Bucharest
Part 2: My new home
A
friend's family expected me in Bucharest's Gara de Nord, whose name I had heard
first years earlier, during the media-hype about the street children that used
to hang out in the station, until the government imposed an entrance fee of a
few thousand lei for everyone who did not have a ticket (currently a Euro is approximately
40.000 lei).
The family
helped me carry my luggage to their old Dacia and took me to the two rooms that
they, a family of four, shared. The children usually slept in the living room
on two sofa-beds, the parents had a separate small sleeping room. Whenever I visited
them the 14 year old son Vladut would share their parents' bed and I would sleep
in his. Still they invited me to stay at their house as often as I wanted.
The
next day they took me to Piata Kogälniceanu, in the centre of Bucharest,
where my future apartment was supposed to be. But while I had the address I couldn't
find the right Block, and I could not see anyone on whom the description of the
owner of the place fit either.
Finally I came back with them to the school
where the family's mother worked, and where I met Cindie, and Australian who worked
for a year in Romania, and who was to become one of my best friends.
I
was quite nervous about the apartment now. The family had offered that I could
stay with them, for free. Yet coming from a country where it is normal to move
out of home as soon as one finishes school, and having lived several years by
myself, the idea of going back to a family life with no room of my own was not
comfortable to me, even if the independence I wanted cost me 120 Dollars per month.
In
the evening my friends called Domnul Florescu and found out what the misunderstanding
in the morning had been, and where we could meet him the next morning. "E
de treaba," - he is alright, he can be trusted, they said when they got off
the phone, and were now less worried about their young foreign friend staying
all by herself in Bucharest.
The next day I moved into my nice little "garsioniera"
from whose window I could see over the roofs of Bucharest. From here I could walk
within ten minutes to University or other central locations, but still hear chickens
from somewhere when I left the window open.
Part
3: Friends
