Cluj and such

The past couple weeks have been insanity on a stick.  And I have procrastinated with the whole “write blog posts about it” thing precisely because of this.  But the time is now!  The moment is here!  And I don’t think this is going to be very good, because I have no idea how to summarize two weeks of AWESOME from here and now in my apartment in Lupeni.  

And…I’m just stressing myself out, now, about how hard its going to be to make this whole beautiful experience come alive on the page…so perhaps I will first take a pancake break.  That sounds like a plan to me. 

The pancakes were good.  Not great, but certainly good and they smelled even better!  I completed one batch of batter-and-bake and had them stacked on a plate, sprinkled with powdered sugar.  They looked so lovely that I felt it was important to take a picture.  That never happened, though, because when I wandered into the bedroom to find my camera, Julie began sniff-sniff-sniffing in her sleep, which made me burst into giggles and offer her the plateful of pancakes.  I made another batch and Kelly joined us in munching down the immense pancake piles, doused in strawberry syrup, vanilla powdered sugar and jam.  Good breakfast!

I made espresso with the second batch, and even figured out a way to keep the pot from falling into the gas-burners – put it inside a pot.  Not the classiest method ever, but fairly effective!  And I intended, again, to take a picture of my morning creation…but my batteries are dead.  Just ask me to make you some pancakes, sometime, and I’ll show you, instead.  =)

So, Cluj…The saga of Travel, part 1.

This is probably going to be more like a list of memories than a complete description.  Be forewarned.  Also, I maybe track time in terms of when I drank coffee.

Schedule (I’ll just tell you what we did and explain fun stuff as I go…or explain later!):

Friday AM-mid PM – Drove to Cluj.
6 PM – IMPACT banquet, Dana spoke. Coffee.
Later PM – Tromped around cluj a bit, played “energizers” from Viața in front of the fountain with Roxa, Lexa and others and then  went to 30+ (a bar) with Roxana and the gang for music/dancing and conversation.   Super good fun, particularly dancing in front of the fountain and stomping around town with some dear, sweet girls!  =)  

 Saturday AM-PM  – A tour of town with Roxa, Alexandra and Octavia!  We visited oodles of churches (the Orthodox Cathedral, the Hungarian Catholic church, etc.), historic sites, the university, beautiful streets, the National Theatre, etc.  LOVE!  I think I’ll move to Cluj.  =)

2 PM -- Coffee break at Insomnia! AMAZING!  Pictures of this will for-sure show up here.  I fell in love with this place.  Most beautifully comfy coffee shop I’ve ever been in, possibly.  The coffee wasn’t great (although very pretty!), but the place was a delight! 

Insomnia

Insomnia

Insomnia

Lunchbox

5 PM -- Our first Lunchbox Experience (Irish Coffee!).  So the lunchbox: The Lunchbox was our meal-supplier for the week, since we each received 5 vouchers for meals there, through the IMPACT banquet budget stuff.  It was great!  The ciorba pui al grec (Greek chicken soup!) was a 3-time meal, because I simply couldn’t get enough!

7 PM – Concert at the mall/shopping with Kadie.  The concert consisted of 2 of Octavia’s favorite musical groups, both old-ish men playing guitars or traditional-ish instruments.  It was lovely, but I opted to stomp around the mall with Kadie for some quality Kadie-time, which I had been lacking in in the past weeks.

Late PM -- Lost! In two senses!  First there was getting home from the mall via the bus…Octavia told me many many times exactly how many stops it would be before we hopped off.  Unfortunately, she didn’t mention where we were to go from there or where to get on the bus in the first place.  We made it safely home to our hostel, though, and Tad & I never even let on that we didn’t know where we were leading the group.  In actuality, Tad mostly just saved face for me, since I was the one who was supposed to know where we were going (“Of course I know!  Octavia told me a bunch of times!”), but he didn’t blab at all about my total lack of navigational prowess and instead confidently wandered on with me.  He even whistled casually to reassure our following hoard.  =) 

Sunday AM – Church hopping.  Julie & I each looked up churches in English the night before and we decided on the one I had found, but when we arrived there, the signs were in Romanian, so we decided the service probably would be as well.  The vote was to head to the Orthodox cathedral instead, which was crowded and crazy but also really really good. 

Early PM -- Split and hang-out time.  I’d been in a grouchy mood for much of the morning, so Kelly, being the sensitive woman that she is, recommended that we split off for a while and not travel in a pack of 5.  This meant a Coffee Shop for Marit, Tad &Zach and a dash home to the hostel for directions to the Lutheran church and a trek to the Vintage Market for Kelly & Julie.    Have I mentioned that Kelly reads people really well?  She does.  Have I mentioned that I get overwhelmed when in the same group for extended periods? I do. Have I mentioned that Zach & Tad are somehow calming to me?  They are.  I think its because they converse without me.  I’m invited into their conversations but not required, even by myself, to participate.  I somehow feel obliged to talk in the larger group…but not in their company.  And its nice to just people-watch up close instead of be involved, sometimes. 
2 PM -- Lunchbox #2 (Coffee: Caramel Latte)

4 PM – Vintage Market & then coffee (Marit & Tad), Coffee with the Funny British Man (Julie & Kelly & Zach).  I think you’ll have to read Kelly’s blog to find out about the funny British man.  He was great, but I missed most of the conversation, so I don’t feel qualified to repeat it.  I’ll post a link, once I find out whether or not she wrote about him, yet.  =)
5 PM -- Lutheran Church (in ENGLISH!).  FANTASTIC.  I never appreciated the Lutheran church enough until this day.  Suddenly I could sing and understand a church service…or even just understand ANYTHING!  An unusual moment in this semester, but a beautiful one as we were welcomed with open arms by Romanian, Hungarian, Ukrainian, African, Turkish and American Christians – some Lutheran, some not…but all speaking English!

