Thoughts

Sorry it's been a while since I last posted!

Not too much has gone on. I've been here about 5 weeks now, and I think this is where you really start to get in a routine. This is just my life now, instead of just a trip. I have my daily routine down. I wake up around 6, go on a run, get ready for work, then ride into work with two of the women who work in my building. Then there's work, which varies in its levels of satisfaction and frustration. I then ride home in the evening, cook dinner, watch some NCIS (Kevi has 6 seasons on dvd), and go to sleep at 10. Though it sounds pretty boring and routine, I like it because it moved into a certain level of comfort with this place.

I have a pretty busy next few weeks planned out. Today, there's a dinner at the 2nd in command's house for the interns and young foreign service officers. This Friday, I'll be traveling to Craiova (Romania's 6th largest city), for work stuff involving democracy building grants. This weekend, Kevi and I are going to a charity dog walk for one of the shelters here in town. Next Friday is the huge 4th of July party that the embassy hosts for 3,000 Romanians. (I would much rather be home blowing things up and eating hot dogs than watching three thousand Romanians gorge themselves on McDonalds and cupcakes shaped like American flags.) But, on the bright side, I leave the next morning to fly to Istanbul, where I'll be for 4 days. Natalie, a friend of mine from Vienna, is flying from Switzerland to join me there. I've wanted to go to Istanbul for years, so I'm very excited to go! Then the next week, Stephen is coming out to visit for a week, which I'm also very excited about.

To conclude this post, I will leave you with some of my thoughts on Romania / Romanians (most of them - there are obviously exceptions):

- Romanians enjoy showing off wealth, even though most of them are really poor. The person with the brand new BMW generally lives in a barely habitable apartment. Same goes for cell phones - they'll buy really expensive cell phones and then wear them around their necks on a cord. Makes sense when you consider their past relationship with materialism (or a lack thereof), but it's still strange.

- Like the Austrians and The Sound of Music, Romanians didn't know Dracula was something people associated with their country until the fall of Communism, when a bunch of tourists showed up looking for vampires. I think it still confuses them, but they've at least managed to find ways to profit off of it.

- There is a huge difference between urban and rural life here. Under communism, many peasants were forced to move either to Bucharest or to artificially created commonuties centered around factories. This has resulted in Bucharest being the only major city in the country, and the complete center of their political and economic system. The peasants feel a huge disconnect and oftentimes, aid and education don't manage to reach anywhere outside of Bucharest.

- While speaking with a 23 year-old Romanian student, I was initially quite jealous. She gets to go to college (bachelor's and master's) for free! But then she went on to explain that a master's in Romania doesn't mean anything, because there are never any jobs. She says she'll probably end up working at a grocery store or gas station, becauset that's where there are jobs. No wonder so many people emigrate!

- They call people here "grammar Communists" instead of "grammar Nazis." Which is funny.

-Bucharestians have a strong desire to be "European". This manifested primarily in the way the men dress. On a side note, most of the women here are pretty beautiful, and the men are very much not. I can see why a lot of models come from Eastern Europe - plus, they're always dressed in mini-skirts and 4 inch heels anyway, so they wouldn't need much training.

- Thoughts on the Romanian healthcare system - it's pretty terrible. The American Embassy employees get med-evaced for pretty much everything, because the hospitals here are so bad. Not very clean and you have to bribe everyone, from the receptionist to the nurse to the doctor to get anything done. On a side note, Romanians (and most Eastern Europeans) believe that all of their diseases are caused by drafts. So they refuse to open windows or turn on the AC even when it's sweltering hot inside. Fortunately, I don't work in a room with any Romanians, so I can keep it nice and drafty.

- There are security companies everywhere. Apparently, it's because after the fall of communism, there were suddenly a bunch of unemployed secret police types around. I'm still not exactly sure what they do.

- Romanians are generally very disenfranchised with their government, primarily because it is so corrupt. You get jobs in the government based purely on who you pay off. There are a lot of "ghost positions", where someone gets paid a salary but never actually works. Young people, in particular, don't see the point in voting or even caring about politics.

- As is a common theme in this blog, the stray dogs and particularly the stray cats are starting to get to me. I petted a tiny little stray kitten on the way to work today, and it almost broke my heart. Unfortunately, there aren't enough shelters, and the shelters that do exist are overflowing. I take comfort in the fact that all the strays seem to be very well fed. All the embassy's security staff feed and brush the dogs and cats near their embassy. The Austrians across the street have two, and my boss feeds one by our embassy everyday. And the cats are very street savvy. But, as an animal lover, it's still really hard to see.

That's all for today! I'll try to update a bit more frequently from here on out!