t quite understand why you can’t just say it. I mean, I’ve said it everyday since I could speak. If it’s that hard for you, maybe you should just give up and try French or something.”

So, you buy an espresso pot and head indoors.

After devouring a couple of bananas (healthy), covering every single bite in nutella (I’m not sure that eating a stick of butter could be worse for you), you begin calling in the troops: Friends and family that miss you and tell you so in e-mail after e-mail after snail mail card after quick instant message, relentless in their efforts. You have called because you are lonely and you feel like no one in the whole world knows who you really are, so you need to make sure those who know you best haven’t forgotten about you and your importance in their life. You need to feel that you still have a place in this big scary world.

And also, maybe there is something happening on the other side of the world, something that requires your presence, in which case you may have to book an urgent flight home. (All of this has been circulating in your mind as you pressed the speed dial button no. 5 to get the low down from Mom on how everybody is doing.) Oh, it’s ringing!

So, there you are, spilling your guts to Mom (at the cost of 19 cents/min) and saying how scared and sad and completely incapable you feel and you think that after a month you will just come home. And, you expect her to say, “Well, honey, that’s okay, you know. If you want to come home, we want to have you hear, we really do miss you.” And she does say it. But then she says something else: “You are incredibly brave, baby girl. We miss you, but we want you to see this through. And besides, I’ll be there in December.” Well, nothing important is happening at home, so let’s call one of the girls. Your best friend says something like, “Yeah, things are good. I had this great new soup for lunch today, really good. Miss you lots.” Except this time, the "miss you" doesn’t have the same ring to it, because well, in the states, you live hours apart and you’ve said “Miss you lots,” everyday since you graduated high school. (Not to say that we don’t mean it, we really, really do.) After she/he regales you with the recipe for that soup she just ate, you hear this: “You know what? I really admire you for doing what you’re doing.” More support. Geez, how’s a girl supposed to feel sorry for herself when she’s got all of these feel-good people surrounding her? C’mon guys, I wanna come HOME.

So you call your siblings, other friends, send e-mails to friends from college just joining the workforce and all you get is more support. Not one snide remark from the whole crowd! They want to see you finish this thing out. Succeed. And, basically, all you get on the news front is that they are eating a lot of good soup. So, “culture shock” be damned! It looks like you’re gonna be just fine after all.

The landscape

Here are the pics from my adventure. Enjoy!

In this one, I was just in awe of the weight the branches of this evergreen could withstand!

The Christmas tree (aka "brad," pronounced like "broad.")

This is a picture of all of the people I was with during the holiday: Tony and Geta (good friends), Florin and Laura (the couple I stayed with), and the boy is Razvan (9 year old son of Florin and Laura), and then Andrea (12 year old daughter of Tony and Geta who are expecting a new baby this year!). Honestly, these are some of the happiest people I have ever met. They are always finding something to laugh about or something pleasant to think about. It was an incredibly happy week.

And this, well, this is Romania in the winter time.





There's always another story with which I could regale you, but for the time being, I hope you are able to enjoy the pictures and possibly begin to conjure up the nerve (or the money) to make a trip like this yourself someday.

~Grace
p.s. I'm sorry about the images being sideways, I can't figure out quite how to rotate them once I post them...

Traveling to and fro.

So, let's start with the beginning, end with the end, and then next time I'll tell you about alllll that happened in between, promise.

So, I started my journey early on a Friday morning, around 5:30 am to be a bit more precise. I took a bus to the train station, caught the train to Rome where I caught another train to another bus that took me to the airport, where I was several hours early for my flight. Better to be extra early than just a little too late, right? Right, unless your flight is delayed 4 and a half hours, which it was. Well, so, after lots of waiting in the land beyond passport control, which is considered to be no land at all, we hopped a small bus to the plane and landed in Bucharest, Romania around midnight. The delay would not have been such a drag, except that upon my arrival I had to meet my friend and then begin the, supposed, five hour drive north to their city of Falticeni (Fall-te-chain). Florin and his son Razvan picked me up in the airport and looked a little distraught as we embarked on the last leg of our journey (our days had been of equal length and travel to this point). The night was dark and foggy, and the roads...the word "rough" just isn't a fair description of their condition.

After grabbing a burger (yes I caved and ate McDonald's) and some "light" conversation, Florin told me that it was okay to sleep, so I nodded off. Well, so, five hours was around 5 am, and we were definitely not home. In fact, at around 5 am, I perked up and realized we were not moving. I look out the window and can see only darkness in all directions, then I look for Florin. He was asleep. So there we were, in the middle of nowhere (we were "somewhere," but nowhere that I new of), stopped on the side of the road, Romania. So, feeling safe (?), I nod back off to sleep, hoping that whatever was to happen, good or bad, would just happen while I was asleep. Around 8 am we arrived in Falticeni, watching the sunrise over the crystal white Romanian landscape. It was a beautiful sight, in so many ways.

Then we had Christmas. (Remember, I promised to write about the in between part in the next post)

Traveling back to Italy was a solo adventure. I packed myself into the back of a bus on the following Friday night at 10 pm, slept for most of the 7 hours it took to get to Bucharest, caught a taxi to the teensy tiny airport, and sat for hours. Then I stood up for a few hours. Then, when I was informed that my flight was delayed, I stood up for a couple more hours.

We boarded the plane, made it to Italy, and then I waited for a bus that never came to take me to the train station, at which point I caught a pricey taxi just so I didn't miss the last train out of Roma that would get me to Perugia that night. I caught the train with moments to spare, caught the bus connection in Foligno, caught my last bus from the Perugia train station to my street, and by 1am, I had collapsed in my bed after a 27 hour journey home (there was an hour time difference).

A question that came to mind when I was lamenting my sore arms, back, legs and aching head was this: "Was it worth it?" Well, I'll let you judge for yourself after you've seen the pictures...next time, because the weather is bad in Italy and none of the computers are working well enough to post pictures! Sorry! Don't hate me!

Love you all!
~Grace