Site Visit Part Two: Apuseni Mountains

Ok, so now for the rest of my site visit last weekend. After being in Cluj for two days, we went backpacking for the weekend in the Apuseni Mountains, where I will be working much of the time over the next two years. We drove a couple of hours out of Cluj to some small villages in the country where people still live much as they have for centuries. It was amazing the contrast between the modern city and the countryside. We then went even farther, hiking from a remote village out into the forest. We went to a cabana in the woods that my organization owns and keeps up as part of their ecotourism projects. The cabana is actually an old schoolhouse in a village that now is almost completely abanonded. There are no road for cars to the village now, and most of the buildings are abandoned, so it was fun to go around and see things. Amazingly, the village was still largely inhabited as recently as ten years ago. We stayed in the cabana for the weekend and hiked around, seeing a bit of the mountains. Some other members of the organization also hiked in on Saturday and we had a big campfire complete with mici, beer and palenca. It was a very good time. I could not have planned a better site visit if I had tried, and now I am anxious to move to Cluj next week and start doing more of this stuff!

Site Visit Part One: Cluj

So, this weekend I got out of Ploiesti and visited my new hometown of Cluj for the first time. I met my counterpart, saw where I will be working, and got to know the town a little bit. It was an absolutely awesome weekend, and I could not have planned it any better. This post will focus on the city of Cluj, where the first half of my visit was, then I will move on in the next post to the Apuseni Mountains, where my organization does most of its work. Anyway, on Wednesday night we took the 6 1/2 hour train ride to Cluj from Ploiesti, arriving a little after midnight. I met my new host sister (Roxana) at the train station, and she drove me around the city a bit before we went home. In the morning she took me town to the center of Cluj and we saw a bit of the city in the day. We met up with another volunteer and his counterpart and spent the afternoon with them. Cluj is an amazing city, very old and full of history. It was once a very distant outpost of the Roman Empire and was inhabited by Germans for a long time, and was a majority Hungarian until about twenty years ago. It is now a center for several universities, and is literally crawling with college students. The middle of the city is all old Saxon architecture, but the outskirts are all communist block buildings, which makes for an interesting contrast. Anyway, we went to an animal museum and basically just hung around the city for the day on Thursday. Thursday night I got to meet many members of my new organization and they did a presentation at a school about their activities over the past year, so that was very informative an exciting for me, even though I couldn't understand much of what they said in Romanian. At least there were pictures! Anyway, that about sums up the Cluj portion of my site visit.

Brasov

Hey, so it has been an awful long time since I updated this here blog, so I figured I would go ahead and let people know what I have been up to. I will start off in this post talking about our trip to Brasov last weekend. Brasov is a medieval Transylvanian city about three hours from here by train. We decided that it was necessary to see this famous landmark while we were relatively close to it. So, we got on a train at 7:30 in the morning and headed up there. The day was beautiful and probably the best day I spent in Romania up until that point (maybe some better ones since). We hiked up the side of a mountain to an old fortress and hung out for a while. Then, we went down into the central square of the old German part of the city. For a long time, Romanians were not allowed to live inside the city walls, and it was only Germans there. You can definitely tell that it is an old Saxon town by the architecture. We had some lunch and hiked all over the city in the afternoon. The biggest site to visit in Brasov is the "Black Church" that dominates the city. It is the biggest gothic cathedral between Vienna and Istanbul, and it is amazing. It has an organ with 6000 pipes and was built in the 1300s. It was built as a Catholic church, but later became Lutheran after the reformation. That evening, we tried to take a bus out to Bran Castle, but it was to late, so we will have to do that some other time. Instead, we went back down to the square where there was a concert and a big festival (Brasov days). We saw "Accent" (Think Romanian NSync) and we drank beer out on the square. After a very fun evening, we went and got some shwarma at a fantastic all night restaurant called Ando's. We didn't make it back to the train station until after two AM. We finally arrived at the station in Ploiesti at 6:30 Sunday morning, exactly 23 hours after we had left. Anyway, it was a great day and an amazing town!

Site Placement!

