Blogs from Transilvania, Romania, Europe - page 27

Happy Saturday!! Ioana had to go into her other office today for a bit so I hopped a bus to the downtown area and gave myself a tour. It's really interesting what you can do when personal survival is of a concern. I managed to come out unscathed and much more informed so I'd say it was successful. Where to start: I bought my bus pass (in Romanian thank you very much) and waited for the 27 train which was to take me to the History Museum. I didn't see any signs for the 27 but I did see one for the 25 and I figured it was close enough so I got on. The bus ended up dropping me off on the complete other side of town after I saw the stop I was supposed ... read more

To start off, I'm just going to apologize in advance if the next few entries are a bit "blah".. i feel like I've been up forrrrever! Anywhoos, I got my first real taste of how the Romanians do the nightlife. After my nap I awoke in the nick of time to join the brother of one of the workers here to met his colleagues at a local hang-out spot. We met many of his friends and even his boss for drinks and pub-games. It was fun teaching the adults English as they taught me Romanian. Another fun point of the evening was reading the drink menu and seeing many of the same drinks we have, like a long island ice tea and kamakazi. They're even made the same way too. I ordered a local beer called ... read more

Those were my exact words today at lunch when I was talking to Ioana about weekend plans. My first week with the kids came to an end with lots of smiles and fun times. We started to play hangman or, "spanzuratoare" (try saying that 10 times fast). The kids had a great time with that and I learned that the same techniques to get kids to shut up in America work on kids in Romania. Give them a stuffed animal and whoever has the stuffed animal speaks, thats it. :) Then we went down to the grassy area and played ratsa ratsa gooska...again. I think they like that game, just a little bit. They played a few local games as Ioana and I helped introduce a new worker here to the building and whatnot. The kids ... read more

Welcome to day 3!!! I started today off with an AMAZING breakfast of coffee and a pastery type snack which tastes something like a soft won-ton with cabbage inside. It sounds grose but throw some jam on that and boy is it deeeeelish! And I'm proud to say I've conquered Romanian coffe without sugar or milk!!!! Yay! As the students arrived, I first noticed that our size had grown!! Good news travels fast as we gained 5 new kids today!! We played tic tac toe and prepped for the day. We went outside and the kids started asking to play ratsa ratsa gooska from yesterday. I couldn't say no. After that we continued on to play Simon Says or Simon' Spine (Spee-neh). We would alternate between using english and Romanian. After that Ioana got the kids ... read more

So I just finished up my very first day with the kids, who are so awesome!! It's pretty crazy how many of them have never met an American, quite the responsibility to prove we're cool people. So, from the begining of the day.... We started out by introducing eachother and learning names. (as though it's not hard enough when the names are familiar in English....) Then we went outside where I tought them red-rover red-rover. the best thing ever was that they couldn't quite get the American "r" sound down, so they said land-rover land-rover. SO great! I then showed them duck-duck-goose which in Romanian is Ratsa Ratsa Gu(oo)ska. The kids enjoyed that greatly. We then wondered inside and we split the kids into 2 rooms so they would fit comfortably. There's maybe 20 kids so ... read more