1st Week of November

I cannot believe it has been a little more than a week since my last post!  It seems like the time is flying by so quickly.  Still, it only has been a little more than a month since I have been here, and it definitely seems like longer than that (not in a bad way though).  If this was my time in Cambodia this summer, I think my six weeks already would be up.  Wow.  Oh, speaking of Cambodia, I got to talk to some of the girls (menghun, dany, kimleang, and channy) on skype last Sunday.  It was so nice to talk all of them, and skype continually amazes me - I am in Romania and was talking to people in Cambodia...for free!  It just baffles the mind!

The first week of November was pretty busy.  I started things off on the 1st with the Day of the Dead happenings (I was suprised about it, too!).  However, I have so many pictures that I will put that in a separate post.  On Monday I had lots of meetings and appointments.  First, I met with the person in the BBU international advising office to create the schedule of workshops that I will be offering to help students apply to graduate school in the U.S. The workshops will last for 6 weeks (one a week) and begin this upcoming week.  I hope it goes well!

After that meeting, I met up with Lauren to take care of some of our "residency" appointments.  As Americans in Romania, we do not need a visa for the first 90 days.  However, we will be here for 8 months (okay, that sounds like a really long time when it has only been a month and a half so far - wow), so we need to get temporary residency.  For this, we need to jump through many, many hoops and pay all of these strange amounts of money to different offices.  A week ago we had buy one month of Romanian health insurance (like 120 lei) even though we all have health insurance in the US and additional health insurance from Fulbright, so go figure the point of that.  On Monday, Lauren and I went to the student doctor's office at BBU to get a form signed (at a cost of 20 lei) and then to the post office to get another mystery formed signed (4 lei). I think we now have completed all of the paperwork and will go to the foreigner's office this next week to get everything taken care of.  It will be very nice to have that finished!

To prove that I have been working on this, here is a picture from the doctor's office.  It was pretty funny because people were just in a waiting room and kind of controlled themselves to go in when someone came out.  Then, inside there were three people - a doctor and two people (nurses, secretaries??) - it went pretty quickly.

Beyond my fun times with the residency appointments, I also had my language class on Monday and Thursday.  We started to talk about definite versus indefinite articles, masucline/feminine/neuter, and singular versus plural nouns.  What a pain!!!!  In English we pretty much just have a and the, and Spanish has el/la (definite, singular), los/los (definite, plural), un/una (indef, sing), and unos/unas (indef, plu).  In contrast, in Romanian the forms are completely different for each one, depending on the ending of the word.  It makes my head just spin.  Sigh.

Example of the craziness: un caine (a dog), caineul (the dog), caini (or maybe caineuri??) (some dogs), cainii or caineurile (the dogs) - See, I can't even remember which version it is because there are so many choices and rules!!!  My brain hurts.

Now, for some things that I have done that involve pictures :)  I joined a group called the International Women of Cluj (a yahoo group), and it is very interesting.  I went to a special talk with the group on Friday to see an American woman who has been in Cluj since 1979 (actually from 1979-1981 and then from 1997 to the present).  It is hard to imagine that there were too many Americans in Romania during the era of communism - definitely a tough time to be here and talk about inane bureaucracy!  It was interesting to hear about her experiences and to listen to the differences between then and now.  It is pretty amazing how much and how quickly things have changed.  To really show this, the mall we met in (the Polus Center) didn't even exist just two years ago! 

Here is one picture of the talk:

And, of course, I couldn't resist a shot of one of "yummy yang's" teapot (the restaurant where we met - two Chinese people actually worked there, which is pretty rare for Cluj):

It was a great talk, and I finally got to check out one of the malls in town - the other is the Iulius Mall.  There was a large grocery store in the mall - actually like a super wal-mart - which was a lot of fun to look around.  Also, it was interesting to meet all of the women in the group.  At just this meeting, there were women from American, Britain, New Zealand, Indonesia, India, Mexico, Lithuania, and Croatia.  There is a bit of the "ladies who lunch" feeling to it, but there also is an incredible arrange of ages and backgrounds - older and younger, most with kids, many married to husbands working here for just a short period of time (a few years), but some have been here for many years and one is even married to a Romanian.  It is an incredible bunch of women to meet, and many of them have lived in so many different places and have had such interesting experiences.  What a great group of people!  Just getting to meet the groups of expats here and in Cambodia has made these experiences worth it.  Coming from a small town, we rarely get to meet people like this, so I am just soaking it all in.

It also makes it ever-more enticing to stay in Cluj for the whole year - it could be very comfortable to stay here and easy to be entertained and amused.  Cluj just makes me happy when I walk around, and I doubt that Bucharest gives the same warm-fuzzies.  I guess I will found out when I go down there on December 5th....

And, of course, I am not quite finished with the fall leaves and colors.  Check out this leaf.  It looks of a fairly normal size, no?

But, wait, it is huge!  You can tell from the bewilderment and slight fear in my face that leaves do not come like this in Texas or Arizona....

Leaves, leaves everywhere....