Tag: family travel

In which we make a shift in plans and head for Spain

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The initial plan for our break between Romania and Ireland was to travel to India. I thought we’d have a good four weeks there, but the Romanian refused to give us the dates of winter break until after we’d arrived, so we learned late that it would only be two and a half. When we were in Budapest we tried going to the embassy to get a visa, only to be met by a malodorous clerk who informed us, after an hour of waiting in a small cheerless room with a random table of Ayurvedic products for sale, that it would take five weeks. Then when I looked at tickets to a visa on arrival airport instead, they came to about $2000/each, putting them well out of the budget for this year. In hindsight, what I should have done was get a year long visa while in the States and then buy tickets the minute we had our schedules in hand. Live and learn, and perhaps we can make it happen next year with better planning.
We decided instead on a shorter hop to Spain, and using one of the discount airlines in Europe (the somewhat off-color named “Wizz Air,” not joking) got a ticket from Romania to Valencia for $31 each. We pulled into Valencia in the evening, and even after the sunset the warm air was a relief from the frozen air of Timisoara we left behind. I’ve learned to book a certain type of neighborhood for us now – one that’s closeish to downtown, not in the main tourist area, residential, but still with shops and restaurants nearby, honestly similar to our own neighborhood at home. Here in Valencia, that neighborhood was Russafa. It was once a downtrodden area, but has been revitalized thanks to an influx of artists and city planning which has created more pedestrian friendly zones.

Russafa market


The next morning Eric picked up a plate of incredible pastries from Dulce de Leche, a delicious coffeeshop/bakery down the street and along with coffee at home we had a breakfast feast. It was a rare rainy day in Valencia, so with our trusty Tokyo Disney umbrellas in hand, we made our way Eastward to the Jardin de Turia park and then the Science museum. The Turia river had run through the city of Valencia, but after recurrent flooding was diverted and the riverbed converted to a large green space that snakes through the center of the city and ends in the City of Arts and Sciences buildings, including the science museum, aquarium, theater, and Imax among others.


The buildings are a futuristic collection of metal and glass by Santiago Calatrava and Felix Candela. Locals hate them because they cost a fortune to maintain and are in continuous repair. The project also came in far over budget and is a symbol of government financial waste. As a tourist, however, I have to say that they are impressive.



The science museum was, well, adequate. Having been raised on excellent science museums, and having the highly interactive Denver one at home, I expect more than what we saw here. There’s a section called the Exploratorium, and it has a collection of the exact same experiments as the one in  San Francisco, where I spent many happy hours as a kid and, well, also as an adult. The activities are spread out in awkward ways and not well explained at all, a true disappointment when you know the magic and wonder of the original.. An exhibition on Tesla detailed his unappreciated discoveries and feud with Edison, who comes out of the whole business looking like a real jerk, but there was little to interact with and the exhibit was mostly a lot of text on the walls of the museum. Exhibits are dual language for the most part, and we used Google translate to fill in the rest with mixed results. My favorite one was where they had chicken eggs in various stages of hatching. I’m not sure, though, what happens to the chicks afterwards. I suspect a well fed reptile nearby. A pleasant way to spend a rainy afternoon, in all, but I don’t know that I’d recommend this museum as a must-see. Had the weather been more amiable, exploring the park would have been nicer. 

I think he’s a little too big for the pouch anymore…


We hopped a bus home and left the kids to relax while Eric and I went out for happy hour. We’ve been doing this a fair amount on our travels to everyone’s benefit. The kids get to watch TV, we get a little time alone, then all join up for dinner, happy for the breaks. I would have thought that by now, the kids would have learned how to walk, but they are incapable of it. Always stepping on my feet, or suddenly cutting in front of me and causing me to trip and fall, or pushing me into the street, or walking in front of me and then stopping abruptly, or even running into people on the street because they aren’t watching where they are going. Sometimes I slow down a bit to let them get some space, to no avail as they also slow down and remain six inches in front of my feet. It is a full time labor of attention to simply walk with them and a relief to get a break for an hour and just enjoy the ambiance of walking around a city without it feeling like an obstacle course. 

I knew that restaurants opened late in Spain, but I wasn’t really ready for the reality of it! Many don’t open their doors until 8 pm, and even more don’t open until 9! It took some getting used to, but our schedules have adjusted to this eating schedule a bit – we wake up around 8 am, putter around until 10, have a late breakfast, late lunch, snack and then dinnner. The weather is mild and even at 9 pm you’ll see a lot of families out and about.

The next day I was forced to stay at home for the morning due to some more poor planning on my part, namely waiting until the last minute to order our rail tickets which have to be delivered to a physical address. Eurail passes are in general not that great of a deal anymore, unless you happen to have kids and then you get a “kids travel free” pass where you only pay the reservation fee for the leg of the journey, so we still opted for them. My forced torture of being home alone, no bickering of children, being stepped on, having to answer constant questions, just…peace and quiet. I don’t know how I survived it, but readers, I perservered. I met up with the kids and Eric later for some delicious veggie paella and we spent the rest of the day ambling about the neighborhoods, with the orange tree lined streets. Fun fact: Valencia oranges were actually developed by a Californian agriculturalist and have nothing to do with Valencia, Spain. 

Battle of the Graffiti


Valencia overall is a wonderful smaller city to enjoy and explore! It reminded me a lot of cities like Portland, Denver, and Austin in a way – not as massive as the level A cities, but more inimitable and full of character. 

-s

In which I say goodbye to Romania, and have one last madcap adventure

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It’s our last few days here in Romania. We packed up all of our stuff we wanted shipped to Ireland, since we’re traveling for 2 weeks before we get there. It all fit into seven smallish boxes that we took to the one post office in town that handles international packages. To demonstrate our ridiculous helplessness at basic life skills here, we had four helpers to assist us mailing packages. Three of these were Eric’s delightful students here, and the fourth was Rob, who has become our guide here of “How to manage Romania as an American.”


