WOO NEW STUFF!!!

So it has been just about a full month since i have last updated, wow, that is a new record of laziness even for me i think. I dont know why i didnt update, but i didnt. But this morning, i have the day off from school, i decided something must be done. so actually quite a bit has happened since my last post i have jsut realized. I have had my birthday, rehearsals have started for my play, the baddest angel band, and yesterday was thanksgiving! woot woot! Let me start with my birthday, which was absolutley incredible. Ok, so it was a monday, whcih kind of is a sucky day to have a birthday. You have to wake up to go to school, and it is the first day of a long week of school, you all know what i am talking about i think. I got up, totally not remembering that it was my birthday until my mother said to me as i was walking like a zombie into the bathroom, "La multi ani!" which is surprise surprise, how romanians say happy birthday. i think it means something like many years. That was cool, i totally like say it that way, for some reason it sounds cooler than aying happy birthday. :D anyway i brushed my teeth, got ready for school and headed out. My friends had texted me the night before and asked me to meet ehr a little bit early out in front of the donut stand. so i did, and it was so cool. For those of you who do not know, our family has a tradition where we wake up the birthday person with a muffin and a candle in it, along with a loud, rousing chorusof happy birthday. Each of us always has a particular muffin that we get too, usually from dunks. Mine happens to be coffee cake for all those who are curious. :) anywho, i got there, and she had something behind her back, and she told me to close my eyes for a second. So i did, i heard her ask for somethign from another friend i was talking to and when i opened my eyes there was a candle stuck inside a muffin. I forgot that i had told her i was not going to get my yearly muffin, like 2 weeks prior. It was awesome, i smiled wide, gave her a huge hug and gulped down my muffin after making a birthday wish. :) so we went to pe, the first class of monday morning, whoever was n charge of making vlasses is truly evil, and went through the day. Everyone, knowing that i am american, said happy birthday to me as i passed. Way more people than i thought knew it was my birthday. It was actually kind of weird. Literally 75 percent of the school or more said happy birthday to me. i am ok with it, i was just curious how they all know so much about me all the time. :P anyway, we went through the first few classes, and it was fine, just another day at school. Actually my birthday happens to rest on the day of st. mihai, the name of many people in my class, and therefore it is an occasion somewhat similar to their actual birthdays, everyone sings happy birthday to them too, so we did that. Then during the large break we have at 10 or eleven, i can not remember which right now, me and my friend deea went to the store to get our ritualistic snitel sandwich, delicious piece of work from the "fast food" restaraunt next to the school, owned by "tante claudia" who is aweosme. :D we stayed outside on a bench eating it, just a normal break, me thinking about hoow boring the next class was going to be. We went back after i had finsihed my sandwich, and when i opened the dorr, the lights were off, there was a mass of people in the center of the room, their faces light ominously by the candles on a massive birthday cake. Then started the romanian birthday song, much longer and much more interesting than ours, i wish i learned it, and they all came towrds me at once. I was taken completley by surprise. As well i should have! It was my first surprise party ever, and it was soooo awesome! they sang in romanian, then they sang in the english version. I was smiling so wide at this point. I blew out the candles and they gave me a present from the class. A nice watch, and a toy version of a mini cooper, which they learned