Little Things

I saw something traumatic in the park today, so it's a good thing everything else today has been great. Examples:

The kids were good this morning. I let D play with my hair because he has never pulled it before. He was making some weird noises and stroking something across my head. Then Ang explained that he was pretending to shave my head because they had their heads shaved last week. Haha! He also repeated “okay” when I just randomly said it, which was really exciting! We also got him to say 'Ajutor!'

I was fanning myself this morning and then I realized that G must be hot, too. So I started fanning him. He looked confused at first and then put on this face of utter bliss and giggled. It was the cutest thing of my life.

N said a word really well today, so I opened my arms for a big hug. He yelled Nu! And shook his head. I looked really sad like I was going to cry and then he felt bad and rand up and kissed my hand.

We only have two weeks left. I can’t believe that! In two weeks, I’ll be gone. I’ll never see my kids again. I won’t even really know how they’re doing or where they go. I'm excited to go home, but I feel guilty about that because I'm leaving these kids here alone. They have workers, but they are there  to provide for their physical needs, not emotional needs. The next interns aren't even going to be coming for another month and a half! I hope the kids don't regress too much. I get to go home to my parents and they don't even have any and most never will.

I fell in love with 2 older kids at the hospital today. One of them, Danny, was 15 and got drug by a horse. He didn’t talk to us much at first, and then Kelsey let him play with her iphone and he would throw us mischievous looks every time he died in Temple run and say “I’m dead!” He was so funny.

And Peter was in the room, too. He got hit by lightning and liked to talk a lot. His hands were burned, so he couldn’t play with the iphone, but he watched Danny and talked to us. At one point I started fanning him because it was burning hot in the room. He thought it was the funniest thing on the planet. Then all 3 of us (Kelsey, Megan, and I) were fanning him and he just laughed like a king.

Some of the girls gave E in the hospital today a Mohawk. Chelsea and I were the last ones in the room and I was holding her and then 5 kids walked in to stare at us. I had to make awkward conversation with them in my crappy Romanian. It was rough, but E kept smiling up at me, so I got through it.

I got Scotty to smile a lot today by tickling him. He’s growing some teeth now and looks like a little redneck missing his teeth instead of gaining them. It’s great. His feet were peeling awfully today, so I put some lotion on them. They looked like the tectonic plates at the end of the world.

Where is Todd?

Yesterday when we went to the hospital, Todd (my favorite kids) was gone! I’m terrified that he’s ended up at one of the other orphanages. A lot of the other orphanages are horrible, like the stereotypical ones they show in movies in the states. (Ours is pretty great, though.) We have never been allowed in any of the other orphanages. But when kids from them end up in the hospital, we are able to see their behavior, and therefore surmise how they are treated where they live. Some go crazy with attention and climb all over you and some of them won’t let you touch them at all and smack your hand away or retract from your touch. They have RAD, and you can tell that they sit in their cribs all day everyday. Todd cannot go to one of these places, but I don’t know where he went. And there's nothing I can do about it. Bah! Hopefully he shows up in our orphanage. Sometimes the kids will disappear from the hospital for a while and then appear again later. We never really know where they go or anything.

Continuation:

The second day of the midsemester trip, we went to church in Bucharest. We got there early because we didn’t know how long it would take for us to get there. We were taking pictures in front of the sign when we first got there. A pair of elders walked by and looked really confused, but didn’t say anything to us. We went inside. Kelsey had burnt her arm on her hair dryer that morning (she was leaning over comically because she had to plug it into an outlet in a different room in the hostel since ours didn’t work) so we went in the kitchen for her to run it under cold water. I decided to look for some ice in the freezer. An elder walked in the room and looked extremely confused about who we were. Then Kelsey said “hello” in English. Then he was extra confused and said “hi.” Then I explained that I was leaning into the freezer in a random church building because I was looking for ice for Kelsey’s burn. “We don’t have any.” “I realize that now.” It was a great conversation.

Before and after sacrament meeting everyone came to ask us who we were and to kiss us on the cheeks and to practice their English. I've never felt more popular in my life. A nice English speaking Romanian translated for us into translators instead of just whispering behind us like the missionaries do in Iasi.

