Blogs from Comanesti, Bacau, Moldova, Romania, Europe

We were asked to spend our day today at the Habitat for Humanity Comanesti warehouse as opposed to painting - which half of us were fine with the change of pace. Little did we know that 7000+ boxes of flooring in 30 different shades waited for us. So, as you can imagine as we unstacked and restacked box after box we all heard someone say - No, that one is different! Before we got too far into it, we also got to move some furniture out of the way and three team members spent a good part of the day organizing hundreds of paint cans. Think of cleaning your garage and then the garage of all of your neighbors! One of the highlights of the day was sharing the volunteer experience with 6 kids from a ... read more

In my attempt to see more obscure parts of the countryside I contacted what turne out to be a rather eccentric American teacher that I spent a few days with. She revelled showing off her village. She graciously arranged for me to sleep in a spare room of her gazda's (host/landlord) house. There was some confusion in getting to her village because the auto gara (bus station) she was used to using was unmarked to anyone walking by - an unfortunately common thing in Romania - and when I asked a city bus driver where the autogara he took me to a completely different place. This set me off-schedule, but still close enough not to upset my host. After a couple errands in toen we boarded the train for her village. Unfortunately, I just missed the ... read more