FOOD

A couple that lives here in Iasi makes our lunch and dinner every day and we get a stipend for our breakfasts. The food here is pretty good. I decided that I would love it no matter what, so even though we eat chicken, potatoes, and cabbage almost every day for lunch I still enjoy it. It's not quite traditional, but we all really appreciate it.

We either buy a pastry or buy breakfast stuff from the grocery store for the mornings. Our favorite patisserie here is called Petru. It's less than a block away from my apartment and on the way to about everywhere we go. In Romania they make these things called covrigis (pronounced cove-rigs) that are so good! They are ring shaped soft pretzels filled with almost anything you want- chocolate, cherry, sweet cheese, ham and cheese, vanilla, etc... My favorite pastries that I've had here are called Kürtőskalács. They are originally Polish, but they are popular in Romania in the Winter. Basically they are a sweet dough that gets wrapped around a spit and cooked over coals. They get covered in cinnamon, coconut, sugar, caramel, and lots of other things. 

 Kürtőskalács

Lunch and dinner are a combination of potatoes, chicken, and cabbage. I actually really like the cabbage that they prepare for us, it's seasoned with vinegar. The potatoes are either mashed, cubes, or french fried. Recently the caterers have been bringing us more variety than we had at the beginning of our trip, so we've been eating pork, omelets, and ground beef. We get pizza at least once a week, which is awesome because the caterers are from Italy. Occasionally we get more traditional foods like sarmale and mămăligă. Sarmale is ground pork, vegetables and seasonings wrapped in pickled cabbage or grape leaves and mămăligă is cooked cornmeal.

Sarmale and mamaliga from a restaurant in Brasov

Berlin Weekend

With the ILP program we get some planned vacation days- two four day trips and one ten day trip. For my first vacation I decided to go to Berlin, Germany with two other girls in my group. The three of us got really cheap flights and a great deal on a hostel, so we were able to do almost everything for under 200 USD.

Our hostel

We visited the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which was an awesome experience for me. The memorial has over 2,000 stones covering a city block, and literally covers a museum. The underground museum put the holocaust into perspective for me. One exhibit had the number of people killed in each country, including Romania. I had never really thought about Romania's place in WWII, but the Romas (gypsies) were thought to be racially inferior alongside the Jews and were sent to concentration camps.

Another of my favorite stops on our vacation was Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp. My group tagged onto a tour that we found at the train station, and it was definitely worth it. I learned information that I never learned in classes before and was reminded of history that I thought was unimportant at the time that I first learned it. I had forgotten how terrible people could be. The feeling of the camp was very solemn. Someone had laid white carnations at especially touching parts of the camp, which, to me, really showed respect to the men that were murdered there.

Other highlights for me were being able to see the Berlin and Checkpoint Charlie.

Some random pictures from the trip:

First "Real" Week

The past few days have been the first times that I've been able to go to the orphanage, apartments, and hospital. I absolutely love it all! The kids here are amazing. They all have had pretty rough lives due to social cases or disabilities, but the programs here really help them out. 

The love that I feel for these kiddos is undeniable. I do have a favorite though, I'll call him George for the sake of privacy. When I first walked in and sat down in his room he happily walked over and proceeded to bite my wrist, leaving teeth marks for three hours after. He reminds me of my little brother Timmy when my parents first adopted him, he can't walk well, can't really talk, and uses his teeth to express feelings. He loves to cuddle and be tickled and his favorite toy to carry around and chew on is a set of plastic keys. Those keys have saved my skin from so many bites!

The Orphanage

I have loved going to the hospital and orphanage extension apartments, too. The kids that we mainly visit at the hospital are the ones whose families live too far away to stay with their kids, kids from the orphanage, and kids whose families abandoned them. The kids at the hospital have captured my whole group's hearts.