They led us through the process of filling paperwork, then giving it to the clerk to check before sealing packages, then weighing them, getting the paperwork stamped, putting the paperwork into little pouches and sticking those on the boxes. While this was happening I heard a sound that instantly took me back to childhood, a whirring, clicking, beeping noise. I followed the sound and it took me to…a DOT MATRIX PRINTER. I stared at the relic, remembering hours of lining up the dots, then carefully tearing the edges off at the perforations.  


We followed with a lunch at a local restaurant, where we had lively discussions about the new Gilmore Girls revival, the Romanian job market, and how to steal cable. 


It’s no secret I wasn’t all that excited about Romania when we first found out we were coming here. Romania? I thought, picturing dreary landscapes with concrete blocks for miles, lines to pick up milk and eggs, and scheduled power outages. People shuffling around despondently, grandmothers with scarves tied over their ears and men with cylindrical furry hats. And when we first got here, it seemed that this would indeed be the case. 
But over time, as we learned the layout of the city, where to find things, how to do things, and I was able to let go of some of my own doubts and fears, it became increasingly warm to us. Unsurprisingly, people react to who they see, and the more open and friendly we were, the more we got in return. 

We learned so much about the world of Communism and dictatorship, what that really felt like, and the lasting impact it still has here.

Things change when you are able to build community somewhere, which makes anywhere seem like home. I’ve had more lonely and dreary times in some of the world’s best cities than I’ve had here. 

And I leave with a feeling of sadness that we’re not staying for longer to let that community grow, as it feels we’ve only just started. I’m sure we’ll find the same, and even more in Ireland as the kids will be in school and, well, we can speak the language. 

Timisoara occupies a warm place in my heart, and I’m happy that we ended up here after all. Had we been in a more Westernized city, I don’t know that we would have been able to make the same connections that we did. 


I’ll share one last story from Timisoara here, something that just wouldn’t have happened back home. The kids and I had gone to see Rogue One (excellent, btw) and hopped in a cab to take us to Viniloteca. Eric was working as assistant bartender for the night, and when we got there, he was flitting about from table to table with a frantic energy. I had run out of cash, so grabbed a 10 lei note from Eric, ran back out to pay the taxi and headed in. Lots of people were there for the amusement of watching Eric work, including many of his students. We chatted with some friends who were there, and I had a nice conversation about the differences in hospital organization with a young medical student. Eric asked me then to take pictures to document his night of servitude, and I reached in my pocket for my phone. It wasn’t there. I then searched my backpack, the kids’ pockets, and my pockets again, but to no avail. 
I used Eric’s phone to track it, and saw that my phone was making its merry way around Timisoara, having some fun at the mall, then heading back to city center. Clearly, I had left it in the taxi. I rang the phone remotely, hoping the driver would find the phone and bring it back, and a few times the taxi did seem it was heading back my way, only to turn in a different direction. Emile, upon hearing my plight, tried to call the taxi company to see if they could track down the driver, but was told “this is not possible.” A few other people tried to call also with the same result. At one point I had a few people clustered around me, watching my phone’s progress around the city – it had become a bar-wide event. The battery indicator of my phone, which shows up when you’re tracking it, was at an unnerving 8%. There was only one thing left to do, which was track it down ourselves. Three of Eric’s students, Dena, Roxy, and Roxi decided to help me out. They called another cab that was there in five minutes. In the meantime we changed into trenchcoats and fedoras so as to feel like we were truly private detectives on a mission, well, at least mentally we did. “Who’s going to yell ‘follow that cab’?!” I asked the girls. 
We got in the cab, they told the story to the taxi driver and while tracking my phone yelled out streets for him to go to. He picked up his phone and called the dispatcher to try and call the taxi, but that driver never picked up. I would refresh the screen, call out the street “Tigrelui!!” The girls would respond in unison “tigrelui street!” And then the driver would say “tigrelui!” Into his cell phone, talking to the dispatcher, he too now fully invested in the hunt. We followed my phone around, the battery becoming ever more depleted, until it stopped moving on a small side street. We drove down the street and off to the side, in a small lot, was the taxi I had taken! The interior dome light was on and I yelled excitedly “That’s it!” The girls and I piled out of the car and surrounded the taxi with the stolen goods. I peered in the passenger window and spied my phone on the seat “There it is!” I couldn’t believe we’d actually tracked the phone down. 
I tried to open the passenger door but it was locked. The driver got out of the car, looking incredulous at being tracked down. He stammered some lame explanation of planning to give the phone back tomorrow, which was clearly a lie. The girls and he bantered in Romanian before he finally got into the car and picked up my phone, continuing his false excuses. He gave it one last longing look then opened the passenger door and handed it back to me. We scrambled back to our car, hooting in exhiliration. On the way back home, after dropping the girls off, the taxi driver told me how happy he was we got the phone back, which was sweet. I paid him double the meter reading, a whole $15, which was a small price to pay for getting my phone back, and in all what ended up being a fun adventure. (Not that I wish to replicate the experience!)

Us, trying to look like badass detectives


I recently changed the settings on my phone’s Weather app, deleting some cities which we didn’t need anymore – Tokyo, Saigon. My kids saw what I was doing and said to me, “Make sure you always keep Timisoara on, Mom, because it’s another place we’ve called home.”
And you know what? I think I will. 

At the airport, saying goodbye with Romanian wine


-s

In which the Vatican doesn’t quite have the intended effect on our family

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Our first Italian train was from Milan to Rome, on the excellent Freciarossa. Clean, modern and fast, we made the trip in just under four hours. A friendly taxi driver took us to our Air BnB, this time centrally located just next to the Pantheon.


