[en] My trip to Romania – part 2 – Romania
This is the second post in a series about my summer in Romania, click to read the first part, Getting there or the third Back to Denmark.
You know that feeling when you go away for a while and then come back to your town and look around to see if anything changed? And most of the time nothing has changed, but there is this feeling of change or, rather, outlandish although nothing is changed. Well, it wasn't like that for me, the town looked almost exactly as my memory recollected it, but compared to the memories of myself which I can find on almost every street downtown, it seemed that I had changed...
In order to better asses how much I changed I spent the first days going around seeing the city and considering the way it changed and the way I had changed. And a few streets were changed here and there, there was a new mall in town, some of the bars I didn't like downtown went broke and the old bridge was in repairs again.
I had to change my Romanian bank card since it had expired and I discovered the indeed the bank system is more constant and stable than a rock, the procedure was a bureaucratic as ever. I tried not to have cash on me during my stay and pay by card, I was only able to do that in two places, I ended up taking the lute with me all the time.
During one of the first days I went to the new mall and got the change to see the new Cărturești book shop there. I was quite happy that there such a nice book shop in town. I tried to meet as many of my friends as possible, I seem to have been in town at the wrong time and staying waaaay too little time to be able to do so.
One of the things I hated about being back in my town was the high temperature that lasts all day and all night and during the night it comes with the added bonus of mosquitoes. I got to experience the heat to it's highest when traveling by tram during noon, I must say I've become extremely appreciative of the wide and air conditioned buses in Århus after using the trams in my town. I wrote a few days a post (in Romanian) about the new ticketing machines.
Two of the things I enjoyed a lot were the fact that I could easily talk to everyone on the street since I knew the language perfectly and the fact that I got into a lot of arguments with friends. You might not know this, but when Romanians talk one has to be right, it's an absolute, there are no ties and no hostages and we're genetically programmed to do our best to win the argument, even when there is no solid proof for either of the sides and the arguments lasts for eternity and everyone else gets bored, and it's getting dark and you're in the middle of nowhere. Yeah Alex, I loved our argument about the VAT. Talking about middle of nowhere, I went to Moni's birthday and that was at a place called Trei insule (roughly translated Three Islands). This place is supposed to be very close to my town, just after the forest, none the less, I had never been there and although I've been working on Open Streetmap for Arad I'm still not in clear as to where the three islands are. 
)
I ever got to have a talk, I was a speaker at the Edmundo conference in Timișoara where I held a extremely over timed presentation of what being a college student in Denmark means (see the presentation here). This conference was about 5 days after I arrived in Romania, and if you remember from the previous post, because of the whole airplane situation my luggage had been lost. I received the luggage 5 days after arriving in Romania, even though they said I would receive it in the first day, then the second, then the third, then the firth. Luckly, nothing had been damaged (except for the bag itself).
A few days before I left the country I got some bad stomach & guts which made my days a pain in the arse.
This is the second post in a series about my summer in Romania, click to read the first part, Getting there or the third Back to Denmark.