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!

—

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!

—

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.

Merry Christmas faithful readers! If you are reading this on Boxing Day, then you are indeed dedicated, so thankyou!

We hope you all had a good day yesterday with lots of good times and little stress. We’re here in Romania with Jon, Margot and James Nairn and really enjoyed ourselves!

Here’s a short (yeah right) run down of our day:

8am: We wake up and turn on our laptops. Soon the apartment is filled with the joyful tune of ‘boo di doo boop’ as family in Australia – who were by that stage well and truly over-indulged – called us on skype to tell us all about how fun it is to have Christmas in summer and to ask if it snowed. It didn’t snow, but there’s still week old snow out there so we’re not complaining.

9-10am: A batch of chocolate filled croissants emerge from the oven and Team Jon and Stu go hard on the coffee making. Yummo!

11:30am-ish: The other Christmas orphans – Texan Dave and Canadian Andrea – arrive which means we can divvy up the presents and rip into them.

We’ve become severely disenchanted by the shopping in Haskovo, so I was impressed and delighted by how thoughtful the presents were. Of course, we are biased towards Romanian shopping! I love the orange spiral earrings Margot found for me, they’re so fun! We are also very taken by the cute little European-esque Santa ornament, he will definitely be treasured for the rest of our lives. With those and the beautiful candle set and big box of choccies we were really spoiled by them!

We in turn presented the Nairns with a ‘Snowed In Survival Pack’ which will aim (probably in vain) to get us socialising together and not on our computers if we do indeed get snowed in. The pack included the last bag of Humphrey-roasted coffee, Bulgarian wine, home-baked brownies and a 1000 piece puzzle of Sighişoara. Fun times ahead!

1pm: LUNCH!!! Jon and Margot created a wonderful lunch of roast chicken and veggies for us. It was probably the first Christmas where I appreciated hot food! They very thoughtfully made sure to include lots of root veggies (potato, carrot and parsnip) that we’ve sorely missed because of uranium avoidance. Dessert was homemade apple pie and custard with ice cream. I inadvertently started everyone off singing the Happy Birthday song with ‘Merry Christmas’ substituted in. Quite strange.

After lunch: More skyping. The non-Australians were shocked to hear that my brother Fred woke our parents up after midnight just to tell them I was on the phone. It was quite a foreign concept to them that we would treat our parents with such disrespect! The rest of us found it pretty funny and not at all unusual. We continued the introduction to Australian irreverence as we played a game called Dutch Blitz which involved Margot declaring that James needed more alcohol so he would stop winning and James launching a counter-attack against her. How dare a son treat his mother like that! [Dutch Blitz is a great card game, but I think you can only get it from the US]

Now: We just watched a funny little animated movie called Igor together before the parentals went to bed and Andrea went home. The boys are now watching a horror movie ‘30 Days of Night’ which I think has vampires in it. The movie is set at night, when there’s snow on the ground and after the viewing, Dave himself will have to walk home alone in the snow in Transylvania – the birthplace of vampires. How fun for him!

Boxing Day plans: I think sleeping in, puzzle starting, left over eating and beer drinking are definitely on the menu.

Hey, we sound like a family!

Merry Christmas everyone,

Love Elly and Stu xx

By popular request*, and by way of giving a nice visual representation of how excited we are that we’ve now seen our way through three whole seasons here in Bulgaria, here is a series panoramas taken from our flat. They’re slightly different to the panoramas you might already have seen. Click on them for a bigger version.

[* on this blog, the term "popular request" should be taken to mean "as requested by someone cool" rather than "as requested by several people".]

—

Early Summer:

—

Late Summer:

—

Early Autumn:

—

Late Autumn/Early Winter:

—

Proper Winter:

—

Tomorrow we’re heading to Romania for a very white Christmas with the Nairn family (minus Andy ). Apparently they have 30cm of snow already!

Wishing everyone who reads our blog a very merry Christmas!

Cheers,

Stu and Elly.

—

ps. Winter can be a real challenge for people here. Not us! We’re fine, but we’ve seen a lot more people doing it tough since summer work dropped off and (especially) since it got cold. If anyone wants to donate towards those who have to last the winter without proper heating, clothing or food, contact us and we can find a worthy cause!