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!!!!!!

An overdue update

I enjoy my lack of internet at home.

Retezat

I can’t figure out how to explain Retezat…I’m not sure if I should even try, but I think I’ll give it a go and see what happens.  So, I have never felt more out of shape in my life.  It was HARD work.  The backpacking business is not an easy game.  But now that it is over, I want to do it again.  I think I’d enjoy it more, now that I know how wonderful the experience is!  I was cold every night, even in 5 or more layers of clothing (Yes, I wore 5 layers of pants to bed.  Running tights, Long underwear, fleece pants, hiking pants and then last of all those black pants that I love a lot that are kinda like thick wind pants).  And that was all inside a sleeping bag liner inside a sleeping bag on a sleeping mat in a tent.  Brrr! I would wake up in the night with my 3 layers of winter hats, a hood and a scarf around my ears and still feel like they were freezing. 

Drama in the Retezat Night
The worst was if (or more aptly “when”, since it happened 3 out of 5 nights!) I had to pee in the middle of the night.  The process went like this: “Do I go out? I will be cold.  I’m already cold, I should just go.  But I’ll have to get out of the sleeping bag and the tent…that’s not going to be easy.  But it is better than being cold AND having to pee!  Besides, Alice said you will just get colder if you have to go and don’t, since your body expends so much energy keeping your excess liquid warm so it doesn’t freeze…  But its cold!  So are you!  And it’s a lot of work and I can barely move.  Barely move?  Then it’s a good thing to get out before you become claustrophobic!  Oh, rats, what if I can’t get out?  That would be scary.  I’d rather not even try, ‘cause what If I get stuck?  I’d freak out!  But I’m already going to freak out if I keep laying here.  Then I’m freaking out AND cold AND have to pee…”  Anyway, the end of the story was always that I would get up, try to sneak out of the tent (not easy in a space where 3 scarcely fit lying down, let alone can get to the door climbing over one another!).  Once out of the tent proper, another hurdle cropped up: getting over the packs and out of the little entryway area…the zipper only had a pull on the outside, so I had to dive down to try & reach under and grab it…all in a tiny area that I couldn’t even hunker in, on top of three people’s packs (they wouldn’t fit in the tent.  At all.  As in, it was us or them.), and while trying to find my shoes; an adventure every time, needless to say.

Morning Chills (for a good cause…)
In the morning came another struggle, each day… getting up and out of the sleeping bag again…getting dressed (sounds like that’d be easy since I’m wearing all my layers, right?  Nope!  I have to take them all off my bottom half to apply a clean pair of underwear, because excuse me but I’m not going to wear dirty underwear when I have the option to change it and am wearing dirty everything else all week! And then the same on my top half, because even though it seems like a minimal comfort issue, I  felt it was worthwhile to sleep without my awful sports bra…I had enough uncomfortable layers on for warmth that I didn’t need an extra one that had no warmth value!

Of course, once I finally got outside and into the sun, it was warmer than in the tent by far…by late morning, I was usually down to a tank-top, t-shirt, running tights and hiking pants…maybe a sweatshirt if I was going to be in the shade for long.

Thoughts on Hiking
And the days were beautiful!  We hiked hard up-hill all of the first day and half of the second, which was tough for me, and I ended up at the very tail of the line with Alice and Kadie, for most of the steep parts, which was ok for me…I didn’t have the energy to scamper, so their steady patient pace was much more enjoyable.  Once we hit down-hill areas, halfway through the second day, things were much easier for me, and I headed up the line with Florin (our guide and Kelly’s host-father), Ilie (Another guide and a translator, since Florin speaks no English.  He works for New Horizons and helps teach our Experiential Education class) and Julie (who walks FAST always and takes the hardest route from any given point to another). 

Some Moments worth Mentioning (there were more.  My fingers aren’t interested in recounting them all right now.) 
Ok, this is getting long… Highlights from the trip: On Wednesday, we hiked up to the top of the highest peak in the Retezat Park, where we took pictures, filmed a few videos for promoting the semester, etc.  On the way up, we hiked up a VERY steep part that looked like Mount Doom (in Mordor, Lord of the Rings!), where one side was clear and on the other you couldn’t see down at all because of the thick thick fog, so we felt in constant peril of falling over a cliff and dying!