was my dream car. :D The school also gave me a traditional romanian rug, which is to grace my dorm room if i have my way. :D i cut the cake, hugged and thank many many people, iincluding my head teacher, my principal, and importantly my english teacher, who had a large part in orchestratign it. we ate, drank soda, and had a dance party. I taught them the cotton eye joe, which they seemed to find more difficult than their traditional dances, which they tried to teach me, like a hora and some other ones. I was thoroughly confused by them. But whatever. It was fun. This went on for the last two classes of the day and it was a grand time. After that, i went home, talked to people on the phone and on skype and later that evening i went out with two of my best friends and we hung out in a park for hours just talking and having a good time. It was an amazing experience. What could have been a sad, homesick filled one, turned out to be amazing because i have awesome friends here. I really do. :D
Ok, in other news, my play rehearsals have started. If you do not remember, i was asked to direct a play, in english, for christmas. I, being the fool i am , accepted, totally not knowing what i am getting myself into. I had to choose the play, cast it and produce it. So i held auditions, seeing who would turn out, which there were around thirty girls and then 6 boys. I chose my play, the baddest angel band, a short play about three angels who get kicked out of heaven for screwing around and to stay in they have to find a reason for earth to keep on turning. lucky for them it is christmas. yadda yadda yadda, much hilarity and witty comment later, christmas and earth are saved. It is a good play, and the casting was ok. Then as rehearsals went on, less and less people started showing up, even my friends, who said in the beginning they would help with what i need, stopped showing up. Anywho, i started with 17 or so, i am now down to i think 9. But it is ok, i making do. there are more lines for people, and those who continue to show are talented and very fun to be with. THANK YOU GUYS! we wstil have time to work ont he ply, as it is dcember 20th, but i am getting slightly nervous alreay. My cast is working hard, and i am sure it will be fine, but i do not want my baby to be a flop, you know?
Yesterday was thanksgiving! hooray! i said happy thanksgiving to people yesterday and they were like oh, is that today? and went about their business. Haha, whatever, i do not mind. It is another cultural difference that is both interesting and expected. :D In lieu of turkey and gorging myself, i made egg and cheese sandwiches, blated music while i ate them, and watched evolution. It was actually ook, i didnt mind. :D OH! by the way, it is good that the pats finally got their buts in gear yesterday and decided to be the lions. I would have been rather angry if they lost to the lions. :P So i hope you all ate much and had a grand time yesterday. :D
I am just about used to romania. It is ok now. I am used to school, i am used to the way you do things at restaraunts, i am used to dinner and lunch. It is good. I am proud of my self. I have had several conversations in romanian, and i am still trying to learn as much as i can. I am worried that i do not know as much as the other exchange students, but whatever. I can still deal and i know quite a bit. I am happy with what i have got. One of the biggest things that i am sad about is harry potter. I still have yet to see it, as there are no movie theatres in within reasonable distance. There is actually one opening up in slatina (maybe today?) but i am not sure exactly what movies are going to be playing, and for that matter if i will even be able to get in, because everyone has been waiting years for this. whatever, i am sure i will see it. I am re reading the book just so i can remember things. It is as excellent as i remember. :D
Ok, i really havent anyting to talk about. :D sorry i havent updated for so long. Maybe i will fix that. ;)

