Day 4: In Which We Travel Through Time Itself

Day 4:

I know I left off with this big cliffhanger about going to the countryside. Let me be right up front with you: there's no countryside in today's events. There is, however, time travel, which is at least as good. Going to the countryside involves a lot of chickens and whatnot, but traveling through time includes the possibility of accidentally killing your own parents and erasing your existence, or stepping on the wrong butterfly and destroying all human life. Since you're still reading this blog, you can feel safe that that didn't happen.

Today is our first wedding anniversary (thank you, thank you very much) and we had bold plans to do a lot of stuff that I totally spoiled by sleeping all day. But I'm pretty sure I'm over my jetlag now. We got a late start and headed out on the town.

Our first couple of stops were related to our upcoming Romanian church wedding that we're doing for Io's family. We stopped in at the cake place and then at the florist. I had what I thought was a pretty awesome idea for our flowers, but Io is apparently set on the idea of having blue flowers with regular flower petals and all. As my dad likes to say, "Happy wife, happy life."

After that, it was off to "the park," which you can say in Bucharest because it's like New York City and everyone will know you mean the gigantic park downtown. (Note: you shouldn't actually say "the park," though, because that is English). So we hopped on the subway and headed way north and west, including a train switch that was sure to throw off pursuit. The park turned out to be pretty awesome. It's humongous, and really pretty.

In addition to lots and lots of greenery with biking and walking paths, the park includes a giant lake where you can rent paddleboats or rowboats, or take a mini-cruise on a larger powered boat with a bunch of other people.

There's also a rose garden, a skate park, a bunch of playgrounds for children, and an awesome place where you can borrow bicycles for free. You just leave your ID and grab a bike for as long as you want, and then bring it back there when you're done. Pretty cool. There are also lots of monuments littered around, most of them to people who aren't Romanian (Mark Twain, Chekov (but not the one who piloted the Enterprise), and a bunch of other writers and artists, as nearly as I could tell). There's a museum and a sort of combination library and coffee shop. There's a big stone circle with about a dozen gigantic heads in it. There's a lake with about 400 billion swans of all colors and sizes in it. Overall, it's the sort of place you could spend a long time hanging out on your wedding anniversary and you'd enjoy every moment of it, which we did.

This park was also the site of a big event in Romanian history, which took place on August 24, 2010:

That's me holding my snack of donuts with chocolate sauce and raspberry soda, which I ordered by myself in Romanian. What what! It's a short step from this to the presidency, baby. Aw yeah. Ioana swears to me that these are called "Sassy Donuts," but I am starting to get really skeptical about whether this is some kind of gigantic practical joke designed to stop me from becoming President of Romania. Look, powerful majority: you couldn't keep Barack Obama down, and you're not going to keep me down, either. So stop trying.

The next stop in the park was what Ioana called "the village museum," although that's probably not its official name. It's a large medieval "village" made of ancient houses from all over Romania. These are the actual original constructions, although they've been uprooted and all moved to this big park so they can be cared for as historical monuments. Most of them dated back to the early 18th century, and some of them had some pretty incredible artwork preserved along with them. One of my favorite ones was this old wooden church from 1773, which included an illuminated front that I was, for once, actually allowed to photograph:

We spent a lot of time wandering around the "village," looking at different buildings with different styles of architecture from all around the country. Romanians consider their country the crossroads between East and West, and in a lot of ways they're right. So you get a wide variety of building types, colors, etc., everything from thatched roof mud-huts to stone buildings, stuff done in natural woods and stuff painted white and bright blue.

Ioana tells me that when the buildings were originally moved who-knows-when, the people living in them -- rural peasants who kept to the old ways -- were moved along with the buildings and allowed to continue living their lives in the "village," so people would go around raising chickens and planting crops and drawing water up from the well and so forth, dressing in their traditional dress and carrying out their traditional rites. Apparently this sometimes caused friction, though, because you had sections of buildings from widely separated areas of Romania now existing just down the road from one another. All of which got resolved naturally as those owners died off.

Each area still had informational plaques, though, including photographs of people wearing the local clothing and diagrams showing how various machines worked and the layouts of the interiors of the home and what each room was used for. A couple of the homes were open and you could go in and look around, looking at the period furniture and house decorations (all of which had been preserved). You couldn't take photographs inside, though.

Even outside, though, there were lots of old machines, tools, and devices on display, including an ancient still (Romania isn't really wine country, I guess, but every region has some sort of local liquor called "tuica," with every region convinced that their tuica is the Nectar of the Gods and their neighbors' tuica is swill that would perhaps be fit for the hogs if there were no sewage available).

One thing that was interesting: a bunch of the old Romanian housing types were actually built mostly underground, with just the roof and a couple feet of walls sticking up. I assume this was to keep them safe from vampire and werewolf attacks, but the informative plaques didn't actually say that. There was something about the carved horse-heads on the beams being there to "ward off evil spirits," which I thought was pretty close.

I made myself a new friend from among the dozens of stray cats that lived in the village, and after a few hours we headed off. By this point I was pretty exhausted; water and sassy donuts will only take you so far.

We headed out to the other side of town to meet our new godparents, Ovi and Kathy. I am probably spelling their names wrong. In Romanian tradition, you get a set of godparents when you're born but then another set of godparents when you get married. The marriage godparents are supposed to help you keep your marriage together. They're the ones you go to if you have any problems or rough patches, and they're supposed to keep an eye on both of you and make sure that everything is copacetic. Considering that neither of them has ever met me and only one of them speaks English, I thought it was pretty menschy of them to volunteer.

We met at a nearby restaurant for mici, which are traditional Romanian sausages, I guess I will call them. They don't actually have a casing like a sausage, but they're mixed ground meat and spices that are cooked on a grill, so whatever. I love mici and this place had great mici, so I was a very happy man by the time we got our food. And Ovi and Kathy turned out to be two of the nicest people you could ever hope to meet. I doubt I will actually call Ovi at 3am his time when Ioana and I can't settle whose turn it is to do the dishes or whatever, but they seem like good people to have as friends.

Tomorrow the big thing on the schedule is the arrival of M, the leader of Her Majesty's Secret Service. That's no Dracula, but still pretty awesome, right?