Learning the language

Can I buy a vowel, please?

The biggest challenge in learning Romanian is that the language uses vowels in very precise ways.  My Southern twang never met a vowel that doesn’t have at least three sounds. So I am forever trying to get the exact pitch on the vowel: a (as in groggy; ah) is different from ă (as in grub; uh), â (halfway between grave and grieve; eeuw), and its close relative u (groove; ooh).

I have my numbers down pretty well, and I can recognize when cashiers tell me how much to pay.  They say it really fast.

I recognize words spoken around me, but I can’t come up with the right word in the right conjugation to be able to make much conversation.  I had a beer and a tsuika with Cornell, the retired gentleman who we rent from, and we talked about his work in the garden that day. I could understand mostly what he was telling me, but all I could reply was “good, good (Bun, Bun).”

Romanian taxi drivers aren’t accustomed to hearing foreigners mispronouncing their language.  They will look at you quizzically and repeat what you said.  Our language teacher says it is because they don’t have frequent contact with foreigners.  I blame the Southern accent.

 

I don’t ask for lemons in Romania

Every language has the words that sound like scatological terms from another language.  Americans traveling in Germany or Austria snicker when they see “Gute Fahrt” on the highway entrance ramps. And years ago when we travelled in England my mother insisted on calling out the name of the sunflowers that lined the road, “Rape.” And Brits ask for “a rubber, please” to clean the chalkboard, which led to great embarrassment of a Scottish exchange student in my high school.

A Romanian friend of ours let us in on a local joke, that foreigners often mispronounce the word for lemon to say instead a crude term for a sexual act.  It is only one vowel difference, and if you have trouble enunciating vowels exactly, you could end up with a… well, let’s just say, you won’t be squeezing lemons.

...with the refreshing taste of lemon.

not a refreshing taste

Jewish life in Romania

Last week I had lunch at "the Jewish Canteen." The Jewish Canteen is a kosher kitchen and dining hall that serves the 200 or so of the Jewish community in Cluj.  Talk about a small market segment!  You can't just go there on your own.  Non-Jewish people have to be invited by someone in the community.  You have to call in your reservation the day before, they only cook enough food for the people they have coming.

Nancy, Kent, Eleonore, and Jake at the Synagogue, Botoșani

   You walk down a street, turn into a parking lot for a TV production company and auto repair shop.  Walk around to the back of the building where there is a courtyard, and you will see the dining hall.  Go in the door, check in with the porter, pay, get your disposable yarmulke, and go sit down for lunch.  They bring it out for guests, but it looked like the locals went back in the kitchen to get their own.  The food was tasty and filling: a chicken broth, a bean puree with beef cutlet, pickle salad (murați), and a white cake for desert. 
     Jake Shulman-Metz and I were meeting with members of the Cluj Klezmer band to discuss venues for Jake's concert tour in June.  My department chair, who is Jewish, introduced us to a young man who is doing his doctoral dissertation on Jewish music,  he took us to the Jewish Canteen and introduced us to the members of the Klezmer band.

Jewish Transit House, Cluj

    Back in October, Duncan McDougall and I went to the Elie Wiesel Musuem in Sighet.  It was sobering to learn the extent of the Holocaust in Romania.  In the 1930 census in the county of Maramures there were 39,000 Jews, less than 4,000 in 1948.  At age 15, Elie Wiesel and his family were deported to Auschwitz where his mother died. Just before the Allied troops defeated Germany, the Germans moved the entire Auschwitz prison camp to Buchenwald, "The Long Walk."  Elie's father died from exhaustion on the walk.
    When the allies liberated Buchenwald, Elie, a 16 year old orphan, felt that he had no home to return to, so he chose to emigrate to Paris where he completed a degree in philosophy at the Sorbonne.
     A quote of Elie Wiesel from the museum : "Indifference is not a beginning; it is the end. And therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor--never the victim."

Recent Travels, Part 2

This continues my overview of our Romanian travels with Kent, our son.  

• Traveling to Șigișoara with former exchange student Eva

Another Austrian exchange student, Eva, and her boyfriend, Joffrey, came to visit.  She wanted to see Romanian castles and rural villages.  We extended our car rental and went to Șigișoara, Brașov, Bran, and Sinaia; put them on a train to Buchureșt and we explored the Faragaș mountains. On the way to Șigișoara we passed through the village where, last November, we stayed with the Roma family (Staying with the Roma).  We recognized the house, turned around and pulled into the driveway.  We didn't know what kind of welcome we would get; Dan was ready to commence greetings and introductions if the father came out to see who was in the driveway, and Nancy was ready if the mother came out.  Gabi, the father, came out, and immediately recognized us and invited us in.  They remembered our names, welcomed us warmly, and Ghizi, the mother, couldn't stop hugging Nancy.  We had coffee and showed them pictures from our last visit.  Our Romanian was good enough to carry on a conversation.

