Maglavit: Day Two

Our second day in Maglavit was every bit as busy and exciting as the first. It began with a trip to the village community center, where we were treated to a special performance by Valentina’s Romanian folk dancing troupe. In their traditional costumes, the girls travel around the country and the region to compete with other folk dancing groups. Their recent performance in the nearby village of Călăfat attracted an audience of nearly three hundred people, and they are planning to attend a competition in Turkey later this year. Imagine how special we felt when they got up on a Saturday morning and donned their costumes just for us!





Me and Andreea with some of the dancers

We also got to see a short comic sketch, which was still quite funny even if we didn’t understand all of it. Andreea’s sister Cristina gave a hilarious performance as a crazy man with a serious stutter talking to an official in a train station.



At the community center, we also got the visit the local library, where Valentina is the librarian.

Next we met Andreea’s boyfriend Marius and his family at their house on the outskirts of the village. Marius’s father is a beekeeper, and he enthusiastically explained the inner workings of the colony to us.

Getting ready to see the bees!

Another bee-hat picture, just for fun.

Marius's father shows us a colony. We got to see worker bees, drones, and the queen, and we learned to recognize the difference between cells full of honey and cells with eggs in them. At this time of year, there were a lot more eggs than there were pockets of honey. The peak season for honey is later in the summer.

Pointing out the queen. She is larger than the worker bees and the drones, and she has a green dot on her head, which was put there by the laboratory where she was hatched. The detailed tour of the colony that we received reminded me of trips to the science museum in elementary school, only entirely in Romanian!

Rows of hives or stupi, as they are called in Romanian.

Like Ionel and Valentina, Marius’s parents grow all of their own food. They preserve and use most of the produce from their garden, and they sell the honey from their bees at local markets and through a company in Germany.



Our last stop in Maglavit was a picnic near the lake. The village lies right along the Danube, which marks the border with Bulgaria, and there is a large lake the branches off the river near Maglavit. We cooled off in the weedy lake before enjoying a feast of sarmale and mămăligă with smântană (sour cream) and homemade wine on the lakeshore. Sarmale and mămăligă are classic Romanian dishes. They are some of my favorites, and I’m pretty sure that they were a big hit with Mike as well.

Looking across the lake towards the village.

After our picnic near the lake, we had to catch the bus back to Craiova, and then a train to Bucharest. We were sad to leave Maglavit and our new friends there, but after seeing and doing so much in less than a day, we were exhausted. Andreea and Marius's families urged us to come visit again someday, and they sent us on our way loaded down with fresh produce, honey, and homemade wine and brandy. For our part, we didn't know how to thank them enough. Our visit to Maglavit was by far one of my favorite travel experiences. Talking with our hosts and translating was excellent practice for my Romanian, and in retrospect, it was far and away more rewarding than visiting castles in the mountains, as beautiful as they may be. We made some great memories, and I think that it was the perfect way to introduce Mike to Romania.

Maglavit: Day One

Neither of us was quite sure what to expect from our visit to Maglavit. I hoped that we would have a pleasant visit and get a taste of ordinary life in a Romanian village, something quite different from the choreographed version of Romania and the Dracula kitch that you get in touristy areas. The trip exceeded all of my expectations. The family that we stayed with could not have been more welcoming or generous, and we saw so much in the twenty-four hours that we spent in Maglavit that I’ve decided to break up the story into two posts.

We arrived in the village in the afternoon by bus, and Andreea's family picked us up. Andreea had to work in Bucharest until late, so we had several hours to tour the village and hang out with her family before she arrived. Our hosts were Ionel and Valentina, Andreea's parents, both of whom have lived in Maglavit their entire lives. Ionel works at the village's water treatment station, which was built several years ago with funding from the United States, and his wife Valentina runs the library at the village community center, in addition to teaching folk dancing classes and courses in Romanian Orthodox Christianity. We also met Andreea's sister Cristina, who attends high school in a larger village nearby and is a budding actress, and Valentina's nephew Andrei, whose mother is working in Italy.