Eric and I left the kids at the flat and walked about the streets, which are charming everywhere you go. Narrow cobblestoned pathways with small shops and restaurants around every corner. Every few streets they would open up into a plaza with a statue or obelisk of some sort. We figured the kids could use a little more time alone, so we stopped in for a few glasses at the wine bar across the way. Alex, the host at the wine bar was affable and knowledgeable about different types of Italian wines and brought us a few to try. He then told us about a wine called “Amarone,” and said that it was one of the richest and tastiest red wines they had, but only to be had at the end of the evening else one’s palate would be spoiled. After a couple glasses of other reds, we had a small taste and thought it was delicious, so asked for a glass. Alex hesitated a bit and said, “A glass? You are sure?” Yes, we’ll split one, we replied. The glass came and was shared, and it was entirely delicious. What was not delicious was our check which came to near 70 Euros. We went back the next day and learned that a glass of Amarone cost 30 Euro! We’ve seen bottles for sale elsewhere that are around 300 euro, so it’s just a very expensive wine overall. Well, at least it was tasty and honestly, had I known the cost I never would have ordered it, but can now say I’ve had $300 wine!

Early morning light in Rome, omnipresent smokers


The next day was planned by the boy. I’ve found that the kids do well with travel planning but need a real map and book to do so, which were kindly lent to us by our friend Rob. The plan was to walk south to see the old city wall, and then follow it westward to the Vatican to see St. Peter’s cathedral and the Sistine chapel. We committed to not using our phones to navigate, only maps and street signs. We quickly learned that the signs in Rome may leave out some critical turns, and we got a bit lost! We started just asking people ways to known landmarks. Our first stop was the Campo de Fiori, a former flower field now the site of a bustling market. We arrived with anticipation, perhaps we would pick up some fruit and cheese for a snack, and found the plaza entirely deserted. The boy asked a local vendor, “Scuza, where is the market?”and we learned that on Tuesdays, the market is closed. Ah. We found the church of Santa Maria and popped i to enjoy the detailed stone flooring and gilt ceiling work.

Onwards south we went, through narrow winding lanes that climbed upwards.  Worried we were getting lost and the path to the Vatican the boy had planned was unreasonably long, we stopped at a corner to catch our breath and consult the map. We had just decided to descend when two friendly walkers came upon us and asked if we needed help. They told us that our initial plan was actually a lovely walk, and if we made it up to the top we could see the firing of the noon cannon. So we continued on, Eric yelling at the girl periodically to stay out of the way of oncoming traffic, and found ourselves at the plaza Garibaldi overlooking all of Rome. Eric and I had a cappuccino whille awaiting the cannon fire. Once my eardrums stopped echoing after the blast, we went down the other side of the hill, found a simple lunch place and then headed to the Vatican. 

When the kids take pictures, they manage to make sure you have the most unflattering expressions

The museums of the Vatican are massive, and contain room upon room of antiquities Greek and Roman. Every room is decorated with opulent gilding on the doors, the ceilings with elaborate paintings, and the overall effect is rather overwhelming. I think I’m supposed to be awed, but mostly it makes me think of the extravagance and wealth of the Catholic church, and how it seems hypocritical given that there’s something about rich men and camels and needles in the Bible, but what do I know. By far our favorite was “The map room,” a long hall with frescoed maps on either side.


The Sistine chapel is truly beautiful – no pictures allowed inside. We’ve all seen the closeup shot of Adam and God, but I didn’t know that the entire rest of the chapel is decorated with frescoes as well. Michelangelo did a series of them telling the story of Creation, each more detailed than the last. One wall is a bright fresco of the Last Judgement, demons and hell in grotesque details that was truly shocking for the time. His painting was, in a way, a rebuke of the church’s control and an expression of artistic freedom- he had been hired to paint pictures of Popes and saints, and instead used his art to depict something quite different, to tell the story of God instead of painting hagiographies of Popes past. 
Our feet were quite tired by the end of this, and my phone pedometer told me we’d walked eight miles already. One last stop at St. Peter’s Cathedral, the largest church in the world. It was time for vespers and the choral singing lent a hallowed air to the cathedral, though again, it’s hard for me not to feel a sense of overdoneness with all of the grand churches. The reverent purpose of the church is also lost on the girl, who exited Vatican city and came up with this sacrilegious joke: “What’s Jesus’ least favorite letter? A T!” We shushed her and told her not to say it too loudly, at least until we were out of hearing range of the Pope.

Our next day was another big touring day, this time with a later start. We walked down to the Colosseum, excited to see the grand spectacle. One advantage of travelling in the off season is that there are no lines to get into any of the main tourist sites in Italy, as opposed to summer where you could end up waiting three to four hours just to get a ticket. We really had wanted to do the extra tour where you could see the upper level and the basement, but when I went to purchase, the ticket seller said, “All English tours are sold out for today. There is a Spanish tour at 1 and two Italian tours in the afternoon.” Eric and I looked at each other, shrugged, turning the corners of our mouths downward in a “what the hell” expression, and signed up for the Spanish tour. Between the two of us, I figured we’d have enough Spanish to figure it out. The kids were free for both entry and the tour, so it wasn’t a big loss on that end. 
We entered at first to the grand arena, thinking of the brutality that occurred there, imagining tens of thousands of Romans cheering and jeering a bloodbath below. 


It was time for our tour and we hurried off. Our tour guide was an animated young man, and more often than not we were grateful for the hand gestures to help us understand what he was saying. I mean, I can get myself through a train station and even a hospital in Spanish, but understanding a tour about the construction of Ancient Rome is another thing. The Hypogeum, or basement, was really interesting – the old stones and a reconstructed wooden contraption to show how animals and props were brought out onto the stage from below, a water gutter as well for drainage. Fun fact: before the basement was constructed, the floor of the Colosseum was solid enough that they would fill it with water for aquatic competitions! Boats would be floated in and grand maritime battles were staged, all in the space of the arena. Much of the Colosseum was made out of valuable marble and travertine, all of which were stripped away for use in other buildings when the arena fell into disuse, leaving only the stone foundations. 