The Gabori family with Kent, Eva and Joffrey

     Ghizi called Bertie, their daughter in 2nd grade, at school and told her to come home.  Ghizi wanted her to see us and practice her English, probably more learning activities than she would have at school. Bertie is taking English lessons from a neighbor in the village, and she showed us her English picture books and her drawing book of vocabulary.  She colors in a picture of every English word that she learns.
      While we were visiting, Ghizi went back in the guest rooms to get a hoodie that Nancy had left onthe previous visit (laundered and folded, waiting for a chance to return it), and some accessories that Ghizi had made to go with the gypsy dresses that the girls had bought during the last visit. More hugs as she presented the gifts and for whom each was intended.
    Sometime I will blog all the negative reactions that we have gotten about our gypsy home-stay from Romanians and ex-pats who have "gone native."  For now, all I'll say is: the life we experienced last November is pretty much the life they live; they are not an ordinary Roma family, in that they are open to outsiders, value education, and see that there is a wider world out there; and they have shown greater hospitality to us strangers than anyone else in our Romanian experience.

• Visiting castles, palaces, and fortified cities

In Șigișoara, our fortified city, we went to the Clock Tower museum, which has a good exhibit on the medieval guilds, and you can see how the tower clock works.  Amazing what engineers in the 1600s can do. We walked the wall and ate lunch.
     We visited Bran Castle; we were more interested in Queen Maria, who lived there during WWI, than in Dracula, who never lived there, and maybe once attacked the castle in the 1600s.
     We visited Peleș Palace in Sinaia, the summer palace of King Ferdinand and Queen Maria. We put Eva and Joffrey on the train to Buchurest and went to a rural homestay in Bran, where we ate well and watched a foot of snow fall.

• Nancy's High Adventure  Travel

The next day as we awoke in a winter wonderland, we decided to look at the Râșnov (rɨsh-nov)  Citadel that we had seen towering over the plain the day before.  It reminded us of Minis Tirith in the Lord of the Rings movies, a fortified city high over the valley nestled into the surrounding mountains.  The citadel was built about 1215 by the Teutonic Knights. Since it was a Saturday, the local volunteers were dressed in their best medieval reenactor costumes. So did we.

















  There was a cave nearby, so we decided to explore it before lunch.  We walked up an icy vehicle road for 1.5 km to get to the cave, and had a wonderful English-speaking guide for the cave tour.
  On the way out, things got interesting.  We decided to walk back down using a footpath because it had a railing to hold onto.  As we entered the footpath, Nancy slipped on some tree roots and fell on her back, bouncing down the path.  Kent was in front, reached her first, and put his boy scout training in Wilderness First Aid into practice.  He immediately immobilized her, treated her for shock, and started to monitor her breathing and consciousness.  Fortunately, she never lost consciousness, but because of the fall, we had to assume some sort of spinal injury, so we called the ambulance.  Because we were 1.5 km from the parking lot, on a mountain trail 30 meters above the icy road, they had to call the Mountain Rescue team to get her off the mountain.  She was in a great deal of pain, she thought she had broken ribs and punctured her lung, but Kent kept talking with her to keep the panic at bay and help her breathe.  After 20 minutes, the emergency medical personnel arrived and carried her down the mountain to the waiting ambulance.
    The crisis turned out better than we could imagine (let me tell you, our imaginations on the mountain were impressive): no fractures, no punctured lung, only one seriously sore lady.  The EMS and the Brașov emergency hospital were helpful and efficient: she was stabilized on oxygen and a glucose drip in the ambulance, and was in radiology for x-rays within 30 minutes at the hospital.  We got the good news from the doctor that there were no fractures at 5:00, and we could go home when she finished the IV pain meds, about 8:00pm.
    Nancy has been impressed with the quality of the medical care she has received in Romania. The facilities are old and some are shabbier than others, but the doctors are well-trained and knowledgeable.  The biggest difference from the US system is the access and attention she gets from a physician; there aren't as many support staff as we have in the US so the doctors do almost everything.  This wasn't her first encounter with the Romanian health care system, she needed her blood pressure medication adjusted and she had a recurrent infection.  So, she has seen a private medical office, the public medical system, and now the emergency medical system and a rehab doctor. 

Recent Travels

By recent, I mean, since I last talked about traveling in this blog.  The university had a break for the Christmas/ New Year's holidays, then final exams in Jan, and a break between semesters in Feb.  So, here are pictures (one or two for each place) and commentary (one or two sentences, unless something really outstanding happened) of:

• Christmas trip to Austria and Germany to see friends
• Dan to Monahans, Texas, to celebrate his father's 100th birthday
• Dan and Nancy canceled their trip to Egypt to see Kent Feb 1, while Kent came to Romania
• Showing Kent Romania: trip to Bucovina and Botoșani to meet Jake and Eleonor
• Visit to Fundatia Inocentia in Bistrița
• Traveling to Șigișoara with former exchange student Eva
• Nancy's high-adventure mountain experience
• Kent and Dan to Bucharest for the Fulbright Mid-winter Orientation

As Kent told a friend, "I've only been in Romania three weeks, and during that time I've only been home three days!"