After getting settled in and freshened up, we joined the family for a late lunch of delicious fresh fish from the Danube nearby followed by a tour of their incredible garden. The family grows all of their own food, from corn, cabbage, beans, and cherries, to chickens, rabbits, and pigs, and they preserve food from the garden by canning or freezing it, so that they can enjoy it all year round. We were amazed by the scope of the undertaking, and wondered how they had time to tend to the garden and its yield when both Ionel and Valentina have jobs. They explained that they have a lot of help from Ionel's parents who are both retired and live with the family. They also got a bit of help from us, harvesting cherries and strawberries for a delicious dessert!

Once we finished lunch and the garden tour, we piled into the car to tour the rest of the village. Our first stop was the Monastery. Maglavit Monastery has an interesting story. It was built in the 1950s in honor of Petrache Lupu, a shepherd who saw a vision of God while tending his sheep near Maglavit. At the time, the Communist Party's policy of atheism was taking its toll on the Orthodox Church, and after seeing God, Petrache Lupu began to speak out against the Communist Party's atheism and call on Romanians to return to the Church. The Monastery had fallen into disrepair, but was recently renovated with funds donated by controversial Romanian politician and football team owner, Gigi Becali.

Maglavit Monastery

The Monastery is home to a community of Romanian Orthodox nuns. Here one of them looks after the Monastery grounds.

A bell in the yard of the Monastery. After visiting the Monastery itself, we went to see the tree where Petrache Lupu saw God. The tree has become a pilgrimage site not unlike the spring at Lourdes, as its bark is reputed to have healing powers.

The next stop on our tour was the water treatment plant where Ionel works. It consisted of two of these little trailers, one for pumping and one for purification, and it was located next to the local football stadium, where Maglavit's team was practicing when we stopped by.

The pumping station

Our last stop for the day was at a fishery, which is run by Ionel and Valentina's cousins. We took a look at all of the different-sized fish in their tanks, and we got to throw them some food and watch the resulting frenzy of fins and tails.

Our hostess Valentina holding a live sturgeon.

Our host Ionel with a net full of fish trying to dive back into the water.

After a quick nap back at the house, we picked up Andreea from the bus stop around eleven, and headed back to the fishery for a late picnic dinner. Andreea's cousins picked out two huge fish from the tank and set to work killing and cleaning them.

Cleaning the fresh fish and prepping it for the grill.

We enjoyed homemade wine and plum brandy, and then the grilled fish with a delicious fresh garlic sauce. The night ended with a swim in the pool (not one of the fish tanks!) and an invigorating, multi-national game of keep-away, which ended at three in the morning!

Mike and I in the gazebo at the fishery where we had the picnic, which was decorated with traditional Romanian masks. I'm not sure which is scarier here, the mask or Mike's smile in this photo...

Craiova

I'm sorry for the dearth of posts lately! I'll do my best to make up for the long silence over the next few days. I have lots of pictures and stories to share.

About two weeks ago (I can't believe it's been that long already!), Mike came to visit from Portugal. As I may have mentioned, he's working at a research institute in Lisbon this summer. Thanks to a Portuguese holiday, he was able to take some time away from work to come to Romania for a long weekend. I must admit, I was a little nervous about my responsibilities as a tour guide. This was Mike's first visit to Romania, and I really wanted him to like it here! As readers of this blog will know, there are a lot of beautiful places to see in Romania, way too many to see in five short days. So I had some difficult decisions to make.

After going back and forth several times, I finally settled on an itinerary. Instead of going to see some of Romania's best tourist spots, I decided to take us off the beaten path a bit. My friend and hiking-partner Irina introduced me to Andreea and Marius whose families both live in the village of Maglavit on the Danube. We arranged for Mike and me to go and stay with Andreea's family and to visit Marius's parents as well. Partially motivated by a selfish desire to see something new, rather than visit the same (beautiful) places for the nth time, I also wanted Mike to get a feel for ordinary Romania and village life.

To get to the village, we had to take the train to Craiova and then take a bus from there. Seeing as we had to stop there anyway, I decided that we would spend a night in Craiova as well. I had never been to Craiova, and I had heard mixed reviews of it. Jenny described it as a charming little university town, while some of my other friends were not so enthusiastic.

