romania VII

note: previous posts of my vacation now all contain pictures (except turkey I).

i'm on my last day in romania. =( this post is about yesterday though. yesterday laura and john had meetings and work to do, so i had some good time to catch up letter writing and studying chinese and things like that.

to go back to a previous day though, actually, here are some pictures from walks into cluj.
this one is looking into cluj as we walked from their house towards the city. don't know if you can really see it, but there are taller buildings in the distances, apartment buildings that remind me of china, where i will be again soon. i was surprised at the tall buildings that were in cluj. i don't know why i didn't think there would be 6 story apartment buildings here either, and many of the apartment buildings look somewhat similar to the ones in china too.

also on our walks, we walked past this yellow house that i really liked. they don't have brightly colored houses like this in china. or really houses at all actually, that i can think of. just large apartment buildings so this house makes me happy.
that's the house on a snowy day, and here's the yellow house on the clear day:
so anyway, after john and laura were finished with the things they needed to do yesterday, we made an excellent dinner of pasta with cheese sauce with chicken, all from scratch (and to john's disgust, or perhaps to disgust john, i added the leftover broccoli to mine). and then we had the rest of the excellent chocolate chip pie that john and laura made. i was skeptical about that pie, and then when they were cooking it, it took way longer in the oven than it was supposed to, and they had to take it out and finish it later on christmas day because we had to go to their friend's house for lunch and there wasn't time for it to finish cooking. but we came back and they put it back in the oven, it stopped looking soupy and weird, and when we ate it, it was so good! i think we got to enjoy it for three days. it was great warmed up, with all the chocolate chips melted on the inside.

after dinner, we played settlers once more, and alas, john won every game that we played while i was here. it was fun though, and laura was very gracious to play with us even though she isn't as excited about the game.

i've really enjoyed getting to know laura better. i knew her before, but not so well. it feels like i've gotten to know a new friend more than i expected, and it's been lots of fun.

and it's been awesome seeing john and laura together, how they care for each other, work together, and are building their life together.
in the last picture, laura is wearing a scarf that i made! i wanted to write about it many times before, but i couldn't give away that i was making it since it was a surprise. =) so that's why there haven't been any cross stitch updates--i've been crocheting instead. but perhaps a cross stitch update will be justified again in the near future, we shall see.