Mailing Address

We have a box at the post office now. If for some reason you want to send us stuff (bbq sauce -preferably Sweet Baby Rays-, Southern Comfort, Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars etc.) then this is where you would send it:

McMasters Robert or Golub Amanda
Oficiul Posta 1 CP127
Brasov, Romania
COD 500500

Also, if you want post cards or cheezy souvenirs then send us your addresses as well.

New Apartment

Our apartment hunt proved successful and we even lucked out by finding an apartment right in the historical center of Brasov. The only downfall is that we have no washing machine, but thankfully, we have friends who oh-so-generously allow us to use theirs. The apartment is nice; it has two rooms – the kitchen and the bedroom, but it’s very spacious. Yes, we have an indoor bathroom with hot water and a working shower, so no more bucket baths for me!

We had looked at one other place but the place we chose was about twice as good and the same price. The apartment “contract signing” process was a bit different than what we’re used to in the States. We had our friend Alex go with us to make sure that we didn’t get screwed over since this was the first time we’ve been through something like this. It was a good thing too because I could imagine that it would have taken about 4 times as long for them to explain things to us.

We got the apartment through an agency, so they took a 50% cut from the first month’s rent. The landlord refused to sign a contract with us because he didn’t want to pay taxes on us and even when we suggested that we pay the taxes he still wouldn’t do it because he said that he had done this before and he had to go through a quagmire of legal work with the former tenants and he wasn’t willing to do this again. Alex said that this was normal so we went ahead and wrote a very non-legal hand-written contract about what was in the apartment so that he couldn’t say we stole anything.

So the plan for now is renting here month-to-month. We may need a contract or documentation for where we’re staying when we go to get our visas and our lack of a contract may be a problem. In this case, we will either have to move out or find some nice person who owns property to say that we’re staying there with them. We will see. The plan this week is to go and meet with someone from the embassy and talk face-to-face with an expert on visa issues.


We’ve only had one real problem with the apartment so far…
It was our second night in the apartment and we had just turned off the TV (it came with the apartment) and both started to doze off to a sound sleep. All of a sudden, we were awoken by a loud POP POP POP coming from the other side of the room! Now I’ve never lived in a house with gas heating before, so my first thought was that our heaters were about to explode and incinerate our entire building. We both jumped out of bed and turned the light on to find plumes of smoke coming out of our TV, and even more distressing, the entire inside of it lit up on fire! Good thing Robert was here, because I was ready to abandon ship. Bravely, he pulled the cord from the wall and saved the day! Below, you will find a reenactment (click on it for more detail):

Besides extinguishing electrical fires, we’ve been keeping ourselves busy with exploring the city and spending time with our new friends. Saturday was an unseasonably warm day, so we took advantage of it by hiking up to the top of Mt. Tampa. There’s a cable car that runs to the top of it, but there’s also a well-maintained trail that zig-zags its way up to the Hollywood-esque BRASOV sign that looks over the city. I imagine during the summer this is not a very difficult trail to casually stroll along; however, we found that the snow that had accumulated on the trail over the past month or so had been packed down and was in the process of melting, thus forming one long icy serpentine slide down the mountain. Did that stop us? No! With only a few close calls, we carefully picked our way up the trail and eventually reached the peak… ok, so Mt. Tampa probably doesn’t qualify us as alpinists, but we definitely broke a sweat. Needless to say, I opted for the cable car ride back down.

Now, we’re waiting for an appointment to talk to the American Embassy in Bucharest to see what our visa options are. After we do that (and hopefully find out that staying longer than 90 days isn’t an insurmountable feat), we’ll have all the information we need to start the job hunt!

Brasov

Brasov and the Apartment Hunt

Brasov Romania is a pretty, if not magical-looking town like something right out of a fairy tale. It’s a different story from Bucharest and it managed to avoid getting beat too hard by the commie stick. It’s still a little bruised and battered, with the obligatory monuments and block apartment buildings that overshadow its otherwise medieval look. There are mountains in the background and it has cobblestone roads. There might be elves living in the mountains but I’m not 100% sure of that.

I think Amanda will probably appreciate it a little bit more once we get a little more stable. Until then we will remain on an emotional roller-coaster as we lug our bags from place to place, trying not to get ripped off. Right now she’s tripping pretty hard because we got the ol’ bait-and-switch and are paying 40 dollars a night instead of 30 on a place that has more than what we need. I try to remind her that this is just temporary and we will find a place soon. Meanwhile, the search for a permanent residence continues.

We met up with Bogdan, a friend of our Virginia-located Romanian friends Radu and Emi. Bogdan has connections and said that he would be able to help us find a place and a job. Hopefully the bottle of “KVint”, the absolute best cognac from the former Soviet Union that we bought for him in Tiraspol will help grease the wheels a bit.

We went with our new best friends, Alex and Simona to a Saxon celebration outside of town. Alex is half Saxon, but these people are a dying breed in the area. Long ago, they were a sizable minority in Transylvania but Alex explained that many young people leave for Germany. The older generation still speaks a variant of German but the younger people are losing the language in favor of Romanian and English.

