I am really glad that I was able to get up so easily when my alarm went off this morning. When I started up the water for my first shower, I was sprayed in the face with cold water and the shower curtain fell on top of me. There’s no showerhead, just a hand held sprayer. Later in the morning, we heard a few more loud crashes. One of my roommates had slipped and fallen, because our tub is so slippery.
After our adventurous morning, we walked a few blocks to the other girls’ apartment and met with Mario to go over some important business and to pay our rent. We showed up with lei, but are apparently supposed to pay our rent in euro for some reason. We couldn’t run to the bank and exchange our money, because today is Worker’s Day and all government institutions are closed. They will be closed tomorrow as well. Mario said that Worker’s Day is a communist holiday that the current government has continued to implement.
I got to meet Mario’s 4 year-old daughter. Her name is Joanna, but in Romanian, it is pronounced yoo-wahn-ah. She can speak English fairly well, but won’t respond unless you talk in Romanian. We were all a little intimidated to try, so we didn’t say much to her. She kept telling her mom, “I am frustrated. I don’t want to speak English.” When we all walked over to a pet shop with Mario to get flea spray, a few of us waited outside with Joanna since we couldn’t all fit in the store. I finally got the guts to speak to her, but couldn’t think of what I could say. Finally, I just told her she had a beautiful name. She opened up a little and started picking up piles of gravel and putting it in our hands. We made a game of it, and she’d laugh when we’d drop it. I realized that you really don’t have to speak much to be able to interact with the people here. As long as you just try your best, they’ll usually open up to you.
It rained a bunch today, so it was a good motivator to stay inside and do some spring-cleaning. There’s a lot of stuff that has accumulated from previous groups of interns, and so we sorted through everything and decided to throw a lot of it out. We bagged up tons of clothes and shoes, and hauled a spare mattress that was infested with fleas to the dumpster in the back of the building. Besides trash, we sat everything in front of the dumpsters rather than putting it inside. Just as we expected, everything had been taken within a short while. People out here will make use of just about anything that is thrown out. We always see people going through the dumpsters. After hauling the first load, we saw a man who was waiting close by, so he could have first dibs on everything. He was already pulling stuff out before we were very far away.
We went back to the grocery store at the Hala for a few more things. It’s so close that we’ll probably go at least every couple of days. We had a much easier time today. We noticed that some items are discounted if you have a grocery card, so we asked a cashier for one. It took us a little while for us to try and explain what we wanted and she laughed at us, but we finally got one.
Tonight, we watched Miss Congeniality while we ate dinner. We don’t have a T.V. but we brought some DVDs to watch on a laptop. I won’t have a hard time adjusting to having no television, because I don’t watch it very often back home anyway. I thought for sure that I would have a hard time leaving my cell phone, but I’m already forgetting all about it.
