Castelul Peles...the "Extended Tour"

Entering the private part of the castle...

The concert hall

The piano on the stage was played by George Enescu,

one of Romania's most famous composers.

This organ has over 1400 pipes!



It also has 2 keyboards, one in the concert hall and one
in the next room; both engage the same set of pipes.

Outside the entrance to the Royal Suite

The Royal Suite

Home to King Carol I and Queen Elisabeta

If you look closely in the picture below, near the center you

will see the bed in which King Carol died in 1914.

The Roccoco Suite

Designed to host visiting heads of state

The Empirial Suite

Designed after Emperor Franz Joseph (of Austria) visited and stayed in the Roccoco Suite; the king decided that something better was needed to host visitors of the Emperor's stature in the future. Unfortunately, the Emperor himself couldn't fulfill his promise to return because of political events at home (which eventually led to WWI).

The top of the chandelier is designed to replicate the Emperor's crown.

And that's where my camera batteries died...

Fortunately, I didn't miss much...a couple of rooms where the

queens' maids did her hair & makeup and then we were ushered

back to the entrance and sent on our way.

As Jenny likes to say, "This is a REAL castle!"

Back in the Saddle

I went back to work last Friday, but today really started hitting things hard. In fact, I started at 7 o'clock this morning, and I'm having to force myself to stop now (it's 8:20 pm). Not everything was work...but even the "non-work" stuff was interspersed with work stuff.

I met my goal for translation projects for today (unfortunately, this doesn't happen too often, since I'm very good at overestimating what I can get done in a day). I'm working on the simplified English version of the last teacher's manual in the series! That means the end is in sight. Gabi's on target to finish right on schedule next June with the student manuals. I'm having to slow down the teacher manual translation so we don't get too far ahead (the books are too closely interrelated, and we need to be able to refer back & forth in the final translation). Student book #8 has been done for awhile, but the courier actually takes it off to the publisher tomorrow. Book #9 is ready for proofreading. Did I mention that the end is in sight?!?! :)

So, while I was typing today, I also made & froze taco meat, did laundry, and cleaned the kitchen. While my car was being washed (inside & out - it was to the point of DISGUSTING!), I caught up on most of my e-mail correspondence. And this evening, I alternated between the living room, where I was responding to an audit request, organizing financial receipts & getting ready to do reports, and the kitchen, where I was making barbecued chicken, rice & broccoli (dinner tonight and 5 more dinners in the freezer). And I cleaned the kitchen again.

If I were really dedicated (or a workaholic), I'd be working on filing all of those financial reports right now. But I'm trying really hard not to be a workaholic. So I'm catching up the blog instead. Aren't you glad?

A Month in Review

So, what have I been up to during the last month while I've been AWOL? Here's a quick look...

After depleting my stock this summer, it's time to restock the pantry. So, when I've been home, it's been applesauce, apple butter, pizza sauce, pasta sauce, peaches...whatever I can preserve and stick in the pantry for winter!


Jenny helped stuff my pantry, too, when she came to visit. So now I've got good homemade stuff and good not-so-homemade stuff. : )

Now I just need to work on stocking that freezer that I'm babysitting while the Windham family is in the States...

But, I really haven't been home that much. Tonight will be my 7th night in my apartment in the entire month of September. The month started with meeting guest speakers in Bucharest and then taking them to our teacher training retreat.

After the retreat, we went back to Bucharest & enjoyed a fantastic concert with the Oslo Philharmonic. It wasn't at the Athenaeum (pictured below), but we enjoyed it nonetheless.

The team left on Sunday and Rebecca came to visit from Budapest. My goal is to see something new everytime someone comes to visit (so I don't always go back to the same old places), so we explored some and found the Kilometer 0 marker, the place from which all distances in Romania are measured.

A couple of days later, Ruth came to visit, too, and the 3 of us went to visit Peles and Bran castles.