The kids at the apartments have a lot of energy. Each apartment has three or four kids living in it with a worker. As volunteers we get to go visit for two hours in the afternoon and play and play with the kids so that the worker can take a break or cook dinner. The kids at the apartments are almost ready to go into foster homes, so they are very mobile and can understand Romanian.

First Impressions

Buna! (Hello!) I've been in Romania for two weeks now, but I hadn't been able to do anything that I signed up for until today. One of the babies at the orphanage potentially has measles, so the government wouldn't let us go in to any parts of it until today. All eight of us were able to go visit two apartments that house the kids that are almost ready to be put in a foster families. Today was also my first chance to visit the children at the hospital. My group got to see 3 and a half kids today! One baby, one has bad burns, another has cerebral palsy (we nicknamed him Caleb), and the fourth had a woman with him and seemed to be doing okay. We played with the first two and helped stimulate Caleb by holding his hands and showing him books. I gave a wooden car to the last boy that we saw. He didn't have much with him and he seemed happy to have it.

The Hospital

It's been hard not knowing when I would be able to visit any of my kids for this long, but I love them already! I am so excited to meet them tomorrow! While we haven't been able to do much here in Iași other than explore, we had the opportunity to travel around Romania a little bit. We took a bus to Brașov, which is where Bran/Dracula's castle is. We visited that castle, Peleș castle, and Râșnov fortress on a tour through the hostel that we stayed at. The hostel is called Kismet Dao, and it was great! Comfortable beds, free breakfast, towels, and sheets, and really friendly staff! AND THEY HAVE A DOG, which was probably my favorite part. Here are some of my favorite pictures from this adventure:

Bran Castle

Inside Bran Castle

The view from Râșnov

Râșnov view

Group picture in Brașov 

The Black Church

Peleș Castle

Rope Street- one of the narrowest streets in Europe!

Thanks for reading! Sorry I haven't writted anything really about how Romania really is, I promise I will in my next post. I've just been so excited to be here and to be able to go to the orphanage tomorrow!

Travel Time

My itinerary for my way to Iasi, Romania was PDX to JFK to Istanbul to Bucharest flying, and then a van to our apartment. It's been really hard to grasp the idea that I'm actually going to be gone for four months. I learned that you can pack a carry-on bag as heavy as a checked bag and still have it fit in an overhead bin. If the line for security is short and quick you only need about 15 minutes to get to the C6 terminal of the Portland airport, giving time to start a blog post and get a Netflix account. Use the eye masks on red-eye flights even if they look ridiculous. Circle the perimeter of the airport to find power outlets. It was a fun 48 hours of traveling.

Some pictures:

<New York

                                                                                                    Bucharest^

Getting Excited!

I leave for Iasi, Romania on January 12th 2017! I will spend four months volunteering in an orphanage (well, "orphanage" because Romania recognizes it as a daycare, even though it's not) and a hospital. I'm going with ILP (International Language Program), which is an organization that sends college aged kids in America and Canada around the world to mostly teach English, but the Romania program is different. There will be seven of us split between two apartments and taking care of the kiddos over there. Most of the kids are disabled, either mentally or physically, and are divided into different rooms at the orphanage by age and how disabled they are. I'm so excited to meet these kids and help them develop!

I've always loved traveling and I have a little bit of "I want to save the world" in me, so this is the perfect opportunity for me. I thought and prayed long and hard whether or not to serve an LDS mission, but discovered that that's not what I need to do right now, so here I am going to Romania. 

No, I don't speak Romanian. I speak English and some French, plus a semester of Latin, so maybe I'll be able to get around without too much help. I've been using Duo-Lingo to learn the basics and I'm planning on taking a Romanian to English dictionary. I'm starting to learn about the culture of Romania and Romanians are very superstitious. I can't sit on the ground, I can't have a window and door open in the same room, and I always have to be all bundled up or else the locals believe that I will become sick or infertile. The little ones can't learn how to crawl on the floor because they could get hypothetically sick, so they learn to crawl on a small mattress. It will definitely be an adventure.