Romania and beyond

racel, bobby-joe, phil,becca, janie, me, rasov castle

4.20.08 7:52

Here it is the Romanian trip. I don’t think I will go into too much detail here but I will give the gist of what happened. I will start with us all leaving the peace corps office at about 6. We all are walking and I am having no problems what so ever given the lightness in which I packed. (2 pairs of underwear 2 shirts and 2 pairs of socks). So im ridin light (phil did the same and we were both glad for it given the walking distances we were in for). But unlike phil and I the girls seemed to pack in great quantity. I offered to carry a bag that I regretted as soon as I picked it up. It was a good 30 pounds atleast (I dunno what she had in there but I imaged bricks and dumbbells). As soon as I grabbed the bag I stepped on a manhole cover and as luck would have it caved right in! My foot began to fall but lucky for me I had this 30 pound counterweight bag on my right as my left leg was attempting to detach itself down the hole. Anyway I as able to recoverand slowly do a lunge out of the hole. I scrapped and bruised my leg up pretty good but had I not had that bag I most likely would have broken my leg and ended my trip right there. (good start to the trip).

The bus ride was not too exciting getting there. I was uncomfortable and it was an overnight trip. I took some benadril to help me sleep and became more groggy then anything else. The bus was stopped at the border for 3 hours as our passports were checked and bags and stuff. I really didn’t sleep more then an hour or so during the whole ten hour escapade.

We arrived finally in bucherest about 6am in the middle of a city where we had no idea where we were. From there it was my job to get us to our hostel. This proved difficult because my city navigation skills are sub par but when you have 5 people in a group somebody has to take charge or be forced to take charge or else everyone just second guesses everything. We mad our way on the metro to a part of town that was going to be our launch point in our attempt to find our hostel. (2 hours later we arrived at our hostel).

First day without sleep phil and I wondered around the town a bit while the girls slept and ate some burrito lookin thing on the side of the road at this stand and made conversation with a girl from turkey who ran the stand. We all later met up together and wondered around the city. It was a really beautiful city. I had heard it described as just a larger Chisinau (capital city in moldova) but they were very mistaken. There was utterly no trash on the ground the roads were clean and buildings up kept and huge. The public transportation was great and monuments beautiful and great restaurants. Around 5 pm we all went the air port and picked up one of our companion’s friend from the airport and became 6.

The next day we had not had enough of the city so we walked around some more played near the fountains then made our way to the train station and then took a 2 and a half hour train ride to brasov. The train was great, really comfortable and plenty of space for my legs. Rachel the volunteer in the cab behind me was talking up a storm with these random people she was riding with and was rewarded with a free bottle of wine from them.

We arrived in brasov at the trainstation. I followed the instructions on how to get us from there to the hostel we were stayin at and we succeded. (my sole responsibility for the trip was getting us from transport to our hostels and booking them, I dominated my assignment and our accommodations were great). Now that all my stress was over from getting us to our destinations I was ready to relax and enjoy the town.

The town is beautiful. That first night we all got something to eat and then walked around the city. Beautiful… only word for it. The next day we walked around again (bascily all we did there was walk around and see things. They have a magnificent church there that we went in to see and really the whole town looked ancient but really well kept.

The second day we were all there we went on a castle fest. We took a bus out to Bran and then Rasov to see two castles. The first one was dracula’s castle and was not very impressive. Very touristy and a bit expensive. But we got a good lunch out there in Bran so ill call it a success. Plus phil and I raced up this mountain path and we nearly both had heart attacks because … running up hills as fast as you can will get ya. The second castle was awesome. Its more in a ruin state not restored or kept. Had you know the broken down walls and stuff. Plus it took us about 25 mins to hike up this mountain just to get to the thing. So once you got up there then ontop of the castle lookout you got really magnificent views. We stayed and played around on everything ( there was do not touch signs so we climbed on everything played with everything thre and just a great time). As it was closing we all sat around comsuming a beverage when this guy came up to us an started talking. His name was nigel and was from outside of London. He works there and lives up thre in that castle. He also claims to be the archery coach for the Olympic team in Romania. After the castle was closed he gave us the secrete tour and showed us this well where this show ghost hunters apparently shot an episode. He lit a piece of newspaper on fire and dropped in town this massive well (about 250 feet down and about 10 feet across this thing was massive) then he showed us this skeleton they found while doing some repairs a few years back. It was under glass below the floor but he opened up a secret door and we all got to see it up close without glass or anything… it was crazy.

The next day phil, Rachel and I hiked up this mountain that our hostel was backed up to. It took us a good hour at a steady pace and we were all pretty exhausted from the climb. The highlight was as we are taking pictures of ourselves being kings of the mountain at the top I spotted a bear coming up the path towards us. We snapped a few shots and got the heck out of there! Later that day we hired a private taxi and went out to the Palace about 40 minutes out of town. IT was a palace for the king and queen of Romania about 100 years old. It was easily the most expensive house I had ever seen in my life. They had suits of armor and weapons on all the walls beautiful paintings and statues… my mouth was open the entire tour.

