Cserediákok!

     This weekend was Inbound Orientation for our district, which is District 2241 and includes all of Romania and Moldova.  I got to skip school on Friday and sleep in.  At 11:30 György and I went to the hotel to have lunch and meet up with Ashlee and her host dad János.  Then we started our five hour drive to Brăila, a city to the south east of Udvarhely.  We had to drive through the Carpathian Mountains to get there and it was absolutely gorgeous!  I honestly just stared out the window and took pictures for five hours straight.  After we got to the other side though, the mountains immediately dropped off and everything became super flat, not a hill in sight.

  

There don't seem to be many high ways here, or at least we have yet to drive on any, though the roads through the mountains were pretty big and well maintained.  There are also dogs everywhere!  And actual stray dogs, unlike most of the ones in Udvarhely.  They are all over the streets of towns, wandering through cornfields, and even strolling down the side of the roads in the miles-long empty stretches between towns.  They are very pretty dogs though.  Most of them are very dog-looking, generic mutts, but every now and then we'd see a wild chihuahua and it was hilarious.  The dogs in Brăila even had a system for crossing this huge five lane road.  People here don't really pay much attention to traffic signals, they just start walking across the road and cars stop.  So these dogs would stand on the curb, wait for a group of people, wander across the road with them, then go their separate way.

     Brăila itself is a pretty big city, way bigger and Udvarhely.  It has some of the most beautiful old buildings but they are all, quite literally, crumbling into the street.  We all stayed in a little hotel, I roomed with Ashley.  We got there around 6pm and after we dropped out stuff off, a bunch of local Interact kids met us in the lobby.  I'm not really sure what that is, but I guess its like Rotary as a high school club.  Two girls walked Ashlee and I to the restaurant and we peaked in an old theater on the way.

   
     In the restaurant, we had the actual Rotary meeting.  We sat next to two girls from Brazil, and there was another girl from Mexico.  Some Romania kids did presentations on their long term and short term exchanges, then the five of us stood up and gave mini introductions in Romanian.  Everyone is so nice.  They gave us cute little books on the history of Romania printed in Romanian, English and German.  I found the section on Transylvania which was very interesting.  After we sat down for dinner and two more inbounds arrived.  In all there are eight of us.  Ashlee (16) and I from the US, Milena(16) and Danielle(18) both from the very very south of Brazil, Chava(16) and Astrid(18) from the same town in Mexico, Yurina(16) from Hokkaido, Japan, and Shirley from Taiwan.  She isn't here yet though, we're not really sure why, but I think she's going to meet with Örs in Taiwan at some point.  Chava is the only boy.  They all speak excellent English with the exception of poor Yurina.  She speaks Romanian less than I do and her English isn't much better.  Talking to her involves lots of charades, google translate, and trying various Romanian and English words to get the point across, but she's very nice and I hung out with her a lot.  Milena is in Sighetul Marmație, which up north right on the Ukrainian border.  She had something like a 10 hour drive.  She also hasn't met her host family yet because they're on vacation in Greece.  She's staying in a hotel that a rotary member owns.  Dani is in Iași which is in the east somewhere, Yiruna and Astrid are both in Râmnicu Vâlcea, but they didn't realize that until now.  Chava is in Slatina which is an hour from R.V.  

    We ate dinner and afterwards everyone started dancing.  We joined in.  I'm not a huge fan of dancing, but when a traditional song played we did some simple Romanian dancing, which involves lots of holding hands and walking in circles.  It was a lot of fun, we didn't walk home until close to midnight.  

    There were a lot of things I wanted to experience in Romania, but I can't say my first earthquake was one of them.  At 2 in the morning Ashlee and I woke up because the beds were shaking and the window was banging.  It only lasted a few minutes.  We figured what it was and just went back to sleep.  In the morning everyone was talking about it.  Except Chava who some how managed to sleep through it.  Ioana is in charge of inbounds so she went over the rules again and gave us some information on what we'll be doing in the future.  In April or May we get to go on Euro Tour and we'll be doing smaller trips through Romania some time.  She also said this is the one and only meeting they will speak english in so we had all better learn Romanian.  I really want to learn Romanian and Hungarian, but trying to learn both is making for slow progress, especially since people keep talking in english.  György said someone at school should be helping us soon, so I'm excited for that.  After we traded pins.  My blazer is getting pretty full now.  

    Some of the interact kids walked us down to the Danube, which flows along the south of Romania until it hits the Black Sea.  The Delta is in Romania and is supposed to be really beautiful.

     
     

We got on a boat with the Rotary members and sailed down the river for a ways.

(Look!  They even have crane farms here!)                 (A naval base of some sort, they told us.)

(Some traditional food, baked pig skin, fried and seasoned fat, cheese, olives, and onions.  I tried it all once but I don't plan on doing it again.)

(The one on the right is Iona, who is in charge of us.)

(Me, Ashlee, Yurina, Astrid, Chava, Dani, Milena)

     We eventually stopped and had a bbq on the river side.  There was fish soup which tasted pretty good but the full spine in mine and the head in someone else's was a bit off setting.

     
     We ate mămăliga, which is polenta in english.  Its some sort of yellow corn meal pudding that tasted good.  The brazilians were very happy with it, I guess they eat it a lot in south america.  After eating we painted.  One of the Rotarians is an art teacher or something and it was a lot of fun.

     The boat got back around 7, the sunset was very pretty.  We went out to eat dinner and had some delicious pizza.  It was the first time I've had any in about three weeks.  

     Sunday morning we all got up, ate breakfast, then headed our separate ways.  I can't believe we have to wait months to see each other again.  On the drive back, we took a different route and stopped by the ruins of an old Hungarian castle that marked the old border between Hungary and Romania, back before World War 1.  The Hungarians who manned the fort and who now live in this region are the Csángo, opposed to the Szeékely who live in our area.  The mountains of Romania definitely feel like something out of a fairy tale, which their extremely tall  pine trees and misty tops.   
  

Boldog Szülinapot!

     Today was Zenkő's birthday.  I made pancakes for breakfast and we used some of the maple syrup I brought.  They came out pretty good, all things considered.  I forgot that they would have any measuring cups or teaspoons here.  Everything is in mL and grams.  Also, we had to use baking soda instead of baking powder and olive oil instead of cooking oil.  They still tasted about the same though.  Cooking them a difficult too because not only was the stove not in degrees fahrenheit, but it wasn't in celsius either.  Fanny just turned it on to its default setting and we experimented from there.

     Yesterday we drove to a nearby village where their little cousins live.  Kincső is maybe 6 and Babi turned 3.  She and Zenkő had a joint party.  The girl from their Grampa's house last week, Monika, was there, as well as her little sister who's probably 2.  None of them speak english so I had fun playing with them.

This is Babi's room.  The entire inside of the house was really cute.

     Their house is beautiful.  Its a big cottage looking thing that's really haphazardly fenced in, with a really old barn, and some sheep behind the house.  On a lot of the old buildings the date it was built is tiled into the roof.

     They even had two massive sheep dogs.  They went up to my hip.

     They have an outdoor stove/oven/chimney thing that they cooked a sheep in.

     There was also mashed potatoes, bean salad, and lots of bread.  They made this yummy dry fudge paste stuff out of sunflower seeds.  The cakes were beautifully decorated and everyone sang a Hungarian birthday song.  We ate out on the side porch and after all the dishes were cleared they pulled hammocks down from the rafters and people sat around chatting.