Johnny Pumpkinseed and How I Got Sunburnt

So sorry about the delay. I went to Braşov the weekend before last but that will be the subject of a future blog post. So this weekend, a bunch of use went to a city called Piteşti to volunteer with Habitat for Humanity. So a bunch of us got together after the last day of my teaching practicum to go on the train there. We thought we asked for the fast train to there but oh no, that was not in the cards. Instead they sold us a ticket to Piteşti on the tren personal. That meant that instead of taking a fast train to Buchareşti and then on to Piteşti, we took a very slow train. The ride to Buchareşti was uneventful except for the fact that we ended up at the podunk train station so we had to walk a ways to a Carrefour where there was a McDonald's. Haha! After spending time at the station we finally got on the train to Piteşti. There were already people on the train so we didn't have a place to sit but hey, it is the Peace Corps so I am not one to complain. So in the middle of nowhere on the way there, a hundred people got on the train where there was room for maybe 30. Needless to say, we were absolutely squeezed. So about Johnny Pumpkinseed. My friend Mark was standing at the window with no room to breathe when this random Romanian man tapped him on the shoulder and offered him some pumpkin seeds. Mark didn't want any but the guy didn't want to hear that and he repeating kept trying to stick the seeds into his mouth until Molly, another friends with us, told the guy that he was allergic to pumpkins and he left him alone. We laughed our asses off. In the mean time, we didn't have room to breathe and people kept trying to walk down the little hallway on the train. I was glad when in another stop in the middle of nowhere, almost everyone on the train got off. After that, we all had a train compartment to sit in and laugh at each other in. After getting there, we walked to the hotel and past out.
The next day. We all had to be up and ready at 8 AM when the bus would come and take up to the work site. After a complimentary breakfast, we got on and went to a place in the middle of the countryside. There, we broke into three groups. One would work on demolishing a wall in a building, The rest of us would work on ditches on the outside. One group had to extend the ditch that a previous Peace Corps had dug the weekend before. The rest of us had to dig through a small rise so that the water would flow into a drainage ditch beyond that. All of this would be filled in with a pipe but we were free labor. After a while, all of us guys said fuck it and took off our shirts because we were sweaty and it was the manly thing to do. :) Unfortunately there were two things wrong with the ground. One, over the past decades, people living at the site had buried their trash in this area so we found tons and tons of trash and had to deal with getting that out. The other problem was the the little hill has mostly clay so we had to deal with that. That meant that one person would take a pick-axe to the ground and then the rest would come at it with shovels. Now this is tiring work, so we took turns doing all of that until we got the depth of the trench to the liking of the foreman and broke the wall that was holding water from the rains of the night before and it all flowed out. We were all excited that was we done was worth something in the end.

After that, we all went back to the hotel and I took a nap. When I woke up, my shoulders hurt like shit from the redness that I had on them from not having a shirt on, even on a cloudy day. I am still hurting from that. That evening we had real Italian food for the first time since being in Romania and it was SO GOOD. We went out that night and then sometime that night, I passed out. The next day, a bunch of us rented a maxi-taxi (small private van for rent) to take us to Ploieşti. I was wore out and after lunch, I passed out.

That is all the stories I have of Romania at the moment. On Wednesday, July 5th, we finally find out our permanent site and I will be sure to let you all know about where I am to spend the next two years of my life and how you can send me plenty of mail and packages.

Ok with that,

Pe curând