Because of the mixed reports I'd heard about Craiova, I though it might help to have the right tour guide. I got in touch with a couple on Couchsurfing, Razvan and Alexandra, who agreed to give us a tour of their favorite spots in Craiova. After a few mishaps with the train, we finally made it to Craiova on Thursday evening. Raz and Alex picked us up at the train station, and after a quick stop at our hotel, we went out for a traditional Romanian dinner. We spent the evening talking and laughing, getting to know Raz and Alex and their friends, and exploring Craiova's central square. Raz and Alex both grew up in Craiova, and they are getting married in July! Alex recently won the "visa lottery" and the two of them are applying for an immigration visa to move to the United States next year. They were wonderful hosts, and getting to know them and hear about Craiova from their perspective made the trip truly delightful.

The next morning, we walked around Craiova by day and took some pictures before w caught the bus to Maglavit. We visited the art museum and a huge park in the southern part of the city. We were struck by the beautiful architecture in the city center, which was full of ornate old buildings and impressive churches.

The Prefectura, the seat of the county government.


Craiova's central square


From our walk in the park

C'est la vie dans la grand ville

Or "A sad, sad day in Bucharest"

For a week or so now, I've been looking forward to posting about cycling in Bucharest. I borrowed a bike from a friend of a friend, and I was loving it. It was so nice to ride around the city. Riding alongside the traffic was a little bit scary, but I wore my helmet and kind of enjoyed the rush. Mostly it was just great not to be dependent on the bus or metro lines or taxis. And Bucharest traffic can get pretty backed up at certain times of day, so it was great to speed past all of the waiting cars and buses and just get where I was going.

You may have noticed that I'm using the past tense a lot here. Today, I went out to get on my bike and go to the library, and it was gone. I had locked it up in the parking lot behind my apartment building last night. Sometime during the night, someone must have cut the lock. In retrospect, it seems so obvious that I should have found a way to lock it up inside the building.

As you can imagine, I'm pretty broken up about it. It wasn't my bike, and I feel terrible for losing someone else's bike. I'll have to pay for it now, which means that money will be tight for the rest of the summer. But really the money isn't that important. What's much worse is the guilt I feel over losing my friend's bike and the prospect of getting around Bucharest without a bike for the rest of my stay. It won't be a problem to take the bus and the metro or to walk, but I was having so much fun riding!

I talked to the police (in Romanian!) and filed a report. Hopefully they will find it, but you know how these things go... Wish me luck. As my junior high French teacher used to tell us "C'est la vie dans la grand ville"--that's life in the big city. And I suppose she's right. That's life. And it goes on. It doesn't stop me from feeling pretty terrible about it today, but I know that it's not the end of the world. These things happen, and I'm alright. Does it sound like I'm trying to convince myself of something? Maybe I am, but just a little bit.

Don't miss the (much more upbeat) post about Sulina below!

Sulina

On our second day in the Delta, we took a long boat ride out to the village of Sulina, where the Danube reaches the Black Sea. At the entrance to an important European waterway, Sulina was once a bustling international port. It once had a population of over 40,000 people of various nationalities and was the home of the European Commission of the Lower Danube, which regulated trade and travel along the eastern Danube. Today Sulina is much smaller, with a population of closer to 5,000 Romanians. Because of its rich history and its current isolation, Sulina feels like a ghost town.

From Crisan, it took an hour and a half to reach Sulina in a small motor boat.

Here I am enjoying the ride. It was a bit chilly in the morning, but it turned into a beautiful sunny day.

Although Sulina is no longer and important port, large ships still pass through on their way from Russia or Turkey to western Europe.

One of the fascinating things about Sulina is its three lighthouses. The newest lighthouse is perched at the point where the river opens out into the sea, directing ships towards the mouth of the Danube. Older lighthouses are further inland, illustrating how the Delta has grown over the years as the Danube continually deposits silt on its way out into the Black Sea.

Here is Sulina's second lighthouse, which is now about a kilometer from the sea.

Sulina's first lighthouse was built by the European Commission of the Lower Danube in 18--, and it is now several kilometers from the sea.

We visited the lighthouse, which is now a small museum, to take a look at its inner workings...


...and get a nice view of Sulina from above.

We also took a closer look at Sulina's beautiful Romanian Orthodox Church.

