As I'm sure everyone knows by now, last night in a daring raid reminiscent of something from a Tom Clancy novel, Gabriel killed Osama bin Laden. I know: pretty shocking. Some people think he's peaked early, being less than six weeks old. All I can say is that Hitler is going to be pretty surprised when Gabriel gets older and invents time-travel.
At first I thought this was just something Gabe did to benefit the world at large and to put an end to someone who was, let's be frank here, a fairly gigantic asshole. But then I read an article saying that for some reason, killing bin Laden has increased the strength of the U.S. dollar. That would be handy for someone who was, say, living in a foreign country and sitting on a stash of U.S. dollars.
Unfortunately, the Romanians apparently didn't get the memo because the dollar is still off over 15% from where it was when I got here. Where is my bin Laden money?! But I appreciate the effort, Gabriel.
Romanian money is wacky. The official currency is called the lei. In 2005 Romania did a 10,000-to-1 reverse currency split, taking all the old notes out of circulation and replacing them with ones that had the same name (great idea!) but were worth 10,000 times more. So a current five-lei note (sometimes called "new lei" or "RON") is worth 50,000 of the old lei. But about half the time when Romanians are talking about money, they use the old numbers. So Ioana will say she wants to buy a bottle warmer for the baby, and I'll ask "How much is it?" and she'll say "A million lei" and then I have a heart attack. But what she means is a hundred lei.
BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE. Just when you think you've gotten the hang of routinely dividing things by 10,000 if the price sounds crazy, it turns out that for some reason, when they're talking about prices in old money, Romanians always say "X million" for stuff over a million lei, but they leave off the "thousand" part for anything under. So when someone says something costs "one million three hundred lei," in your head you need to convert that to one million three hundred thousand (old) lei, and then to 130 new lei, and then to about $45. Pretty easy!
We took His Grace the Duke of Milkmouth out on an exciting car-trip adventure to the Real hipermart this week. He's been to Auchan before, but Real is like Target to Auchan's Wal-Mart: in its own mind and the minds of the people who shop there, classier. Gabe was so excited that he missed the whole thing by forcing Io to go to the lounge to feed him, and then sleeping through the rest.
The rest of us went stone crazy because Real was having a sale on baby items, so we stocked up on stuff we needed and most especially on stuff we didn't. Gabe now has more hair- and skin-care products than most top-flight fashion models* despite the fact that, FOR NOW, he earns a lot less than they do.
Also on sale: my favorite cheese
I think this is the first week that we don't have a doctor's appointment scheduled, so that's pretty exciting. It's going to be a regular week of ESL classes, Io going to nursing school for a bit, maybe getting Gabe's birth certificate, and then all culminating this weekend with Io's exorcism.
You read that right.
Moment of Zen:
* You may be wondering how I know about the bedroom habits of most top fashion models. I just sit here smugly, give you a broad wink, and go "Trust me...I know."
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