Weekend Trip to Piatra-Neamt!!

Frank, Dirk, and his colleagure and his girlfriend, and I took a roadtrip to Piatra-Neamt and its neighboring regions this past weekend. Again, beautiful pictures. I posted them on Picasa this time because I was getting a little frustrated with Yahoo! flickr. Eventually I'll replace photos from flickr to Picasa.

Some stories from the weekend...

Churches - we visited quite a few churches in the region, all of which were Eastern Orthodox, of course. There are not many catholic churches around here. And there are some significant differences between Catholic and Eastern Orthodox...you can google it to find out the details. One difference that I noticed was that there are no musical instrument used in Eastern Orthodix, at least from what I saw. Catholic churches normally have a pipe organ or something else to accompany the rituals, so I was quite surprised. And also, there is almost no seat inside the churches, and the space inside an Eastern Orthodox churches is much, much smaller than that of catholic churches. And most importantly, the paintings. Paintings on the walls. Look at the pictures.




Middle position - Frank, Dirk, and I were constantly fighting each other to avoid the "bitch seat" in the car. We ended up taking turns, but at night, we had the same issue with our bed (we only had one bed for three of us), and the same solution could not be applied. So we played the most classic test of luck on Earth to decide who gets to be in the glorious middle, and of course, Frank lost. So we slept in that order, but I was in constant fear of getting kicked out of bed by Frank while sleeping. And he almost did. I think next time I'll take the middle and kick both of them out for a good night sleep.




Flowers - I found out that my camera is extremely good at taking pictures of flowers.




Spineless Creature - We stopped by a restaurant, that has menus with English and French translations on them. But they must have used an online translation tool or something because the translation for mamaliguta was totally weird. Atole, maize, milksop, spineless creature, porridge. NONE OF THESE ARE ACTUALLY CORRECT! I had mamaliga before so I knew what it was, but when I saw the translation "spineless creature" it still made me hesitate to order it. I mean, what do you normally think of in your head for spineless creature? I thought of a jellyfish.

The menu -


The actual mamaliguta (the yellow stuff) -


Before I left for Romania, my good friend Kyle told me to be prepared to be stared at by a lot of people for really long time while I am in Romania. He was totally right. Because I'm an obvious foreigner to the people here, on the street, in the cafe or bars, or anywhere I go, I can sense the stare. I'm normally not so self-conscious so I don't care when people just stare at me for whatever reason, but to get that ALL THE TIME is something different. I used to do the same thing in Japan while I was growing up when I saw foreigners. Just stared at them thinking that they are somehow "different" from me. But as I grew up Japan became more and more touristic and it was not so weird to foreigners anymore, and I stopped seeing them as "different." But here, people have not gone through that process. They are not used to seeing foreigners. And therefore they need to observe...until they see no difference. And maybe when I come back here years from now...people won't stare at me anymore. MAYBE.