Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Finally here!! Monday Oct 8



Finally here in Bucharest!! I left San Francisco last Monday to meet up with my friend Nora, who is volunteering as well, and help her out with some work stuff in Chicago. We then left from there for Amsterdam on Thursday evening, and arrived early Friday morning.

Amsterdam was great, such a cool and pretty city. It is so easy to navigate so it was a perfect choice for a few day stop over. Our hotel was ok - undergoing renovations, so basically a 4 star in the lobby and about a 1.5 star in the rooms. Luckily neither of us had any trouble sleeping at all, and kicked most of the jet leg.

We saw most of the major attractions, The Reijmuseum, Ann Frank house, Heineken Brewery tour (my kind of museum for sure), and a canal tour of the city. We planned for the Van Gogh museum the day we left, but it didn't open until 10am, and we had to leave by 10:30. No red light district either - maybe some other time.

Our flight leaving Amsterdam was delayed, of course, so we arrived in Bucharest about 2 hours late. Gica, the Director of ARCHWAY was there to meet us in the van. He was very nice, but didn't speak much English to us (although later I found out he speaks English quite well, but I don’t think he is always really comfortable doing so, especially I suppose to 2 total strangers). Bucharest traffic was terrible, much worse than I remember it being last year. About an hour later we arrived at the house. A few of the older boys ran out to carry our bags in and show us our room. They offered to make us food as well, but we didn't want to add any extra work for anyone. The other kids were watching tv in the front room so we waved in to see them.

We decided to take a little walk and found a patio bar a few blocks down where we could relax and have a few Ursus (my favorite Romanian beer). Then back to the house to see what was in store for us. Everyone was in bed, so morning will show us.

Around 6:30am it sounds like there is an elephant stampede that happens - footsteps and little voices everywhere. We were both so tired we decided instead of getting up at 9am,
maybe 9:30am.... that quickly lead to 10am, 11am,, etc... Finally at close to 1pm we peeled ourselves out of our beds. The smaller kids had gone to school in the morning so were in the kitchen having lunch with the house dad, Bogdan, and the cook. I apologized for sleeping so late and we said we were going to run to the store for a soda.

On the way to the store we ran into Gica, returning from the airport with Susan Booth, the founder of ARCHWAY. We were sooo happy to see her. It will be so great to work with her and pick her brain.

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