bună ziuam (zee-wa)

{This was my rough draft/outline for when I went to Caleb's school and talked about Romania. I decided to post it here for journaling purposes. No critical reading here. This was my notes}

That's how you say good afternoon in Romanian. Romania is a county far away that is between in between Europe and Russia. I lived in Romania 13 years ago for 3 months. 

Its just a little bit bigger than Utah but in Utah we have almost 3 million people and in Romania they have 21 million people.

This is what their flag looks like.

Their money looks really cool and I brought some that you can pass around and look at.

They speak Romanian which is what they call one of the Latin languages so it is kind of like Spanish and french. If you were a boy in Romania your name would be something like Narcis, Nicoli, or Florin and if you were a girl your name would likely be Roxana, Mariana, or Adriana.

Romania is a really poor country so the people don't have a lot of things...

·         How many of you have a car at your house. How many of you have 2 cars at your house?

In Romania very few people have cars.

They have trains that go all over their country. Instead of planes to go from city to city they ride trains. (picture) In the city though you travel on trams that run throughout the whole city and then you do a A LOT of walking! If you are really rich you can ride in a taxi but most people don't have that kind of money.

·         In Romania they have really little refrigerators, In fact they probably are about as tall as...pick a student. 

They buy fresh food almost every day. Bread especially. Every morning if we wanted bread for breakfast we had to go to our little corner store to buy it and by the next morning it would be as hard as rock. There are little corners stores everywhere so its not hard to get bread. They don't have stores like Walmart but just all sorts of little stores all over. 

·         They have piatsa

If you want fruit and vegetable you have to go to the piatsa. Its a big outdoor market where they have fruits and vegetables that the farmers bring into the towns. Its a lot like our farmers markets but its the only place to buy fruits and vegetables in Romania. The town I lived in had 3 so they are not as common as the little stores.

·         Most of the homes in Romania are very small apartments built right on top of each other.

How many of you have your own room? In Romania most of the kids have to share rooms with all of their bothers and sisters and often times the whole family shares 1 room.

·         The food in Romania was not my favorite kind of food. They eat a lot of cabbage, sauerkraut, and they pickle everything! 

Some of their traditional foods are polenta - which is cornmeal but its made to be runny and then you add a cheese and sauce to it that is like sour cream.

Sarmale is also a big meal and it's a cabbage roll that has meat, sauerkraut, and tomatoes in it. 

They also drink carbonated water. It's hard to find a water bottle filled with plain water in it because they like their water with bubbles. They never drink water out of their sink. They have to buy their water. That is one phrase I will never forget - Izvorule alb which meant water without bubbles.

Don't worry though if you don't like their food they do have McDonalds in Romania but it's really expensive there! Something interesting is when you get a meal here in America the fries are large and the drinks are large but in Romania they are all small. I don't even think they had large fries on their menus.

I was only there for 3 months so I didn't get to see it but I heard that in the summertime when you go the piatsa there is watermelons piled in mountains and that every watermelon is the best watermelon you will ever eat!

·         Who has heard of Transylvania? How about Dracula?

Romania is rumored to be where Dracula is from, the castle Bran. Guess what? I got to go there! It's just a rumor though there was no Dracula living there!

·         I'm dressed up as a Romania Gypsy because Romania has the largest population of gypsies in the world but they are not like gypsies in the movies you see. Most of the don't tell fortunes its just a different race of people. 

They like to live in separate colonies and they have a king they all work for. Its easy to see Gypsy's from far away though because they have a little bit of darker skin and wear really bright clothes! Romanians and Gypsies don't get along very well and don't like each other very much. When I was all by myself in Romania the Romanians were not very nice to me because they thought I was a gypsy. 

·         Even though the people live in not very nice houses, everywhere in Romania they have huge old churches!

They have churches that are hundreds of years old and they are so pretty! They even have big government buildings that are huge and pretty like this one here. Show book. That is very much what Romania is like. The government is very corrupt and run and by not good people. They build really pretty buildings for themselves while the people are left to be hungry and live in old broken homes.

·         How many of you have heard of communism? It's a type of government that collects all of the money and food then gives it back to everybody. Its suppose to make it so everyone has the same amount of things. The goal is that there is no rich but there also isn't any poor people either. The problem is that there are always corrupt people and it doesn't work out the way they say it will. 

Romania was one of the last communist countries to go to a democracy, which is like our country, and that only happened in 1989. That was only 22 years ago and so their government is still trying to learn how to work. I've heard its getting much better since I was there. When I was there communism had only fallen 10 years before and the people were still very poor, very suspicious, and very sad.

I have some pictures here that I bought off of an artist in the city because they reminded me of how the Romanian people looked - kind of sad. Not like how we smile when we take our pictures.

(If time tell the flower story)

So now I want to tell you about why I went to Romania. When the old communist government was in power they made it so people had to have a lot of babies but then they were so poor so they couldn't take care of their babies. This meant that there were a lot of kids that were getting abandoned on the streets. So they made orphanages for these children. In the town I lived in there were 13 orphanages for all these babies that didn't have a Mom, Dad, Aunt, Grandma to take care of them. I went over to try to help these babies for 3 months. 

Each day I would go to the orphanage in the morning and I would just hold, play, and rock the babies.