A week later, Jenny came as we prepared to say goodbye to the Windhams. The four of us had an all night girls' party. Here they are singing and dancing to Veggie Rock. Relient K singing "The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything." Quite entertaining...

Don't we look fantastic at 5 in the morning? Our sock puppets were in much better shape than we were. Even the plastic whistling gnome looks better than we do. Sad.

A day after the Windhams left, Jenny & I headed back to Bucharest.

Then she, too, left me to my wanderings around the city and in the mountains. And that brings us up to this week.

Today I came home, and I'm planning to stay here for a while! Maybe I can actually write something other than a travelogue now. Maybe.

Libertatii Camp Pictures

The last day of camp, my task was to gather pictures & put together a 10-minute slide show. The kids loved seeing themselves (and all of their friends) up on the big screen. We actually saved most of the best pictures, because tomorrow we are getting all of the kids together to watch video and look at more pictures. It's a good way for us to maintain contact with kids who don't normally come to church (probably 3/4 of the kids who were at camp are not from our church). Thankfully, someone else is responsible for this slideshow! Not my forte...

As promised, here are some more shots from church camp.

I was gonna' be good...

...and update you on everything right after my last post. But, alas, I was somehow distracted (can a 32-year old be diagnosed with ADD???) and am just getting back to it. So, where were we? Yikes, I just took a peak at my last posts and realized just how far behind I am. In short:

1. The water leak finally stopped after a week and a half. By then, it was leaking down the outside of the door, someone noticed & called the building administrator, he shut off all the water to the building, and my landlord finally realized I wasn't exaggerating. The electricity was fixed a week later (still scary, but at least it works), the door that I had been body-slamming to open or close was "trimmed" around the edges so that I can get in and out of my apartment again, and the mold continues to grow rampantly. My landlord promised to deal with that when he gets back from vacation...we'll see.

2. I taught a week of English classes at Bethany Baptist Church in Tarnaveni, about an hour's drive from Targu Mures. My students were a mixture of intermediate and advanced, so it was, ummm, interesting. A good start, though, considering the fact that we haven't done anything like this before. A couple of our students were from outside of the church (the true target group!), so I'm praying that the church will have opportunities to further develop relationships with them.

3. English camp ended the same day that our church kids' camp began. The church has used the camp facilities of Livada Orphan Care for the last couple of years, and this year we moved "with" them as they moved camp to a newly purchased property. That meant camp in army tents for this year. Unfortunately (read that sarcastically), this was the same week as my water leak, so I ended up coming home and sleeping in my own bed each night while waiting for my landlord to come (which he never did, that week).

What do you get when you mix together a huge piece of linoleum, a hose, and a botte of baby shampoo? A "kill-two-birds-with-one-stone" activity! The slip-n-slide was a favorite for the kids because it helped them cool down in our 100+ temperatures (at a camp with NO shade). The adults liked it, too, because it doubled as bath time for the kids :)
I have almost 1000 pictures from camp, so I promise more in the days to come.
4. After camp, I made a whirlwind trip back to Budapest for a 3-day vacation. No pictures from that trip...Rebecca and I were having too much fun shopping (ugh!), relaxing at the mineral baths, etc.
5. The next day, I traveled with my team to the Transfagarasan Highway, a highway pass through the Fagarasi Mountains. The road is only open in July & August. The cars were overheating half-way up, so we took the cable car the rest of the way up & enjoyed the view from the top. Can't say that I'm sad to have missed the ride on this road...

6. Next was a week of day camp at Libertatii. A family from Cincinnati came to do day camp with one of the orphanages in the afternoons, and they ministered to our church kids in the mornings. I have lots of pictures from this week, too (especially since I had no responsibilities...I just followed everyone around with my camera and helped out occasionally!) Just one pic for now (I used someone else's camera for most and haven't gotten copies yet) -

7. Finally, two weeks of our ABWE camps. I drove back & forth a lot (1 1/2 hours each way), alternating between time at camp and work on translation projects at home. The first week there were 100 teenagers & the 2nd week there were 50 young adults. I was able to spend the last 1/2 of the second week staying at the camp, enjoying great activities, singing, chapel time and all of the other good stuff about camp!
The teens loved the activity called "fight night" - I called it the World's Biggest Food Fight (here, they are flinging buckets of wet spaghetti at each other).

