Sheep Guarding Llama

Today was kind of the day that we made our leap from being visitors to being real members of the community.  It started off as a normal day.  The sun was out and it was bright and warm.  Liesl did school in the morning and I spent the morning working on my writing and posting.

We knew that there was some chance that the kids would be coming to the house again today so we worked to make sure that Liesl was doing school early and I was getting lots done in the morning as they might come back at any time.  We had little idea when they would be likely to arrive, if at all.

We were supposed to go on a picnic today and had made all of the food for it and the girls were so excited but we never managed to make it.

We were right, in the middle of the afternoon suddenly a huge group of kids, about sixteen of them, came down the road and into the house.  Suddenly it was a massive party at our place.  Kids all over the house with toys and kids all over the hard.

An older girl, thirteen, came over today who speaks English very well.  She spent a bunch of time hanging out in the kitchen with Dominica.  Since they were able to communicate nearly fluently they just talked and talked.

I tried my best to work through everyone in the house, but it was hard.  In the later afternoon the neighbour from next door came over and said that I was to go over to his place.  We had not met yet.  So someone came and got me and told me to go out and meet him.  I grabbed Dominica’s interpreter and across the “road” we went.

We went over for at least an hour.  The cognac flowed rather generously which made for quite the start to the afternoon.  My neighbour makes the cognac himself from his own wine.  I got a tour of his farm including his “secret” winery.  He hooked me up with two litres of his homemade wine, too.  The grapes grow right up on the hill behind the church.  I got a tour of his home and all of his antique furniture as well.  Good insight into Romania life, the house has a lot of original stuff.

I was over there for a few hours before there was a group of kids going to get ice cream because the ice cream coolers have been brought into town now.  So my interpreter and I went back to my place, dropped off the wine and a lot of other things that were given to me like a tomato spread and tomato juice and I grabbed cash and we ran down to get ice cream.

We returned, met back up with the neighbour and were set off to go see his gardens down the road a bit.  We ended up getting side tracked and taken to my interpreter’s home where I was introduced to her parents and grand parent and promptly was sat down on the porch and a glass of their own homemade cognac, tuica and wine were all brought out!

We were there for quite some time before I finally managed to return home.  But that did not last for long.  My interpreter’s father had been sent down to fetch me to go meet what I can only best describe as the deputy county executive who wanted to meet me and had wine stores to open.  So I went down there, it was dark now, and the three of us sat out testing out his wines (he had red, white and rose of his own) until nearly midnight.

I was in very rough shape by the time that I got back home.  Not only had everyone insisted that I try their wonderful, home made drinks all afternoon and all evening, but I had been interrupted and never even had a chance to get any food all day, either.  We had been just about to leave to go to lunch for the picnic when the kids first arrived and we had been trying to do the picnic somehow all day.  Dominica and the girls ended up doing an indoor picnic late in the afternoon after all of the kids left without me.  My sandwich was saved for tomorrow.

Dominica and I have to be up early tomorrow because our neighbours, not knowing what my night was going to be like, invited us over for coffee at nine.  Originally they had asked us over for coffee at six, but that was just a bad idea.  So we made it nine.  Tomorrow is going to be a very difficult day.

Today started off like “any other day” in Baita, Romania.  Sun was out and it warmed up quickly from the chill over the night to the warm of the day.  We are feeling pretty comfortable here, now.  We know how to get around, how to get what we need.

My desk at the house sits right in the front so that anyone coming down the side road that goes to the village well and our drive way can easily see me sitting at the desk.  So I often wave to people all throughout the day.  And I keep the window open so I can hear people as well.  It is very quiet outside and the hard is shallow so it is very easy to say hello to people out on the road.

Each day we have noticed a lot of kids going to the well to get water, it seems to be getting more and more common.  We live right across from the school so kids on the playground sometimes come over to get a drink or fill up a water bottle.  What is weird is that there is a communal coffee mug that sits on the edge of the well and everyone just shares it.  Yes, a village sharing a single coffee cup.  It seems a bit much.

At one point this morning a group of girls went to the well and waved a bit.  Then one of the older girls tried to convince some of the other girls to come back to our fence but some of them continued on.  Then they waved when they went down the main street and could see me through the front room windows (we are really close to all of the roads.)

Later this group of girls returned and stood at our gate.  So Liesl and I went out and introduced ourselves.  They had brought some boys with this this time, the oldest girl, the one who had tried to get them to come back and had waved so much did most of the talking.  She spoke a bit of English and they all thought that it was great fun to practice their English with us.  So they all introduced themselves a few times, then all said their ages and such.  There were nearly ten of them!

It was  a fun time trying to communicate.  We eventually got Dominica and Luciana to come out and meet everyone as well.  Luciana insisted in bringing out her robot monkey, Cuddles, to show to everyone.  The kids all thought that it was great fun and played with her.  The gaggle of children ranged in age from about eight or nine up to twelve.

