Saturday, Sept. 26th
To quote Calvin and Hobbs, the days are just packed!
This was the second and final day of orientation, and we finally got to see some of the "old stuff" instead of the shiny new things around town. We started off with a walking tour of Cluj's city center. We walked around the orthodox church and its piaza, along with the National Theater (an opera house) that bordered a side of the piaza, the orthodox church and its piaza, the only remaining section of the wall that used to surround the city, and a few more cute little areas.
A crazy ugly library that we passed. Oddly enough, it reminds me of the library at ASU!
A much cuter (and older!) of town. This is the only remaining chunk of the old wall that used to surround the city ages ago:
We also were able to go into the orthodox church. It was interesting because there were not any pews, just a few seats along the edge. Apparently people tend to stand during the service. I do not know if all of the orthodox churches are like that or just the larger ones. I will report back if I find out!
Picture of the big orthodox church in Cluj. It is in the same piaza (not sure of the name) as the National Theater, which does opera and perhaps symphony performances:
Someone coming out of the church. I love this picture!
To compare the big orthodox church to the catholic cathedral, here is a picture of St. Michael's church in Piaza Unirii:
After the tour, we got on the bus and headed out of town, driving to the north. On the way to Banffy Castle, we stopped for lunch at a mega restaurant seemingly in the middle of nowhere. It was quite strange. We started with a wonderful and large salad - tomatoes, cucumbers, red onions, lettuce. They tend to just put oil and vinegar on their salads, but there also was some sour cream mixed with something else that was available as well. We thought that was all the food (well, at least my table did!), and then they brought out the main course. I have pictures but descriptions will have to suffice for now. Most people got four little pieces of chicken with green olives chopped up and rolled inside. They had some kind of cream sauce on them, along with more of the green olives. The three vegetarians (me, another ETA, and the person from the US embassy), got a strange plate with roasted mushrooms and yellow/orange bell peppers (sounds good but wasn't), some potatoes, and a little mound of rice. I did not eat too much of mine, but the salad was really plenty! Then, we had dessert - 2 crepes (clatitas) with raspberry jam inside. They were delicious, but I don't think anyone could finish them because it had just been so much food!
A picture of my veggie main course:
We finally got back on the bus after one and a half hours at lunch and headed on to Banffy Castle. It was a very interesting place, started in the 1700s and added on to and changed up to WWII when the Germans destroyed most of it because they thought it was some kind of espionage center. An organization called the Transylvania Trust has been working for the past several years to restore the structure (well, structures, really). Here is a link for more information on the building and its restoration: http://www.artnouveau.org/TTF/engbon.html
A few pictures of the castle (it doesn't look very castle-y to me, but I think I have much more romantic images in my mind).
A nice overview picture of part of the buildings still in the "castle" area. -->
The guy who takes money for tickets or is the caretaker or something. This picture just seems very rural, Romania to me. -->
You can see some of the construction / re-construction going on in this picture. There also were piles of bricks and concrete and wood all over the place. It looks like quite a process. -->
I hope they don't change this part though. It would be great to keep some of the falling down part instead of making it all nice again. -->
The interior of the building above. Talk about some treacherous falls :) -->
Luckily, they warn you of the danger - in hungarian, romanian, and english! -->
The castle is in a tiny little village where lots of people use horse drawn carts to get around. People really do use them (more than cars it seems) to get around in the villages! It is pretty spectacular to see the very wide differences between the urban and rural areas. Other than the satellite dishes outside every window, it looks like not much else has changed in the villages in many, many years. I would say that the urban-rural divide looks even greater in Romania than in Cambodia, although I imagine in reality the differences are wider in Cambodia. I haven't spent enough time in the rural areas of either country to really know, though.
Proof that people in the rural areas really do get around on horse-drawn carts!!!! -->
Following the castle we went to the city of Gherla. A historian from BBU came on this whole bus trip with us and gave quite a description of both the castle and the city of Gherla. Apparently it is the first and perhaps only city in Romania to be built following a grid system, something that the Armenians brought with them. It also is the home of a large prison that held and tortured prisoners, often students, during the communist era. It is still open today, which is pretty strange because so many prisons with controversial pasts and especially ones tied to old regimes tend to be turned into memorials or museums rather than just continuing with the same function.
