First Romania Post! - Monday, September 4, 2006

When I flew into Romania, it wasn’t as exciting as I thought it would be back in Spring term. I think it was really just because I traveled beforehand and so being in Europe and in an airport and even being with the girls again wasn’t as much of a novelty (I went with some of the girls on the pre trip). But anyway, with that said, it was still exciting and I was still really glad to finally be in Romania. The airport experience was actually pretty funny. This is what happened. When we (Megan, Marina, Shannon and I) walked out of the arrivals terminal, we saw Jessica right away and then we weren’t sure what we were supposed to do because we didn’t know where Jenna was (didn’t realize Holly had already picked her up and thought she’d still be there), didn’t know when Melissa was getting there and weren’t sure when Holly was getting there. Also, we didn’t realize that we hadn’t actually left the closed off part of the airport yet. Like, we thought Holly was just going to find us where we were. It wasn’t until Jessica and I decided to “go outside” to look for Jenna that we actually discovered where we were actually supposed to meet Holly. See, we thought the doors you go out to get to where everyone else is (where people are holding signs for people who they’re meeting at the airport) was instead just the outside of the airport. So we just go over and walk right out the doors and immediately stop and just stare at all the people holding signs and talking and all the commotion and all the eyes on us. I felt almost like a celebrity, especially because we just stopped in the middle of the doors and stared at everyone for a couple of seconds. It wasn’t until I saw Holly waving to us from behind everyone else that I snapped out of my shock and started walking down around the line of people. Then, it wasn’t until after Holly mentioned something about our luggage that I realized we’d walked past the point where we could freely walk back in and had none of our luggage. So we had to tell the security and go through this process that took like 10 minutes and then finally the security guards let us back past the doors. It was interesting though because they still let Jessica go back through even though she didn’t have her passport (would NEVER have happened at an airport in the US because of all the importance of our strict security measures. I got the impression that they wanted to look official and strict but when it came right down to it and was hard they gave up pretty easily. Anyway, so we got the girls and figured out a few things and then Jessica, Shannon and I went with Marin (the branch member in Bucharest who picked us up – he’s also our language teacher, Maria’s, brother in law) to get driven to our hotel. We were just chatting and being excited in his car, when I remember all of a sudden seeing everyone looking toward the other side of the road and I turn my head and first I just see a stopped police car and then I see a young man wearing a purple shirt and black pants with black hair lying in the middle of the street, feet closest to us, dead. I won’t go into all the gory details, but basically he’d been hit by a car and was just lying there in the street and we, unfortunately, had a really good view of it. After that we were all just kind of silent because what do you say after that. Everything you could say would be too irreverent and awkward. Somehow we got back to normal conversation but it definitely wasn’t me who started talking because I don’t think I felt it was right yet and so it was really weird for me when everyone was ok with talking about normal things right away. I also remember Shannon asking me if I was ok because I think my mouth was gaping wide open and I was kind of surprised that they asked because usually I’m always the one who’s more ok than I should be in situations like that. And the thing is that I was ok, like I wasn’t about to break down and start rocking in a fetal position but it was disturbing and I was still recovering from the shock and still just felt I shouldn’t just gloss over it. Like I kept thinking about his poor mother and how he was a person with a life and how it would be the least I could do to take a few minutes and just be sad about it. Also, I think it might have affected me more than most just because first of all I’ve always hated violence and blood and such. Like, just when I’ll see something like that in a movie, I think it affects me more than most people and I really hate it. When I see something like that on tv I tend to think about the people as individual people whereas I think most other people just think of it as something of a purely aesthetic property that’s just part of the motion of what’s on the tv at the time – if that makes sense. Also, on top of that, especially recently I’ve been really paranoid about hitting pedestrians or being hit by a car because I was a delivery driver before I came up here and always felt like it was possible that I could hit someone. Anyway, the reason I’m going into all of this is because due to all of this, and due to the fact that it was so morbid and one of the first things I saw in Romania. And also that combined with everything else I saw when I first got to the city, like all the HORRIBLE drivers, the fact that crossing the street really is dangerous, the stray dogs, the gypsies and just all the horrible, dirty living conditions, it all made Romania just seem like a really scary place. Like later on when we were walking to McDonalds, I really just feared for my life when I looked at every Romanian I saw and every time I crossed the street and just no matter what I was doing because it seemed like things were so volatile. Anyway, it just kind of cast this pall over the rest of the day for me that I don’t think the rest of the girls really had. It really kind of blew my mind that the city was so run down too. Like I remember that there was this house connected to some kind of run down parking structure or something like that which was fairly close to our hotel and it looked like something that was too run down to walk or live it because it could just fall apart at any moment and yet there were clothes being hung right outside one of the windows. And there were a lot of abandoned parking structures that reminded me of the one that Cristina from the Street Kids movie that we watched in prep class, stayed at. Anyway, so the hotel we stayed at was kind of a dump but probably pretty nice for Romania. It was a little ghetto, but no worse than the one we stayed in in Paris which gave it some charm and I’m pretty sure at this point that pretty much all the accommodations in Romania will be a little bit ghetto. So Jessica and I shared a room and it was pretty uneventful until after Jessica and I came back to our room after having watched a movie in Marina and Jenna’s room. So, we get in the room and do a few things and it’s probably about a half hour after leaving Marina’s room and we’re standing by the door because I was about to walk out and go to the restroom when all of a sudden we see the handle of our door move and we see that someone tried to open the door. Then we hear a little knock and at first we totally thought it was just Marina or Jenna, so we were like “Marina is that you?” and she didn’t answer and we just kept trying to talk to her because we really thought it was her and she just wasn’t answering for some reason so we were like “Marina, is that you? Knock if it’s you. Can you hear us?” and so on. Then, when she just wouldn’t answer and yet kept knocking every once in a while, that’s when we started to wonder if it really was Marina and that’s when we started to half worry. Anyway, about 30 seconds or so after the last knock we decided just to open the door. So Jess opened it and then shut it right away and was like “there WAS a creepy Romanian man out there!” And that totally creeped me out because I was picturing there being a man standing in front of our door just staring at it when really I guess he was right next to our door and had just turned the other way to walk off, after giving up on knocking. Also, it confused me because I thought it was weird that she would have just slammed the door on him so then I thought maybe she was joking with me and trying to scare me but she swore she wasn’t. So anyway, to make a long story short, I was totally creeped out especially because I’d been creeped out all day. Then he knocked again right after we closed the door and we decided to open it and see what he wanted. So we opened it and he wanted a cigarette lighter so we told him we didn’t have one and closed the door. Then we kept trying to go out again and he kept walking though the halls and stuff and then he came back and knocked again! This time he was with a friend and offered us some beer (which we refused J ) and then he asked us where we were from and told us they were from Moldova which just made me more nervous about them. Anyway, after that we were even more creeped out and I really didn’t want to go out and go to the bathroom until they were gone but they kept walking around the hall. So then Jessica was like “maybe you should just use the sink!” and I kid you not, I really considered it just as strongly as I considered going out in the hall. But eventually, I thought they might be gone, so I really had Jessica grab one of her rolled up paintings that she’d bought in Italy and stand by the door while I quickly went in the men’s bathroom which was right across from us and came back! And the whole rest of the night I just didn’t sleep well because we could hear them in the hall and the dogs howling in the street.