This past weekend were the interviews/first meeting for the Romanian outbounds next year. There are three girls in my town, all in ninth grade at the moment, who applied and I went with them to the meeting, which was about five hours away in the big city of Iași. We got there Friday evening and went to the opening Rotary meeting where there were some power points on what Rotary Youth Exchange is. It was held in this beautiful building, Palatul Culturii din Iași.
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| Palatul Culturii din Iași |
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| View of the court yard between the palace and a big shopping mall. |
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| The palace in the day light. |
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| Cool building opposite our hotel. |
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| Iași |
Saturday morning the actual interviews were held. All of the students, about 20, introduced themselves. They chose their countries as well, they get three choices here. Most people chose some variation of US, Australia, Brazil, Mexico, or Japan. A couple kids had India and Taiwan as choices, I'm not sure what other ones they offer here. After everyone was finished we all got on a bus and drove to see some cool buildings.
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| A little palace thing. There was a prince who lived here and the inside has been reconstructed to look really realistic. |
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| Painting on the ceiling of an old monastery. At some point it was a children's ward (?) and there was a fire too. A lot of the paintings on the walls were gone but its still a beautiful old building. |
We went out to dinner Saturday night and it was a lot of fun to get to know the other kids better. Dani, the Brazilian girl living in Iași at the moment, came as well. Between Romanian, Hungarian, and English communication was a bit tricky at times but everyone made do.
Sunday morning we drove back through the mountains, which still had snow even though it had melted down below. This is Békás-Szoros, roughly Frog Canyon I think. There were little wooden stalls along the side of the road in places, selling things. It was really kind of cool because this was deep in the mountains without any other houses or anything around.
This is Red Lake or Gyilkos-Tó (Killer's Lake), its a really big barrier lake in the Carpathians.
And this is an adorable dog we saw somewhere along the way who looks like Luna.
Was the big shopping mall over there anything like the malls we have here?
ReplyDeleteIt was pretty much the same, they even had some of the same clothing stores. There were lots of little booths inside selling touristy stuff and there was a pet shop and a beauty parlor. We really only stayed in one section so that's all I saw. There was a Starbucks that the girls from my town were excited about because there aren't any close to us. I also went to KFC for the first time ever! Someone said there was a movie theater there too, but I didn't see I so I don't know what type of movies they were showing.
DeleteWhat are they selling in the place along the road by the cliffs?
DeleteBeautiful places. I checked the map. It looks like your getting to see a lot of the country.
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