romania

places change people... people change places but none have changed me more than this... romania... a place where everything is broken yet everything is beautiful... the smells the sounds the sights... all are in a word ugly when thought on as something conventional... but all are beautiful in my mind when i look at the past the moments that i rember... things like buying dafodils from street beggers for the women who cooked meals for us... the way they just laughed knowing where we had gotten them... then loveingly puting them in a vase on the windowsill like a beatuiful treasure... eating gogoosh till you wanted to burst (the romanian verson of kispy creme)... painting walls till your arms felt like they might fall off... sweaping floors, washing floors, trying to have 3 minut showers with hair as long as mine... reading my surf girl magazine with the other romanian girls... singing worship songs with the students at the same time but in differnt langueges... knowing that you were praising the same God at the same time in the same way and yet in a sound so compleatly differnt... holding children with no parents only to look in their eyes and find not sadness but joy... being broken and weak and knowing that was okay... going to the only cappachino bar in Reshitsia and watching how they would laugh at us for drinking like... 5 in caps in a row after work... riding trams at night and that flash and flicker of the lights in the dark streets of gypsy suburbia and how it made every moment seem that much more sureal... being a tram couger... the smell of burning waste and wet plaster.. and the way that when i smell things that smell like it i feel comforted and reminded... while every one else gags... the smell of grout from tileing a bathroom... the hospitality of a family who combined makes less in a year than i do in a month and their giving spirits... acttually petting a tiger in the gypsy zoo for 5,000 lei... aproximately 50cents... the hyenas that i swear were nothing more than rabbid dogs that wanted to ripp of my head and eat it... realizing that if you want to run away from everything you fear... only to realize that if the only thing your afraid of is yourself... you wont get too far with out it being there too... climbing a tree 3 stories high to do my morning devotions... and having every boy in the school tell me i was the most stupid crazy girl they ever met... and then them all atempting to heroicly rescue me... which never happend... actually i jumped when i was about 10 feet off the ground... which made them yell and grab their heads like an old man would... you know what i mean... the way my first love was playing the guitar so perfectly and just met my gaze and held it for so long... then that night the way he smiled and looked at me from across the room and told the romanian boys i was cute and sweet but talked entirely too much... the way they told me what he had said... the day that i realized that my first love was my first love when he looked up at me for that second durning church service that was in romanian there for compleatly undeciferable... and then suddenly... and at the exact same moment realizing that my first love would never love me... becuase that was the way things were... the dreams that you have when your young... before you've ever truely been hurt... listeing to dashboard confessionals on a bus thats going through the mountains feeling so alone you would never notice that your on a buss with 30 other people... feeling so selfish for what you take forgranted every day you wonder how you will ever live again... realizing that the second you get home nothing will change... the sinking feeling of that realizatoin... the pizza place that one night... the way the romanian girls just stared at me when they saw my chanel makup... the way i felt so selfish for having it... tabitha and chealsy and our adventures... the way we were friends... they way things werent complicated then... the way that we thought we would all always be friends forever and ever... the way things made sence when they didnt... skateboarding in the olimpic square with the random punk boys... the way they looked when i did and ollie... it was quite possibly the most pathetic ollie on the planet... but they had never actually seen a girl skate before soo... that was new for them... talking to old people and hearing about life before the fall of comunism... and the stories from people who had actually been pursicuted for what they believed... buying coconuts to make coconut icecream... fauk valuka nabuna... thats romanian for crazy fire cow... yeah dont ask... patche(Gods blessing to you) the common greeting amoung the christinas in the town... the phrase we thought ment good day... and how we said patche to EVERYONE... and the perplexed looks they would often give us... how the girls team bedroom smelled like calgon body spray and the boys team bedroom smelled like old farts and drity socks... the pick pocket boy i slapped on the hand for trying to steal from me... and how i scared him so bad he ran away crying... ha ha ha... markets and bartering and being like on man i got a good deal... and then realizing that you got totaly overcharged ha ha ha ... team canada vs. team romania soccer match... making "canadian" crafts with the preschoolers... eating cowstomack soup... and actually enjoying it till the translation came in and i realized what the chewy bits were...mr. geroky and pricipal fast getting high off oil paint after "accitentaly" closing all the windows and doors in the room they were painting radiators in.. them telling us about the beautiful butterflys that were all around us ... in a compleatly empty room... the beauty in people who have to truely rely on God for their day to day needs unlike us who expect them and enormously more than that... the fact that he gives us so much and we still dont trust him... the way that they would give you everything becuase they love you... and when they tell you they love you... they are so real... that the transparency you think you have shown them turns into mud when you look back at it... the way that i will never forget romania... the way that i will always want to return with all my heart... and the way that places change people... and people change places... when we were there... we changed their school... they changed our hearts... God brough us together and one day we will see each other again...