Sofia and Belgrade!

Just got back this morning from my trip to Sofia, Bulgaria and Belgrade, Serbia. Overall, it was a great trip, but I am glad to be back in Bucharest.

Sofia

I started out the trip with an overnight train from Bucharest to Sofia. Despite the fact that I was technically in "first class", the experience left something to be desired. The train was from the USSR in 1988, complete with sickle and hammer on the outside. The inside didn't have any air conditioning and the windows were stuck and wouldn't open. Needless to say, it was extremely uncomfortable, bordering on dangerously hot.

I arrived in Sofia bright and early, dropped my stuff off at the hostel, and went on a 3 mile run. Nothing wakes you up better! I then went on my own little walking tour of Sofia. Now, despite the fact that Sofia is technically poorer and lower on the development list than Bucharest, I actually found it to be more put together than Bucharest. Better quality roads, no stray dogs, no downed power lines. Sofia also had some cool places to check out; my particular favorite was the Alexander Nevski cathedral. Like most Eastern European capitals, there was enough cool stuff to keep me occupied for a day, but not much else. I spent the second day mostly relaxing in a park, reading a book. Then I was off to Belgrade!

Belgrade

The overnight train to Belgrade was much more pleasant than my previous one. Even though I was in second class this time, the windows at least opened. And there was a nice Portuguese engineer who was chatty enough to keep me entertained until I could sleep.

Belgrade was a very cool city. Unlike Bucharest and Sofia, Belgrade's architecture seemed to have survived communism much more intact. It was also fun off these really great streets lined with great little restaurants and shops. They also had a lot of really cool Orthodox churches. I think my favorite moment in Belgrade was eating a great meal of homemade sausage, potatoes, and beer on one of those cute streets.

Finally, there was my last overnight train last night. A highly unpleasant experience, for several reasons. First, a train employee threw a massive fit that I had my feet on the seat across from me, even though I was the only one in the cabin. Didn't make a lot of sense, since they lower into beds, so people's feet on the head rests every night. Europeans are strangely assholes when it comes to shoes on seats. After a few hours, a Romanian man joined me the cabin and committed two sins that are SO Romanian it made me want to scream. First, he shut the window, despite the 95 degree heat and lack of air conditioning. God forbid there's a breeze in the cabin! Second, he spent like 4 hours on his cell phone in the middle of the night, with no regard whatsoever that I was trying to sleep. I was so close to smacking him when he finally lost reception and went to sleep.

Other than that, good trip! I leave Bucharest tomorrow morning, have a few hour layover at Heathrow, and then I'll be in Baltimore for a couple of days. I'll be back in KC on the 15th.

Who needs sleep?

Yesterday was my last day at my internship. My coworkers through me a surprise going away party, which was cute. It was a potluck, so I got to try all sorts of tasty homemade Romanian food.

This is my last day living in the house in the suburbs. I'm completely packed up, cleaned up, etc. Like so many other times, my life is once again packed into two 50 pound suitcases.

In a couple of hours, I'll be boarding an overnight train to Sofia, Bulgaria. I'll arrive bright and early tomorrow morning, do some sightseeing, and stay that night in a hostel. The next night (Monday night), I'll be on an overnight train to Belgrade, where I'll also be staying two days and one night. Then I will conclude my journey with an overnight train back to Bucharest. Despite the misery that is bound to accompany so many overnight train trips, I'm pretty excited. I've wanted to visit Sofia for a long time, and Belgrade will be my first excursion into the Balkans. I managed to fit everything I'll need (including pillow/blanket) into my big purse, which my backpacker self is quite please with. Hopefully, I can avoid getting robbed / harassed on these trains. I'll be in 1st class, so hopefully there won't be too many problems. I'm also hoping that I understand the visa laws correctly; hopefully I don't have problems with any Bulgarian/Serbian border police.

I'll be back in Bucharest for one day, then my plane ride back to Baltimore! I'll put up a post about my trip during that day in Bucharest.

Thoughts on Running in Romania

For non-runners, this may be a pretty boring post. But, since a lot of my time here in Bucharest is spent training for the marathon, I figured it would be appropriate to comment on some of the challenges of running here.

- Bucharest is a smelly, smelly place. On a daily basis, it's annoying, but ignorable. When running, however, it's much less easy to ignore. Now, I'm a person with a pretty strong gag reflex; smells don't usually bother me. But these smells have caused me to almost puke, which is not a good feeling while trying to run long distances. Usually, I think the smells are either rotting animal corpses, rotting trash, or human excrement. Really unpleasant.

