One of the funniest, and funnest, things about Romania is the music here. As I understand it, there's a decent amount of Romanian music, made by local bands, often in Romanian. I rarely hear that being played when I'm out, though. When you're in the hipermart or just walking out on the street, what you more often hear is a crazy mishmash of music from other countries. There's a lot of American and Euro-pop, as well as some oldies, some rap, some C&W, all sorts of stuff. There seems to be little in terms of flow or format -- it's just one song after another, almost at random. It'll be like ABBA, Eminem, Willie Nelson, Jefferson Airplane. It's like JACK-FM on steroids. At least half the time, the song you're listening to is actually a cover version by a (presumably) Romanian artist, but in the original English. I assume this is because it's a good way to get popular music on the cheap here in royalty-free Romania. I'm interested to see whether that (along with the thriving market in pirated DVDs) changes as Romania becomes more and more integrated into the EU.
We've had a fairly lazy last couple of days. Some errands, walking Io to the bus stop for her job at the hospital, and a lot of time hanging around the house. I'm realizing this blog, like my life in general, is changing from "Wow look at all these amazing things I'm doing in this foreign country" to a sort of maintenance mode, where I settle into more of a business-as-usual lifestyle here. This is the new normal.
We did finally get our new couch, which is great. Storage space here in the bloc is at an absolute premium. There just isn't a lot of extra room for storage and whatnot. Most of the furniture here is designed so that it opens in some way so you can use the empty space inside it for storage (bench seats hinge up, etc). Even the oven is used for storage when things get tight. Living here with everyone is like serving on a submarine together: there's a lot of "We need to eat dinner so you have to put the computer away" sort of stuff, but it also brings you a lot closer through necessity. So far everyone has been very cool and understanding with one another. And obviously, it just shows the level of sacrifice that Romanian parents will go through for their children / son-in-law. Letting us live here involves major changes for Tania and Gagi, at a time (Gagi's retired and Tania's approaching retirement) when their lives are supposed to be settling into an easy routine. Soacra si soacru: multumesc foarte mult!
Anyway, the new couch. The shot at left is the old configuration of my and Io's room. It's a 9x12 bedroom that has about a foot and a half of one wall (the one not visible in the photo) taken up by floor-to-ceiling bookcases, and two feet on the other side taken up by a wall-length bureau/desk unit. Space is pretty tight, to the extent that I sit on the bed when I'm working on my computer (mine's the one on the left). The bed is a futon couch that folds out, but it was pretty narrow (about the size of a full), which is, you know, an issue when one of you is nearly seven months pregnant.
We have since given away that long desk unit and gotten a new couch/bed, this one the kind that has a changeable frame (so the mattress is better as a bed). It's about the same length as the old one, but definitely wider (about as wide as a queen, I think, maybe a bit less), which is a huge improvement for us. Hooray!
The couch is also a good thing for Tania. She got her current furniture over 20 years ago, during Ceaucescu's time. Back then, availability of furniture (or food, or medicine, or anything else) was pretty irregular. And if you wanted to buy furniture, you pretty much had to take out a loan because nobody had money. And the only place to get a loan was from the government, because it was a centrally run economy. When it was time for Tania to get furniture, she found a couch that she loved. She went to get the loan, but it was Communist times, so it took weeks for the money to come through. By the time she got it, she went back and the couch was gone. And it wasn't like you could just order another one, this was Communist times and availability of things was sporadic and random, and you just took whatever was available.
So Tania ended up getting this other furniture, which she didn't like nearly as much, and has had it for 20 years now. With Io and I arriving, Tania and Gagi decided it was time to get a new couch, and we shopped around until we found one that was exactly like that couch-of-her-dreams from 20 years ago, and we bought it. Yay for heartwarming capitalism.
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