:P SOrry!

Hey everyone, i am really sorry i havent posted in a verrry long time. I have been extraordinarily busy, and also extraordinarily tired. I have seriously not felt well rested since coming here. In some ways, that is a good thing, because it means i am out doing things and getting to be part of this place, but in another way, it sucks, because i am constantly on the verge of having a nasty cold. :P UGH! but! enough about such depressing topics. That is not fun to hear about. GUESS WHAT! i got stuck in an elevator yesterday! and this is a romanian elevator! the are maybe 3 feet by three feet and are quite sketchy. We were coming down from the top floor of a bloc and we had four people in the elevator. That was a dumb move, but it would have been ok if one of my friends hadnt started to jump. It was terrifying. Three jumps in, the lights went out and there was a nasty slam sound. It sounded like we slipped out of something. Truly terrifying. The light said we were now on the second floor, but according to our friend who could not fit in the elevator, we were still on the eighth. Well between the eighth and the ninth actually. So there we were, four boys squeezed in a tiny area, suspended 8 floors above the ground, stuck between floors, without the ability to get the door open. Fantastic. So what do we do in this case? TAKE A PICTURE! it was really quite fun. We were in there for a total of five minutes, nothing as compared to what it could have been. We managed to get the door open and jump out. Before jumping out i remembered the fact that the elevator might slip while i am crawling out and cut me in haalf. GREAT! But i made it out alive, and i am going to try and post the video of our escape.
In other news, i am going to be directing a play, for which auditions are on monday. :P haha. I do not know what i got myself into. It is going ot be december 20th, which is kind of a bummer, because it limited my selection to christmas plays, which can be boring. I found a really funny one, but it is both short and maybe not the easiest to understand. It is going to be in english, as it is for my english class, and all of the people in the school who can speak english in the school. I am trying to find a christmas play that is interesting and easy to understand, harder than it sounds. I am very excited however. It will be so cool to see my final production. I am hoping someone will tape it in december, so i will post it if so. WIsh me luck, as it may be the endeavour of a lifetime. Trying to get a bunch of romanian kids to concentrate and come to rehearsals, and make a set. All in about a month and a half. :P
Halloween is comign up, and our class is celebrating by having a party tomorrow. I am excited. Iam going to dress as the joker. I went to thrift stores today and put together a decent costume. Not like the one from the movie, but still very jokeresque i feel. I cannot wait. I am going to be the "guest of honor" and i am even going to get a little certificate. They give out alot of certificates here. They call them diplomas. For example, I wrote and essay on the holocaust with my friend deea, and we were recently invited to a little ceremony to give out diplomas to those that wrote exceptional essays. I got a certificate and a book with pictures of SLatinas historical district. Ifelt honored. :D It was very cool. It is nice to know i can still do good things while i am here. It is frustrating not being able to do the school work very well, so to have a sign of progress is good.
MY friends have been teaching me new games too, which i WILL be teaching to people upon my return. They are so fun, the kind of games a bunch of teenage boys would play. They often involve pain. There is one, called lapte gros, or hard milk. It involves jumping in the backs of other guys, who are bent over with their heads in each others crotche for protection. It is so fun, depsite the previous description. I will also be posting a video of us playing that, when i get it. It is awesome. :D
I had tacos with my family the other night. It was like a bite from heaven, that first taste. IT was delicious, and it was a memory straight from home. OH! by the way, if any care packages are on the way, Kettle brand salt and vinegar chips or taco seasoning. I have quite a bit of peanut butter, but those two are what i need/ want, if interested. :D I will be sending my package out soonish, i just have to get somemore things, but it is going to be like a big, one time thing. SOrry if i have owed you for a while, chances are i have your present, i just need to buy the others to send it. :D
I PROMISE that i will update more frequently. I feel bad. :P DOnt give up hope on me!
Goals ,continue to leanr more vocab, and order somethign from a restaurant besides a drink.

