Adventure Looms

It's warmed up a lot the past couple of days, into the high 30's. We haven't done much in the past couple of days -- a lot of shopping, some errands, etc. We ordered the new couch for Io and my's room, which will be showing up tomorrow.

We took grandma Negru to the eye doctor. It turns out she needs some eye surgery, and after the surgery she needs to stay in a warm environment for two weeks to assist in healing. Grandma and grandpa live in a house on the outskirts of Bucharest that has no real heating system. In the winter, they live in just one room of the house, which has a wood-burning stove they use for heat. So after the surgery, grandma (and presumably grandpa, who can't really take care of himself) are going to go live at Io's aunt's place. But that means nobody would be around to keep up the maintenance on grandma's place. In particular, all of grandma's chickens would die.

It looks like the most likely solution is that Io and I will go live there to take care of the place for those two weeks. This would be quite an adventure, because in addition to no heat, there is no working indoor plumbing and no internet. There is one electrical wire run into a small junction box there, but it doesn't look like it would support much load. Then again, how much electricity could you use in one room?

Depending on what you're doing, potentially a lot. But for us, probably not so much. Going without the internet for two weeks will be pretty challenging for me, though. I might actually look into renting a USB satellite internet antenna for a month, which I think you can do here. But if I'm off the radar for a couple of weeks, that is likely why. The whole thing is potentially a fun adventure-within-an-adventure, like going camping for two weeks while I'm in Romania. Io knows the house well because she lived with her grandma and grew up here for several years as a pre-teenager.

I also had an amusing first brush with Romanian business practices today. We went out to renew Io's private health insurance (she's covered by the national program, but with the pregnancy we put her on some supplementary insurance as well). You basically have to go do this in person, because Romania still operates primarily as a cash economy. Few places take credit cards and most Romanians do not even know what a personal check is. It seems like this is in the process of changing, and maybe pretty fast, but for now most everything at the consumer level is done in cash. Io had tried to renew the insurance yesterday, only to discover that the business had relocated on the other side of the city without informing any of its policyholders. Today we had Gagi drive us out to the new location, after calling to verify where it was and when it was open. When we got there, they wouldn't let us in. It had been a busy day because a lot of people renew insurance in January, so they decided to close an hour early because they were sick of working. Hilarious! Can you imagine if, like, a bank in the United States did that? "Yeah, we're tired, so we closed up shop. Come back tomorrow." It's like something that would happen on Seinfeld.