 Our tour guide kept talking about huevos… huevos this huevos that. Eric and I wondered what it was about eggs that was so important to ancient Romans. Perhaps it was a slang word for something that we weren’t quite getting, I mean there were a lot of male gladiators. Near the end of the tour, I realized he was saying “juegos”! Aha! Games!! Given this, I think we probably got about 40-50% of the tour, though I’m not sure if I understood him correctly when he talked about the ancient audience taking pictures and tweeting about the fights. Every now and then I’d stop to translate for the kids, sure that it was something like a game of Telephone,, where little of the original information reaches the final recipient.
Our last day in Rome was one of wandering and souvenir shopping, more meandering the small streets.  Campo de Fiori was operational, and we picked up fresh tomatoes, cheese, pesto and some bread for lunch. 

 We found our way past the Trevi fountain again, then onto the Spanish steps and an easy stroll back home, not before stopping at the magical, magical place that is the Lindt store. Bins and bins of chocolate truffles in whatever flavor your heart may desire.  My heart desired almost all of them, except for cherry because that is revolting.

In the morning, we had one last stop at the Pantheon, the boy’s favorite place to visit, before heading out to Venice. Imagine, a building that is 2,000 years old, still standing and in use as a worship site as per its initial intention. 


-s

In which we find that we quite like Milan

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Eric had a trip to Bologna lined up to visit colleagues there, initially planning on a five day trip as he had to teach on December 2nd. Of course, this being Romania, it was announced a few weeks before that classes would be cancelled on that day as the previous day was a holiday for Romanian National Day. We looked for cheap flights to Italy to leave the week prior and found that we could fly one way into Milan for €30 per person. Done.
Milan is not thought of as a big tourist destination, lacking the old world charm of Rome and the tourist draw of the Venetian canals. Even the tour books say bluntly “Milan is not a city that rewards casual strolling. Take the metro.”It’s known as more of a business and fashion capital, but is becoming more popular. We landed in the afternoon into Bergamo airport, one hour away by comfortable shuttle bus. Looking up directions to our Air BnB, I anticipated a bit of a walk from the center of town. This is where paying attention to the scale of a map is important. We ended up needing a subway ride to the end of the line, then a walk through a somewhat desolate area. A somewhat derelict building lay ahead, and I found myself hoping that it wouldn’t be our place. As we walked up a dog began to bark menacingly at us behind the gate, and a small handwritten “bnb” sign on dirty paper taped to the black iron. My heart sank, wondering what we would find inside. Thankfully, the dog was actually quite friendly and the space itself was large and clean and even had a piano, though it was rather far from the city center. 
We found our way to a nearby restaurant at 7:15 and walked in, finding the space bright and cheerful. “Do you have reservations?” No, we didn’t, so she gave us a concerned look and said that she had a free table until 8:45. An hour and a half for dinner seemed preposterous to us, but now seeing how the Italians eat super leisurely, I can understand her concern. The boy, excited to see gnocchi on the menu ordered those. In a few minutes a hot basket of fried dough pieces arrived! Delicious, but not the gnocchi we had been thinking of! Turns out, of course, gnocchi here can just mean “little pieces” or dumplings, not the potato gnocchi we think of. We munched away on the happy surprise. The girl had the first of many caprese salads whe would eat on this trip.  We noticed all the other Italians finishing their meals with a bright yellow liquid. “What is that?” We asked our waitress. “Limoncello! I bring you some as a gift.” Tasty stuff, and like the liquid version of lemonheads candy as was described to me later. We finished our meals with this whenever possible and I highly recommend you do the same if offered the chance.
 I had worried that we would find Italians to be unfriendly based on what I had read, and I can say that this is categorically not the case. Of course, I have a different standard for immediate friendliness based on my time in Romania, but again, if you smile, say a few words in Italian, and aren’t generally rude, I’ve found that Italians are generally kind and playful and most importantly, sweet to my children. 
The following day was our big tourist one. We started off by a visit to “The Last Supper.” I wasn’t expecting much to tell you the truth. I mean, we’ve all seen pictures of this work of art so much we can recognize it anywhere. But much like seeing “Starry Night” in person, it is a different experience to be there. The painting occupies an entire wall of the chapel, and was painted over a long period of time so that da Vinci was able to perfect the details. Unfortunately, this meant that it was not done as a fresco and thus has degraded quite a bit. Frescoes are painted onto wet plaster and have great longevity, appearing brilliant centuries afterwards, but paint on a surface fades and wears away. You can still see the expressions on the faces, ranging from anger to sadness to disbelief, at the moment Christ tells his followers that one of them has betrayed him.  I did get a giggle out of the fact that the doorway right below Jesus had been enlarged at some point, and the workers failed to notice that they sliced away his feet in the process. I can only imagine the conversation between the priest and the contractors after that happened. “Salvatore, what have you done with the feet of our Lord?!” “Father, you said you wished for a taller door, I have given you a taller door, who needs feet anyway, he is going to ascend to heaven soon.” After which Salvatore quietly disappears. 


There’s a well known science museum in Milan, and as it is steps away from there, we stopped in. They had a long display of da Vinci’s machines brought to life from drawings, and we spent a lot of time to see if we could figure out how they worked, just amazed by the ingenuity and brilliance of da Vinci. They also have incredible exhibitions on everything from Electricity to Steel, World’s fairs to Reusable Energy. We simply did not have enough time here!


Afterwards we headed out for a bicycle tour I had arranged before we arrived. I love bicycle tours, as you get to see so much of a city and spend time with a local resident as well. My favorite sight was the “forest apartment” buildings: 



Trees on every level chosen by arborists, maintained by the buildings. In the fall they have turned lovely shades of red and orange and are striking against the skyline. Unsurprisingly, this is a plum piece of real estate and inhabited by the Milano elite. Then a roll through the fall-orange central park and the main palace in which some bizarre silent crowd gathering was happening. A woman with a headset guided a large group all wearing headphones to move from one side to the other, raise hands, lower them, put on vests… It remains a mystery to us and to our guide, who was of no help in solving it.