- The animals are no less annoying when they're still alive. Many runners in Bucharest carry sticks or pepper spray to keep the stray dogs away. I haven't had to resort to that yet, but most strays really don't like people running near them and get pretty antsy.

- Romanians stare at anything they perceive as different (even my culture guide notes this). Unfortunately for me, they perceive a female American runner is definitely different to them. During any given run, there are dozens of people staring at me, yelling at me, saying things to me in Romanian, honking at me, etc. At first, I though it was pretty funny. After a few hundred instances of this, it just really pisses me off now. The runner in me is annoyed because it's very distracting, the feminist in me is pissed because I should be able to run without being harassed.

- Bucharest is not easily traversable. There are big holes in the roads/sidewalks, places where no sidewalks exist, random mounds of dirt/trash in odd places, and cars parked on the sidewalks. It gets tiring on long runs.

- My final annoyance is the lack of supplied. I need new shoes, new socks, some Powerbars, new Fuelbelt bottles (Delilah chewed mine), etc. But since no Romanians run, there aren't any running stores.

Despite all these things, there have been some nice moments. There are some truly beautiful areas of Bucharest that I've gotten to see, that I would never see if I didn't run. You don't truly know a city, til you've run through it.

Exciting Events - International Version

Sorry it's been awhile, folks! In my brief hiatus, some exciting things have happened in my life. Probably the most imporant, is that I got engaged. Stephen came to visit for a week and popped the question in Herastrau Park last Tuesday. Being abroad presented some interesting challenges. For example, ring is about a half a size too big, but I have to wait til I get home to resize it. And you have to call family/friends on Skype, which means a lot of people don't pick up the unknown number. It's also rough saying goodbye to your brand new fiance when you know you won't be home for another 4 weeks. Oh well, life goes on!

I also moved out the Baneasa, one of the suburb areas of Bucharest. I hesitate to call it a suburb, because it's actually crappier than the inner city. Europe is so backwards. However, I do get to live in a really nice house (a house in Europe, I know, didn't know they existed), for the next 3 weeks. And there are two cats that live with me, though they're quite shy and don't hang out with me as much as I would like. I have to take the bus into the city to go to work, which takes about 45 minutes. Another downside- I can't get in very much outdoor running, since there are no sidewalks and the drivers are crazy. However, this family has a membership to the gym/spa next door, which I can use while I'm here. It's actually really nice and has a hot tub and I can get my weekday runs done there. But I'm going to have to bus into the city to do my long runs on the weekend.

Also, Stephen located an apartment for us to move to when our lease is done at the end of August. We'll be moving downtown, which will be a nice change. We'll be on the 10th floor, which I'm sure Thor kitty will get a kick out of.

Next weekend, I'm taking a short, one night trip to Constanta, which is a city on the Black Sea. I went there last time I was in Romania (October 2008), but it was the off-season and not very nice. I'm hoping to spend some quality time with a beach while I'm there!

And it's official. I've bought my train pass to go to Sofia, Bulgaria and Belgrade, Serbia during the 5 days I have after my internship is done before I fly home. I'm excited about it, but it'll also probably involve some pretty miserable moments. I'm spending 4 nights on the road, 2 of which will be on an overnight train, and 2 of which will be in a sketchy Eastern European hostel.

Last but not least - I am getting very ready to come home. It's been fun, but I just want to go home. I have about 3 weeks left, then a couple days in Baltimore chillin' with siblings/friends, and then home to KC. So ready.

Not Constantinople

Sorry it's taken me so long to get this up here! Got back Tuesday from my long weekend in Istanbul with my friend, Natalie. I had a really great time and Istanbul definitely ranks up there in my favorite cities.

We both arrived in the Istanbul airport around noon on Saturday (I arrived from Bucharest, Natalie from Geneva). After a relatively easy tram ride downtown, we checked into our “hotel”, which was barely a step up from a hostel. We spent that afternoon/evening at a restaurant down the street, watching Germany destroy Argentina and catching up (it’d been a year since we’d last seen each other).

