The Other Side of a Year: Still in Romania

OK, we’re looking at the other side of our first year here, in fact, we’re pushing a year and a half; the honeymoon is definitely over. But, like many people agree about a good marriage, it’s not there’s nothing left to discover, or that things are getting dull, or that it feels like same old same old. No, far from it, but we ARE becoming familiar and comfortable with life in Romania. Let the pictures help to tell this story, but I warn you: there’s not much of a plot in this issue.
Allow me to ramble, in no particular order:

The traffic is horrible, at least in rush hour. Last year, it took three minutes to get home from school; this year, on a usual bad day, it’ll take maybe 35 minutes to go the two kilometers to our apartment. In terms of growth, let’s call it urban sprawl; this joint is jumpin’, except, Bucharest is not ready to grow this fast. They haven’t got around to building enough roads and the usual infrastructure needed to handle this kind of a boom. At first we were disappointed not to be housed downtown where the action is, but then we hadn’t considered the commuter gridlock situations; now we are content to stay in our comfortable suburban domicile. We’re OK watching from our balcony, as the cars do the daily glacial creep back south into the city.

Life goes on: Millie works very hard introducing herself to the continually unfolding new realities of teaching grade 3 classroom this year (her mat-leave music position evaporated at the end of last year when the new mom returned). And she’s doubly busy due to the heavy PYP emphasis at this school. Millie can tell you all about that if you have the nerve to ask her. There are two reasons my own yoke is easier this year. Firstly, because this is my second year at the job, I now have a few stronger clues about the mysteries in what I’m supposedly doing way down in the low (for me) grades of 7, 8 and 9. Secondly, this year I share the teaching load with a very able Romanian colleague, Miss Luiza, a Doctoral candidate, no less. She’s on leave from her music high school, getting her pedagogical feet wet American style, well, Canadian, really.

Pictures below illustrate a very small part of beautiful Bucharest architecture, some bits of life as we see it out here, and some pictures because, well, I just wanted to include them. Again, there’s no plot, no story, no order to this blog’s set of pictures, but please, enjoy them.











































Maybe we should say at the outset that flowers at the end of a concert are perhaps a bit over-rated??













We had planned a weeklong September motorcycle tour starting from Barcelona, meandering through the Pyrenes Mountains and the Catalonian countryside, exploring twisting and steep climbs and medieval castle ruins. As it turns out, Johanna’s surgery was suddenly scheduled to coincide with those times, so Millie flew to Calgary for support for Jo. That left Ed to solo through the mountains, anxiously connecting with the recovery process in Canada via email and text messages. We are happy to report that Johanna is well on the way back. And Ed is more sure than ever that we need a new(er) motorcycle when we return to Canada.