We ended at the Duomo, a striking baroque cathedral which is large, ornate, and made of such delicate pink marble that some part of it is always in disrepair and scaffolding is ever present. Each of the hundreds of statues on the spires must be replaced every fifty years or so, ensuring that generations of sculptors should be employed for years to come. The sun had dropped by this time as had the temperature, and we were all chilled before we got back to the bike depot and off our bikes, into a warm place for dinner and then the train trek home. 

Milan is definitely worth a visit of at least a few days! I would have liked more time at the museum and som etime to shop, as the merchandise was enticing. Next time, perhaps?
-s

In which we make key lime bars and learn something in the process

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We get a lot of questions about how we’re educating the kids. Aren’t you worried about them falling behind in school? How do you know they’re learning anything? Do they need to prove anything to the school when they return? (The answer to that last one is no) And sure, we’re doing some academic formal schooling, but sometimes the lessons are those that come from just being somewhere else. 
Yesterday, the boys went off to a yoga class and left the girl and I for a little time alone. After a bit of reading, we thought we’d engage in the classic teenage banter of “I don’t know, what do YOU want to do?” Mulling over the park (too cold), the mall (uh, no), we settled on baking. Initially, I chose a salted caramel brownie recipe but then the girl saw a link for key lime pie, her and her brother’s favorite. I thought we should make it a little easier and go for bars instead, and off we went to the grocery store, shopping list in hand. Limes, butter, eggs, gingersnaps, cream cheese, sweetened condensed milk. A few veggies for dinner too.

She insisted on putting the coin in for the shopping cart herself. Here, the carts are chained together to prevent theft, and to use one while you’re in the store you insert a 50 cent coin that you get back if you reattach them. 

We got into the store, crowded as usual, and set about to find our ingredients. Limes were the first one. Would they be next to the lemons and other citrus fruit? No. Near the refrigerated section? No. Would we have to abandon our mission? No, we kept looking and found them tucked in between the ginger and the pomegranates, in what I think is the “exotic fruit” area. 

Butter, eggs,cream cheese were no difficulty. The next barrier was the gingersnaps. Walking through the aisles, none were to be seen. We thought, maybe we’ll substitute with graham crackers, but again no familiar boxes of grahams, even after studying the pictures. We settled on McVitie’s digestives, a crumbly round biscuit that resembles graham crackers, though doesn’t have their cardboard like properties.  
Then came the sweetened condensed milk. I actually thought this wouldn’t be a problem since it seemed to me preserved canned milk would be common for a prior Communist state, and headed for the packaged milk section to look for the familiar cans of Carnation. Of course, none were to be found. We searched the baking aisle, the sweets aisle (all on opposite sides of the store) and then one last search in the milk section. In the States, if a certain store doesn’t have an essential ingredient I’m looking for, I tend to do one of two things. Either I give up on that recipe for the day or I just get in my car and drive to another store where it will be and I can be out in five minutes. Here, it’s a bigger deal. If we wanted to go to the bigger store, at the mall of course, it’s a half mile walk and far more crowded. It would take us an hour. The girl, undaunted, was all for the extra effort of going, just to be able to make our recipe. One more desperate scan in the milk aisle showed me two bottles that looked like they had condensed milk. Was it sweetened? Who knows – the nutritional info label, in German, was covered up by a sticker in Romanian that I couldn’t translate. 
We made our way out of the store, not before being veggie shamed by the checkout lady as I thought the cucumbers we got were priced by the number, not kilo, and got home. 
The milk was just evaporated milk as it turns out, so I looked up how to make it into sweetened condensed, which involves a little sugar and and a lot of simmering. While that was happening, the girl got the other ingredients going until it was time to crumble the cookies. Lacking a food processor or blender, we crumbled them by hand until we had a relatively fine meal, using the flat side of a meat pounder for the rest. 

We don’t have a 9×11 pan, but do have a tart pan so used that instead. No mixer to beat the cream, so did it with a hand whisk, triceps aching by the time stiff peaks formed. Had to figure out what the oven temperature should be in celsius to set it correctly. Melted butter in a pan on the stove as we don’t have a microwave. Throughout all of this, not one peep of complaint or whining from the girl, even though this was much harder than it would be at home.



In the end, it all worked and we had some tasty lime bars. Sorry, this is the only picture I was able to get before the hordes gobbled them up. 

My point is this – one thing you can’t learn in a school is the essential lesson of learning how to figure something out. Maybe things don’t work exactly as you want or expect them to, maybe it’s harder than you anticipated, but you learn to make it work. I think it’s hard to do this in your familiar environnment as you know how things work and it’s set up for you. If I were Romanian and coming to the States, I’d be lamenting how to substitute for smantana and papanasi mix instead – it’s not about US vs other, it’s just about being somewhere where things are unfamiliar, being away from home. 
More than all the history and the culture, it’s things like this I think are the true value of leaving home, stepping outside your comfort zone. So while my kids may be missing out on watching a bean seed soak in paper toweling and sprout or making a solar system model out of styrofoam balls, my hope is that the lessons they are learning make sure if they ever need to figure something out, they’ll know how to.  

-s

In which we have a typical day  of school and city wandering

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The weather here has been a bit funny, or so the locals tell us. Instead of typically warm, 70 degree October days we arrived to relative gloom and chill. One of those where it was okay if the sun was shining but the minute it disappeared, an icy chill wind would blow through and freeze you. We only left with summer clothing and so have, out of necessity, had to acquire more fall and winter appropriate clothes. I had hoped to find funky, 80’s era clothing here which we would feel okay ditching at the end of the year, but alas, it wasn’t to be. The shirts and jackets were all of the truly ugly 80s variety, think bright yellow with small pink and green isoceles triangles. Moreover, I had the opposite problem I had in Japan – everything here is about four sizes too big. I did find this cool leather jacket for $10, but everything else has come from H&M. The kids have new weather appropriate shoes, the thin Chuck Taylors having worn out with so much wear and growing too small for them anyway at the rate their feet expand. I’ve started knitting for need as well as pleasure, making hats, fingerless gloves, and scarves to shield us from the cold. 