The last part of our visit to Sulina was terribly exciting for a history-nerd like me. We visited Sulina's cemetery. Part of the cemetery is still used today, but it dates back to Sulina's heyday as a port city. This means that in addition to recent graves, it has whole sections of graves marked in English, German, Italian, Greek, and Ukrainian from the 1800s. Many of the people buried there were sailors who died in or near Sulina, while others worked for the European Commission of the Lower Danube. Visiting the cemetery made me think of my friend Caitlyn, who studies English and American maritime history. It also made me want to get in the archives and uncover the story of the cosmopolitan Sulina of the 19th century--the story of the people buried in those forgotten graves. Maybe after Caitlyn and I are both finished with our dissertations, we'll have to work on a joint project on Sulina. What do you say, Caitlyn?

Delta Dunarii

Over my first weekend in Romania this summer (two weeks ago now, wow!), I went with Jenny and Fabien to the Danube Delta. I had never been to the Delta before, but I had heard from Romanians and foreigners alike that it is a must-see. The delta is a UNESCO protected wildlife area, and it is famous for its enormous variety of fish and birds. Over 300 different species of bird live in the Danube Delta for at least part of the year. Those of you who have ever witnessed my reaction when a bird gets too close to me will understand what this meant. The Delta was a potentially terrifying place for me! To my mingled relief and disappointment, we did not see nearly as many birds as I expected. And to my unqualified relief, they kept their distance!

In my opinion, one of the neatest things about the Delta is its remoteness. The few towns that are scattered throughout the wetlands can only be reached by boat. Large ferries, small motor boats, rowboats, and canoes carry people and goods along the various branches and canals of the Danube. The town where we stayed, Crisan, was a single row of houses stretching for seven kilometers with the main branch of the Danube on one side and marshes on the other side.

The scenery was beautiful, and we spent several enjoyable hours exploring the network of canals and lakes near Crisan.






Me, Jenny, and Fab squeezed into the boat for our tour of the Delta. Our guide, sitting behind us, made me miss Franklin from Manuel Antonio National Park. Viorel certainly knew his way around the Delta, and he was good at pointing out egrets, but he was nowhere near as knowledgeable or enthusiastic about the local flora and fauna as Franklin was.

An owl fast asleep on a branch.

A swan taking off. Its partner and their line of cygnets had just swum off into the reeds, a little too quickly for me to get a photo.


A floating gas station.

Unsurprisingly, the most common dish in the Delta consists of delicious, fresh fish. We had fish at nearly every meal, and we got lots of practice eating around the bones! Here Jenny and I show off our fish skeletons after our first dinner in Crisan:




On our second day in the Delta, we visited the old port city of Sulina--read all about it in my next post!

Bucharest Update

I'll have a few new posts on my trip to the Danube Delta up soon, but in the meantime, I thought I'd give everyone a quick update on what's going on right now. I've been in Bucharest for almost two weeks now. I've been staying with my friend Jenny, who I met in the language class in Brasov last year, and her husband Fabien. Jenny and Fab have been the best of hosts for the past two weeks. They've been so welcoming--they even let me join them for a holiday weekend at the Delta!

Staying with Jenny and Fab has made my transition to Bucharest life very easy this time around. Last week I found an apartment in a cool part of town with roommates who seem really fun. I also started my work in the archives and found a bike to ride around the city. Now that I'm all settled in, I'll be moving to my new place on Wednesday. I'm looking forward to exploring my new neighborhood and riding my bike to the archives. The research has been a bit slow thus far, but I have a bunch of new leads to follow up on this week, so I hope that it will improve very soon.

Those of you who have read this blog in the past will know that I occasionally write about being lonely, or homesick, and even downright miserable once. While I can't say that this trip has been entirely without little pangs of homesickness or lonely moments, I can tell you that it's been a whole lot better than past years. I've been really happy here over the past few weeks, and while I certainly miss my friends and family back home, I'm having a great time. I've been able to get in touch with a lot of my friends from last summer and the year before, and I've already made a few new friends. Staying with Jenny and Fab has helped a lot as well. Dinners with the two of them and going jogging and to yoga with Jenny have made me feel very at home here. And finally, the fact that Mike is also spending the summer abroad helps more than I had expected. It's wonderful to talk to someone who really understands the ups and downs of a long trip like this because he's going through the same thing.

