Sheep Guarding Llama

Today is a holiday in most of Europe. It is a bank holiday in the west and here it is the Easter holiday from school and work.  So pretty much nothing was going on around town.  We noticed that the kids were off from school today.

Liesl spent today getting back into her school groove.  She has had more than two weeks off so this took some work.  She had a good attitude but we are all out of the school mindset.

I was very busy all day trying to get caught up on writing and posting.  So much to be done having been away from my laptop for so long.  I feel very overwhelmed.

This evening, since we have pretty much no groceries in the house, we went out grocery shopping again.  To our chagrin we found all of the grocery stores closed in Reghin.  They have not been open since Saturday afternoon.  This is a problem.

Since we had driven into the city we looked for a place to eat.  We wanted to do something different so we explored out east of the city and found a strip of restaurants and hotels there (strip might be a generous term).  We were excited as this was several places that looked interesting.  Dominica picked one with a big terrace and a view.  We sat outside and ordered dinner.

Dinner was not bad, but not as good, or as cheap, as we have gotten used to.  The food was almost twice our normal prices, although still cheap compared to eating in the US of course, and only moderately good.  But it was a nice dinner.

On the way home we stopped at the gas station for coffee and to let the girls play on the playground.  This only lasted a minute, though, before Luciana couldn’t stop asking over and over for us to buy Kinder Sorpressa from the store.  We told her that they were out of it and explained that she had to enjoy the playground and not keep wanting other things but she could not stop and ended up having to be put in the car and to sit there with Dominica while I sat out so that Liesl could play on the playground for a while.  So it was a sad evening for Luciana who ended up getting in more and more trouble all evening and has lost getting to go to the playground in the village tomorrow, her Kindle Fire, getting to play games and more.

Today is Easter Sunday in the east where the Julian calendar is still used.  This will be our first time trying to do Easter or any service in an Orthodox church.  Everyone is a bit nervous.

We got up this morning but have not had good communications as to what is going on today.  We are not sure what time church is, where to go or what to do, if we are going with someone or not, when or where lunch is, etc.  This is not making us any more confident.

We got up and realized that we just didn’t know when we should go to church.  We thought that there was a service at ten and eleven thirty.  Or was it noon.  We really did not know.  We quickly realized by nine thirty that the village was totally full of cars, every single person was either in a black suit or a cocktail dress with five inch heels minimum and that people were coming and going constantly and there was no way to tell when a service started or stopped at all.  And, of course, times are not posted or anything, you just have to know.

This got very stressful, very quickly.  We’ve never seen this many people in town.  People were pouring in from the cities as everyone goes out to the country to see family for Easter.

We were totally unsure what to do until around eleven suddenly the family that we rent from came walking across our front yard to fetch us!  No one was dressed.  Well, I was and basically ready to go but Dominica and the girls were in pajamas and not even slightly ready to go to church.  We asked when we should go and they said “now” but that they would wait for us in front of the church.  So they raced to get ready and as soon as they could be, which was easily twenty minutes, we went to the front of the church.

We ended up just standing out front for the entire service.  They forgot to meet us out front and we were never confident as to when it would be okay to go in.  The service was just one continuous thing from early in the morning until nearly one in the afternoon.  Very confusing.  And tons of people were standing around outside the entire time that we were there so it was not even clear what they were doing.  It was probably for the best, though, as the church was packed and Dominica was incredibly nervous about having to sit with the girls and having to have me be sat somewhere else without her.

It was an awkward hour standing outside, but I think that it worked out well.  At one point the priest came outside as part of some ceremony and I managed to make eye contact while standing with the locals and holding Luciana and I got the wink and nod so he knew that we had made the effort to be there at least.

After the service we ran back to the house to drop off anything that we did not need and grabbed the Texas Sheet Cake that Dominica had baked for today and walked with the girl who orchestrates things for the house in English for her parents to her grandmother’s house.  We have not met her in person previously because she lives in southern Italy but had come in for Easter to see family.

Her grandmother’s home was towards the end of town that Dominica has never seen and on a side road that I had not taken before.  It wasn’t a long walk, but it was warm today.  Very warm and very sunny.  Not what we have been seeing for some time.

We had a very nice lunch sitting out with the family.  It was so nice that they invited us to spend their Easter holiday with them, especially as we speak no Romanian and most of them speak little or no English.  They daughter was stuck translating for the whole time.  But we all had a very nice time.  They made a lot of vegetarian food for us, as well.  We got to experience the traditional Romanian Easter.

They also made for us a ton of painted Easter Eggs, somewhat like kids do back in the US.  But the processes that they use here are different and they like soak them in a dye or something and the colours are solid and very vibrant.  They taught us the local game that they play here called chocking or chalking (we have no idea, it’s a Romanian word describing the sound that two eggs hitting each other make) where you battle with eggs and whoever crushes the other person’s egg wins the egg.  The girls thought that this was great fun and wanted to play it all day!

