Living Ever After: When we traveled back in time...

Or, at least it felt like it. We went to Maramures, a county in Romania very isolated in the mountains, that is thus able to maintain lots of tradition and culture that has slipped away in many other parts of Romania.

First we explored the village town of Vadu Izei.

Most houses had satellite dishes, and most houses had wells and clothes lines for drying. Does that seem backwards to you? I grew up with a very comfortable income, in a big house, with a washer and dryer and even when we were poor in college we had pumped water. And we still don't have cable tv of a satelight dish. That was a luxury we never got to. These people have that, but they never quite got to running water. Isn't that a little funny? Like dudes- satelight tv was invented maybe 30 years ago, and it's awesome and stuff, but the Romans invented indoor plumbing 2,000 years ago. And yet, old women with head scarves are visibly all over the village drawing water from wells in buckets and boilng it over cauldrons in their backyard. Like- does this really exist? Apparently 50% of people here do have running water, they put in a pipe system themselves. I also saw a kid on a bike today listening to an ipod. Wouldn't he want a car before an ipod? I don't know.

It was like a fairytale. Not the happily ever after part. The princess-is-living-as-a-pauper part. People have cars, but horses and buggies are always used for any type of big load- hay, logs, sacks of stuff. And instead of people being dressed for work in shirts and ties getting ready to go to the office, they're all in outdoor farming clothes, and most every house you pass has someone out working in the yard, trimming bushes, building things out of wood, working in the garden. And it's February. This community is a legitimate farming village.

The clothing. All women wear flower-print head scarves and skirts with thick tights underneath. All men wear leather shoes and button-up shirts. But jeans.

It's like poor house, poor house, poor house, huge ginormous beautiful church. Church is the pride and joy of the community. Florin says if the church needs money, everyone gives. But, if the city needs money to fix the road, no one does. I think he's bitter. :)

Then we went to a brandy-making shop, with a turning water wheel that used to power a corn grinder, and a strainer for water so the man could use it for brandy. In the back a girl 17 years old that just got married last year was making bracelets and jewelry. She got married, moved in with her in-laws, and started helping out with the new family business. Traditional yes, but abnormal for Maramures today. 17 is very young, too young Florin says, and she probably had no other prospects for education or a future.

Highight: I told Florin I wanted to get pictures of people in traditional Romanian clothes, so as we drove by a young kid in traditional garb, Florin pulled over to the side of the road, asked the kid if I could have a pic with him, and took the picture. SWEET.

Then we got to go see a world-famous wood carver. He just sent off a shipment to Washington DC. It was so beautiful! I love the carved wood look. I also got to try carving some wood. You get a scalpel thing, and pound on the end with a heavy pounder, like a hammer with nails, and slide it along the wood at an angle. With wet wood, it's easy. Making lots of big crosses and crusifixes of Mary and Jesus and stuff is very common. So are chains- wooden chains. And gates with braids on the sides. They draw with a permanent marker on flat wood and

then work their way into the wood. So beautiful. I said it smelled good (I mean because of all the fresh wood and the spring air) and the wood carver said, “Good? But I just drank beer.” And apparently he's a priest, which just makes it all the more interesting.

It's funny- to pass many horse-drawn carriages with hay, logs, or manure, driven by a guy with stylin skinny jeans and nice leather shoes. Whatevs.

My favorite part was going to the Barsana Monestary. There were maybe 7 large wooden church buildings, large buildings, and it's nestled in the mountains overlooking a valley with the wooden spires slicing through the fog against the lush green background of the mountains. I kind of felt like I was in a Lord of the Rings movie. You could see how for Eastern Orthodox Christians, this is their pride and joy- their temple square- and they want it to be beautiful for the people, but mostly beautiful for God. 10 nuns live there, to keep the place up. We saw 3 inside a gift shop making crafts, and one weeding in the garden. I bought a fun colorful bracelet for me and for Aspen too. Homemade by the nuns that live there. They also had a free (not all toilets are free) squat toilet- my first one! We went inside one of the churches, it was so intricate, so beautiful, with gold and colorful mosiacs of saints everywhere. The wealth of these small village communities- they obviously choose to give to the church.

Our tour continued with a tour of the Merry Cemetary. All the headstones are made intricately with a description of the person and a picture depicting their life- either their job, or how they died if it was an accident.

We also saw inside the church the cemetary surrounded, a service was going on. The men were in the front, the women were in the back of the church. All the women wore floral skirts with matching floral headscarfs and black coats with black high-heeled boots. They were looking' fine. :) All the men wore black pants, black leather shoes, and black coats with black or fur hats. A very Romanian look. Children were surrounding the church, begging. It was harder to ignore them this time, because I had just read that book about street children. One boy even showed me a “certificate” from the government asking the people to please give the boy assistance. But in the book, I read about how the kids fake those certificates- they type up an official looking paper and lightly color over a piece of bani with a colored pencil to make it look like a stamp.

Then we went to a very tall wooden monestary. The steeple was very tall. It was supposed to be the tallest wooden monestary in the world, but the stone foundation was too big, so The Guiness Book of World records didn't acknolwedge it as the highest wooden church. It reminded me of those big wooden playgrounds- with secret tunnels and stuff. There were many different stairways, spiral stairways, and chandeliers. It was in the mountains, and it really was beautiful. There was a service going on downstairs, and when I opened the door, the people said I could come in. So the 5 of us did, for a moment, but it was very very crowded, and we barely fit in the door, so we quickly left afterwards. Something interesting- inside, the men and women were not separated, but when the service ended, we saw all the men exit before the women were allowed to exit. Gender equality wasn't the greatest. :)

We went to a Victims of Communism memorial that was built in one of the rennovated prisons for communist victims- people that died being arrested. 7,000 people died in that prison, but all over Romania there were 700,000 victims of communism- either executed because they were a former leader, policemen, or religious monk or priest or nun, or because they were a minority sent to a concentration camp, or they showed resistance and were sent to the Gulags in Siberia and died there, or they were relocated and died in the moving process, or they were set to work on public works projects in Romania like the People's Palace in Bucharest or the Danube Canal project, and they died in the process. Horrible. It was very similar to the Holocaust museum in Washington DC. Very educational and eye-opening for me. I've always thought that the holocaust was horrible, but I have tended to forget that even after the holocaust ended, concentration camps still existed in eastern Europe, run by the Soviets, and that communism was just as bad as extermination camps. The torture was unbelievable. I walked into a cell that was all dark with a single chain in the middle of the room where a person's ankles would be chained to- where the people had to stand all day in cold water, and it gave me the chills. Kind of like walking through the cattle car in DC- these were cells where people actually died- actually breathed their last breath- all because a government wanted power over the people. Horrible. In the back there were 12 trees to symbolize the 12 apostles and we lit a candle for the victims.