Made with a deliciously springy merino picked up in Vienna


It’s been sunnier lately, and the other day was a crisp sunny fall morning. I think often of the Ray Bradbury short story about the Mars colony, where the sun only comes out once every seven years, focusing on a classroom of kids who lock a girl into a closet and forget about her, dooming her to miss the sun for another seven. Not to lock my kids in the closet, though I have often dreamed of it for other reasons, but to make sure that we enjoy these days among the gloom. Our days here are relaxed in general. We wake up around 8, and the kids snuggle in the living room under duvets and read whatever they’ve lately downloaded from the library for fun. 
At some point, we have breakfast (eggs & toast for the boys, Toast & yogurt for the girl, granola & yogurt for me). Eric and I have coffee, drinking instant nescafe. I’ve always quite liked nescafe, it reminds me of being in Mali, where breakfast was hot sugary milky nescafe and fresh baguettes under a canvas tarp outdoors, waving away flies who wanted a taste too. After we’ve all settled ourselves, we have the kids read their assigned reading – thus far we’ve read “One Crazy Summer” by Rita Mae Brown, “Number the Stars” by Lois Lowry, and are currently reading “The Shakespeare Stealer” by Gary Blackwood. We’ve downloaded lesson plans and have the kids write out answers to them. Sometimes they have to rewrite the answers, and then there may be tears and wailing. I do my best to ignore those, but sometimes fantasize about the aforementioned closet locking. 
They then switch to math, we’re using an online program called Dreambox which both kids like, though the boy will sometimes change to Khan academy instead. This needs occasional supervision but for the most part they’re on their own. We also do Geography, using online maps and quizzes, and while my kids now can identify all the countries in Europe and South America, this is the one place where I struggle in that there’s a lot of screen time involved with this type of learning. 
At some point during the day, we’ll sit down and have a discussion about the book, usually in the morning after math time. Eric is much, much better at the literature teaching than I am, given that he actually knows how to guide them to think and write and I just stare at them goggle eyed and say helpful things like “I know you can do this, why aren’t you?” Still, it’s where we try to mix in history of the times and places of the books – so far Civil Rights and Black Panthers in the 60s, World War II, and now Elizabethan England. Next up we want to read “the Wall,” a graphic novel about growing up in the Communist Era. The girl protests, saying “I’m SO SICK of learning about Communism! It’s always just communism in Vietnam and communism in Cambodia and bad things happening to people!” We will persevere. 


Afterwards we took advantage of the lovely day, playing in the fall leaves at Kids Park, picking up ice cream, wandering through the open squares and painted alleys, and finally finding our way to Viniloteca for a taste of a delicious IPA homebrew and some good conversation. 

-s

In which I go grocery shopping and face a wall of mustard and some guy named Bob Lung

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Grocery shopping in any foreign country is always an adventure. First of all, you’re not sure where anything is and since you can’t just scan signs or aisles because of the language, you have to actually walk down each one and look at the pictures on merchandise to figure it out, given that you’re a functional illiterate. As a result, it takes three times longer than usual shopping. Most of the time it works out in the end, but sometimes you can end up with surprises like the time we thought we purchased tofu onigiri in Japan and it turned out to be mashed tuna. Things that you take for granted as being a typical food just isn’t so everywhere. Cheese in Japan was relegated to a small corner, and here in Romania things like fresh cilantro are nowhere to be found. On the plus side, Japan had more choices for noodles than I’ve ever seen and fresh sushi at the market and Romania has a ton of choices for sour cream, paprika and chocolates. If they’re on the shelves, that is.

In fairness, most shelves are well stocked.

You can use google translate, but other times even that doesn’t help. I wanted to get arborio rice to make risotto, but none of the “orez” was labeled as such, just had labels like “bob lung” written on it. Who’s Bob Lung? I wondered. (Means long grain, I’ve since figured out). Ten minutes of examining each individual clear plastic bag of rice to see which one looked like a short grain starchy rice, and found one called “camolino.” A google search and translate of camolino yields that it translates as….camolino. All the other pages were in Romanian. Another tricky one is the cheese – in the cheese section you’ll find a whole row of “branza,” “cascaval,” and “telemea.” Google will tell you that these are all “cheese,” so then you have to spend five minutes searching for the difference between them, staring at your phone like a moron in the dairy aisle while literate Romanians walk around you, grab their cheese and get out in ten seconds. (Telemea and Branza are feta like cheeses made from sheep and cow’s milk respectively, cascaval is a cheese akin to colby with a smoother taste in case you were wondering.)
As in Vietnam, you have to weigh your own produce at scales in the produce section, which spit out a sticker with the price on it. Thankfully, these are coded with pictures as well as words so it’s not entirely impossible. Fail to do so, and the checkout clerk will snap at you in disdainful Romanian, leaving you shamed in front of the line. God forbid you mistakenly identify your produce. There was a funky pear like thing here which I thought would be fun to try. I couldn’t find the sign for it so I just picked the picture that looked most like it on the scale and hoped for the best. The checkout clerk looked at my lone fruit in the bag and chattered at me in Romanian, clearly saying “This isn’t a pear, you fool! It’s a (something)!” And then she called a different clerk over who took the fruit away. I thought maybe he would weigh it correctly and bring it back, but no, it was simply not to be. No fruit for you! (I’ve since learned that it is a quince.)

Produce is all largely unrefrigerated here, woe is the endive

The scale for weighing

The stores are not arranged in any logical order either. You enter and to the left is a section for produce, behind it bread and wine. In the center of the store and seemingly blocking your path to the other side is a labyrinthine section of spice packets and some noodles. Beyond those are school supplies. Between the school supplies and some cookies there is a narrow entryway leading you to the other side of the store where you’ll find the dairy section, rice, and beer. It makes absolutely no sense and half the time is spent trying to figure out where the hell you have to go to get something in the first place.

Special offers in the front, like a wagon of cabbage. To tthe left is an electronics section. The actual produce section is clear on the other side.