During young adult week, they decided to have the World's Biggest Campfire, instead.

Now, I'm staying home (for a few days, at least), catching up on translation stuff, and preparing for the next round of craziness. More pics to come, soon. I promise...

Romanian roads – 40 times more dangerous than the EU ones

Romania, one dead in every three accidents, UK, one in every 93, according to a report by the Romanian Academic Society (SAR) made public Thursday.

In Romania, there is an average of one death every three accidents, while in Germany the average one death in every 63 accidents, and in Great Britain, one auto accident fatality in every 93 accidents. At fault are the faulty designs of certain road sections, late maintenance works, the lack of ring roads. Auto traffic in Romania is excessively concentrated on national roads. Motorways, useful as they are, are not always priority no 1 and nor do they represent a solution to all traffic problems. One-third of national roads are in a terrible state, infrastructure is unsafe and an obstacle to economic development. All of the aforementioned reasons SAR experts say, lead to accidents with a very large number of victims.
Moreover, the study “Works under repair? SAR report on transport policy in Romania,” shows that the network of county and local roads should be urgently redone, so that a great part of the existing auto traffic could be redirected, which requires only a percentage point of the funding allotted to motorway construction.
Another conclusion of the study: in Romania, the cost of building a kilometre of motorway is twice more expensive than that in other countries in central and eastern Europe, such as Poland or Hungary. Moreover, some of the maintenance and operation costs are also double the average price in the European Union or the United States. The current institutional structure of Romania’s national railway operator CFR and the National Company of Motorways and National Roads in Romania (CNADR) are financially bankrupt actually. Instead of operating independently, they suffer are year in and year out the impact of political changes at the Ministry of Transports. At the same time, there is noticed a trend of substantial increase in auto traffic, at the expense of railway traffic. If the trend continues, the passenger section of the CFR (CFR Pasageri) risks to go bankrupt by 2020 from lack of customers.
Money, programmes and … fanciful strategies
Romania only has 264 kilometres of built motorways and numerous strategies for expansion which however have been dragging their feet for years now. By comparison, Portugal, a state half Romania’s size, has 1,500 kilometres of built motorway. SAR experts say that the motorways and expressways announced for the interval 2007-2013 are fanciful, as they suppose an investment absorption capacity of EUR 2 to 3 bln per year, although the actual absorption capacity never exceeds EUR 500 M. These great national road and railway projects are advancing at an extremely slow place, despite Community funding being available for several years now.
Compromise solutions: sensitising the public
If a great many years pass until infrastructure-related problems are settled, the Government decided to at least take different types of measures. The Tariceanu Cabinet decided Wednesday that the World Commemoration Day of Victims of Auto Accidents should be held on the third Sunday of November. Several ministries – Interior, Health, Transports, and Education, respectively, will organise public awareness and sensitising campaigns, together with NGOs, other legal entities and private individuals.
Severe accident at Mangalia
Four more persons died in a severe auto accident at the entry to Mangalia. The car with the four passengers on board, running at 150 kilometres/hours, hit an oncoming minibus. The four passengers in the car died right away and three of the passengers in the minibus were injured – two of them seriously. The minibus driver broke one leg in the accident, and local traffic was detoured. According to Police, high speed and driver tiredness could be responsible for the accident.
by Alina Munteanu

...and you all thought I was exaggerating the dangers of driving in Romania. Turns out it's actually much worse than even I thought!

- from "Nine O'Clock", an English language newspaper published in Bucharest

Entryway Makeover?

I've been contemplating a makeover of the entryway in my apartment as a birthday present to myself. Something along the lines of these goodies from Ikea, I'm thinking...