They did not stay too long, probably needed to get back to school.  We would see some of them passing by the windows throughout the day and they would wave.  We suddenly know a lot more people in this town.

Maybe two hours later, a dozen kids returned to the house and this time they came onto the porch and tried talking to us again.  A lot of repeating what was said last time as only one of them has a significant amount of English and that’s being generous.  A lot of things could not be conveyed.

Dominica brought out load after load of the girls’ toys which were met, with each successive round, with loads of ewws and ahs.  I have no idea if this was just a lot of toys, toys that they rarely see or just they were being encouraging to the girls.  But everyone seemed genuinely excited to see what toys the girls had.

The kids hung out for a while and everyone had a good time.  This is awesome as our girls have such a hard time making friends when we are in different countries and we have not been in Romania even a week, let alone in Baita for that long and already we have a dozen kids over to see them.  This has never happened before!

So that made for a very exciting day.  Dominica was exhausted after an hour or so of a dozen kids over at the house.  And we didn’t have anything for them, we put out some pretzels and tortilla chips.  We were not stocked for anything on this scale.

The excitement only lasted until around six when everyone suddenly took off and headed out to their homes.  After that it was a quiet evening for us.  A very unexpected day, to be sure.

Today would turn out to be our one quiet day for quite some time.  It is Tuesday and today was the only day that we had almost entirely to ourselves.  Thankfully we turned it into a very quiet day and did almost nothing which would turn out to be important.

We were up on the early side and I got a lot of writing and posting done today.  It was a pretty good day.  Bright and sunny again.  We are loving the weather in Romania.  I’d prefer light drizzles but this is pretty good, too.  Great weather for whatever you want to do, although being able to sit outside at night at cafes without a jacket would be nice.

We just stayed home today.  We did not go out for food nor did we go out and do any shopping.  Just us, at home.

Today is our first “normal day” in Romania.  It is Monday and we are done with our travelling.  Now it is time to just settle into real life living in the little village of Baita in rural Transylvania.  We were up around eight this morning, it is bright and sunny.  I am amazing by how clear and sunny it has been every day that we have been in Baita.  It is still chilly in the house but pretty nice outside and very nice in the sun.

We heard that last night (or probably right now as I write this on Monday morning in Romania) that five inches of snow is coming down in Western New York after as much as two inches came down the other night.  Hard to believe that that could be happening there when it is so nice here.

For those wondering, the part of Transylvania that we are in is just a tiny bit north of the northern tip of Maine.  So we are rather far north, in line with northern France to the west, Quebec in North America, Mongolia to the east and the top tip of the Japanese islands.  We will never get over just how incredibly far north Europe is.

We could hear and see the kids attending the local school across the street.  The school is right next to the church so we can even here the school bell ringing in the house.  We are surprised at how many children there are in this tiny village.  We are not used to this after living in several countries where kids are uncommon.  Here, kids are everywhere.

After school was out, one of the village girls came over to the house and came in to the living room and spent the afternoon playing with Liesl and Luciana.  This is awesome, their first real friend here and it is only our first week day in the village.  It took months before they started playing with the kids in Spain a year ago.

This evening after the girls’ new friend (we don’t know her name) had gone we packed up and drove out to Reghin again so that we could look for the bigger Kaufland grocery store that we have been told about.

We found the grocery store pretty easily and boy are we glad that we did.  Kaufland is enormous and has so many awesome items.  It is definitely the equivalent to a Wegman’s here.

We spent way more time at Kaufland than we had planned to.  It was so big and we kept finding new things.  We found peanut butter which was a big win.  And we found loads of vegetarian items.  Romania, at least central Transylvania, appears to have solid support for vegetarians with at least as many items as you would find at the major super markets back in the States.  We got several things, including veggie hot dogs which we are super excited about.  That is one meal that we seriously miss when we travel abroad.

We bought a lot of food at the Kaufland.  Then we drove to the main square and parked because we saw a large playground in the middle of the city so we let the girls get out and play for quite a long time.  This was very good, their first playground in Romania.  They live for their playgrounds.  I remember liking playgrounds a lot as a kid but I certainly do not remember liking them as much as my girls love them and I never did the imaginative kind of play that they like to do while on the playground.  They almost always wind up setting up a pretend bakery and selling pies and cakes to each other for the longest time.  This first started, that I noticed it at least, when we were at the large playground in Oslo nearly a year ago.

While the girls were on the playground I walked around to located a restaurant to go to for dinner.  I found a pizza place on the square that looked good.  So once we were done on the playground we just walked over to the pizza place which had a courtyard back behind the front line of buildings on the square and sat outside for our meal.

When we sat down it was very nice out, but Romanian temperatures plummet at night.  It can be in the mid seventies during the day and just lovely and suddenly be in the mid forties at night.  We have gotten used to warm nights in Spain, Greece, Nicaragua, Panama and Texas.  This is more like New York and it threw us off.  We went from very comfortable without jackets and sleeves rolled up when the meal started to absolutely freezing with jackets on by the end of the meal.  Dominica even had her scarf on over her sweater as a kind of blanket.