Even in different stores, the illogical ordering of stuff persists. One “hipermarket” which I think is akin to our SuperTargets has an aisle with plastic wrap, tinfoil, but also hideously ugly bathmats, bath towels, and random plastic toys. One cool thing – they sell the plastic wrap rolls and such separately from the boxes, which is a brilliant way to reduce waste, I think.

Bulk frozen food!! Genius! Saves on packaging.

There are walls of mustard, yogurt, cheese, wine and beer at most places too. I love the “foreign foods” aisle, which stocks “oriental” food next to Swedish and British.

THE WALL OF MUSTARD

THE WALL OF OF PLAIN YOGURT. there isa nother wall for flavored yogurt.


The final gauntlet is the checkout line, which I have yet to see be less than five people deep, no matter the time. The clerks pick up each item, rotate it maddeningly slowly to find the barcode, then slide it over the scanner before moving it to the other side where you bag your own groceries. I have never missed the self checkout lines more.
Despite all this, I’ve managed to make some nice meals here with some twists! I couldn’t find ground coriander at first, so I had to make do with a meat tenderizer and a plastic bag. No chocolate chips exist, but that’s easy to do with just chopping up bars of chocolate. I don’t have any real measuring cups but using mugs works just as well and estimating spoon sizes has been fine too.

Coriander smashing technique

Quiche!

Butternut squash risotto, turns out camolino works just fine.

Curried vegetable and tofu soup

No poli to be had, so I made some! Not bad for a first try

Granola, of course

In which we go back in time a bit and chat about Slovakia

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Eric did a moving write up about our family in Slovakia and how wonderful it was to meet them. They greeted us like we were close friends who they hadn’t seen in a while, not like people whom they hadn’t before met. I’m still blown away by how welcoming and generous they all were to us and hope that we are able to reciprocate in the future. 
I would like to write a bit about Bratislava itself though, to keep up with the travelogueing. 
Before I get into the time there, though, I feel I must go back and tell you about our Romanian taxi driver who got us to our car rental agency. All four of us had walked out of the flat early morning of our departure, hoping to find an easy taxi. None seemed to drive by so we walked over to the nearby grocery store, where you can usually find a waiting taxi, but not today. Just as we were contemplating walking over to the mall taxi stand instead, one drives up. Eric walks over and asks if he is free, and he burbles back to us in Romanian that he is here on a call and that if you wish for a taxi you must call one. Dismayed, we started to walk off but he signaled us back and told us to wait for a moment as he would call a cab for us. “How nice!” we thought. 

When his customer came over, holding a bag of groceries, she got in the back of the cab and I expected they would take off. Instead, he began to chatter with her in rapid Romanian which I could hear through his open window, and she then proceeded to get out of the back, get into the front seat, and then he opened the trunk and gestured for all four of us to squeeze in the back. Apparently, the plan was now that he’d drop the woman off at her place and then take us since it was kind of on the way. The girl squeezed onto my lap and off we went. Eric soon switched into the front seat and for the rest of the ride, in broken Romanian and English helped along with Google translate, we had a fun ride and a conversation, focused on the kids, life in Romania. At one point he looked at us and asked, “George Bush?” To which we gave a horrified “No nononono!”response . Along the way his phone rang and he had a short conversation in Romanian, though we could make out the words “America!” and “Obama!”amongst the palaver. When we told him that the kids liked Romania, he answered “super!!” in such a sweet way (pronounced “su-PEAR!”), genuinely delighted that our family was enjoying his country. All this to show one example of the great interactions we have had here. 
Alright, back to Slovakia! We drove across Hungary to get to Slovakia, and I mused that it no longer seems strange to just drive across an entire country in one day. It was about 5 hours of driving, which barely gets you out of most states back home.


Eric’s relative Eva lives in Nitra, which is a bit outside Bratislava, the main city and capital of Slovakia. A pretty small European town, the only real sightseeing we did there was to see the castle, interesting chiefly for its opulent cathedral, touted as one of the oldest in Europe. It really is stunning inside, though I have to admit that sometimes cathedral interiors feel a bit overdone to me. Everything shines about in gilded facades and every surface is painted with saintly scenes, sometimes it can be visually overwhelming, like a bad “after” from an episode of Trading Spaces. 


We made it to Bratislava in the evening and met up with Denisa and Edmund, Eva’s daughter and son-in-law, or Eric’s third cousin. I looked up a chart of those weird relationship things and discovered that Eva is technically a second cousin twice removed! I’ve always wanted to say that and now I can! Eva had gone through some trouble to find us the perfect flat in the middle of Old Town Bratislava, so we were well situated. Side note: I really much prefer the old name of Posovny. Bratislava just sounds so…brutal…and like the name of a country, not a city. Posovny is so much more romantic! Perhaps the civic leaders will take heed of my blog and take the appropriate steps.


Old town Bratislava is lovely, with narrow pathways through old stone buildings. Once you leave the picturesque old town area, though, Bratislava reverts into a fairly typical landscape of paved streets and commercial buildings, so we scurried back to old town as quickly as we could. We rounded a corner and stopped to see a man coming out of a sewer grate! The tourists posing with him were a bit curious, until we got close enough to see that it was a statue! There are several such statues around the old town area and we made good fools of ourselves for pictures like everyone else. 



That evening Eric’s cousins treated us to the UFO, a saucer like structure on top of a bridge pylon, which overlooks the entire city & Danube river. We wandered about on the top deck, open to the elements and looked over the view. The kids played about on a set of stairs, which made me a bit nervous given that we were, oh, 300 feet above the water. Afterwards we went into the thankfully enclosed space below and had a cocktail and cheerful conversation with our new cousins, watching the sun set over Bratislava. 


-s

In which we learn to say, “Ah, Vienna!” Like everyone else.

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[Side note: This is part 2 of a special Fretz 2 part blog crossover EVENT. Check out the first part of the Vienna trip over at ericfretz.wordpress.com]

Vienna! I remember when my parents visited Europe many years ago, and when they returned they waxed poetic about the beauty of Vienna. Yesterday we saw the summer palace in the outskirts as Eric mentioned but didn’t get much of a chance to see the city during the daytime, so today was devoted more to that.

