At the apartments, I had Lena again – she is a great worker. She is consistent with the kids and doesn’t put up with crap, but she also is very loving at the same time. She is very patient with my complete inability to speak to her, and my inadequacies. I feel like sometimes she is like my Grandma – today especially. I arrived and she asked why I was late. I told her the bus was a few minutes late. I realized later she was just giving me a hard time. Then, I went to change my clothes and put my jeans folded up right under my purse. I got back later to check and I couldn’t find my jeans. After looking around the floor for a few minutes, I looked up to find them hanging on the coat rack next to all the coats! One thing you must know about Romania is that they floor is a huge NO NO. I haven’t quite figured it all out yet, but I have noticed a few things. Examples: They believe that a woman who sits on the ground will freeze her ovaries, therefore you do not sit on the floor. You also NEVER walk barefoot on the ground. You always have socks. It is also very common to have indoor shoes – at first my workers were horrified that I only had socks around the house and they have now have a set of indoor shoes for me in the cupboard when I arrive. The kids get put into timeout when they sit on the floor. I get in trouble for setting my pants on the ground…I’m not sure what it is about Romania and the floor.
She is also the same worker who looked at the bottom of my pants and giggled because my pants are too long, and she was also the same one who rolled up my pant legs for me. She wouldn’t let me leave today without some lunch. And, today she asked me if I remembered the pictures of her boys and if I wanted to date one of them. HA, I love Romania, but not that much!
She let me take G outside for a little walk. It was a nice break from the little apartment and all the kids. We did all of the things little kids should do – picked leaves, skipped, and picked up bugs. He loved it.
The hospital was not nearly as successful. We went only to find our little boy asleep. We waited outside for a few minutes. Then, we peeked in the door to see the little family and saw a man in there, who could have been their father, so we didn’t interrupt them. After sitting there for a while, we were able to change our little boy’s diaper and he went to sleep again. So, we decided that rather than counting our hours to sit there, we would get some stuff done.
Even though it was the afternoon, it was only the beginning. We had to go to Carrefour just to get a few things (lightbulbs, rice, floss, things like that) and looked around at the mall. We grabbed some food at the mall in the food court. It was just a nice break from all of the craziness we experience everyday, so Kala and I started making a list of all the things we liked about Romania. We were feeling pretty good about our day. Little did we know what would happen only minutes later.
We got on the tram to head home. Here, you have to stamp your own ticket when you get on. It was so crowded by the ticket punch, we decided to sit down to put our bags down and then we would go punch them. We sat down for no longer than 10 seconds and I took both of our tickets and got up. I turned around to have a big man talking to me in Romanian asking me what I was doing. I didn’t know what was going on and couldn’t think so I was just speaking in English. I told him I was going to punch our tickets. He told me to stay there. I wasn’t sure if he was talking to me, so I stood there for a second but then tried to make my way again through everyone to punch. He looked at me again and told me to sit down. Kala and I have no idea what is going on at this point. All of the sudden two guys have come over and are now standing over us. They asked us what we were doing. I told him again we were just taking our tickets to get them punched because it was crowded before. Everyone in the tram is staring at us (roughly 50 people) and these guys are demanding to see our passports. I don’t ever carry my passport and I usually don’t have my copy with me, but last week I decided to repack my bag and include my emergency phone numbers and my passport copy in my little notebook. Tender mercy. At first, I told him I didn’t have my identification with me. Then, I remembered that I had repacked my bag. I pulled out my passport and Kala pulled out hers. They took the copies into the back for a few minutes. I am scared to death at this moment because I don’t know what is going on, I didn’t know what they were going to do to us, etc. When they came back, they told us we had to each pay 40 lei. Absolutely ridiculous! Seriously? We each had a ticket book full of unused tickets. For goodness sake just take our ticket books or something, but don’t rip us off like that. This is the kind of crap you hear about when they try to rip off Americans because they don’t know what is going on. A younger guy who had gotten on the bus the same time as us started talking to the “security” guys in Romanian. I didn’t know what he was saying at first, but then I realized he was defending us and yelling at the guy for trying to get money from us because we weren’t trying to scam them. Now, 3 guys are YELLING at each other in front of us, the entire tram is looking at us and we are pulling money out of our wallets because we just got ripped off. The two security guys and the guy next to us were yelling at each other for a good few minutes. After a few minutes, the guy turned to me and said “Sorry that was …………(insert your own few cuss words here).” It felt like eternity. I was so humiliated and angry that they had really just done this. And, to make matters worse, the guy straight up pocketed our money. Thankfullly our stop was the next one and we got off. Even more embarrassing was the fact that Kala and I were the only ones that had to get off at the next stop so everybody just watched us get off. I can’t wait to be home where I’m not a spectacle everytime I go somewhere. So, that list of things I like about Romania may have just gone out the window because at this point, home sounds like a million bucks.
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