We left dinner at ten and drove back home.  It was, more or less, straight to bed for Dominica and the girls.  I stayed up dealing with some writing and posting until after midnight but was determined to get to bed myself at a decent hour.

Sunday in Baita.  Even having gone to bed very early last night, we were all feeling pretty tired today as well.  Dominica got up around nine but was back asleep by ten and slept for a few hours on the couch in the living room.

This morning is church, of course, and the church is directly across the street from our house so from the front parlour we have quite the view of everything going on.  Town got very busy with many cars coming into town and parking along the road and lots of people attending mass.

This is our third time since we started our journey just over a year ago, that we are living next door to the church in the village.  So we are getting used to this.

We took it pretty easy today.  The girls mostly played around the house.  Luciana and I did some racing on Sonic and Sega All Stars Racing.

In the afternoon the girls wanted to go for a walk so we got our shoes on and took a stroll down the main street to the south this time to see more of town.  The whole town was out.  Apparently the thing to do is to sit out on a bench in front of your home so that you are visible from the road and everyone can talk to everyone else.  Tons of people were visiting with neighbours in front of their homes.  Everyone wanted to talk to us, of course, but speaking only English and no one in town only speaking Romanian makes that very hard.  This is going to be rather a challenge in the coming months.

This evening we decided to go to Reghin and eat out at a restaurant.  We wanted to go to the big Kaufland grocery store but we did not get moving quickly enough to consider doing that and we had no idea if they would be open today or not, anyway, being that it was a Sunday.

Around eight we set off for Reghin, it is just under twenty kilometres away but it takes a while as the roads are very slow between here and there, especially the roads through out village and the ones along its road as you have to creep through the town.  The roads here are loaded with dogs, people, horses and more.

We had decided to just try our luck driving down the main drag to see what we could find.  We stopped at one spot loaded with banks because I wanted to hit the ATM and get some cash.  Being able to only take out around one hundred to one hundred and fifty dollars at a time is a bit cumbersome, but at least you do not tend to go through cash very quickly when in Romania so that makes things a little easier.  I was able to get 500 RON this time which was $127 USD, a little better than what I was able to get when at the airport on Friday which was only 400 RON, which came out to $108 USD.

Luciana was feeling a little sick from the drive so we decided to just set out on foot to explore the immediate part of the city and see what food options might exist.  There was a sign for a hotel up the street about one hundred metres so we decided that that sounded the most promising.

The hike up the hill was a bit much, it was steeper than we had realized and I think that they were being a bit conservative with the use of one hundred metres, it was closer to double that.  We were warm by the time that we came around a corner to see the hotel.

We went inside and it was deafening loud.  It was like a family birthday party with loud music, balloons, kids running around.  There was no way that we could have spoken to anyone there to order food and we could not tell if this was a real hotel and restaurant or if it had been shut down and was now just a home.  It was very confusing.  They had a lot of banners and stuff promoting this as a hotel, but they sure were not ready for any guests to arrive for rooms or for food.  So we quickly turned around and left.

Across the street was a pensiune called the Casablanca.  I peeked in the windows and they had a couple eating at a nicely set table so we decided to risk it and walked in.  It was very empty but the waitress came and she spoke a few words of English.  I asked about dinner and she said yes so we sat down.  It was very warm there, especially after our walk up the hill.

They had one menu in English that we had to share.  We were very surprised to find that they had real vegetarian options on the menu such as a vegetarian schnitzle and pasta with veggie meat substitute.  This is awesome.

I went for the full vegetarian tray which included a salad, fried cheese wheels (the standard European competition for the American mozzarella stick that I first had in Germany in 2012), fried mushrooms and vegetarian schnitzel.  It was huge and it was delicious.  Dominica went for the veggie pasta which was also really big and very good.  Luciana had eaten as we left the house so just got some pom frite.  Liesl loves soup and Romania is soup country and they had a hearty vegetable soup that she really wanted and ended up loving as well.  It was a really great dinner.

The bill came and the entire meal, which left us with enough food to take home for a full meal tomorrow, came out to fifty five RON or, more or less, fifteen dollars after tax and tip!  Incredible.  We are definitely outside of the tourist area now, this is the real price in Romania.  And this is a hotel, not some local restaurant.  I can only imagine how cheap some things much be.  Reghin is a tiny city of thirty three thousand well off of the tourist trail, but it is big enough to have hotels.

We got back home before ten thirty and the girls wanted to play a hidden object game about ancient Greece called Odysseus so we set that up and put in a little less than an hour.  Dominica was asleep before the first scene of the game was over and Luciana was clearly pretty tired.  I was getting sleepy so we cut it short and got everyone off to bed.