Thursday, from about 10 AM-4PM we split off, all went to specific locations ¼ mile apart or so and spent 6 hours alone with God…SO good.  I want to do this often.  It was much easier to invest time in talking to God, praying, thinking and such without other options of things to do and with the knowledge that I had a lot of time.  It was So good.  

Friday night was our only bad weather of the trip (Thank you, God!), when we had wind at night (the tent collapsed on us at one point, I guess, or at least one side; Kelly’s. I think they said…I’m glad I was asleep, or I would have certainly had a heart attack…I was struggling to contain my preemptive claustrophobic freak-outs even just thinking about what I’d do if it came down on us…I even had my little pocket knife in my hand at one point, all ready to cut our way out to freedom, if the rainfly zipper stunted an escape!), rain in the middle of the night and then sun the next morning for our final trek out of the park. 

Ok, enough Retezat for now.  

First week of classes!  You may find that hard to believe, since I have been here for over a month (1 month and 1 day, to be exact), but such is my life and learning community at present.  The past month has been full of opportunities to learn incredible things from wonderful people, and I love the informal learning environment I have been immersed in.  But I am thankful for this new step – for the formal coursework.  Although our language class, a component of the Romanian Culture and History course, had a 6-day intensive just prior to Retezat (15 hours of language, plus homework = more than 5 weeks-worth of Spanish class at NWC, although with less homework, typically!), our other coursework did not begin until Monday, Sept. 20^th, when we enjoyed a lovely RCH (culture & history) course, with two of our beautiful friends and program administrators, Kadie Becker and Brandi Bates.  This looks to be a fantastic course, in spite of my antipathy toward all things time-line, and includes such gems as Romanian cookery, poetry, history (of course!) and several opportunities to travel around the country!

Orthodoxy
For Tuesday, we read and thought about the first chapter of The Spirituality of the Christian East, which was pure delight to my mind and (if I end on the side of dualism eventually) soul.  I felt a little awkward in class when Dana apologized for the “density” and general un-interestingness of the chapter…I had enjoyed it quite a bit! Full of poetic phrases, quotes from incredible books which I may never read but now suddenly wish to, and a systematic breakdown of Orthodox theology, which inspired my mind to once again delve into the theoretic, theological aspects of my faith, ethics and thought! I can’t tell you what we talked about in class, because we bounced like a new pogo-stick from here to there to the syllabus and back again, but I get the feeling that the reading for this class is going to continue to challenge, inspire and recreate me!

Developement
Wednesday’s Sustainable and Human Development class (the “Love your neighbor” part of out 2-great commandments coursework) inspired me to be smarter.  Not necessarily to educate myself on the issues where I am currently lacking…just to suddenly acquire vast amounts of knowledge in all possible fields of study. I never knew that it was possible to care so much about an idea, in theory and with regard to my faith, and yet know so little about it in practice and in terms of basic knowledge.  This class will be a great thing for me, if I force myself to invest.  I care deeply about the issue it seeks to expound, but have such a meager knowledge bank, that I currently feel more sink than swim in my “thrown in” position.  Here’s to more focus, concentration and the enthusiasm to invest hardcore in learning how to begin in a new realm of social science.  Well, new to me!

Impact training…but not right now

And finally, Thursday and Friday were spent in Impact training.  But more on that soon because my fingers are getting tired and I have other thoughts to share.

Friendsies!
Last night Anca came to the Impact building to visit us after class.  It was a busy and short time, but a delight to reconnect with this dear sweet flirt of a girl who has a lovely big heart.  Tonight, after class, cleaning of our classroom building and some homework time, Tad, Kelly and I tromped off to Valacia (a restaurant/bar…mostly bar, at this hour) to meet Ile, Ella, Alice and Kadie (and Anca showed up again!) for some sweet catch-up time.  Apparently our table (particularily Tad, Kelly and Anca) were being harassed by the absurdly drunk men in the next booth over.  I didn’t realize what was going on (what’s new?) until Kelly told me later.  Interesting. 
Side note: The drunk men had a box of beer.  Not kidding.  Like, a whole crateful of bottles for the 3-4 of them (hard to keep count as they were constantly in motion and noisy enough for twice that number).