Kelsey had an awesome experience meeting a woman in the ward who her sister taught about the church 8 years ago when she was on her mission here. You’ll have to read Kelsey’s blog for that.

A kindly old lady in the ward who considers herself the mother of the missionaries in Bucharest invited us over for lunch. The four of us squished into her tiny apartment with 12 missionaries and her. The food was great and very traditional. It might be one of my favorite experiences in Romania not including the kids. It was just such traditional Romanian, and she was so kind to us! I loved it.

Kelsey and me after our lunch at Sora Grozo's

We met up with Jen in the park to watch a kids movie. Unfortunately that movie turned out to be Alvin and the Chipmunks, so we went to a different part of the park until it was over. We talked for a while and watched some really weird mimes that appeared to be trying to be anamatrons. I don’t know if this is usual for mimes or not since I’ve never seen one before. It was pretty cool, though.

Mime

Mime (Hamlet)

Then How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days came on the screen, so we sat and watched it, got bit by bugs, and wandered home. 

Also, for your entertainment, I present a toy that one of the girls at the hospital had a few days ago:  

Nearly Headless Nick (get it?!?)

Rewind

I've been asked by a few people to recount our midsemester trip, so I suppose I shall do that. I'm too lazy to do it all at once, though. And you don't want to read it all at once, so I'll just go back and write it a day at a time. We'll see if I stick to that.

The first day:

Kels and I got to the train station a few minutes earlier than the other girls Rachel and Cortlandt. They walked up to us and informed us that they had left the phone in the taxi, so they were going to go look and see if the taxi was still there, but we would probably never see it again. They did not find it. The trip was off to a great start. Then we got on the train.

It was night, so we had planned on getting a sleeper train to Bucharesti. Not so. We had been wondering why our tickets were so cheap. Kelsey accidentally got us seats on the 3^rd class part...Where the seats are completely upright, the people are loud, the air is freezing, and the lights are on all night. It was 11 at night when we got on and 7 in the morning when we got off.

We decided to go to the hostel (the YMCA) so that we could take a nap and leave our bags in our lockers there. We had a very confusing encounter with the only worker who was there since he did not speak any English. He seemed a bit frustrated with us, but what we wanted really wasn’t that confusing.

After our delightfully refreshing hour-long nap, we decided to go search for an orange store to buy a prepay phone for the week. We had a surprisingly hard time finding one and stopped at every single phone booth in the city to try to call Mario and my friend, Jen Good since I told her that we would call her to meet up. We finally found the big shopping district, which included an Orange Store, but it turned out that they did not offer prepay phones, so we wandered around a big piata and got overwhelmed by gypsies before getting lunch at a McDonalds with the most confusingly designed bathrooms I have ever seen. 

We then decided to do a walking tour on our own that was based on a map that one of the men at the hostel gave us. This included visits to the peasant museum (which was worth it just for the section with holiday masks that will give me nightmares for years to come), the village museum, and the triumph arch. At the village museum we got followed around by a little girl and her grandfather who was following her. We finally started talking to the little girl and then the grandfather was surprised that we spoke any Romanian since he had heard us speaking English, but then he told us all about his life as a book translator from Romanian to Spanish as well as Romanian to English. It was fascinating. Usually Romanians his age don’t speak English, but he was almost fluent. He was very disappointed that he wasn’t carrying one of his books around to give to us on the spot. 

Kelsey, Me, Rachel, Cortlandt

A lovely sample of the village museum

Kelsey is professional at doing "sneaky shots." This is the grandpa and little girl who were following us.

We ended up eating at Hard Rock Café. I had never been to one. It wasn’t actually very good. We finally found a phone booth that actually worked and didn’t smell too much like urine. We got a hold of Jen and decided to have her pick us up from the YMCA to go to some festival thing some of her friends had a booth at. It turned out to be a huge hippie festival. I’ve seen some Romanian hippies before, but this was something else!

Mural painting at the hippie fest.

More painting. Sometimes people just don't wear shirts.

People were bumping me as a tried to take a pic of this drumline at the hippie fest.