Hogmanay in Târgovişte

I’ve been meaning for ages to write about my travels over break, so voila:

On December 30th, Paula and I made the voyage from Glasgow to London and then from London to Bucharest, all using the cheapest airlines I've ever met. We weren't too excited about Blue Air, based out of Romania, which was extremely difficult to work with when we got our tickets. But before we checked in, we met an air hostess for Blue Air, who set the mood for the trip. She was positively delightful: she cheerily told us in her heavily accented English to get to the gate around 10 am, which would be "perfect!" Then she asked us to get rid of our liquids, and I asked if it was okay if they were under 100 mL. She said, "Under 100 milliliters will be perfect!" Adorable. The flight was just fine, albeit smelly, and when we arrived in Bucharest, a bus came to get us from the plane. Everyone packed into the bus-- there was no space to move-- and we were taken to the airport, all of 500 feet away. Then we all tried to run into the makeshift little airport, and some of us rushed into what was actually a deserted office (there was no one directing us). This was Romania.

Alexandru picked us up from the airport, and from there we began the whistle-stop tour of Bucharest and Romania. We saw the People’s Palace, the highly resented second biggest building in the world, as well as a park, an orthodox church, and tons of stray dogs. (Stray dogs are a big problem in Romania, and they’re everywhere.) We caught up with Andreea, who fed us the first of many traditional Romanian meals, and met her boyfriend Marian. We then proceeded at the most absurd hour to the town of Braşov. The next day we visited the resort there on the mountain Postavaru, taking a cable car most of the way and then climbing the rest of the way to the top. There was a lot of slipping and sliding and videotaping of the beautiful scenery. It was the first real mountain I ever had the chance to see, and I adored it.

Once we had left the mountain, we visited around the town, which was quite colorful and apparently very German. We continued on to Bran, home of the reputed Dracula’s castle—a perfectly normal looking place. No lightning bolts or anything. That said, we arrived too late to see the inside, so we went into a pub to see “Dracula’s Haunted Castle,” a little set of rooms full of three teenagers making funny noises and wearing masks. I screamed and laughed a lot, and once the "actors" heard me and Paula speaking English, one of them said from the next room, “The Dracula, he waiting for youuu.” Hahahaha.

Alexandru took us to his home town of Dragoviste, where we met his lovely, generous parents and one of his sisters. They served us traditional Romanian food again (these people cook everything at home), the same New Year’s meal that Andreea had fed us of dumplings, Macedonian potato salad, sausages, and pork. With this meal, they served us the staple drinks of homemade whiskey and a powerful alcoholic beverage called țuică. (The day Paula and I left, they gave us mulled wine at 7:30 in the morning.) After that we headed into Târgovişte, where, everyone proudly told us, communist president Nicolae Ceauşescu and his wife were executed on Christmas Day in 1989. We celebrated the New Year with Alexandru’s friends, a lovely bunch of people who were incredibly warm, welcoming, and spoke excellent English. They told us what everyone told us—that Romania would be as advanced a country as any, given a few years—and that Ceauşescu was a good-for-nothing person who, along with communism itself, impeded Romania’s greatness. We danced all night, shot off fireworks outside the house, and heard a million roosters crowing in the wee hours of the morning. (Everyone keeps chickens.) When we were outside at midnight, an elderly woman suggested we all sing New Year’s songs together, but the only volunteers she found were Paula and me. So Paula and I hummed along with her, saying occasionally “La Mulți Ani,” which means both Happy New Year and Happy Birthday. (Several of Alexandru’s friends wished me a happy birthday for this reason.)

A couple of days later we took off for the treacherous 36-hour journey across Europe, and I was lucky enough to see some of Romania’s worst roads, as well as some donkeys on the side of them. There were animals everywhere, really. The difference was astounding when we crossed into Hungary, where the border guards insisted they had seen Alexandru on his cell phone and took a bribe in order to save him the trouble of going into Budapest to pay off his ticket. This kind of bribery is apparently really common. We traveled through Germany (and heard Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious in German on the radio, yessss), Austria, and Switzerland afterward; in Austria we stopped for about an hour in Vienna. It was about 10:30 at night, and it was beautiful. I can’t wait to go back; I’ve never seen a more aesthetically pleasing city. There were signs for cultural events everywhere I looked, and the architecture was lovely, clean and white and radiating an aura of royalty.

So that was Christmas break! Sunday we got home, and Monday I went back to work. So far this semester feels better than the last one; in most of my classes, I’m pretty comfortable with the students. I still have one class of older students who look at me like they’d rather be watching paint dry than learning English, but they’re clearly not very happy, and I think that might have something to do with their depressing teacher. I’m trying to figure out what to do with them. I’m feeling scrappy and tough, and I think I'm up to it.

I also got a new job at the Red Cross, located literally five steps from my apartment. I’m teaching English to the university students there—future nurses. So far the classes have been a bit uncomfortable, largely because the students are pretty shy about speaking English around me. And unfortunately, I may not even be able to keep this job. I’m not officially cleared to teach for a private institution like the Red Cross, and today I went on a hilarious wild-goose chase to get the necessary authorization. I guess I had it coming, anyway; French bureaucracy has been too easy on me so far.

More strikes, more dinner parties, more wild-goose chases, more cheese (which I almost always dislike), more mini-trips, more vocabulary, more paperwork, more pictures, more foreign culture. Such is life in France.