Romania, part 2

Previously: part 1.
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People don’t realize that getting back into your car is much more difficult when you haven’t got one.

This takes place on our planned day of travel from Hungary to Romania, which would end our touring of Europe and start us living in Romania. Early that morning, we had visited two train stations in Budapest before finding the right one. Too late, unfortunately. Since we needed to get to Romania that day, we used the last day on our Eurail pass to get us to the closest Hungarian town to the Romanian border (Eurail is not accepted in Romania). We took a cab from the train station right up to the border. Not having enough money for him to take us across the border (more paperwork for him), we just got out and walked up to the queuing cars, pulling our luggage behind us. We waited in the line of cars until it was our turn at the guard booth. The border guards gave us strange looks and told us to go talk to the police at the station across the way. So, we went and saw the police, and all they told us was to get back in our car. “But we don’t have one”, we tried to explain to them. Tired of dealing with this unusual scenario, they phoned the border guards and told them just to process us through. So, we went back down, and walked our way into Romania. The picture below is me as we stopped in the middle between the two borders – “no man’s land”.



Our intended destination was a village that we had visited on our missions trips. It was called Vadu-Crisului, named for the river Cris on which it is located. We call it Vad for short. It is a small village, where everyone has a plot of land and some assortment of chickens, goats, and cows. Many people travel to nearby towns and cities to work during the day. The “big city” nearby was Oradea (see hand drawn map).



We got there just in time for winter. It wasn’t long before the whole village looked like this.



Yep, that snow fell and didn’t melt for four months. Definitely not what this boy from North Carolina was used to. It looks cool – but gets old really fast. Anyways, getting used to winter in Vad was a big hurdle. Can’t say I ever really got used to it. The houses don’t have central heating, so each room is heated individually with a large ceramic block furnace. They didn’t work as well as I would have liked, so I was constantly wearing multiple layers. Winter was not a very good time for me to do the meet and greet with Romania.

Justin and I shared a room that we rented from a family. With the parents, two boys, and two grandparents, that made eight of us in a rather small house. But we liked them and they liked us and we had a good time together. I remember playing chess and other games during the winter nights. Being around them really put me on the fast track with learning Romanian. The dad, Florin, was the only one who spoke English, so I was forced to use what little I knew to communicate with the rest of the family. I learned a lot in those first months.

How did we occupy our days there? Well, that’s another post. Stay tuned.