Late PM -- Lost!

Monday 10 AM – Class #1 – Super good, but super over my head.  =/

12:30 PM -- Lunch Break (Coffee!)/ Pretzel hunt with Kadie & Tad.  Kelly had invited Cami, a girl we met at the Lutheran Church the night before, to join us for our classes…she was an international something-or-other major, like Kelly, and just listening to them talk about the things we were learning made me want to cry!  I’m sure I’ll eventually feel like I’m understanding this a bit better but for the moment I decided not to join their lunch date and to, with Tad & Kadie, venture off in search of non-Social Science conversation and pretzels.   We ate and then sat by the fountain (a fixture in our Cluj trip!) watching pigeons and enjoying some good old sunshine.  ‘Twas lovely!

2 PM – Class #2 – This one was awesome and I felt connected to it.  Possibly because Kadie had read a good-sized description of the subject matter to us that morning.  At any rate I learned loads about a housing injustice caused by Communism and felt like I was able to better engage with the material and connect with the speaker.  It was just an all-around good experience and made me miss the academic environment of NWC more than ever.

Dinner PM – Lunchbox Experience #3 (Coffee: Mochaccino)

Tuesday AM – Class #3 A brief overview of the history of Romania…the intention was to end up looking at post-communism and reconstruction and whatnot.  But we never really got there.  Nstead what we got was a good, thorough look at the history of Romania.  Maps, invasions and the whole She-bang!  Good stuff!

Lunch PM – Lunchbox #4 (Dulce de Leche Coffee!).

PM – Drove to Sighet, through beautiful mountain passes (loads of switchbacks were not awesome for Zach & myself in the backseats) and gorgeous autumn colors.  Love! 

Dinner PM – Ate at the restaurant connected to our hotel.  Delicious.  But we had WAY too much food and ended up leaving a ton of it behind, for which I think we all felt guilty.  In attempts to avoid that guilty feeling we tried to cram down as much as we could.  We didn’t succeed…which resulted in not only a guilty conscience but also extremely uncomfortable bellies.  Bad pair, those feelings! 
Notable: Zach ordered fried Brain.  And most of us tasted it.  I even tried it, although I had to close my eyes and I made them feed me both a bit of brain and a bite of fried mushrooms with about the same texture just so I wouldn’t know until afterwards which was which. 
Quotable: “If I was given the choice between a pound of brains and a pound of brânzȃ, I’d probably pick the brains.” –Zach

Elie Wiesel House

Late PM – we slept in a gorgeous hotel…interestingly enough we all slept very badly. 

Wednesday AM – Elie Wiesel’s house.  Right next door to our hotel.  Interesting and thought-provoking, but mostly just a house full of pictures and quotes…which was kinda great!

 Early PM – The museum of Communism.  Wow.  The location was an ex-communist prison, where hundreds of intellectuals, artists and other dissidents who were unlikely to cooperate and had to be “disposed of” were sent.  Many many people died here, and we walked into their cells and torture rooms.  Each cell was used as a topic-room, ranging from imprisioned poets to technology of the time.  It was amazing to walk through, even though most of the display material was not translated and I could pick out very little from the Romanian.   Three floors of cells, though, made for a rough experience.  The worst by far, though, were the people: a HUGE hallway of faces, floor to ceiling on both sides and a memorial sculpture which included HUGE black marble slabs into which were carved thousands of names of victims of communism’s massacres.  Painful.  I sobbed.

Mid PM – The Merry Cemetery.  I was really excited to visit this one…a different take on death and a place I had been told to visit.  John Gary Brown (an incredible photographer who works at Creede Rep in the summers as their company photographer) showed me a book of his photos of graves/grave stones and pointed out in particular a series of shots from Romania.  “It’s out of the way,” he told me, “but if you get a chance go see it!”  And we got the chance!  And we saw it!  It was rainy and cold and semi-miserable weather, but it was really pretty awesome to see a cemetery with such a light-hearted atmosphere.  

Every grave was marked with a wooden marker pained/engraved with a poem about the person buried beneath it and with a stylized painting of the person’s profession or some other defining aspect of them. 

We drove back to Cluj on Wednesday night, stayed for the night, visited a few places around town the next morning (The lunchbox #5 and The FNO office!) and then headed back to Lupeni for a day & a half stay and one class before… FALL BREAK!  (Posts about that one coming soon!)

