The Grants' Bulgaria Blog.

Hi all,

We had a great time away over Christmas and New Years’ in Romania. We ended up staying in Transylvania – enjoying the Nairns’ excellent hospitality – for nearly two weeks! It took so long to travel there and back that we felt like we needed to make it worthwhile. We spent about 50 hours on buses and trains, and Google Maps tells me that we travelled over 1600km. And we thought BG and RO were neighbouring countries!

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A Romanian phrase we used quite often over our trip was “la mulţi ani!” (pr: lah mooltz ahn) which means “to many years”. It’s quite a pretty phrase, I think, but also very useful. It’s used for Christmas, New Years’ Eve and birthdays.

James went to a village for New Years’ Eve, so it was up to Texan Dave and Elly and me to have/find/create huge amounts of fun for the countdown.

Inspired by rumours of the stoic efforts of Romanian nationals who stay up to watch the dawn on New Years’ Day, we planned to stay out late. We left the house at 11:30pm and made our way to the centre of town, where we could hear loud and decidedly “traditional” music. Sure enough, a swaggering, middle-aged Romanian guy was crooning away with a backing band of clarinet, fiddle and accordion. Sorry Dad, it was nowhere near as good as that sounds. Nevertheless, it felt so authentically Romanian that we quite enjoyed it, even after Elly pointed out that we were probably enduring the Romanian equivalent of John Farnham or someone with equivalent mass appeal.

At 11:55pm, someone was welcomed on stage with sufficient polite applause to convince us that he was the mayor (or someone like that). He gave a rousing speech (probably), but was interrupted by a large projector screen lowering down in front of him. He chuckled and popped around the side of the screen to continue his speech, but before long all the stage lights went out and the poor mayor got drowned out by fireworks.

They started a lesser array of fireworks with a minute to go. This confused us, because all of a sudden, without any counting down, there was cheering and bright lights and explosions! So, of course, we cheered and yelled out “Happy New Year” to everyone… only to see a 30-second countdown display appear on the screen shortly afterwards. Impressively, the real fireworks display after the real countdown was much better.

After the countdown an enthusiastic (ie. slightly drunk) young performer came on stage to sing some traditional Romanian songs. Based on the average age of those who sang along with him, we’re quite sure that the songs being performed were of the Auld Lang Syne ilk. Again, we were blissfully ignorant to the uncoolness. The singer eventually got the crowd to chant “Radul, Radul, Radul…” so we’re fairly sure that was his name.

Radul spoke three words of English: “oh”, “my” and “God”. He had a very strange habit of interspersing his long-winded Romanian banter between the songs with cries of “oh my Gaaad”, as if it was another way of saying “isn’t it great to be in Târgu Mureş tonight?” or something equally inane.

At one stage we spotted a bunch of people our age who we quickly decided were not locals. They were dancing too exuberantly. Some red hair and a Guinness t-shirt made me think they were Irish. I think Dave guessed that they were German (or was it Scandinavian…?). Anyway, it turns out they were Croatian.

There were six of them, and they’d travelled to Târgu Mureş because they found cheap flights there! They all spoke excellent English, which impressed me. I asked how they’d learned such good English and they quipped that they watch a lot of TV and spend a lot of time on the computer! But I think they were being humble – I suspect the language is compulsory there, as it is in Romania.

After the Radul Spectacular finished at 1am, the crowd dispersed and the clean-up began. We followed a large crowd, who turned out to be returning to their cars (and not to party). So we walked back to the main strip and found our Croatian friends again. They were looking for a party, too. Like us, they hadn’t realised that all the bars and clubs are closed for private parties on New Years Eve. Since we hadn’t booked, things were looking grim.

Luckily, we managed to crash a party in a nearby restaurant. We’d walked in to ask if they were open but the owner said “sorry, it’s a private party” and directed us to a Michael Jackson-themed bar up the road (eww). But moments later he caught up to us on the street and said “hey, the people said you can come in if you like”. So we did!

Turns out the party was 100% Hungarian, which made for a very multi-cultural experience: 2 Aussies, 1 Yank, 6 Croats and several Hungarians in a Romanian taverna. (Hungarians make up about half the population of Translyvania, since historically the region was a part of Hungary.) They served us sausages with mustard and crusty bread, which was highly appropriate since: a) it seemed a very Hungarian meal and b) it was 2am and therefore the perfect time for such stodgy cuisine!

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We had a good time. Since then, we’ve returned to Bulgaria after an epic 2-train journey of 28 hours. We’re looking forward to staying right where we are until it’s time to catch a plane to ‘Straya! Here’s the plan until then:

- Start school (term 1) this coming Monday;

- Teach for about 8 weeks;

- Have a week off around my birthday (March 9);

- Teach another 2-3 weeks;

- 2 days after the end of term 1, we fly home (April 4)!

Writing it down like that has really made it seem like no time at all! It’s less than 3 months until we leave! We are of course very excited to be going home, but I think as it approaches our feeling will become increasingly mixed. Stay tuned for our philosophising about that particular experience in later blog posts! For now, suffice to say that we’ve talked about it (what else do you do on 4 x 12 hour train rides?) and set ourselves some goals.

Essentially, we want to make the most of the rest of our time here. It will be very tempting to “tune out” towards the end of our trip instead of allowing ourselves to be stretched and challenged until our last day. We’ve barely scratched the surface of the various cultures (let alone languages) we meet every day, so there plenty more “experience” to be had by us before April. Feel free to ask us how we went with those goals in a few months’ time!

Thanks for stopping by!

Cheers

Stu.

Tags: Christmas, coolness, food, holidays, music, photos, prayer points, Romania, School, Special events, trains, travelling

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