Author: glen

Hello everyone! This is Deb…So a bit about my placement….I work at Sacele Hospital which is about an hour away from where I live by the time I have caught 2 buses. It is quite a nice drive – my loved ones keep me company on the way to work by texting me. My bus is about a 10 minute walk from our house and I catch the number 23 at 0820.
Continue reading “Deb’s placement @ the hospital”

After a pretty crap buffet breakfast, we headed off to the botanic gardens in Cluj to try and find some of these painted park benches Larissa was keen to find. Upon getting there, we noticed that most of the benches were in fact new. Still, being the highly cultural people we are(n’t), we thought we’d look around and take it all in.
Continue reading “Road trip – Cluj, Romania – day 2”

We really wanted to go and see Cluj, a “student” city in the north-west of the country, around 4hrs or so from Brasov. Trains over here are, well, slow, so either we could get the 4hr train at 4am or if we left at a more reasonable hour, it goes to 6hrs or more. With our previous average experience on Romania’s train system, which isn’t cheap, we thought we’d hire a car, considering there was 4 of us – Larissa (California), Vicki (Melbourne & more recently, Cyprus), Deb and myself.
Continue reading “Road trip – Cluj, Romania”

2 more glorious days in Brasov since the last post. Seriously beautiful weather except when leaving the house. At that time, it’s freezing cold, there’s fog everywhere and just miserable. It’s not until about 10am or so does it lift, or in my case up in the mountains, not until you get above the fog does the day improve weather-wise.

Had another enjoyable day at the sanctuary. Not as much to do this week as I learned that 2 of the full-timers were off on leave for the past 2 weeks or so, so with them back, the volunteers aren’t pushed quite as hard and the days are shorter – 9 until 4 instead of 5:30-6.

We got to do a bit of exploring around the sanctuary today… absolutely stunning place. It’s easy to forget the scenery with how cool the wildlife is.

Part of the exploration included visiting the wolf enclosures. There’s at least 2 – one with 3 fairly young wolves and another with older, fully grown wolves. For the first 5 minutes of us being there. they hid in the foliage but after we were quiet and still, they became a bit more inquisitive about who we were and started play-fighting with each other. Fascinating animals – very quick across the ground and they all move in unison. Clearly the pack mentality is instinctive and not learned behavior.

We went out for drinks with 2 girls from the sanctuary and Lora from the hospital and met up with 2 locals plus friends. Was a fun chat with them all, particularly with the friends. One guy was from Budapest and his girlfriend from Brasov. Neither could speak each other’s native tongue so they have to speak English. Pretty amusing watching boyfriend/girlfriend struggle to
communicate with some words/phrases and have to refer back to a friend to find the English word they’re after!

Tomorrow I have the day off so I’m going touring with the girls from the sanctuary whilst Deb is at the hospital and then having dinner with her placement friends. Should be a good day!

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”