The top 10 things I’m NOT going to miss about Romania:

The top 10 things I’m NOT going to miss about Romania:

10. Mămăligă. Bleech! This is a traditional Romanian food that I just can’t stand. And that’s too bad because it’s very cheap and filling, so at the end of the month, when I’m running dangerously low on money (like now) it’s a staple in most PCV diets. Mămăligă is corn meal mush. You may know it as polenta. Usually you eat it with cheese, sour cream and pork fat.

9. Stray dogs. This country has a serious problem with stray animals. The people here are pretty religious, and they believe that euthanizing old, sick or unwanted dogs is a sin. They also believe that spaying and neutering them is “against God’s plan.” So there’s a large amount of dogs and cats wandering the streets. It breaks my heart to see a flea ridden puppy digging through trash for food.

8. Manele. This is a style of music that cannot really be explained in words. Please refer to the YouTube video for an example.

7. Teaching. I love my students, but I was not meant to be a teacher. I don’t have the patience to answer the same question over and over again.

6. Not being able to understand everything. Though I understand a fair chunk of Romanian, sometimes things just slip over my head.

5. Body odor. Older Romanians don’t shower as much as I would like.

4. Getting asked the same questions over and over. See the previous post for more details.

3. Personal trains. Here there are several different types of trains. The IC, or Inter-City, is the very nice, very fast and very expensive train. It only stops at the big cities and is air-conditioned in the summer and heated in the winter. Very nice. Next is the Rapid train. Still nice, fast and expensive, but a step down from the IC. Then comes the Acclorat, and then, at the bottom of the food chain, is the Personal. It stops in every city, town and village on the way. Usually they’re old, rusty and very dirty. And they smell. BUT, they are cheap!

2. Getting gum or candy as change in a store. Sometimes, if a cashier doesn’t have enough change in the till, she’ll give me a piece of gum or candy as change. Gum is usually 10 bani (the coin change is called “bani”), candy is 15 or 20. And on very rare occasions, small packets of tissues are 50 bani.

1. Cockroaches! My apartment is overrun with them. I coat the floors and walls with a bug spray that is supposed to kill them, but I’m pretty sure they’re immune to it by now. Every morning I wake up to two or three just waiting for me in the hallway. And just recently, they’ve migrated to my bedroom. A few mornings ago I woke up to one on my face.