Weeeeeeeeeeeee

This week has been another one full of, surprise surprise, new things! I continue to gain valuable new insight into the curiousities of the romanians concerning America and what exactly it is we do there. I am still hearing things that give me the mpression that it is a "grass is greener on the other side" type thing. The movies and tv shows that come form america are a huge influence in their preconcieved notions. I have been in two other classes thus far, one a fifth grade class and the other another twelfth grade class. The two were surprisingly similar. The fifth graders asked amazing questions, not just "have you met the jonas brothers or hannah montana" which i did get asked, but also questions about how relationships are different, what the difference between teenagers here and there were, and many questions about school. What did i like about school and what did i not like. They were very curious and there lust for knowledge was very apparent to me. It was a great experience. I know have a posse of shortlings. The follow 20 feet behind me and my friends, and they always kind of hide when i look back at them, giggling the entire time. It is strange, i feel like some sort of celebrity, akin to the jonas brothers. It is a cool feeling. But i am not going to let it get to my head. ;) The twelfth grade class was also interesting. They were much more terrifed of asking me questions it seemed. Only a handful of students felt comfortable enough to do so. Yet i could tell that they all were interested. They wanted to know if i was like the people in the movies too. They knew i hadnt met the jonad brothers, but other than that, they asked the smae or similar questions as the fifth graders. It was another ownderful experience though. I love sharing my culture with them, as much as i can anyway.
Today i also had my first experience with romanian theatre. I have to admit. I left disappointed. Not in the theatre or the eactors or anythin glike that, in fact i admired them for what they endured. I was disappointed in the audience. Immensly. It was a disgrace. The audience members, most of whom were high school aged kids, were talking loudly, they were jeering at the actors while they were onstage, they were moving around, there were cameras going off, there were cell phones ringing and people answering said cell phones. By the end, during the bows, one of the actresses was close to tears, either that or close to murdering the whole lots of us. I felt ashamed, ebarassed for the audience. My friends assured me that it was just the people who came to this show that made it bad. If i were to go to craiova or bucuresti there many a respectable folk who attend the theatre and it is enjoyable. It was just such a difference. I couldnt imagine being able to do that to people who were performing a rehearsed show for you. It was simply appalling. I wish to go again somewhere else, just to see if it was an anomoly. I hope it was. I would be really sad if it wasnt. This weekend i am going with geo to Rinca, a small town in the mountains, where we will be staying overnight in a room belonging to to one of my friends, andrei badita, who also happens to be my host brother in my third host family. I cannot wait. I have been dying to see the rest of the country. The only other chance i have had is to go to alba iulia, and that was with rotary. This will be different, probably more fun! I will tell all about it when i return. For now i am going to cut this post a little short. I will be getting to your requests in the next blog. I am completley exhausted. This week was busy for me, which is not a bad thing, but i am still completley drained. Goals for the next couple of days: Have fun and take awesome pictures in rinca, leran more vocab, continue work on my essay. I found a person to admire btw. Bode miller. I will be posting the final draft when finished for all of you sceptics out there to read when i am finished. Trust me, i can justify my admiration. ;)

More panoramas!

DUN DUN DUNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN

Rain rain, go away, and never come back! please! It has been miserable weather these past couple of days. It is 8 degrees celcius, with rain and wind, and hasnt given up for 3 days! bummer! I am so bored! no one wants to do anything in this kind of weather, myself included. I am slightly sick, always tired and realllllly sluggish! I need a pick me up! Luckily I have my arnold palmer powers and romanian tv! It is fantastic, romanian tv. It is one my most valuable assets in language learning, believe it or not. They have english programs, duch as discovery, animal planet and plenty of movies, and they have the romanian subtitles to go with them! YOu watch the movie, and read what they are saying. For all visual learners, such as myself, this is wonderful! it is helping me associate words with sounds, pronunciation with spelling, and all that good stuff! And it is entertaining on a grey, very grey, very very very grey day. Top gear is that much better with the romanian subltitles! School is still interesting. I am still confused most of the time, still get headaches and still learning lots on the romanian front. Thanks deea! she is my deskmate and principle teacher of the romanian language. She is fantastic! all of my classmates are! I got really lucky in my placement! My friend geo is going to college in craiova, 30 minutes away, and i met up for coffee with him today. Things are going well with him, and it gives me an interesting insight into (haha that has to be some sort of alliteration) what i have to expect in the years to come at WESTMINSTAH! I am currently researching people of note, citizen whom i admire no matter their nationality or gender or anything. It is a hard process. IT is for a scholarship essay, which i really want/need to win. Who do i admire? what will people think of me based on who i admire? How do i express myself in words, the feelings i have and the reasons i admire them. For some, this process is boring, pointless and a task that is to be put on the back burner and left for another day. But for this essay, apart from the fact that it is worth alllloooooootttttt of money, has gotten my full attention and interest. I really do not know who i admire. I know i admire people, but what do i admire about them? what makes them so fantastic that i want to write an essay about them that is worth a college education? are they interesting enough to catch the attention of the reader? or will they simply render me another face in the crowd? The things i have to do for college vary from those that my classmates have to do. It seems so much simpler for them. From my standpoint, it seems as though they simply have to choose where in romania they want to study, assuming they do well on their equivalent of the SAT. I am jealous in a way. Jealous that they, to my knowledge anyway, do not have to fill out scholarship applications, do not have to fill out any applications at all to be honest. Again, this is to my knowledge, correct me if i am wrong! please! It is a very different way of life, they college process here as opposed to the USA. It is still somethign intimidating, but not something that a student worries about the moment after setting foot in his or her elementary school. I do not know if the system works the way i percieve it, but if it does, i am perplexed. It is so simple. I guess, it has its cons too, as does everything, but i feel as though i would have almost wanted it to be like the romanian way of doing things.
Well that was a rant, but still, it has been on my mind as of late.
I also want you all to know, that if you have any questions or comments, please comment! i would love to expland more on certain topics, ones that are more interesting to you!
Goals: Vocab, GET OUT OF THE HOUSE!, have fun

