Vampires and Brown Bears: How We’re Livin’

Some folks may be wondering what our quality of life is here. It’s really not that bad. We eat pretty well and with the exception of a few items (like the aforementioned BBQ sauce) we can find almost anything that we want. Most of our food comes from the market place down the street which comes straight from the farms on the surrounding areas. Otherwise we get normal stuff from the stores like cereal and jam and eggs and all that stuff. The bread here is good and so is the soup.

As you probably saw from the pictures of our apartment, the conditions here aren’t quite the same as in the village in Moldova. Our friends laughed at the fact that one of my preconditions for a Brasov apartment was to have an indoor bathroom and hot water. The city of Brasov used to be entirely made up of individual houses until the Communists came in and decided that bloc apartment buildings would be a more efficient way of packing more people into a small city. The bloc apartments were first built close to the factories for the factory-workers to have someplace to live. Then the Communists systematically started tearing down the houses in the center for more apartments. One of our friends said that two weeks before the 1989 Revolution, her grandmother received a notice saying she had one month to vacate her house because her land was slated for an apartment building – good timing! Anyhow, we were lucky enough to find an apartment in a former house, rather than a bloc apartment.

Here in the city the cost of living is high for Romanian standards but it’s still pretty low for American standards. We’ve been gone for about a month now and not to brag but all of our meals, transportation costs going from one end to the other of two different countries, one month’s rent, and extras just now expended all of the $700 we each pulled out of the bank before we left.

Our rent is only $200 a month which is pretty cheap for being in the city center. We spend probably an average of about $10 in total for two meals out on the town. I’m probably going to go and open a bank account in the next couple of days. Probably at ING. There’s a lot of ING banks and it’s international.

The language isn’t that much different from Moldova and conveniently there is NO RUSSIAN. That’s what’s up. There’s a bit of an accent difference and they tend to use a larger variety of words compared to in the Moldovan villages. There has been more than one occasion where we’ve been asked if we are from Moldova which is kind of silly because we sound like foreigners. This would be like the Quicky Mart guy talking to you for a while and you asking if he’s from Tennessee. Hopefully the Romanians don’t think that all Moldovans speak like we do.

On the other hand we do have at least a partial Moldovan accent because we learned to speak Romanian there. But I’ve found that there are words that Romanians use that Moldovans don’t and vice-versa. Also, I can’t sprinkle Russian words in every now-and-again which Moldovans think is funny but Romanians don’t understand. I’ve been laughed at a few times using Moldovan-Romanian words for “sunflower seeds”, “watermelon”, “cherry wine” and probably other stuff that I can’t think of.