• Christmas trip to Austria and Germany 

We rented a car and drove to Vienna to stay in a former exchange student's home, just happened to be the worst snowstorm in Hungary.  For three hours around Budapest, we could not drive more than 40 kmh (that's 25 mph).  At each town, we'd decide, "Do we check in and wait it out or go on to the next town?" Well, at 150 k from Vienna, we got through the storm, the highways were cleared, and it was 5:00.

The best part of the trip: OMA!! Zandi lives in a Danube valley wine village outside Vienna in a large farmhouse with her grandmother on one side of the house and her parents and sister on the other side.  Everyday, Oma would cook goodies for us!

• Dan to Monahans, Texas, to celebrate his father's 100th birthday

I went to Texas for 8 days, and talk about jet lag.  The birthday celebration was a great success. Dad was in the FBI during WWII, and this picture is an agent presenting Dad a certificate from the FBI.  Dad is the oldest known former FBI agent in America.  

• Dan and Nancy canceled their trip to Egypt to see Kent Feb 1, while Kent came to Romania

Kent was in Egypt on a US State Dept scholarship to learn Arabic and experience the culture.  Talk about experiencing the culture!!  He stayed with a host family in a suburb about 45 min from all the demonstrations, but got to observe plenty of neighborhood anarchy from his 9th floor balcony.  His host brother was manning the barricades on the street in front of the apartment to keep the looters at bay. While Dan was in Texas, Kent got the evacuation order from the Embassy, and got to Romania where Nancy was waiting before Dan got back.

So, of course, we had to show him around Romania!

• Showing Kent Romania: trip to Bucovina and Botoșani to meet Jake and Eleonor

At the Botoșani Synagogue

Jake Shulman-Ment is a fellow Fulbrighter who is studying traditional Jewish, Roma, Moldovan, and Romanian music  in Botoșani, in the northeast of Romania. We had been wanting to visit him and his girlfriend, Eleonor, also a musician.  On the way we visited the painted monasteries of Bucovina.
Botoșani had the worst wind storm in 50 years while we were there, so we just stayed in and listened to Jake and Eleanor play music. They showed us the contrast between traditional Yiddish music, Roma music and Romanian music.

Moldovitsa Monastery

We  visited the painted monosteries at Humor, Voronets, Moldovitsa, and Suchevitsa. A cool thing to do next time: the monastery at Putna offers guest rooms.

• Visit to Fundatia Inocentia in Bistrița

with Tibi, the Outreach Worker for Fundatia Inocentia

One of my "things to do" in my Fulbright project is to visit NGOs that serve children and families.  I had arranged to visit Fundatia Inocentia/ Romanian Children's Relief in  Bistrița on our way back from Bucovina and Botoșani. I've discussed my visit in other blog posts. Nancy, Kent and I visited a children's ward of a hospital, a special needs orphanage, a group home for special needs children, a school for disabled children, and a foster family. We met the staff of Fundatia Inocentia and high school volunteers from The American School in England, who have been coming to Bistrița on their winter break for over 10 years.

OK this posting is getting long enough.  It's time to make it into two parts.  Don't go away! More travels to come! Recent Travels, Part 2 Don't miss Nancy's evacuation by Mountain Rescue team!

Ready for Marțișor

In one of my first Romanian language lessons, we learned the months of the year, with a sentence describing each month.  Marție (March) is the month of Marțișor (mar-tsi-shor).  Our language teacher explained to us--mostly me--that on Marțișor, the first eight days of March, men give women small gifts.  Every woman they know.  I needed to be prepared to pass out small gifts. She's telling me in October to get ready!
     Well I'm ready.  Here's a picture of my Marțișor gifts, Texas Bluebonnets, one of the first flowers of spring in Texas.  It's kind of like making Fiesta pins!

Marțișor is a celebration of the coming of spring, a tradition in Romania, Moldova, and Bulgaria.  Women wear the red-and-white string for the first eight days of March, or until the first bloom of spring.  Then she ties the string on the branch to acknowledge the first bud.  When we were in Bulgaria in Sept., we saw red and white yarn tied on a branch of a tree, left from the previous spring. Our hosts told us about Marțișor traditions.
    The weekend before Marțișor, vendors' stalls sprang up in every little piața selling little gifts for 1 leu to 15 lei.  I'm a 2 lei kind of guy, and after looking at the selection, I decided I could make my own.
     The custom has its origins in Dacian-Thracian times (that's over 8,000 years ago; these are the folks that Jason and the Argonauts wrote about).  Back then, it was the new year's celebration of the rebirth of nature.  Now, it's a celebration of friendship and respect.  It's not like Valentine's Day, there are no romantic meanings, so you are supposed to give a small token of friendship to every woman you know and respect.  It's not an equal opportunity holiday--the women don't have to give anything, just wear the ribbons.