Vienna has a LOT of museums. You can choose from Jewish history museums, music museums, several art museums of different foci, architecture museums, children’s museums, museums dedicated to Habspurg rulers, a globe museum, and even more. We again found ourselves in a country capital on its National day, which we seem to have a knack for. Luckily, in Austria this means free or reduced museum entry and everything is still open. We opted for the Haus der Musik (Sound Museum) and the Albertina (art museum) and then would see how we felt afterwards.
The Haus der Musik is more than just music – it’s really more like four floors of sound games. A few of our favorite games were a musical dice rolling game where you replicated Mozart’s version of this to create new waltzes, another similar game based on your name. Another was this cool exhibit on how your brain makes sounds that aren’t actually there to fill in the gaps of sound waves that may be discordant. I can’t entirely explain it, because I don’t know that I entirely understood it, but it was cool nonetheless! One room was dedicated to simulating life in the womb, with a pulsating light in the center of the room, whooshing sounds around you and heart beats, and a floor which vibrated under your feet. It was oddly soothing. There’s one floor dedicated to the great composers, where you can see some of their original compositions written in their hand, but other than that the floor is a bit dull otherwise unless pictures of bewigged men makes you swoon.


After this it was off to the Albertina, a more traditional fine arts museum. There, they had an exhibition showing the evolution of pointillism and how it morphed from the style of Seurat all the way to Mondrian style color blocking, passing through Van Gogh along the way, who had little patience for pointillism because it just took so damn long. They blamed this on his mental illness, but I think it shows a particular moment of sanity on his part. I particularly liked an exhibition on woodblock prints as well – they were so precise, and such a difference after seeing the rooms of impressionism and soft colors.
After this we were done with museums and ready for a break, and we found one with some tasty pastries! We ate all of them.

We strolled through the crowded main square we looked around briefly at the museums in the MuseumQuarter, though I was too tired to enjoy them at that point. The kids amused themselves on the walk through by trying to catch giant bubbles being blown by a woman on the square, though “didn’t hear us” when we called them to move on and needed to be corralled. I swear, the number of times I wish I had a sheepdog to round them up.


That evening was spent in, tired as we all were from walking around and still having a cold. I went to a panini place across from our hotel for takeaway, and while waiting at the bar for our food struck up a conversation with a college student from England in Vienna to study art. Within the EU this is relatively easy, as college prices are low across the board and you can move about. With Brexit, though, this won’t be possible and I began to understand why young people in Britain were truly dismayed at the possibility of having a closed border.

I miss playing trivia while travelling, so we played Austrian trivia. Lu did the best with this and beat the rest of us hands down.

The answer was A, in case you’re wondering.

Vienna was delightful overall, and we hope to make it back someday. The people were incredibly friendly and welcoming, the food was tasty and there was so much to see and do we left feeling as if we barely scratched the surface.

-s

In which we find that in Romania, the streets walk on you

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Friends, it was a rough transition from Japan to Eastern Europe. After an exhaustingly long, though comfortable flight, to get to Budapest, we had two days there before coming to Timisoara. The first night Eric and I went out to get some pizza for dinner. Whether it was fatigue, or extreme jet lag, or just real culture shock, my whole body felt stunned as we walked around. It was a complete reversal from Osaka to get to Budapest, from the slick cityscape of metal and glass to the brick and cobblestone buildings and streets. Suddenly everything became intelligible again, at least to a degree, as we returned to Roman script. Gone was the extreme politeness and solicitude of Japan, and instead the harsh straightforwardness of Eastern Europe. 
There were parks, open spaces and benches, which were a refreshing change to be sure. 


The next day we took a five hour car ride to Timisoara, driven by a dour man who was clearly agitated at our decision to eat while in his car, and had no interest in even polite conversation. We arrived at our flat in Timisoara, greeted by our friendly host, and settled in. I found the bathroom directly connected to the kitchen, which in and of itself was revolting. I went to use the toilet and the seat slid out from under me and I almost fell on the floor. I noticed that there were five air fresheners in the bathroom, but that did little to cover up the dank odor of stagnant water. The living space and bedrooms were fine, with high ceilings and large windows that spoke to a grander past. The kitchen was filled with pots and pans that were still covered in a layer of grease from whoever was there last. The shower water had two choices, scalding hot or frigid. What a metaphor. It was full of mosquitos, and the girl and I woke up with no less than 14 bites on our faces. 


We all set out to find dinner, looking up some places on our phone before heading out. The streets were dark, desolate appearing and had menacing graffiti tags all along cement block buildings. Whenever we walked outside, we felt cold stares of people on us. I’d look back in defiance, only to find that Romanians feel no need to break a stare when caught in one, and we’d end up staring each other for sometimes as much as 15 seconds while walking past one another, looking over our shoulders to stare. There was no accompanying smile or any gesture of friendliness in the stare. A Ukrainian colleague of mine once told me that in Ukraine, there is a saying, “Why are you smiling? Are you stupid or something?” And I felt that this had clearly bled over into Romania.
We made it to a wide plaza surrounded by outdoor cafes and people having beverages. We walked up to one and asked if they served food, and they simply shook their heads. Where can we find food at three pm on Sunday, we asked? The mall, they told us. Try the mall. So we went to the mall, a byzantine complex of shops and no clear pathway from one end to the next. There are modern stores there like Sephora and H&M, but then next to that will be a store selling mops and brooms. We found a passable Italian restaurant where we kept waving away the dense clouds of cigarette smoke that wafted over us from the other patrons. 
Before we stopped back home, we went to a corner market to pick up some bread and milk and such for the morning, and found this on the shelves. 


At this point, I felt like Romania was literally telling me to eat shit. We settled in for the night with heavy hearts, feeling that the next three months were bound for misery. 
It’s looked up considerably since then, but man, that was an unhappy start.

-s