Wednesday, November 8, 2006

What to say? What to say? Well, I was actually ready completely on time this morning! That was exciting! Usually I’m not ready on time, but Shannon isn’t either, so it doesn’t really matter, but it was still nice to be on time. On the way to Dancu I saw an old lady with bright blue hair out the tramvie window, which pretty much made my day. You see people with some very interesting hair colors here, because the dye really just sucks and so you never know what you’re going to get. And pretty much all the females here dye their hair – usually a reddish maroon color, so there’s just always interesting hair all around. Sometimes I just look at the people all around me and am so amazed. They really are just so typically eastern European. Like, sometimes I’ll look at a man and be like, “wow, you sure look securitate.” They pretty much all wear leather coats, the women’s are usually red, with fur (very Russian), with dramatic makeup. And the men are usually wearing soviet style fur caps – hard to explain – would have to find a picture. It’s classic though. And the old people are so quaint. Anyway, Dancu was ok. Danna was working with the other one who’s been there the last 3 days in a row. Dr. Ciobano was scheduled to come again and still didn’t. The kids were still “sick.” We got nasty soup, ok bread and this weird Romanian dish called Tocanos or something. It was basically rice and maybe potatoes with this sauce that I think was made of like tomatoes and peppers or something. At the hospital, I started off on the first floor with Constantine and Radu at the end of the hall in the room with Alin and his mom. At first, Constantine was crying nonstop and I couldn’t do anything about it. Once the nurse came in and fed him, though, he was pretty good (still a little fussy though). By that time Abbi had come in and started being with Radu and after a little while, Jess took over for her. Constantine is really really little. He’s very frail and bone thin, with very dry skin and the top of his head has clumps of dead skin mangled with his hair because he’s probably never had a bath. He’s very sweet though. After a while, this evil doctor, with some other workers in tow, came in and started yelling at us and telling us to get out and never come back because “it is intensive care! You understand!?!” Yeah, we were pretty pissed. First of all, she and this other doctor are like the only ones who don’t want us there – everyone else loves us. Second of all, moms are in there with their kids and guaranteed they’re a lot dirtier than we, who use hand sanitizer. Third of all, we’re with these kids every day and half of them are only there to die, and I’m pretty sure if somehow we killed them they’d actually be better off. Fourth of all, Jessica works with half of these kids every day at Donald Duck, so I’m pretty sure she knows how to handle them a whole lot better than the inept doctors anyway! Yeah, we were pretty pissed and we are, of course, coming back. After that, Jess and I went to the 7th floor and decided to just work our way down. On the 7th, Ramona and Octavion are in the same room. Ramona is about 1 ½, but she’s from an orphanage, so she’s really behind. She doesn’t talk and she can’t even sit up and she just does some pretty weird things, but she has this gorgeous head of curly brown hair and she’s hilaaaarious to watch. She was with Melissa and I was with Octavion. Octavion is just a couple months old and his problem is that he has a veeery enlarged testicle. Like, this thing is the size of a baseball and you can feel it through the diaper. You can hold him, but he’s connected to a catheter and you can’t go very far. Anyway, he was pretty quiet and fell asleep after a while and a lot of the time Melissa and I were just laughing our heads off at Ramona and taking pictures of all her facial expressions. After a while I realized that it was almost time to go and I should probably go see Ionella. So I went down there and her mom was there! It wasn’t awkward at all though, because her mom was super nice (though reeeally old) and seemed to be just grateful that I play with her kid. Apparently Ionella is going into surgery tomorrow morning and Ana-Maria, the 14 year old in the room is leaving around 1, so I’m going to try to go there as soon as I can. After the hospital I walked with Shannon, Melissa and Bri to Tirgu Cucu, got a gogosh, went to Hala and tried to go to the bread stand. I had really bad luck in the food department though, because Hala had like nothing that I was looking for. No milk, no yogurt, no vitalis, no animal crackers and no peanut butter! It was seriously so weird! I don’t know what’s happening to Hala! Those are kind of important things! And then I tried to go to the bread stand, but it was closed! When I got home I just got on the computer. Sometime during the day I made some naaaasty lasagna, which I threw away (note to self, stop giving Romanian TV dinners a chance!). While I was writing this journal, Shannon had a little bit of a breakdown, and for a very good reason. She lost her wallet in Paris and has had to borrow money from me for like everything ever since. She really hates being dependent on others for money and it’s this huge stress. Well, she’s been trying to find ways to get access to her money ever since, because she can’t just have the bank send new cards to her in Romania, since they’ll just never get here. So she came up with this plan to get the bank to send the cards to one of the Professors who is visiting us here in a few days and he was just going to bring it with him. Well, it takes a week to have it get there, so she gave herself two weeks and she just found out that they just plain never got the order through, so now she’s screwed and it sucks because she was so excited to finally have her cards and not having to worry about it and now she’s realizing that she’s actually going to have to borrow money for the entire rest of the semester (including Italy). Well, that’s the day.