More on all of this later. Time to post the blog… finally.

Moldova

Moldova is very cold right now. There is a lot of snow. This can make life difficult sometimes when you are in buildings without central heating. We made it down to the village ok. We over-paid the guy who took us down there because we didn’t know what the going rate was at the time. Nonetheless, we were able to keep our entire trip for the past two weeks under $200, most of which went into transportation costs.

When we got off the maxi-taxi in the village, everyone was looking at us. We ran into some people I knew on the way to the house. When we got in, Tolea (old host brother) met us at the door. He had put some nice new doors in on the house, and has changed the back yard around almost unrecognizably. We were able to hang out for only an hour or so before we passed out for the next 14 hours.

My room, or rather my old room, is heated by “soba”, which is a fireplace downstairs with a big chimney that goes up through the wall next to the bed. They also had a mini-heater they hooked up with us but since it’s a big room, it was still in the 50s at night.

People were happy to see us. They invited us over to their houses and we never went hungry and of course we never missed out on a drinking opportunity. The school was having a 10-year reunion (every graduating class every 10 years gets together in the middle of winter) when we were there so we went and froze our asses off watching as people told stories about the “good old days” when they were in school. Afterwards we ate and drank some more booze of course.

Amanda is a veteran of walking on ice now. She was hesitant at first but thanks in part to her winter boots she is almost an expert. People don’t shovel snow in this part of the world and the definitely don’t salt their roads so consequently they have ice to walk on instead of a sidewalk or street. It can be aggravating throughout the entire snow cycle because when the snow melts it turns into lakes where you walk. We are both glad we have waterproof footwear.

There were some changes in the village but overall nothing changed spectacularly. My good friend Vitalie got married and has a baby now. She was born on my birthday this last year actually. They live very modestly with an old Soviet-era TV that barely shows a picture. But they are on the internet.

The “casa de cultura” (big building of events) no longer has a “discoteca” (dance club with booze). Now they just have an enormous room with teenage boys having free unsupervised reign with a pool table and pool cues. The cue balls are about the size of large gumballs but amazingly they still have all the equipment.

Of course I got asked all the time why I wasn’t married and when I was going to have babies. I told people that I was waiting for my host brother first. At this, people just rolled their eyes, saying that Tolea was helpless.

I was amazed to see that the Brazilian Jiu-Jutsu program is still going and all the mats are still intact. Sandu, the now 12th grader is in charge of the program and he has been able to incorporate some judo that he learned in Cahul to the program. I participated in one of the practices and felt every pound of weight that I have added to my body over the past few years. My back was a little messed up the next day but not too bad. I have some video that I will be adding later. Again, it was very cold at practice.

We left the village after a week and our next stop was Tiraspol.

From Amanda’s journal: February 10, 2010

We’re sitting at the border of Moldova and Romania right now on our overnight train to Bucharest. This will be the second border we’ve crossed today…well, kind of. We took a three-day trip to Transdneistria / PMR and just returned to Moldova proper today. Transdneistria is the break-away eastern region of Moldova which has claimed independence and has the international support of Russia (although they don’t even recognize them as a legal country), other break-away regions, and that’s about it. There are currently Russian “peace-keeping” forces stationed in Transdneistria to prevent any further conflict between them and Moldova proper, though the likelihood of there being another war isn’t very likely. I thought there was the possibility of having problems at the PMR border since we’re foreigners, but it only amounted to a little extra paperwork and bureaucracy. During our stay we wandered the streets of Tiraspol and got to know our host, Andrey, his wife Iana and their miniature terrier, Keks (roughly translated as “Muffin”). Andrey is a journalist in Tiraspol where he’s lived his whole life. As for the city, it didn’t look much different than Chisinau. With the exception of the language (Russian ONLY), the money (rubles and kopeks), and the border, you wouldn’t really know that you were in a different “country.”

What's Up

***A note before we begin...Bobby will write in one color, and Amanda will write in another.***

Since I haven’t written to lots of people who might be reading this in quite some time, I figure that I should give some sort of an update of what we’ve been doing since we left Moldova the first time, over 2.5 years ago. When we got done bumming off of our parents and grandparents in about November or December 2007, I got a job as a counselor at an alternative school in Newport News, VA and we moved in to Norfolk so that we could be half way between my grandparents in Virginia Beach and my job. Amanda got a job soon thereafter at Norfolk State University as a housing coordinator. As she puts it, she “made lifelong friends” by placing people in rooms together.

I describe my job as taking crap from kids, writing volumes upon volumes about the crap that they give me, going home and then doing it again the next day. Although I started out at the alternative school working with teenagers, I got set up with the little fellers (grades 1-3) at another alternative school and then they finally switched me again last September to a public elementary school where my former company provides services. Lots of people tell me how great and fulfilling this kind of work is but all of these people have never had this kind of job before. Although our experiences at our jobs and in VA weren’t altogether horrible, we definitely felt like we needed to go overseas again.

