I swore to myself that I wouldn't start any more blog entries with pictures of snow outside the bloc windows. I would like to note, though, that it dropped another inch or so of snow last night, despite the fact that it is March. Io says this is what Romanians call "the lamb's snow," the last gasp of winter before it warms up. I hope so.
Gagi's birthday was this week, so we had a couple of people over during the week to celebrate on the actual day, along with traditional Romanian mici and UFO pork chops. The dinner was lovely but the Romanian was flying much, much too fast for me to keep up with so I retired early. But it seemed like everyone else had a good time.
La multi ani!
Other than that, it's just been a regular week of being cooped up inside, running errands, and teaching ESL classes. Io is now three weeks away from her due date, which my friend Ben (who just had his first child a few months ago) says puts us officially in the "danger zone." What he doesn't realize, though, is that I have spent my life driving on the highway to the danger zone.
With warmer weather on the way and only a handful of weeks left before the baby's born, my guess is that we're going to be pretty busy now. There's stuff to get ready for the baby, and there are a bunch of people we've been meaning to go visit but just haven't gotten around to, and this is our last chance before everything goes all crazy.
Some of them are folks I'll be meeting for the first time, which is always interesting. People usually have questions about America, and somewhere in there it usually comes up that I'm a criminal prosecutor. In the States, most people hear that and think, "Well that's pretty cool," figuring that my life is basically like an episode of Law & Order every day, except that I'm way better looking than that prosecutor guy. All of which is true.
In Romania, though, things are a little different. This is a country that has not had good experiences with government and its arms of enforcement. In America being part of law enforcement means you wear the white cowboy hat and spend your time cleaning up the streets and whatever. In Romania it's more associated with late-night knocks on the door and paranoia.
Even today, twenty years after the revolution, you're talking about a law enforcement community that has to put up big posters at the police stations saying they totally aren't taking bribes any more. So telling people you're a criminal prosecutor here doesn't have quite the same cachet. On the other hand, maybe they assume that if they cross me they'll wake up in Guantanamo with a car battery hooked up to their genitals, so it probably all evens out.
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