The Grants' Bulgaria Blog.

Here is Elly with the next exciting instalment of our Eastern Europe Excursion!

Sunday 25^th: James Nairn had our first day in Targu Mures all planned out for us, which was lucky as we had no clue where to start. In fact, his first words to us on Saturday evening when we got off the bus in TG were ‘Are you guys keen for some paintballing tomorrow?’

Us: yeah! Sure!

James: ‘Oh that’s good, cos I’ve already booked you in.’

Sunday was to be spent with us checking out a local church, then paintball, with a beer to finish off the day.

The church service was held in a nearby disused cinema in the centre of TG. It was a pretty nice little church, maybe 100 or so youth and young adults. The band was quite good – they played at least one Hillsong song in Romanian, which was entertaining but sadly we weren’t familiar with it. Accompanying the band was a small group of girls up the front who danced to each song. I did find it baffling at first but I guess I’m not used to seeing dancing in church as a way of worshipping God. The songs provided a handy crash course on Romanian pronunciation which we found helpful, and Humphrey was relieved to see something in Latin lettering (our Turkish church sings songs in Turkish but written in Cyrillic). Even though we all skipped out early (the message was in Romanian and translating was hard), we all felt good in that church. Our impression from the small time we’d been there was that God was definitely present and it was alive and vibrant. Plus being in an old cinema added massive cool factor!

I must now slide quite considerably down the scale of sophistication and tell you about the hereby dubbed ‘Paintball Game of Death.’ For those who have never cared about such things, paintballing is banned in Tasmania, which does cause some grief among people we’ve spoken to. I’ve heard many reasons why it’s banned and it seems that the main culprit is the tough gun laws we have. Which is fair I guess, cos paintball guns do act a lot like normal firearms (in my ignorant opinion). Tasmania does however offer laser skirmish, which nearly everyone I know has played at least once. I guess it might be fun, but I’d never had the opportunity. After paintballing I’m not so sure I’ll ever go laser skirmishing. In a sentence, the general idea of paintball is you have 2 teams and a fort to protect or a flag to capture, if you’re hit anywhere at all with a paintball then you’re ‘dead’ and the game is over when the fort is compromised/flag is captured/an entire team is wiped out. Ultimately, the entire day is over when everyone has run out of paintballs (we had 100 each ~ 1 hour of game time).

So we had the ‘immigrant team’ (us) and the ‘teacher team’ of James and two guys from the school: Rob (a fellow Launcestonian) and Dave (a Texan). We donned camouflage suits and were handed guns and the first game started. I quickly had to learn some basic paintball survival skills: kneeling in mud is ok, how to run while half squatting and holding an awkwardly shaped gun, that the v notch thing on top of the barrel is supposed to help you aim, and that being shot in the face isn’t too bad. Thank goodness for the Darth Vader style helmets we were wearing! We played maybe 6 games altogether, some on a field with obstacles, and some in a pretty little forest that was on a hill.

There were some minor injuries – paintball pellets can be pretty hard after being shot out at high velocity and bruising is quite common – and so we stood around admiring each other’s handiwork.

The most impressive injury was Stu’s which was inflicted by his best friend and fellow team member Humphrey. Stu had inadvertently walked in front of Humf, which panicked him and caused him to reflex shoot from a distance of about 3m, completely shattering the ‘5m rule.’ Stu’s still living so it’s all good.

We followed paintball with a bit of hanging out at Dave’s place before dinner of pizza and beer at an Irish pub (yeah, weird, I know) and more drinks at a nice little cafe-bar called Shiraz (which I’ll describe more a bit later).

The rest of our time in Târgu Mureş was spent doing the odd touristy thing or two, but really, only two words sum up how we spent the rest of our time: Shopping and Shiraz.

Lets start with my favourite, Shopping.

We spent hours shopping on Monday and it was great, followed by more on Tuesday, and a little bit more on Wednesday. We had been told many stories from Jon and Margot in the past about how good shopping in Romania was and when we arrived in TG we understood. Even though they are neighbours, Bulgaria and Romania differ in so many ways and the shop selection was just one of those ways. The exchange rate was well in our favour (~ 2.6 Lei to $1) and prices looked about as much as what you’d expect to pay in Australia…until you divided by 2.6 and realised what a fabulous bargain there was. Quality-wise, I found Romanian products just looked and felt a lot more reliable than what was on offer in Bulgaria, plus the fashion was a lot more western. I had already developed a slight phobia about shopping in Bulgaria and after 5 days in Romania I don’t think I’ll ever shop in Bulgaria again if I can help it.

I’m writing this from home in Haskovo now and we just added up how much we spent on clothes. We did quite well and now especially because of scarves and massive down filled jackets we’re ready to face winter!

Of course, the shopping itself would not have been the same if we didn’t have Margot ‘Personal Shopper Extraordinaire’ Nairn taking us around the town. She and I at least had great fun. Both my mums at home in Ausland know just how much I love a good shopping expedition so I was suffering massive withdrawals, and it seemed that Margot needed some good proper girly time too, so we both ended the week with fully recharged batteries and only slightly sore banks.

At night when James was finished teaching we developed the habit of hitting Shiraz.

I’ve already mentioned once that this was the name of a trendy little cafe-bar so don’t be worried that we just spent every night drinking shiraz (incidentally, a wine we haven’t had heaps of luck finding in shops here). Rather, we spent most nights drinking ridiculously cheap beer and cocktails while listening to endless Coldplay on shuffle (not a very imaginative bunch music wise). It was a fun place to hang out and unwind from the terrors of teaching or the tired muscles from endless shopping/touring. We also grew a lot closer to James (he is the older brother of one of our closest friends Andy) which was really good too.

We’ve nearly caught up timewise in our blogging, which is a bit of a relief. I think the next post will most likely be about the touristy things we did in Târgu Mureş, which consisted of exploring Transylvanian Romania – and falling in love with it.

For now, we’re back in Haskovo for the next few days, catching up with Dave and the washing and generally having a bit of a relax, battery recharge and budget check. Maybe even let our readers get a bit of a breather before the Turkey tour onslaught

Bye bye for now!

Elly xx

Tags: holidays, music, near death experience, Romania, shopping, travelling

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 31st, 2009 at 12:13 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.