Wednesday, April 30, 2008It is 11:00 PM in Iasi, Romania. I am sitting here looking out the window in sheer disbelief that I am finally here! A year and a half of preparation and this is finally it. I was on the phone with mom a short while ago, sorting out a problem with my debit card. While I am getting ready for bed, she is just beginning the most hectic part of her afternoon. There is a nine hour time difference. I should sleep fine considering the three exhausting flights it took to get here.
We actually left yesterday, and just got in this afternoon. I had a difficult time sleeping on the plane, because it never got completely dark before the sun started rising again and I was a little anxious. I felt completely fine until I arrived at the airport and began to feel pretty nervous. I just had no idea what to expect.
The first flight from Denver to Chicago was nice and roomy. They assigned me one of the premium seats with extra leg room even though I hadn’t paid extra for it when I checked in. I talked a lot with the elderly couple next to me. They were so thrilled about what I was coming to do and promised that if I ever wrote a book about it, they would read it. The woman said just to make sure to include my picture on the back, so she can recognize me.
Once I made it to the Chicago airport, I had a difficult time finding my gate, because the airport is so huge! After walking across the entire airport, I found I needed to get on a tram that would take me to another building totally separate from the main airport. While I was still wandering through the main terminal, I saw a Hispanic woman fighting tears and looking around in confusion. She approached me and I couldn’t understand her, but she pointed to the gate number on her ticket and mumbled something about her son. I hardly know any Spanish, but I was able to walk her to her gate and make a little conversation on the way. I think she felt a little better when I pointed to my ticket and told her I was struggling myself. She was a sweet lady and seemed very grateful for my help. Soon after, I met up with the eight other interns at our gate, and traveled together the remainder of the way.
The second flight from Chicago to Vienna took about ten hours. We flew on Austrian Air and everything was in German, which we found quite amusing. There were about 80 other BYU students on our same flight who were on their way to Jerusalem for a semester. The food was surprisingly pretty good. We ate dinner and breakfast, and were offered lots of drinks and cigars in between. I was thankful for so many non-smokers on the flight. To pass the time, I watched a couple of free movies, talked a bit with a man next to me from Israel, and spent a lot of time staring out the window even though it was almost impossible to see anything with the cloud-cover. There was something so exciting about seeing even the tiniest patches of green here and there and just knowing that I was flying over entirely new places. Once we began descending, I could finally see clearly the gorgeous, green hills of Austria. I already can’t wait to go back and stay a few days at the end of my trip.
We finally made it to Iasi, exhausted and slightly nauseous from yet another landing. It was raining a little when we got in. Like Vienna, everything is so green here! The airport is tiny. There is only one landing strip and besides about four airport personnel, the nine of us were the only ones there. We gathered up our luggage and discovered that two girls were missing some of theirs, but the airport manager seemed very considerate and provided them with some overnight kits until the luggage arrives. We finally got to meet Marionella (Mario), a local who speaks fluent English and who has agreed to help us with whatever we need during the next four months. She already had taxis waiting for us outside. As we loaded everything into the little compact cabs, the drivers were laughing at the size of our luggage. It took three cabs to fit all of our things. Mary, Whitney, and I had a very friendly driver and it was fun trying to put our Romanian to use for the very first time. We struggled quite a bit, but found roundabout ways to tell him what we wanted to say. We passed a big lake and I was curious to know the word for it. All I managed to ask was, “How do you say big water?” He knew what I meant and told me how to say it. When he turned on the radio, we were all shocked to hear a popular American song. Many stations here play music by American artists, even though most people do not speak English. I guess there just aren’t too many popular Romanian artists out there, so they have to borrow music from elsewhere.
I live at Strada A. Panu Numerul 21, Blocul 7, Etaj 6, Apartamentul 29. Everyone in the city lives in a high-rise apartment building called a bloc. My bloc is called “Scala” for short. The floor at ground level is used for small businesses. We have a bank right under us. My apartment is on the sixth floor, but there are far more than six staircases to get up to it. Lucky for us, we have an “elevator” which is really just a small metal door in the wall that opens to two more wooden saloon-like doors; all having to be opened and closed by hand. Only about four people can fit inside at a time, and not comfortably. We learned that lesson right away when the four of us crammed inside and found we couldn’t even shut the doors unless we stood literally shoulder to shoulder. Personal space is a luxury I will soon miss.
Every hallway and stairwell in every apartment bloc has it’s own smell, although the majority contain some variation of a sewage or outhouse odor. Ours smells like a giant sewage pipe while the other girls’ apartment smells just like Casa Bonita to me. I think that its due to all the millions of plants they have in their stairwell.
I can easily say that I will come out of this experience being so much more grateful for the living conditions in the U.S. The tap water comes out brown every once in a while, one of our toilets doesn’t flush at all, and the other can’t flush any paper. The washing machine water is also brown and empties into our bath, and there are flea and roach problems. Luckily, we have only come across two roaches so far and they sell very potent flea spray here. There are four of us in our apartment and we each share a bed with one other person, although Mary and I lost the coin toss and got the couch pullout rather than the bed. The other apartment has five girls, who share two or three to a bed, so I can’t complain. Everything in the kitchen is miniature sized. We have a tiny stove that has to be lit with a match, and is difficult to regulate the temperature. It’s gets extremely hot and it’s hard to avoid burning food. The counters are not connected to the walls, and the drawers in them are broken and falling apart. We have no kitchen table or chairs, so we eat in the living room. The fridge is now working fine, but it took us a little while to figure out how to make it cold.
The one (and only) element of the apartment that I absolutely love is our balcony that overlooks the city. It’s the length of the whole apartment. It’s fun to watch the people coming and going below and there are tons of pigeons that come and perch on it. We have a clothesline that stretches across it to hang out our clothes and towels since there are no dryers. Just below our balcony is a little rooftop with a small shed on top of it. We frequently hear an elderly man clinking and hammering in there.
We went to the Hola Centrala earlier, which is an old mall with a small grocery store inside. We felt a bit lost and did a lot of wandering before we found foods we are familiar with. Many things are similar to what we have in the U.S., but it’s hard to tell what things are by the packaging. We were hungry and exhausted, so we didn’t have a lot of patience. I think the only thing that kept us sane was the American music playing in the background that helped us to feel more at ease. They played songs by Nickelback, Norah Jones, Fergie, and Chris Brown. When we were finally done, we argued over who would pay at the register first, since none of us had ever paid with Romanian lei before. Once we figured out how it was done, it was very easy though. On our way out, with our hands full of groceries, we experienced our first pickpocket attempt. A man passing us on our way out felt Whitney’s back pocket. Luckily she didn’t have anything in there. We’ve been keeping all our cash in our bras and it seems to work very nicely.
After going to our apartment to finish unpacking, we went to get some dinner at the Moldova Mall, which is a bigger and much newer mall. It’s still small compared to ones in the U.S., but just about as nice. We ordered Schworma, which is actually not all that bad. It’s basically a wrap filled with chicken, sauer krout, pickles, whole French fries, and some other things. It took them about thirty minutes to make our food, so we had to sit in the food court and wait. We were all talking and didn’t notice that Mary had dosed off until a mall security guard came over and started yelling at her to wake up. He was speaking so quickly and we told him we couldn’t understand, but he didn’t seem to care. He finally left, but kept close watch on us from a distance. After that we helped each other to stay awake, although it was hard. We aren’t used to the huge time difference, and our bodies are trying to sleep against our will. At least now we know not to fall asleep in public places.
