Everything Takes Longer

The pace of life is a slower in Romania and yet it seems we are busy all the time. It's because everything takes so much longer to do. Take grocery shopping for instance. In the States, I would hop into my car, drive the 2 miles to the grocery store...find everything I needed at one store, wait for the courtesy clerk to bag my groceries and even carry them out to my car if I wanted. I would then drive the short distance home and be done in less than 30 minutes. Here in Romania, we walk the mile or so to the grocery store...careful to bring our own plastic bags with us for after we are finished shopping, we have to put the groceries back into the cart, pay, then move off to a table just outside the check stand area where we bag our own groceries. Then we lug them all the way home. Once we get home we put away the groceries, grab the empty bags and head off to the corner store for the rest of our shopping. Part of the reason for visiting 2 or 3 stores is because you can't always find everything you need at one store. Another is because the prices can be considerably more expensive at the big grocery store compared to the Plus Market or the corner store. Since we're watching our budget, we are price conscious. So...grocery shopping becomes more like a 2-hour adventure than a short errand. Add the fact that we only purchased enough food for 2-3 days means we have to go back again in a couple of days. You can't really stock up for a week or more here because food is fresher and thus spoils quicker and the refrigerators are MUCH smaller than a typical fridge in the States.

Another example of things taking longer is laundry. The wash cycle on a Romanian washing machine is TWO HOURS!!! After the wash is complete, we have to hang our clothes to dry...hoping it doesn't rain that day or we have to hang them inside. Clothes dryers are extremely rare here and very expensive, so no one uses them. Laundry day is literally laundry DAYS!! Unfortunately, washing aids such as Spray-n-Wash or Shout are not available, so stains don't always come out. New colors are common, however. My first load of whites came out gray...everything that was once white is now gray (sigh). Just when I was beginning to feel sorry for myself I remembered the woman I saw doing her laundry when I stayed at the foster care center in Unirea. She was doing her laundry by hand outside her home. She was surrounded by laundry already hanging on a clothes line and was busy working on a pair of jeans. She had a brush and was scrubbing the soap into the jeans. It looked exhausting. I am thankful for the machine...it is two hours I do not have to scrub clothes by hand.

My last example is cooking. I remember Saturdays growing up when my mom would spend the whole day working on lasagna...the sauce was started early in the morning and cooked all day. It was the BEST!! No store bought sauce can compare to my mom's homemade sauce. It's kind of the same here. First of all, although there are some prepared items available in the stores, they are limited both in types and varieties. Most everything is homemade...which means it takes hours to prepare. The main meal for Romanians is the noon meal, usually eaten about 1:00 PM. Breakfast is often bread with a vegetable pate' or margarine and jam. Dinner is usually a sandwich or other simple snack. Lunch, however, is amazing! The foster care center where I am living is fortunate to have a woman come a couple times a week to prepare our noon meal. Her name is Tanti Dokia (Auntie Dokia) and she is an amazing cook. On the days she comes she arrives around 9:00 AM and spends the next 4 hours filling the house with amazing scents as she prepares the meal. Homemade soups, salads with fresh vegetables and herbs, creamy sauces, etc. It's all rich in flavor and her presentation is fabulous. The Romanian teenagers in the house can't stand our "American" food...it's made too fast and lacks flavor. After tasting Tanti Dokia's cooking I agree with them. Mom had it right...but even Mom didn't cook like that EVERY day!

So, the pace of life is a little slower...but it's because everything takes so much longer!!