Rachel took all the pictures for the group because she had this really awesome exensive camera and liked to take pictures. During the trip I just dictated what pictures I wanted her to take and she did. She even let us take pictures with her camera it was great. But sadly I don’t have any pictures yet until I get a cd she will make for us all so we have the pictures.

The next day was our last and took the bus back to chisnau. It took a good 11 hours but it was a little exciting. On the way we had a flat tire and drove through a low hanging power line. We drug that power line with us a good 6 minutes before quickly stopping and cutting it off. ( we watched the thing flying behind us as it hit cars (probably doing some damage!)

That’s about all for the trip.


17:30

Now for the past week since I have returned things have not gone all that good or all that bad. Work is still slow if non existent. I asked my partners for work they say just wait … I believe that this putting me off from doing anything is not intentional they just have no idea what I can do and I don’t either. But I am tired of going to work and not doing anything. I will find other work to do or instead of going to office go to the fields and just walk around and try to take in some agriculture. Maybe visit the towns around our city and just walk around and assess the situation myself.

I do not have really high expectations for my work now. The guy I have the best chance to work with has a very negative attitude towards work. I guess they all do because hey their organization will cease to exist in 1 year and their response to everything is why should we do that if we are not going to be around for another year or so? I can’t argue, I can’t put the drive to do their job into them they should already have this.

After talking with my partner about ideas I had that we could do and him shooting them all down saying naa that wouldn’t work, he finally said ya.. maybe that would work but we only have a little more then a year… why should we do this. That was the finality I needed to find other work. He also said “excuse me.. but how can you help me, I know more then you do”. Not that I am going to argue with him on that, he most defiantly does know more then me on everything dealing with agriculture and most likely a lot more things. After that conversation I didn’t go to work the next day. That was this Friday I didn’t go at all and decided I am just going to do something else that day because I didn’t feel like doing nothing at work.

I went to the market bought a saw for cutting metal, some scrapers to take off paint of metal and some rust desolver and headed to the park. I worked on one of the benches by my self for an hour and a half then went to eat lunch then off to play with the kids. Later that day I met with the volunteers that did show up to our meeting and said ok anybody do what was on the agenda. Nobody had of course so I just said alright lets go to the park and start doing what we can’t seem to put down on paper.

So we worked for about 2 hours talking messing around and preparing one of the benches for reparation. They seemed pretty happy about it, they even got some praise by some people walking by (well it was one older gentlemen and he said wow the boys destroy the girls repair). I only had girls that showed up that day and they were the ones doing the repairing. They liked it and they felt like they were doing something. Success! We atleast started!

Yesterday was Saturday and we met again in the park to actually get something done. We needed to get a budget together so we know how much this is all going to cost. I broke us all up into 3 teams. On team goes to the market to find the price of materials there, one group to one of the locations nearby where we can buy the wood needed to repair the bench and the last group to the other nearby place where we can buy wood for some quotes. Because we have to go on foot or with a maxi taxi this process took about an hour and a half. We rconvined shared information and then went our separate ways. One of the volunteers had nothing to do, and of course me and farina didn’t so we decided to go on and excursion! We took a random maxi taxi to a near buy town and then walked around the town. We got some hilarious looks from the people there. Especially on the ride because we asked how far to our destination it was. Well I asked and I butchered the question and they all looked at me like I was nuts until I clarified what I had said. So when we got on the bus they had their suspicions. As we rode for about 15 minutes people started asking wehre we wanted to go. We just said somewhere interesting or pretty to hike around. They told us just to get off and we did. We saw a hill and hiked it. There were flowers everywhere and sheep in the valley and a river and stream. It was a really beautiful little town. We hiked to the forest over there and just enjoyed nature. We hitched a ride home with some stranger along the road and then walked home after they dropped us of about 30 minutes walking distance from our houses. Good day it was.

Today my partner from work called me at 8:30 in the morning to ask if I wanted to come help him work in his field. I said you bet I would and I was in the field at 9am. He owns a orchard and has a good amount of land. I dunno how much 3 hectares is but that’s how much he has in his orchard. I worked 3 hours with him then came home ate then met with my volunteer group for the 3rd day in a row and had 6 people show up to write our plan down ( including budget, what we want to do, and how we are going to do it). It was a real half assed effort by everyone but we got about 2/3rds of it done which is more then anybody had done in the last 2 months we have been working on it.

We ended the meeting with me making some lists of support where each high school will have at least 100 people write that they support the project. That will be around 400-500 kids. From there we take our letters of support to either the mayors office or alternate sources of funding.

The cost for one bench reparation that we figured for paint, wood, screws, and all will be around $50. Yes I have the power to do this myself but that’s not why im here. They are going to find the money in their own community and then project will be 4 times as successful in my eyes. That’s whats going on in my life right now. Ups and downs.