I'm looking forward to moving into my new place, getting to know my roommates, and making more progress with my research. Oh, and if things weren't going well enough already, Mike is coming to visit a week from Wednesday! More posts (with pictures next time) on life in Bucharest and my travels in Romania to come soon!

Costa Rica Part III: Manuel Antonio National Park

After our adventures in Orosi, Mike and I headed back to San Jose to meet up with Rob and his girlfriend, Amy, and Mike's parents, Jerry and Carey. The following day we would all head to Manuel Antonio National Park on the Pacific Coast. Jerry and Carey were unfailingly gracious and generous hosts, and the trip was a great opportunity to get to know them and Rob and Amy better.

After a night in San Jose, we loaded up a rented SUV (mercifully equipped with GPS!) to drive to Manuel Antonio. As you can imagine, traveling with six people and all of our bags was a bit more complicated than the trip to Orosi and Cartago. Here's Rob helping tie some of the suitcases to the top of the car before we all piled in:



At Manuel Antonio, we stayed at a beautiful resort whose catchphrase was "Still more monkeys than people." Our room had an incredible view of the Pacific Ocean just beyond the swimming pool:



Apparently the hotel was owned by a former pilot, which explains the room made out of the inside of an airplane.



On our first day in Manuel Antonio, we went on a guided nature walk through the national park. Our guide, Franklin, was incredibly knowledgeable and passionate about the Costa Rican flora and fauna. He was an expert and finding interesting creatures in the trees and setting up his "spotters' scope"--a sort of short range telescope on a tripod--so that the rest of us could see them. He was so good at finding things, in fact, that we started to joke that the spotters' scope contained slides of various animals, so that he could point it off into the rain forest in any direction and cue up a slide of some bats or a sloth.

Franklin was the perfect guide, and he found all kinds of neat things for us to see, like these Capuchin monkeys:




A cleverly disguised "stick bird":



And several sloths (if you look carefully, you should be able to see it hanging from a tree in the center of the picture):



The following day, our accommodations lived up to their claim that we would see more monkeys than people there. We woke up to find a whole troupe of Capuchin monkeys frolicking on the pool deck below our room. They ran all over the place, climbing on the canopy over the bar and sliding down it, and scurrying up trees and jumping from one to the next. Two of them even hopped up onto the railing of our balcony where we sat watching them. They paused on the rail for a moment, regarded me and Amy, and seemed to decided that four feet was as close as they wanted to get!





After our exciting morning of monkey-watching, we took to the sea so that Rob could go scuba diving. The rest of us were slated to go snorkeling, but unfortunately the water was too rough to see much of anything, except for a large school of colorful fish than swam all around us for a few minutes. For the rest of the day, we just enjoyed relaxing in the sun on the boat. It was a lovely morning, and we made it to shore just as it started to turn a bit stormy in the afternoon. A few of the party got a bit sea-sick, but I'm not naming any names here... A few hours later, everyone felt well enough to enjoy the best key lime pie any of us had ever tasted!

On our last morning in Manuel Antonio, Rob and Amy took off to visit a village outside of San Jose for a day, and the rest of us enjoyed a zip-line canopy tour. The tour was the perfect blend of sight-seeing and adventure, as we cruised through the rain forest canopy on zip-lines and rope swings. Strapped into rock-climbing harnesses, we hiked up a hill to begin our journey. The tour consisted of a series of platforms high in the trees, which were connected by ten zip-lines, one "tarzan swing," two rappels, and one rope-bridge. Riding the zip-lines was exhilarating, and the beautiful rain forest canopy that we flew by made it even more incredible. For the last rappel, our guides thought it would be funny to surprise me with a little free-fall. They told me to put my hands behind my head, and they would control the rappel for me. As Mike and his parents will gladly tell you, I screamed like you wouldn't believe on the way down. The fall caught me a little off guard, and afterwards I was shaking (but smiling) for quite a while. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures from the tour yet, but if I get some later on, I'll be sure to post them.

The following day marked the end of the trip for Mike and me. We headed back to San Jose to fly back to Chicago, while the rest of the group prepared to continue their journey with a trip to the mountains to see a volcano and the famous cloud forest of Monteverde. The trip was an unforgettable experience, both in terms of what we got to see and do, and just as a chance to spend time with Mike's wonderful family. Thank you so much for inviting me to share in this incredible adventure!