The next day, we hit up most of the major attractions in Istanbul. We started with the Blue Mosque, since our hotel was right across the street from it. It’s really pretty hard to describe how massive the outside of this mosque is and its position in the skyline of Istanbul. The inside was beautiful, though less impressive than how it looks outside. While this wasn’t the first mosque I’d been in, it always surprises me a little to see the fence that separates the area where women are allowed and where they’re not. And the small patch in the back where Muslim women were allowed to pray. No commentary, just interesting. Next, we headed over to Istanbul’s most famous attraction – the Aya Sofya. This was the opposite of the Blue Mosque – I wasn’t a fan of the outside, but the inside was by far the most interesting building I’ve ever seen. Built in the 6th century by the Byzantines to serve as a church, it was converted to a mosque after the Ottoman takeover. Nowadays, it’s a museum, but it looks like a mosque with mosaics of Jesus all over the place. It’s also a massive building with no support columns. And my favorite part was the kitten that was “sunbathing” in the spotlight at the altar. Next, we headed under the city to the underground cisterns. Basically, it’s where the water supply was for a really long time. Now it’s a massive, creepy, dark space covered in water and columns. There are also two Medusa heads that no one knows where came from. It was a pretty interesting space. That night, we hung out at a small restaurant by our hotel and enjoyed a Turkish Delight (nasty candy) flavored hookah.

The next day was primarily devoted to shopping at the Grand Bazaar, which is absolutely massive – over 4,000 shops and employs over 30,000 people. Though primarily for tourists nowadays, it was created in like the 6th century. Natalie and I had a good time trying to avoid all the really pushy shop owners. They enjoy yelling out what nationality they think you are (the strangest we got was Japanese, though German was more common) and asking if Natalie (who’s 6’1” and rail thin) and I were sisters. After a morning of that, we headed over to another mosque, which was closed for renovation and ended up at a restaurant inhabited completely by locals and where no one on the wait staff spoke English. That was interesting; still not entirely sure what I ordered/ate. Then we stopped by Istanbul University, which is massive, with over 60,000 undergraduate students. We finished off the day by attempting (and failing) to go on a Bosphorus River cruise, and ended up instead at the Galata Tower, which gave us a fabulous view of the city.

The next day, we only had a couple of hours to sightsee before having to head to the airport. Spent the morning at the Spice Bazaar and some really ritzy Turkish Delight shops, had another excellent meal and headed out.

I think my favorite thing about Istanbul was all the kitties everywhere. So cute!

Anyway, Stephen comes in two days (yay!). Then I move the suburbs for 3 weeks. Then I've decided to take the train to Sofia, Bulgaria and Belgrade, Serbia for that last week before I come home. Not that far off, strangely!

From Craiova to Istanbul

Shortly after I wrote last week’s post, I took a day-long trip to Craiova, which is Romania’s 6th largest city. I went with a Romanian co-worker and we attended a presentation/round table on the closing of a democracy building grant the Embassy had awarded a non-profit there. The actual programming was pretty boring for me, since it was all in Romanian and I couldn’t understand it. However, that was all redeemed afterwards, with a massive, traditional Romanian meal. We ate at a small restaurant that is connected to an Orthodox church, and run by the priest’s wife. It lasted nearly 3 hours, and was pretty tasty. I though the appetizer was the main course, but then came the soup, coffee, main course, and dessert. And, of course, copious amounts of wine. This was during some orthodox holiday (something about Peter and Paul) that required them all not to eat meat, so everything was veggie, down to the last soy schnitzel. The train ride was about 3 hours each way, so I naturally slept sitting up with my mouth wide open, in typical Bethany fashion.

As for my day-to-day life, things are pretty much the same. I’ve been running a lot in preparation for the Marine Corps Marathon in October. So a lot of my time is spent running around the massive park by my apartment. So far no dog attacks, though I did have one run 2 miles with me once. I got paid for the first time today, which is good. I survived on 50 lei (about $15) for the last 3 weeks and I was running low on food! I did have a low moment a few days ago, when I was feeling very lonely and homesick. This is not like study abroad, where everyone is your age and everybody wants to be your best friend. Most people here have their own lives and families and friends. And I knew all of this going into it, but not having a close friend or family member around can start to grate on you after awhile! Fortunately, I see Natalie this weekend and Stephen in a couple weeks, so I’ll get recharged.

Speaking of this weekend, as I mentioned before, I will be in Istanbul with Natalie, my friend from Vienna who is living in Switzerland right now. I’ll be there from Saturday morning to Tuesday night. I’m hoping to hit all the main sights (Blue Mosque, Aya Sofya, Bosphorus River, and the Grand Bazaar) without going completely broke buying baklava and Turkish coffee. :) I’ll post after I get back and share some pictures. Happy 4th of July to my American friends and family! Eat a brat, drink a beer, and blow something up for me!!

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!