Scattered thoughts.

Saturday, August 28:


It’s raining in Romania.  There’s thunder rumbling outside our apartment, and lightning cracks across the sky occasionally, briefly illuminating the mountain peaks across the street.  Lupeni is situated in the Jiu Valley of the Transylvanian Alps, so the city is narrow, strung out through the valley.  Behind our apartment building, there are a few more blocks of buildings, but then the land rises steeply into thickly-wooded mountains.  Across the street, there are two blocks of apartment buildings (and a Pentecostal church), but then the city runs into mountains again.  This is the Jiu Valley.  It’s one of the poorest areas in Romania: the last official figures put unemployment at 56 percent.  Crime is rare here, but rates of alcoholism and poverty are high.  Corruption is rampant.  All of Romania faces corruption, but in this area it’s especially virulent.  Communism has left a lot of legacies, but the culture of corruption seems to be one of the hardest to destroy—well, that and the big gray block apartments.  They stretch on for at least a kilometer down the valley, one huge cement box after another, each crumbling and worn down, with little glimpses of the life inside barely breaking through the foreboding exterior.  During the Communist era, the apartment buildings were government-owned; now, every tenant owns his or her own apartment.  As a result, walking through them is almost comical for the mishmash—if repairs have been made, they have been made by individuals on their own apartment only.  None of the doors in our building match.  Some people have put in beautiful wooden doors, which seem somehow out of place in this dank gloom of the stairwell (which no one maintains at all, so it smells of mold and crumbling plaster—tragedy of the commons, I guess).  Block apartments do little to build community.  I doubt we’ll meet our neighbors, even if we put forth the effort in our broken Romanian.  (I learned how to ask for things today, though, so maybe I can go ask to borrow sugar…)  I suppose that was also intentional during the Communist era, but it’s still rather sad.

On the whole, though, Romanians are really friendly.  The apartments may not embody that well, but every Romanian I’ve met so far has been wonderful—hospitable and helpful, willing to pantomime with me when I ask stupid questions like where to find the rice at the grocery store.  (Unde eşte orez?)  I am beginning to feel comfortable here, and have definitely fallen head-over-heels for the beauty of this place.  We went for a hike tonight, past the Bates’ house, up this dirt trail to a waterfall in the mountains.  It was a gorgeous evening and a beautiful walk.  We returned to Dana and Brandi’s place for dinner afterward, and it was lovely—their house is an old hunting bed and breakfast, sitting right next to the river and surrounded by gardens and pasture.  Everything is gently rustic and sometimes I have to pinch myself to remember that I’m not just living inside a National Geographic article.  I love it.  Seriously, I’m quite content to sit in the grass as the breeze blows down the mountain and listen to the river and read Dana’s books (oh, so many good books!) and eat caşcaval.

Oh—caşcaval!  That reminds me!  Food!  Other than language class all morning, our day has been entirely taken up by eating, so this seems an appropriate time to write something about Romanian food.  This afternoon we learned how to prepare some traditional Romanian dishes with our language teacher, so we made soup and salad and bread and these awesome thin pancakes that we seasoned with herbs and salt and pepper and filled with caşcaval (it’s a cheese) and fried up… mm.  And tonight at the Bates’ we had sausage and chicken and some mysterious meatball-like thing from the grill (the English translation of the Romanian name is simply “meat,” so...), as well as an awesome cabbage-red wine salad and watermelon and bread (of course) and this great salad of tomatoes and onions and olives and cheese… mmm.  (Well, except for the olives.  I really dislike green olives.  Perhaps even loathe.  But I’m trying to learn to eat them anyway.)  Overall, the food is pretty good—right now, a lot of bread, cucumbers, tomatoes, and cheese.   Soup is the starter to every meal; bread is the staple of… everything.  Everything.  But I could get used to that.  :)