The sun really took a toll on us during lunch.  My eyes were in terrible pain from the sun being in them for a very long time and I could barely keep them open (note: I’m writing this update on Thursday morning, four whole days later and my eyes are still soar) and my head got terribly sunburnt (note again: still very burnt).  We walked back to the house and had a few hours to ourselves before the evening activities in the village began.

Around six a sudden congregation of the village happened at the village municipal building.  Everyone from around the village went there and just stood in the street and talked while all of the kids ran around with their Easter eggs chocking.  The girls thought that this was awesome and all of the kids in the village made eggs for them.  It is a tradition to give each other eggs and everyone was anxious to give eggs to them.  It was awesome.

We could not stay long, though.  Liesl ended up being way too tired and not being able to handle everything so Dominica ended up taking her back home.  I stayed with Luciana so that she could play on the playground for a while yet.  I was there at least another half an hour, maybe an hour, after Dominica and Liesl left.  Dominica appreciated getting to leave as people around people really wears her out in general and the whole day had been rough for her already and she was just tired.

Once we were home it was getting late and the sun was going down.  So time for all of us to just relax at home. It was a great day and a really great cultural experience for everyone.

It is Saturday, tomorrow is Orthodox Easter here in Romania.  So this is a long holiday weekend.  Tomorrow we have a lot going on, we have church in the morning, then we are having lunch with the family that owns the house that we are renting in Romania, then there are Easter activities in the evening in the village.  A lot of things for us to do.

Today is mostly a relaxing day, still.  We are all still pretty tired.  Today I found The 1983 Love Boat Fall Season Preview Special which Dominica and I watched this afternoon, complete with the original commercials.  We were laughing pretty hard at this bit of nostalgia.

This Love Boat special had really no “Love Boat” stuff in it other than the set.  It was a Who’s Who of the 1983 ABC line up with stars of their old and new shows all out on a “cruise” together to announce the new shows that ABC was bringing out in 1983.  It was shown just before the normal Love Boat time slot as Love Boat was one of their flagships and it let them tell people about all of the new shows coming out that week.  Boy did it bring back memories.  We knew nearly all of the commercials that were shown during the special and many of the shows.  But many we did not know, a lot of those shows did not make it for the season.

It is too bad that these kinds of specials have not existed for a long time.  And even this one was only ever shown once (and now only exists on YouTube as rip from an old VHS copy with very low quality.)  But it really takes you back to 1983.  This is what television was like when I was Liesl’s age.  What a different world.  Happy Days was still on, but was just wrapping up.  Dynasty was huge.  Webster was about the only winner that they had that year.  A year later would be the famous year that ABC shook up their lineup and changed all of their shows bringing in the line up that I would watch through most of late elementary school and middle school.  Three’s Company was even still on!

After that we went out to the Lidl to go grocery shopping.  We thought that we were out on the early side but ended up being the last ones there and having to rush to get our groceries.  They were closing early for the holiday.  We had hoped to have gotten Easter eggs and candy for the girls, but there was nothing there like there had been a few weeks ago.

We tried going to the Kaufland but it was already closed when we got there.  So we are not getting restocked on groceries like we had hoped.  Shopping fail for us.

Since we were in Reghin we went uptown to the Casablanca to get dinner.  This is our third time, at least, coming here for dinner.  We were the only ones eating but at least, since they are a pension, were open.  We had a very nice dinner, again.  We love the food there.

On the way home we ducked into the gas station and they had a decent enough candy selection so we stocked up so that we could make a candy basket for the girls for the morning.  Better than nothing.

Once home we found Full House on Netflix and Liesl agree to watch it.  We set it up on the projector and managed to get two episodes in before Netflix said that that show had been dropped and was no longer available.  Bummer.  Bad timing as we have spent a month cajoling Liesl to give it a shot and she has refused until tonight and now she really, really loves it!

We all slept in until around noon today, boy were we ever tired.  Yesterday was such a long day.  We are glad that we did it, though.  We pushed through and got the driving done and now we are home and not spending money on hotels and going out to eat and we can just relax with no major agendas wearing us down.  Fifteen days of continuous travel like that is tiring.

It is very cold in Baita today.  It was just four degrees when we arrived last night and not all that much warmer today.   The sun was out a little this morning but disappeared soon and all afternoon it was heavy clouds and then a light rain late in the afternoon.

Dominica did one load of laundry today but it was unable to try with how humid and cold it was and she ended up having to bring it in to the kitchen to attempt to dry it.  We actually had to turn the heat on today, it is so cold.  So cold at the very end of April!  It is hard to believe that it gets this cold here while the coast is so warm that you want to be in shorts.  It is a long way away, but it feels like it is all so connected.

