romania I & II

i forgot to mention in the previous post that when i entered romania in the van on our 7 hour drive, the border guy read my last name on my passport, pronounced it correctly, and then asked if i was irish! so i told him the name was scottish. =) and then actually today when i met some of john and laura's romanian friends, one of them said when she first saw me she thought i was iranian or something like that! so interesting. in china i'm just any old foreigner. here people consider what my hertiage might be, which is a strange thing to me. even in the US people don't really do that. and also here i could actually blend in, it's weird. john can speak romanian well enough that he could pretend to be romanian sometimes if he wanted to too. i could never pretend to be chinese.

so my first day in romania, laura and i spent a lot of time making cookies to give to her friends as christmas gifts, and that was fun. john made quesidillas with three different kinds of cheeses, which was amazing. i've been eating cheese and drinking milk here. =) having cereal was amazing. i'd forgotten how much i like cereal. i never have cereal in china because i don't really like the milk there, so i stopped buying the milk.

i think it was that night that we decided to watch monty python and the holy grail and play the bean game. we had to finish the movie the next night though because john and laura were falling asleep. the bean game is awesome. john and laura were the first people i played it with, and then i bought it and brought it to china and my friends there like it too. but i think the one we originally played belonged to nick and we played with him too. thanks nick!

the second day, we went sledding! we went with some of john and laura's friends and took some sleds with metal runners and wooden seats up a hill. it was good we went that day, because the snow is melting now and the icicles are all gone. it's gotten a bit warmer since i've been here. even that day it was starting to get pretty slushy, but there was still enough snow for sledding without getting too wet. we basically took turns riding down with the little girls, and when they started to get too wet, we left.

john giving me and little melissa a start

john and laura sledding

we saw avatar that night too. it was really fun! the plot and characters was predictable, but it was visually awesome. i loved seeing the creativity in the other world, especially little things like the leaves and little different animals. and afterwards, i was thinking about why the option to have another body to run around in is appealing to people--because there are things wrong with the bodies we have now. and we like to imagine other worlds, worlds like ours, but that seem different and better. it makes me think of the promise that "we shall be changed"1 and that our world itself "will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into glorious freedom."2 someday we'll have a world like the world the avatars entered that is amazing, but also redeemed and everything made new. what a great hope.

and we went to the romanian auchan (a department store that they also have in china).

(john was in this picture by accident)

it was different, but i couldn't decide why it felt different. maybe it was a bit nicer? although it was just as crowded. maybe because i could actually read things there even though i didn't know what they meant. maybe the ceiling was higher. i'm not sure. the carts were the same, with all four wheels that turn and such, except they were also nicer. it must be that it was nicer and located in a mall.

the taxis here are different too. they are more like regular cars that have taxi signs on top. the taxis in china all have the same design (they're almost all blue or yellow and are a certain kind of car). the taxis in china also have bars separating the driver from the passengers, but here there isn't anything like that.

anyway. random observations. i'm enjoying being in what seems like a countryside compared to my city in china. cluj is not a small city, but compared to chinese cities, it's pretty small. since the house john and laura live in is a bit outside the city, there are hills around with homes on them and snow and trees to see, and it's quiet at night.
no honking horns or anything like that. =) another random observation: people don't honk their horns here. in china that is normal. i can hear honking horns from my work and from my apartment in china.

ok, end of random observations for now. coming up next: romanian christmas traditions! i have some to write about already, but i think there will be more, so i'll save that for next time.

yay for new good friends and snow!

1 1c15.52
2 r8.21