Oh, and on the way back we were re-routed for bridge construction...across a pontoon bridge!!!!!!

Biserica

what a confusing day this has been,so far!

For the past 4 Sundays, I have not attended church.  No, I take that back...it has been about 20 Sundays, since church wasn't an option this summer, either. So, when this weekend looked somewhat free, Kelly and I voted to try to go to the Pentecostal church with Julie and her host family. That was the plan until Saturday, when Julie's family told her they thought she should go to the baptist church.  So, we pondered joining them for Baptist church instead.  Last night, when we finally hit upon a just-facebook-us-a-place-to-meet scheme, everything went crazy!

The plan Julie and her family came up with involved meeting at 8:55am and a full day, right through until the 6 PM baptist service.  I had previous plans, though, to meet Anca in the afternoon, so Kelly an I decided to go to the pentecostal church on our own and thn run our errands until noon, when we would join Julie's family for lunch.

With this plan in mind, we waited at the corner where Julie had intended to pick us up for a full day with her hosts.  ..And she didn't show.  We waited until 9 (which was, coincidently, the same time church started.), then took off in a mad-dash Julie-speed trek to the church.  We were close to late, and I nearly sat us on the Men's side of the church, because I saw an empty row near the back, but some sweet old ladies caught Kelly in time and we got ourselves situated on the right (and correct) side of the church.  

We sat when we were supposed to, stood when the congregation stood, and knelt for prayer 3 times.  Perhaps this should not have been surprising, being in a pentecostal service and all, but I was surprised by how noisy everything was...especially the prayers, when everyone prayed different things aloud, at a range of volumes and with a very broad range of emotional expressiveness.

Well, my watch beeped at the 10 AM mark, embarrassingly enough, but I don't think anyone knew where the beep had come from, and the service ran on.  And my watch beeped at the 11 AM mark.  And the service ran on.  And I caught a few words here and there in the sermon, which I knew.  Notably, "Mickey Mouse" was one of the clearer phrases which I caught. And my watch beeped at the 12 PM mark.  And the service ran on.  And Kelly and I were going slightly crazy from 3 hours of  Romanian, which is very difficult for a brain such as mine to take in...  

Anyway, at just a few moments before the end of the service (we didn't know that at the time!), the phone of a little woman a few rows ahead of us rings, and she picks it up and pads out the back door.  A few moments later, Julie's father has suddenly appeared through the back door and is pointing at me, waving a cell phone and gesturing at Kelly and I to leave with him, and so of course we do.

The phone is handed to me, and on the other end is Manuel, Julies 14 year old host brother, who speaks english well, but is difficult to understand over the phone, plus there is a ton of noise happening...so, anyway, I miss almost everything he says, but get the point that they were concerned when they never found us and wanted us to come over now.  And so I am busy assuring him that we will be right on our way, when Julie's voice shows up on the line and clarifies that we should come over for lunch.

Meanwhile, Kelly has been accosted by the little woman who left with the phone previously, and I assume she is giving us directions, because I make the connection that the phone we were contacted on is probably hers.  I hand the phone back to Julie's host father and am immediately pulled into the conversation of the woman, who apparently wants to tell me something  She says "latina" over and over, mixed in with many other words which I don't know and "scries", which I take to be some conjugate of the verb "to write".  So I nod and shrug and announce in my best Romanian "Nu vorbesc Romaneste" (I don't speak Romanian!), which deters her not at all.

There was a young-ish fellow next to the passel of us, so Kelly frantically asks "do you speak any english?", to which he responds with a simple and disheartening "no".  "Rats!", Kelly exclaims and we turn back to the woman...from a later comparison of notes, we determine that she was prophesying at us...(at?  about?  hard to tell how to take it.).  Kelly apparently has a light shining on her, and there is white writing in the sky about my family.  In Latin. Or something like that. (Don't get too excited, family...she may have been nuts, or we may have translated incorrectly!)

When we finally managed to escape, we took off at a brisk pace toward the part of town where Julie lives, recounting our latest adventure and feeling very discomfited and confused...  Not long into our trek, we realize that I forgot to ask for directions.  ...Cool.

So, we know which neighborhood Julie lives in, but not where exactly.  We know her family has an 

apartment and about 3 houses...and we don't know her family's last name.  So, of course, we march around the neighborhood asking kids if they know where the family with 8 kids lives.  We are taken first to the apartment, where we find their last name on the door (whew!).

This piece of info seemed like a winner, so armed with it and, after a trip to the grocery store on the block, chocolate croissants, we begin to ask "unde este casele de la familia Treifan?"...and are taken to an exactly obviously wrong house, first (which we later discovered belongs to her host father's parents, so the name was still right.). After 2 more queries, we acquired a guide and were finally pointed in the correct direction, found the house, and had a great time!  And Julie's family will require their own blog post...but that will be a story for another day.

All in all, exciting day.  Exhausting, but fun.  And I am home early to take a nap, drink some tea, type up this blog post, hopefully send an email or two and work on getting over my latest sickishness.

Next stop: A week-long backpackng trip in Retezat!  I'll be back next Saturday!

Until.