Forewarned is Forearmed

After much hassling by a few certain someones, I'm caving and posting, even though I have nothing to say. Don't say you weren't forewarned...

So what have I been doing for the last two weeks? Mostly, the same thing I'm doing right now, sitting on my couch with my computer on my lap, typing. One of the first steps in a translation project is developing a simplified English version of whatever is going to be translated. We're hoping to make some serious headway this summer, so I needed to get the simplified English versions of several books finished so that translators can keep working while I'm out and about for the summer. So, over the last two weeks, I've "rewritten" two 120-page books. Add in a quick trip to Bucharest to renew my passport and another trip to Cluj (2 hours each way) to drop off a friend at the airport, and that's pretty much my life for the last couple of weeks. See why I haven't posted? Really, there's not much to say!

But I did promise a brief list of ways to torture yourself in Romania, so here goes...

1. Try to drive. Anywhere. At any time of day. It was bad when I got here two and a half years ago, but I'm pretty sure everyone of legal age has purchased a car since then. This city (ok, this country!) was not built for cars. The police are valiantly trying to bring order to the insanity, but what do you do when there are 3 times as many cars as there are parking spots? Stop in the middle of the road, and leave your car there, of course! The other drivers can figure out how to get around you.
2. Try to be a Romanian woman with smooth legs. Most women here don't shave. Nope, they have another great invention for maintaining smooth legs and, at the same time, torturing themselves. It's called an epilator, and it grabs each individual hair and yanks it out by the root. They tell me it gets less painful as you get used to it, but I'm not buying it yet (the "less painful" part, that is...I already bought the appliance). The "less painful" logic says that, because those hairs you yank out the first time have been rooted in your leg for, say 20 years, it really hurts when you pull them out. The next time, the root will be young and not so strong, so it won't hurt as much. Uh-huh...we'll see.
3. Have a white kitchen. White anything isn't the greatest idea, but white everything? Pure torture, especially if you have obsessive-compulsive tendencies. Cabinets, refrigerator, washing machine. They were all beautiful, sparkling white when I bought them two years ago. And the white walls were freshly painted as well. Not so beautiful anymore. Seriously, I don't know where all of the dirt comes from, but I've never seen so much of it (it's not like I live in the desert or in a village with dirt roads!). But I do know where most of it goes...into MY kitchen! Now, I realize that this is my own fault...I chose the white. But all I can do is plead ignorance (I really didn't know when I moved in and purchased all of these things!) and hope that no one else notices that everything is really more of an "off-white" color these days. Despite days like today spent keeping the entire cleaning-product industry in business.
4. Ummm, that's all I can think of right now. I'm sure there are more, but really, I don't notice most of them anymore, at least enough to remember a couple of hours or days later. That's probably because I've already tortured myself into a state of insanity. Pretty sure.