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.