So… we saved some money and bought two one-way tickets to Bucharest.

The journey out here was quite interesting. We took a trip to Detroit for Christmas, came back and had 2 days to pack all of our junk and move out of the apartment. We finally made this all happen (staying up all night) just in time to leave New Years day for Hawaii. We stayed in Hawaii for about a week, came back and worked at our jobs for about another week while we stayed with one of Amanda’s friends. We headed down to Florida from my parents house out west of Charlottesville where my family had a nice going away party for us.

Our first stop was Amanda’s brother’s house in Durham, NC. Then we stayed with the “Twelve Tribes Community” in Savannah, GA. These guys are a total throw-back and “keep it real” by trying to live their lives like the original apostles in the book of acts. Amanda will tell you more about that. We finally got to Tampa, FL and after a week of sorting what we were going to take out to Eastern Europe with us for an indefinite amount of time we took off on the 27th of January.

This was not without its own problems and adventures. At first the airline people almost made us late for our plane because apparently they had never seen anyone buy one-way tickets to Romania before. After our lecture on only staying in the country for 90 days and almost missing our first plane we made it to New York where we “chilled out” for about 8hrs. When the plane was about to leave there still was no gate number for our plane and they called us on the loud speaker. Somehow everyone else leaving for Rome knew which gate to go to so we got “tisk tisk-ed” for not being able to read minds. We had to run to catch this flight as well.

Of course, I didn’t sleep at all on our 8-hour flight to Rome. But we did get fed twice which is twice more food than on the flight to Hawaii. We were in Rome’s surprisingly crappy airport for 4 hours before we got on the plane to Bucharest. Nobody had assigned seats and nobody was allowed to sit in the front 10 rows of seats which was strange because they put prisoners in the back rows right next to everyone else.

That’s right. Prisoners. These guys undoubtedly were Romanians caught working illegally in Italy and were being shipped back to the motherland. Still it was disconcerting that the pilot kept his door open the whole time with a bunch of surly Romanians with nothing to lose in handcuffs behind us. Why were the first 10 rows of seats open?

We got to Bucharest without any trouble but the city was covered in snow and I think we hit a stray dog when we landed on the runway. New York has birds, Romania has mutts. We got to our Pension without any problems, had some dinner and went to sleep. The next day we bought our train tickets to Chisinau and had some extra time so we decided to see the “peasant’s museum”. We shared a train cabin with a woman and her well-mannered child. The kid slept most of the time which was nice because I sure didn’t. I don’t know why.

We hitch-hiked with some guy down to the village and that’s where I’m writing now. We’ll stay here for about another 4 days before we go try and see the Superbowl in Chisinau. Then we’ll go see Moldova’s break-away region (I’ll write more about this later) before we head to Brasov, Romania to start our new lives. We have no idea what to expect. But it should be pretty awesome.

Amanda's Contribution....

A few more words on our stay with the Twelve Tribes in Savannah, Georgia… You might be wondering how we found ourselves as guests of such a unique group of people. We first learned about the Twelve Tribes in Plymouth, Massachusetts when we saw their house and their tall-ship, The Peacemaker. They’re a group of people who live communally and follow the way of life as described in the Book of Acts. Generally, they believe that God (Yahweh) is love and that in order to take care of one another, they must live together to properly do so. As we searched the “Couchsurfing” website for people to stay with in Savannah, we came across this family who was part of Twelve Tribes and thought this would be a great opportunity to see first-hand a different way of life.

Indeed, it was different in many ways, but also very similar to most people’s everyday life. There were probably fifteen people living in one house – families in their own rooms and single men and women sharing rooms with their own gender. Every night they all got together to sing & dance, share their thoughts as they related to their faith and then to pray. They invited us to observe their nightly meeting and told us we didn’t have to feel uncomfortable not participating. It didn’t appear as though there was one leader of the meeting; whoever thought of a song to sing began singing and everyone joined in, whoever wanted to share their thoughts waited until the person before them finished and then began speaking, whoever wanted to pray for something in particular simply added it to the group prayer. It seemed very open.

They also dealt with many of the same things that most people do. They were trying to open a deli around the corner and the project was taking longer than expected due to building codes and unforeseen obstacles. One of the three houses that they occupied was being foreclosed on in March because they purchased it at the height of the housing market and now couldn’t find the funds to keep it. One older woman with whom I shared a room had a painting of a garden hanging over her bed. I asked her about it and she told me that she used to live in North Carolina and was able to garden every day and that picture reminded her of it.

Before we met the Twelve Tribes community in Savannah, I was a little nervous that we wouldn’t have anything to talk about or that they would pressure us to believe what they did, but I was so pleasantly surprised to find that none of this was the case. Everyone was easy to talk to and only when we asked them about their faith did they share their beliefs. I would say that we came away with an appreciation for their way of life and also more than a few new friends.