...and possibly some black tile on the floor to replace the blackish indoor/outdoor carpet currently residing there. My hallway has turned into the "gallery" of black and white photography that I love while allowing the rest of the apartment to contain lots of color. I'd like to sharpen up the look a little bit and make it a little more functional (including getting rid of the "Leaning Tower of Pisa" coat tree).

Now, I think my hand has been forced...

Yesterday, I started noticing a water stain on the ceiling right next to the front door. Throughout the day, it crept lower and lower on the wall. Meanwhile, the neighbors upstairs won't answer their door (we had this same problem the LAST time there was a water leak...grrr!), and my landlord is in Hungary. The wet smell started getting a little annoying, too.





Today, the annoyance turned into a major problem. You see, right above the front door is the fuse box to my apartment. And right next to the door is, well, a tangle of wires going to who knows what. This morning the water and the wires met, and the result was a bright orange flash and a big bang coming from the wall. The electrical box hidden in this wall is normally covered with a plastic faceplate (like the one you see behind the light switch in the first picture). The "minor explosion" in the wall knocked it halfway off (two of the four screws came straight out of the concrete), and I finished the job to see what was left back there and make sure nothing was smoldering. I also pulled up the carpet, hoping to salvage it before it got too wet.

(If you look closely, you can see a rusty drop of water forming at the top of the box.)

As you can see, the wiring was a little scary to begin with. And the water just finished off the job. I now have no power in the back half of my apartment (that is, every room except the living room!). Sound familiar? I lived with only power in the living room for almost 4 months last year. That time, I ran extension cords & plugged the refrigerator and washing machine into living room outlets. I'm not ready to do that, especially given the fact that the fuse box to the entire apartment is still in the "path of destruction" and I could easily lose power in the living room too at any time. I'll be emptying out the freezer in a couple of hours and bringing stuff to my teammates to either store in their freezers or eat (I'm a sharing person, but I'm keeping those 2 pints of blueberries that I paid a half a fortune for last week and then spent several hours removing stems, leaves, bad berries, etc.!).

Since it's 100 degrees outside today (and has been the last two days, as well), I really won't miss having my stove or oven. I'm not likely to use the dryer soon, either. But, 100 degrees without a refrigerator or freezer? Oy...at least I can plot my entryway makeover which, from the looks of things, might be happening sooner than I planned.

Bridges '07

I returned home last Wednesday from a fantastic 3 weeks in Budapest, Hungary where I taught English. It was nice to feel in my element for once (teaching English, not being in Hungary...which is definitely NOT my element since I can't make heads nor tails of the Hungarian language). I remembered how much I love teaching; I teach here, but always either through a translator or in a language that I'm still not 100% comfortable with. I taught the Advanced class, so it was refreshing to talk with my students, explain things, and feel competent for a couple of weeks. I was glad to come home, but am struggling with returning to my "incompetent" role after being comfortable with a while.

For your viewing pleasure, here's a pictorial recap of the last couple of weeks.

Istvan and Tunde, two of my morning students

My evening class picture (unfortuntely, missing 2 students)

The huge pot of traditional Hungarian goulash that we enjoyed during orientation week (this pot seriously has a diameter of 2 feet!). "Real" goulash is more of a soup/stew.

While in the city Saturday afternoon, we stumbled across a human chess game. Interesting!

And the obligatory picture of the famous Chain Bridge, linking the two original cities of Buda and Pest into the one modern-day city of Budapest (there are actually 7 bridges).

Happy Blog-Day!

I'm back. Are you surprised? Jenny says I need to post, and she's probably right. It has indeed been awhile. For a while, nothing was happening. And then, too much was happening and I just didn't have time. Now...well, I'm just out of the habit. Then I looked at my post history and realized that today is the one year anniversary of my first post...Happy Blog-Day!

Maybe later this evening I will post something of a little more significance...

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.