Month: October 2010

Not a whole heap to report over the past couple of days.

Deb had another good shift at the hospital on Friday while I had the day off to recoup from being sick. It also gave me a chance to sort some stuff out with our accommodation. On Monday I’m going with the projects abroad director here to get a new mattress which should improve our sleeping significantly.

Continue reading “Brasov day 8”

Sorry for the lack of updates recently. We’ve been both sick and busy – not necessarily a good combo.

So from our last post, we’d had our first day and we’ve had a couple since. I’m (Glen) writing up a big post for the work with the bears, but it’s not ready yet, so I’ll just go over some basics for now. Click the link below for a fairly long write-up…

Continue reading “Brasov – day 6”

Deb & I will write a more detailed post when we get a chance, but for now we’ll just say we both survived and enjoyed our first day at our placement. it’s pretty hard work and certainly makes home life seem pretty easy & nice in comparison.

Will write more tomorrow!

This place is a time trip… In a good & not so good way.

My initial impressions of Romania are this:

• they build things well, just don’t maintain them. So many houses, buildings, roads, basically you name it – are just falling down or have been abandoned. But right next door, they’re in the process of building something new. It seems people just say, “stuff it – too hard, let’s just start from scratch” and then go again.
• it’s a big case of the “haves” and “have nots”. There’s some serious money in this country, it’s just that so few have it. Some of the houses we drove past, particularly in the tourist mountain areas, there are some enormous private houses – 4 stories with amazing views. And that’s just their holiday house. But across the road from that, you have a street stand by some poor old man/woman who has a bunch of fruit/veggies/honey/flowers/home made wine that they’re trying to flog to people on their way back from a weekend in the mountains.
• there’s a big police presence – we’ve seen a heap of police cars everywhere we’ve gone, which is both comforting and not at the same time. We’re telling ourselves it’s just because they want to keep things nice. Admittedly, all we’ve seen them do is give speeding fines – although we’re not sure why… it appears to just do what you want. The car ahead of you is going too slow? Beep them and they’ll move over to the shoulder and pass them – 1 lane is plenty!

Continue reading “Brasov, Romania – day 2”

Well we made it finally! The flight from Stuttgart to Bucharest was pretty easy and we were picked up at the airport by a Projects Abroad guy named Daniel. I was so hoping we’d be picked up in a Dacia Sandero (local car – Top Gear joke), but sadly no, just a VW Golf.

His english was pretty good, so he was able to tell us a lot about what parts of the country we were going through.
Continue reading “Buna Romania!”