Trolling for Bananas
After a cappuccino and some conversation, Kelly and I left for home, but discovered to our dismay that we were both somewhat famished and had no idea whether food would be available to us at home at 9:30 PM or not.  (Yes, we had just spent the past hour and some at a resturaunt…but no one else was eating food, so we’d have been out of place!  Oh wait, we’re the instantly-recognizable-as foreigners who carried backpacks into a bar at 8:30 PM in Lupeni, Romania…out of place was maybe not the issue.) So, we marched back down the street, we peered in shop windows, looking for the perfect snack.  Two “Non-Stop”s filled with packaged food (chips, croissants and the like) provided nothing quite perfect, so we crossed the street toward a bread shop we had noticed earlier.  As we tried to decide if it was open or not, I was busy sustaining a sense of confusion over the fact that the door was open and two women were inside and yet Kelly didn’t think the shop was in a business state, so I missed the humorous opportunity to observe what the two ladies inside the shop were working on – One was plucking the upper lip hair (or mustache, as it were…was) of the other.  Oh…of course.  What else would you do, while leaning against the meat counter of your shop at 9:30 on a Friday night? 

An opportunity to experience being “The rich tourist”
In the end, we purchased fruit at an incredibly steep price and munched our way up the road towards home.  We were quite blatantly cheated in the fruit-cost department…a new experience for Kelly, although old hat for me, having experienced the same for the first time 6 hours earlier while purchasing coffee grounds. 

Storytime
Here’s how it went: Marit loafs off from the Impact building at lunch-break time to purchase at least a day’s ration of coffee (about 20 cups worth for Zach & Marit and a sip or two for the rest), since we were getting low (we had only about 9 pots’ worth left) and were in critical danger of running out at an inopportune moment.  (Did you notice the sarcasm in the preceding sentence?  If not, feel free to go back and hunt around for it…because there is some in there, if you are observant and look closely for it.) We also needed bread for lunch (it is impossible to consider a meal here complete without consuming a significant amount of bread), so I made coffee my first stop, selecting two varieties and “cit costa?”-ing each with a final total of 6.20 Lei.  The cash in my pocket was in exactly the wrong denominations for the man behind the counter (1 lei or 50 lei), so thinking quickly I announced “cinci minute!” and dashed out the door and 7 steps down the street to the bread store, a much more accepting local, in terms of 50-Lei bills.  I did, of course, forget that this particular bread and legume (veggie) store does not provide bags for their bread, so after purchasing two extraordinarily large loaves (about the size of 2 footballs…each!), I marched back to the coffee-seller with a loaf of bread under each arm (Perhaps, like Ben Franklin, I too am destined for greatness).  Armed with correct change, and juggling my bread loaves and purse, I proudly approached the counter and started digging out the proper amount.  Strangely, in the less than 3 minutes since I had left, the total price had increased from 6.2 to 13.something… Not sure what could have caused the sudden inflation, since my money hadn’t appeared to lose value in the 20 seconds I spent outside the realm of economics and consumerism. 
I was in no mood to fight, though, between the smell of warm bread, the promise of warm soup and the expectation of coffee, so I paid the requested amount without argument (besides, arguing in Romanian is difficult for those of us who do not speak it!) and returned to the Impact building.  There, soup, bread and eventually a fantastic piece of chocolate (check out the chocolate blog for more information on this one!) erased all annoyance from my mind, and I now know where not to buy coffee. 

Oh, and the fears Kelly and I shared about potential late-night hunger? 

Unnecessary, for me at least, as my hosts were just sitting down to dinner when I arrived (9:30 PM), so I was, as usual, packed full of delicious home-cooked and non-processed foods.  What could be better?  Oh wait, I know: hearing The Jungle Book (Disney, but in Romanian) playing in Iancu and Mirele’s room as I attempted some Orthodoxy study-time, this evening.  =)  Delightful!