Everyone was pretty worn out today.  Dominica put in a bit of time cleaning the house this morning and then camped out in the kitchen slash living room area watching shows on her laptop.  Liesl and Luciana played with some toys, played some video games, had a couple kids stop by for about an hour to play with Legos and then Luciana went into the girls’ bedroom to watch videos and fell asleep like that and napped the evening away.  Liesl set up on our bed in our bedroom with her Kindle Fire and her headphones and watched YouTube all afternoon and evening.  They are very happy to be home.

We really did almost nothing today, we just did not have the energy for it.  We needed to get caught up after the past two weeks.

Today is our driving day.  No plans but to get in the car and go. We assume that we cannot make it all of the way back to Baita in a single shot but we are going to just hit the road and see how far we are able to get today.  It is going to be a very long day.

We got up at around nine and went up to breakfast at the Hotel Super 8 in Skopje, Macedonia.  There were a lot of people having breakfast this morning.  The place was nearly full.  We ate and then returned to the room to shower and get packed up.

While we were packing up we saw the news that Freedom House had reclassified Macedonia from “partially free” to “non-free” last night, basically meaning that the country had officially turned into a dictatorship while we were here!  A very interesting situation to have gotten to witness first hand but it also meant that it was definitely time to be getting onto the road.

We packed up the car and manoeuvred it out of the crazy parking lot requiring me to drive backwards through a maze of poorly and irregularly parked cars and having to wait for some to move as well.  Navigating Skopje is a bit challenging, the city has a lot of traffic problems and the recent maps do not show the existing roads at all.

We did well and in no time we were off into the beautiful countryside east of Skopje with its low, rolling hill and quaint little villages.  The roads were good and we made very good time up to the Serbian border.

At the Serbian border we had a long line of traffic to wait for; our guess was that a lot of people had decided that it was time to leave Macedonia for a while as it was nearly all non-Macedonian vehicles making the exit this morning.  We had no issues getting back into Serbia and were on our way.

We decided to take the big, main roads right up to Belgrade.  This looked like the roads would move faster and be less twists and turns to make Dominica sick.

It was a lovely, bright day without heavy traffic.  Perfect for driving the entire way across Serbia and much of Romania.  These are big countries when you have to drive all of the way through them.

The nice thing about the route from Skopje to Belgrade is that it crosses most of Serbia while basically not hitting anything that we have driven previously, so we got a massive survey of what Serbia is like having now driven it north south as well as east west.

The drive today went well and there is very little to tell.  Drivers are crazy, the sun was agreeable, we had to stop for petrol only once before getting to Romania.  No getting lost, nothing went wrong.  It was an efficient and easy drive.

We skipped meals today completely.  We ate breakfast at the hotel, of course, and other than that it was just snacks in the car.  We stocked up on snacks each time that we got fuel.

In Belgrade we turned east and took the route from Belgrade to Timisoara, Romania that we had taken two weeks earlier in the opposite direction.  At Belgrade there was just a tiny bit of that “feeling of home” as we turned onto familiar roads and saw familiar sights.

It was getting dark out as we approached the Romanian frontier.  We crossed the border, again without any issues, and were back in Romania!  Everyone was excited, this was the last big step before home – although it is six and a half hours from the border to Baita, Mures County.

We pushed on crossing past the hotel that we stayed at on our first night, fifteen days ago, and marked our time – nine thirty.  If we push hard we will get to Baita just one hour or less later than we decided to give up on our first night – and we only stopped then because we did not want to attempt the first Balkan border crossing in the middle of the night, especially for a non-EU country.

We did better navigating Timisoara this time.  We have gotten smarter and no Google GPS is being turned on to mislead us this time.  We zipped through and grabbed the new A1 highway and were on our way east at 130kph in no time.

It was along the A1 here that we took a bathroom break at a rest stop and then hit a gas station for our second and final fueling of the day, loaded up on chilled Illy coffee drinks, bags of chips and prepared to make our final run for home.  No more stops after this.

We took the big route to Deva, up to Targu Mures to Reghin and on to Baita.  It all went smoothly and we moved so much faster and more safely than going the way that Google had tried to send us two weeks ago.

It was four in the morning when we pulled into Baita.  We were so glad to be home.  We loved our two week whirlwind trip around the Balkans and are so glad that we took the time to do it.

Dominica was exhausted and went straight to bed.  The girls, who had been asleep in the car, were wide away and demanded to play The Lego Movie on Steam for an hour and a half before I made them go to bed.

So it was at five thirty this morning, with the sun coming up, that I finally managed to get to bed myself.  Going to be asleep until very late tomorrow.