September 24, 2008: Good-bye

Dear Friend,

The day has come. I can’t believe it’s been four weeks. Today felt a lot like that day back in August when I waited in the Sioux Falls airport for my flight overseas. Disorienting. Separated. Anxious. Back in August, I was subconsciously separating myself from the people I would be leaving in Orange City, probably the psyche’s way of lessening the blow of separation. Today I had to do that with the people I had spent a month trying to connect with. I had done it many times before, leaving. I wasn’t supposed to concern myself with it. I did anyway.

Whenever I leave a place, I always feel as if I’m forgetting something. Part of me is hoping whatever I’ve forgotten is something extremely vital and important for whatever adventure I’m embarking upon. I would then have an excuse to return to where I was leaving from to pick up whatever I’d forgotten. The hidden psychological gesture would, however, be my returning to see the people I love at least one more time. I could care less about the pair of socks I forgot. I just want to put myself through the masochism of the soul, prolonging an already prolonged good-bye.

My last breakfast with Tibi was similar to all the other breakfasts. The silence just seemed a little emptier. I would see him at the office so we didn’t have our good-bye at that point. After he left, I took a shower and packed up my damp laundry (it’s difficult to air dry clothes when it’s cold outside.) I tidied my room up as much as possible, then grabbed all my luggage and headed out.

As I walked the path I had taken so many times in the last couple of days, I realized I had forgotten to take more pictures of Lupeni. To my right I saw the abandoned and dilapidated train station. I really wanted to explore that. To my left was the unfinished block, abandoned at some point during the rule of Communism. I would eventually pass all the secondhand shops and little stores, the restaurants and Penny Market, where I bought most of my food. I had planned on snapping pictures as I made my way to the office, but both hands were occupied with exceedingly heavy bags. My backpack was the lightest thing on me, which I found very ironic.

Language lessons were in full swing when I finally arrived. I found a corner for my luggage and sat down to do some final email checking. Janelle brought her pumpkin pie she made the night before, so everyone got to enjoy a little bit of that. I wasn’t going to be heading to the train station until one-thirty at the latest, so I had some time to chill out.

I talk a lot. If I’m able to blog, it’s apparent I do a lot of thinking and I feel a lot of my thinking goes to waste if I don’t talk about it with others. Most of what I say is expository (most of what I write is also.) Lately I’ve become very irritated with my mouth. All I seem to do is talk, talk, talk. I realized this especially today because of the things I had begun to say to the people I would be leaving, but things I never finished saying. People had to finish something they were working on or had to go buy some food for lunch or finish a conversation they were having with someone else. Before I knew it, I had to go, yet hadn’t finished saying everything I had wanted to say. It was time to say good-bye. Each hug I wanted to be longer. Each final exchange I wanted to be less heavy. I would, after all, see my six colleagues at the end of the semester and would head back to the states with them. That thought, though, didn’t make it easier.

I was on autopilot at this point. Dana took us to Petroşani where we would get on the train for our six hour ride to Bucureşti. It was Dave, Steve (a missionary from Tanzania, who came to check out New Horizons as a potential career change), and me. Dana managed to get us first class seats, which actually turned into us having our own compartment. Personally, I was very relieved to have just the three of us in a compartment by ourselves. I should also mention at this point the joke I inadvertently played on Dana. He had lifted my bag full of books and asked what was in it. As a joke, I told him I had borrowed some of his books. He thought I was serious, but I didn’t realize that. I had meant it as a joke. He later asked me if I had checked the books out with Janelle, at which point I told him I hadn’t been serious. He looked visibly relieved. As a fellow lover of books, I could understand his anxiety, despite the enormity of his library.

This was my first train ride. I had hoped to get more reading done, but my thoughts were elsewhere. Dave and Steve had some conversations, some pertaining to my internship, some about New Horizons. I was surprised by how smooth the train ride actually was. I was expecting something bumpier. Like the telescaun in Straja, though, it was a pretty smooth ride. The scenery was beautiful for awhile, before we left the valley and entered the urban jungle. I was, against suggestion, sitting facing away from the way we were going, so I didn’t get to see a lot of the scenery. In a way, it didn’t much matter. Once we entered the compartment, we all just sat and ended up staying there for the remainder of the trip.

Dave and Steve left the compartment after four hours into the trip and didn’t return until we had reached the city. All by myself in the compartment, I experienced some much welcome alone time. Alone with myself, my thoughts, and the beautiful, dulcet tones of Hayley Westenra coming from my CD player. I managed to listen to all three of her CDs, transported to a completely different world by a voice, I must admit, I am absolutely in love with. Look her up youtube and you’ll understand.

After getting off the train, I entered into another world that seemed very much like a movie. Dave and I found our contact, Iris, a petite young woman, by the McDonalds in the train station. She greeted us with a smile and informed us of our next plan of action, which was to find a taxi. We said our farewells to Steve, and headed for the exit. It was past nine in the evening, so the city was lit up. I managed to not become totally overwhelmed at this point. I was probably clinging to Dave for some semblance of order. We just followed Iris to a taxi, lugging our stuff with us.

The traffic in Bucureşti was crazy. Riding in the back of the taxi reminded me of playing Mario Kart on Nintendo 64, with all the drag racing moves and squeezing through seemingly tight places. This was the part that felt especially like being in a movie, more so than any moment in Straja or the Retezat, as I tried to keep my balance in the back of a drag racing taxi with techno music blaring from the speakers (okay, it wasn’t that loud.) We dropped Dave off at the hotel, I said my final good-bye to my last contact to that previous life, and we went to Iris’ flat.

Iris’ flat is a very short hallway that leads to the kitchen. As you head to the kitchen, there are three bedrooms to the left, two of which are relatively large enough to be small living rooms. On the right are three closet sized spaces and the bathroom, which is the size of a walk in closet. The closet closest to the kitchen has the washing machine tucked in it, and the closet after that has the toilet (the water closet, WC.) I met Iris’ brother, Vali, and their mother, Cristiana. Iris tried to orient me to everything in the house, but the look on my face told her I was overwhelmed. She said it was “f---ing obvious,” then apologized for using that word. Yep, I wasn’t in Kansas, Iowa, or Lupeni anymore. Good-bye familiar. Hello adventure.

I started putting puzzle pieces together as I prepared my bed. I was originally told that I would be staying with a single mother who had two children. I was also told I would be staying with Iris, who was twenty-four. When I was told the ages of the children, what I thought I heard was they were two and four. I therefore thought I was staying with Iris, who was a single mother, age twenty-foru, and who had two children ages two and four. I came to realize upon my arrival that Iris is twenty-four and her brother, Vali, is twenty-two and they live with their single mother. As I watched them interact, I began to realize that life with this family could turn out to be in many ways similar to life with my own family, sans the smoking. They also have two rather old cocker-spaniels, one who barks a lot and the other who stinks a lot. Hello adventure.

Blessings.
Kailen