After all of the stops and visits, we headed back to Cluj. I was exhausted from not getting more than about 7 hours of sleep a night since I arrived, so I kind of dozed on the bus. When we got back, a group of us decided to go out to dinner. After many wrong turns, we finally found our way to the restaurant recommended by the person at the front desk of the hotel/dorm. It was pretty pricey but good until the end when the waiter left on several items that already had been paid for when two people left earlier, in addition to 3 glasses of wine that no one ordered and were never received. There also was this big fiasco because someone ordered a fish listed as 13.50 lei but apparently that was just for 100 grams of fish and they served him 300 grams of fish, but did not tell him that and instead just charged him 37.00 for the meal. It was a lot of craziness, and it reminded me that I will have to look at my check very carefully because they often add things on or do other sorts of sneaky things to make you pay for extras. And, here, the customer is never right.
We then headed to a little carnvial/fair thing that was happening just down the road from where we are staying. Apparently these events look the same, regardless of country or even continent - Texas, Cambodia, Romania, it doesn't matter. I got a huge thing of cotton candy (fresh!) for $1. It was the craziest cotton candy and seemed to very quickly condense in the air and just kind of dripped off. I was covered in pink liquid sugar drops by the time I was finished. It was pretty ridiculous!
Proof of the cotton candy extravaganza (picture thanks to Lauren the photographer):
Do you see the prizes? All bottles of booze!! The drinking age here is 18 - I wonder if you had to be 18 to win one of these?? -->
Even if they do have booze as the prizes, the carnival itself looks about the same as the peach and melon fest in gorman, texas, and the tiny one I went to in Phnom Penh - go figure. -->
Of course, this one had crazed, male Romanian soccer fans (trust me, I mean crazed!). -->
And, the fair food was a bit different. No turkey legs but definitely lots and lots of meat. -->
This morning Lauren (the other girl staying here in Cluj) got up to see the others off at 8:30am. They were all driving back to Bucharest and then either staying there or dispersing from that point out to their final destinations. It is a neat group of people, so I hope that we will be able to stay in touch and visit each other across the country. Let me see if I can remember who all there is...
Bucharest:
- a guy who is a poet and has a research grant - between an MA and PhD program - brought his wife and 3 month old baby - his wife is Romanian but left when she was very young
- a guy who is an economics professor and who will be teaching - only here for the spring
- a guy who is an ETA - from tennessee and just graduated from college
Cluj:
- me :)
- Lauren who is a photographer and doing a research project
- a guy who is a politics professor and who will be teaching at BBU for the year - brought his wife and two kids, who are both going to school here for the year
- a woman who is a social work professor and who will be here in the spring
- a guy who is a violin professor - will be teaching at BBU in the fall - hhe is romanian
Oradea (right near the hungarian border):
- a girl who just graduated from college and who will be going to medical school next year - she is doing a research project on opthamology in rural areas - she is Romanian but moved to the US after high school
Sibiu:
- a guy who was here last year and who extended his grant for another year - ETA - PhD candidate in politics
- a girl who has been out of college for a few years - ETA
Iasi (near Moldova):
- a guy who also was here last year and who has extended his grant for a semester or year - ETA
Constanta (on the black sea):
- a woman who is a professor in a language and literature department
Brasov:
- a girl who has been out of college for a year, I think - ETA - taught english in Prague, Czeck Republic last year
I think that is everyone from orientation, but I am sure I forgot someone! Mostly I am just including this so that you get a sense of who is here and what is going on. I am very glad that Lauren is here in Cluj with me rather than me being sent along to a place. That definitely would have me a litlte freaked out about things! Cluj is looking pretty good so far (the internet issues not withstanding), and I hope that things work out will in Bucharest as well in the spring. I am looking forward ot travelling the country and the wider region and just hope I am able to be thrifty enough to save money to do so!
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