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.

Hi all,

We have lots of small pieces of news! So here goes:

Aydin and Kathryn in Australia: so Aydin (our student) and his mum Kathryn travelled back to Australia 5 weeks ago so that he could catch up with various medical and educational specialists – while his dad Dave stayed in BG. When we returned from our travels with Humf, Dave had news for us. The experts are quite happy with how Aydin has progressed and feel that D+K are by no means disadvantaging him by remaining in BG. This is great news – and a relief for D+K, I’m sure!

Elly and I have felt that the schooling we’ve been doing – especially combined with the speech therapy D+K do with Aydin – has seen his reading (in particular) improve over the last few months. However, we’re not qualified educators, so it’s hard to know what we should expect of a 6-year-old! In that sense it was good to know that Aydin is officially doing well.

Uranium issues: recent testing of the R family has found that they have “concerning” (ie. high) levels of uranium. The (fairly incontrovertible) theory is that the Haskovo water supply is the problem (they mine it around here). Elly and I haven’t yet been tested, but it’s fairly likely that we’ll have elevated levels too. Uranium is a heavy metal, but it’s fortunately not in the same nasty league as lead or mercury. Nevertheless, we’re hoping to learn as much as we can about avoiding exposure. We’ve switched to bottled water already, and we’ll have to avoid mushrooms and root vegetables (no potatoes!!). We’ll also be taking medication that somehow flushes the uranium from our bodies – we’ll have more info on it soon, we hope! All that we know so far is that it’s expensive!

C’mon, leave a comment with your favourite uranium/radioactivity joke; you know you want to…

Term 4 of school: will be exceedingly short! Aydin returns to BG in about 10 days’ time, so we’ll probably only fit in two weeks of term 4 before Christmas (Kathryn has somehow managed to make a start on term 4 material while in Australia – well done on that!). Because we’re following the NSW school year, we’ll then have 5-6 weeks’ “summer” holidays – except it’ll be minus 10 degrees outside, which is hardly “enjoying your holidays by spending every minute outside” weather, is it? As such, we’ll probably start term 1 of 2010 a couple of weeks earlier.

Return flights: we’re organising these at the moment. It’s very exciting! Flying back to Melbourne on our preferred dates is looking tricky (no seats available?!), so we’ll either we flying back a little earlier (late March) or back to Sydney instead of Melbourne. It’s all the same for us poor Tassie mob who have to make the extra domestic flight anyway! So you can expect us back in Launceston in the last week of March or the first week of April 2010.

Good news, you say?

That about wraps up this news bulletin. Sorry to anyone who already knew all of that – we’re supposed to be here to entertain!

How are the Uni exams going, everyone?

Cheers,

Stu (and Elly).

ps. you know when you’ve finished writing a blog post, and then you suddenly realise you have no suitable photos to add to it? Well that happened this evening, hence my wonderful artwork! Good, isn’t I?

Elly’s turn.

Yep, you read right. We are the proud survivors of three months in a very foreign country! We’re going to take a moment and reflect back on our time here.

What has helped:

God. We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for God leading us down this path and even though there has been many tears and ‘what ifs’ and wondering if we’re doing the right thing, God hasn’t failed to show us that he has everything under control and we really should just leave it up to him. Our faith in him has definitely grown stronger in our short time here.

The seemingly bottomless well of support from David and Kathryn. They juggle wonderfully the multiple roles of parents to Aydin, occupational and speech therapists for Aydin, team leaders where most of the team live 40 minutes away in Kardzhali, ‘go to gurus’ for the Millet church and heaps of other things that I can’t list off the top of my head. On top of all that they manage to find the time and energy to be there for us – be it to drag us around the mahalle introducing us to the locals and trying to translate our weird brand of Aussie culture to them, to accompany us to each visit to the police for our visa applications, to set aside a night a week for an attempt at some serious God talk (I put it like that cos we need more ppl to diffuse D and my habit of getting off topic…), and most importantly their patience as they sit and listen to us prattle away in our desperation to have anyone to speak English to. Thanks so much guys and Allaha Şukur! (That was for you Humf, it’s a useful one to know…save it for BG tho)

Routine. It took us a while to get to somewhere we felt comfortable with, but I feel like we’re onto something here. We now feel we have enough ‘busy’ time in the week to justify complete flake out in the weekends. Four mornings a week we do school with Aydin, three afternoons we go to Mirem for Turkish, most of the rest of the time is filled with lesson prep and study. By the weekend we are more than ready to stay at home and not be social, even enjoying the odd spot of housework. Somedays, like today, we are completely anti-social but we’re ok with that. I spent last weekend in Kardzhali chasing up some information for a friend and tutoring Eunsu in English so having the freedom to do nothing today was lovely!

The Internet. We’re in Europe. The Internet is very fast and very cheap. Skype is brillliant: free to another skype account and 3c a minute to Australian fixed phones. All our friends have something on the internet that helps us stay in touch with them, be it a gmail account (chat!), a facebook account (photos!) or a blog, home is never really that far away for us. Sometimes I do feel like we’re cheating in our OS experience, when compared to older generations and I wonder just how we’d handle life without instant access to home. However, on the most part contact has been waning as we get used to life here and don’t feel the need to have such a firm grip on the goings on in the land of Aus.

The other thing the internet is useful for is access to television. Long before we left Aus we’d stopped feeling slightly immoral for downloading television instead of waiting weekly for it to appear on tv (complete with advertisements ruining a perfectly good storyline). It was pure Gen Y impatience and self-centredness, but now this habit is what keeps us sane. At the end of the day it’s so good to be able to crash out in front of the computer for some escapism. I’m not sure what the new season of How I Met Your Mother will be like without Humphrey’s usual post-work coffee churn out, but I think we’ll cope.

Mirem. Our language teacher. She is one of the most lovely locals I have encountered and isn’t at all put off by our weird foreignness. I think we are in turn actually teaching her a lot in the way of Aussie culture!

What hasn’t helped:

Homesickness/Culture Shock. Stu touched on this in his post, but it’s been a big enough of a deal for me to not mention it here. We have encountered this very differently form each other, which I think has helped us greatly support each other through it. This is where I will truthfully say that the internet and it’s promise of instant access to home has been both a blessing and a curse! I think the biggest cause was a general feeling of discontent. We had in effect stopped our lives in Australia and so the idea of returning was mingled with thoughts of ‘return to what?’ but our lives here weren’t feeling very fulfilling either. As I said above, routine has greatly helped with this feeling! We still don’t know what we’ll do upon our return home, but the idea of speaking English and safe drinking water is sounding like a good reward for a challenging year overseas!

Petty Bulgarian beauracracy. ‘Come on now, we saw our ID cards on the desk. How about instead of telling us that the director is away, you just tell the truth and say that as loud Aussies we annoyed you, ok? Just grow up.’

Time is moving more quickly now that we’re busy and in no time we’ll be posting about our 6 month milestone! I am very much looking forward to this upcoming six month block – Humphrey’s visit and a European winter and Christmas. The novelty of a second summer wore off in mid-July.

That’s all for now.

Lots of love, take care, God bless.

Elly xx