Hey, another post with an exclamation mark. Seems that I live a pretty exciting life these days in Romania. On Friday I learned where my site will be for the next two years, and exactly what type of work I will be doing here in Romania. I will be living in the third largest city here, Cluj-Napoca, and I will be doing work for an environmental NGO there, doing eco-tourism and environmental education with youth. Cluj is an exciting, urbane and sophisticated city, full of college students, coffee shops, and bars. There is even an international film festival every year! If you want to know more about Cluj, the wikipedia site seems pretty good: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluj-Napoca. I will be working in the nearby Apuseni Mountains for my job. They are not big mountains, but they are a huge natural attraction and they are full of caves, apparently. There are some pictures of the Apuseni at this site http://www.aboutromania.com/apuseni00.html. Pretty cool looking, no? Being in such a big city center and with some cool stuff around me to do, (I wonder if you can tour the Ursus brewery?) I am expecting plenty of visitors. I will need to be purchasing a nice couch when I move in, I am sure, to accommodate whoever wants to stop by. The more people that stay with me, the better, I suppose. The job seems very exciting, very much what I was hoping for while here in Romania, and I hope to gain a ton of experience that I will be able to use in the future. Cluj is definitely a pretty Posh Corpsish site, but I also expect to be out of the city much of the time, working in mountain communities. Oh, by the way, since I will be in the largest city in Transylvania, I am hoping to have plenty of Halloween visitors as well. Party in Dracula's home, baby! (Actually, I will not be very close to Dracula's castle, and he was actually the prince of Vallacia, but no one not reading this needs to know that). Still, there will be plenty of forests and wildlife around me, and there are lots of wolves in the Apuseni mountains, so that should be all kinds of fun. Anyway, as you can tell, I have been researching my new home and job a bit this weekend, and I am excited. Three weeks until I get to visit, and five weeks until I move there. Time moves fast when you are having fun!

Sinaia!

This weekend, a bunch of us decided that we needed to get out of the city and see some real sites in Romania that we have wanted to see for weeks but have not gotten a chance to. So, we headed up the valley to Sinaia, a little resort town with an old Romanian castle and plenty of hiking and fresh air in the mountains. Sinaia was amazing, and for the first time I felt like I was really in Romania. Nothing against Ploiesti or Bucharest, but they are really just cities, and all cities are alike in a lot of ways. Luckily, all resort towns in the mountains are alike in a lot of ways too, so that boded well for Sinaia. We first walked around the town a little bit and checked out the local street vendors. We went to an old Orthodox church and visited a monostary in the town, which was amazing. The churches here are all very intricately painted and beautiful, and there is just something that is so much more holy about an old dark church than any clean protestant church in the suburbs. Anyway, after that we headed out to Peles Castle, considered one of the best in Europe. It was the vacation home of the Romanian royal family until World War 2, and it is set with an amazing backdrop of mountains in the forest. After the castle we hiked up to 1400 meters a the base of the ski slopes. It was a fun and beautiful climb up through the forest, and the view from up there was awesome. We could have paid 5 lei (a little more than two dollars) for a ride up in a maxitaxi, or we could have taken the gondola for a lot more, but who would want to do that when you can hike? Anyway, we hiked back down, stopped in at an Irish Pub for a quick salute to St. Patrick's day, and took the night train back to Ploiesti.

Trip to Bucharest!

So yesterday we took our first trip out of Ploiesti to Bucharest and to watch our first European soccer match, the Bucharest Rapid vs. UTA. Rapid won 4-0 and it was awesome. We also walked around the city a little bit and saw the Palace of Parliament, the second biggest building in the world (after the Pentagon). Bucharest is a very nice city, the Paris of the East as they call it, and the cherry trees there are starting to blossom. In a few weeks it will be beautiful with the fountains flowing and everything. Guess we will have to go back! Anyway, here are some more recent pictures of what is going on with me here in Romania. The first picture is by the train station here in Ploiesti. Then there is us on a train back from Bucharest, a few volunteers in central Bucharest, the soccer match, and finally me in front of the Palace of Parliament with a Dacia (the national car company of Romania) behind me. Interesting stuff, huh?

Life in Ploiesti

So, it has been a while since my last post and I thought I would throw another one up here. Sorry I don't have new pictures to share at this time, but I will try to get some up soon. I have been here at our pre-service training learning all about the Romanian language and the "Peace Corps approach to Development". It has all been going very well. The language is challenging, but also very rewarding, so even though I spend hours studying it, I don't find it as much of a chore as I thought I would. Immersion is definitely a helper when it comes to learning languages. We have been working on a practicum project here in Ploiesti to prepare us for projects once we get to our site and give us some experience in how to carry out a project in Romania. We were broken out into groups and went out to sites around town to develop and work on various projects. Myself and another volunteer have been working with the environmental office in the mayor's office here in town. We are working on a project in conjunction with the UNESCO (United Nations Economic and Social Council) "world water day" on March 22nd. We are going to distribute a survey to residents of the city to see how they feel about water scarcity and conservation, and then report back to the mayor's office. Then we will help develop a pamphlet and an event to educate the people around here about water issues that the town as a whole faces, which most people seem to not be aware of. It is a very interesting project, and I think we will learn a lot by doing it about how Romanians feel and what direction the country is moving. It is exciting work to be doing. Anyway, we are two weeks into training (20% done) and we will find out our site placements for the next two years in three weeks, so that will be very exciting. It is all good, but there is so much to take in it just leaves you exhausted every day. I am still in that initial stage of adjusting and excitement, for sure, but I think it is starting to wear off and I am starting to settle in here in my new home of Romania. Pa pa for now!