CLick on them to make them larger!

Octombrie~

Hey yall. SO here is another installment of my thought process, which throughout the entire week has been extraordinarily scattered and frazzled, but that is to be expected, even after being here almost a month. :D This week has been an amazing week, the kind i hope to get week after week here in romania land. I leanred lots, met new people and had fun! In school, i had a constant headache, which is a good thing i believe, because i am attributing it to my brain trying to get its act together and gear up to learn some more romanian! I went to Bucuresti, met my host aunt and uncle, who mayyyy or may not be taking me skiing in the alps this winter, whether it be in switzerland, austria or italy, they may also be taking me to venice, no word on that yet though. Thought i would just make you all slightly jealous of me there. I hope it works though. Haha, if the rotary prison says no i may just revolt. I played tennis this week as well, which was very fun! I am getting slightly better. My serves have room for definite improvement, but i would iagine that will come with all the practice i will undoubtedly get by playing with catalin, a rotary member and my host dad. When i come back, i may just be a rafael nadal, so watch out! I took pictures of slatina yesterday, some gorgeous panoramas of oltu at sunset. I was proud of them, but for some strange reason, facebook is being a jerk and will not let me upload them! Kind of pissed about that! I keep meeting people every day! everyone knows me. PEople on the street say 'hi greg!' and i say hi back, but i reallllllly do not know them! i feel bad, because i know i met them, but they have crazy romanian names and i will never in a million years remember them all after a first meeting! haha. My contacts lsit in my phone is growing by the day as well, which feels cool. I always have a person to hang out with when i need to keep my mind occupied, which is always. It is very dangerous not to keep my mind occupied right now. And probably for then next two months or so as well. I am glad my firends can oblige! My friend geo, ana-marias boyfriend, is starting to get really excited for his upcoming trip to america, which is in december. He will be visiting ana for three weeks in kansas, then go to new york city for a week, all on his lonsesome. It is a reallly cool tour de america, he gets to see the back country as well as the biggest and brightest city in the country. He cannot wait to see his girl, and i cant blame him! good luck waiting out the next two months my friend! i hope they go by quick for your sake! I am currently in the process of applying for scholarships, which i realllly do not want to do, but i must. I can only imagine how awesome it willl be if i come out of school with no debt whatsoever. But, it is such a pain, I do not have anyone here to edit really, and it is just... blah! haha, yes mom and dad, do not worry, they will get done! haha. So next week i do not know of anything big happening, will probably play more tenis, probably, and probably i mean will, learn more romanian, as well as have ore headaches. And i hope that next week will be one similar to this week. MY friends have noticed my progress. I am sending them text messages in romanglish. ABout half of the words are in romanian and the rest, what i do not yet know, are in english. They really get a kick out of this, though i think that they are glad and proud that i am doing it! I cannot wait till i can finally speak romanian! Goals for this week, learn the language, starting texting all in romanian, and convince my rotary councelor to consider letting me go with geo and his mother to austria in about three weeks.