Proud to be Romanian

Today, after 7 days of demonstrations all over the country, I'm proud again to be Romanian. Too much humiliation these past years and struggling to make it and finally people have had enough..."We apologize if we can't produce as much as you can steal", that's only one of the things people have to say...All categories of people are out there on the street: rich and poor, educated and non educated, old and young, just everyone...I feel that this country, after 20 years has awoken...Why does it take us so long to fight back? Well, it's never too late, and there's still hope. Tonight I'm filled with hope.

Alas, I'm living in a grown up wold

I can’t sleep, it’s 2am and I've given in, got up and came here with the perfectly good excuse that I had decided to start writing in here again...just write, like some sort of journal...The “I can’t sleep part” happens rarely, I am usually so tired that I don’t have a problem sleeping...always around midnight, I can’t do it before!, but after this 3 weeks vacation and one week of sleeping in every day and one liter of Pepsi (which I love, but drink maybe once every 3 months or so) here I am…Oh well, maybe I’m also hiding some facts here, like maybe I can’t sleep because of some thoughts but hey, you can’t expect me to be quite open on my first entry after the prolonged pause of journaling…nor can I promise to ever be able to open up completely, ever, in the cyberspace…but it’s a start, right?


2012 hasn’t started very well, but that’s nothing new to me, disappointments have been part of my life since…a long time, so my defense system can deal with them pretty well. Because, as a very good friend of mine told me once, “Just keep being yourself, don’t change, and if the others can’t keep up…it’s their problem”. Right he is, I only have to work on the “care less” department now and I’m all set.

I received a phone call from a girlfriend around 11pm tonight and we talked for about an hour…about nothing special, just her heart troubles, about why/how come she likes a guy and about why/how come he likes her and about why/how come it’s complicated etc…I was watching “Sex and the City” and it seemed like one those dialogues and I was thinking why in the world do things have to be so complicated all the time? Actually why in the world do people have to complicate things as simple as liking/loving someone? I told her that, since her ego couldn’t allow her to text/call him on futile/teenage grounds…

Oh wait, I know, I’ve got to stop thinking things as a child, and realize grown up world has codes to consider and unwritten laws to follow…When will I ever learn that?

The hedgehog of discontent

I took this blurry photo of a little frightened hedgehog last evening, while driving home after a really pleasant barbecue for the first of May with friends...I had to share the hilarious dialogue that was being carried on while trying to take it...We saw the little guy crossing the street and we stopped our cars instantly to get down and look at it...I had a camera so yeah, let's take a pic of the cute animal! The cute animal though hid in complete darkness by the wall of a block of flats...I and Crina, a friend, followed it. I couldn't see a thing so my first shot was that of a white wall, when a voice from above (turned out it was coming from the second floor) asked:
"What are you doing there?"
"We saw a hedgehog and we're taking a picture of it!", I said automatically in the most angelic voice...
"Please step away from the building!", the voice continued and it sounded like we were part of a bad, bad movie...
"Damn!" I said, furious at the first shot I took, "it's just the damn wall! I can't see a thing!"
"You can photograph hedgehogs at the Zoo!" the voice carried on, starting to really piss me off. I was thinking one can't really photograph hedgehogs at the Zoo anyway...
"We'll be gone in a sec" added Crina. "Why don't you carry on with what you were doing?" she suggested....
I was thinking yay, now we'll have an argument with a guy on the second floor and all the people in the building will witness...Fun! lol
And that was the moment I took this shot, the second...and right when I was getting ready to take just the perfect one my battery went dead..
"Damn! My battery's gone! Shoot!" I said and I was thinking that it was all in vain...

That's why I'm posting it here now...And that guy...I know there are lots of paranoid people out there...but to guard one's building wall from your window instead of spending your evening with the wife it's pretty desperate...We laughed like there was no tonorrow in the car remembering the exchange of words we had with the guy (some were left out from this dialogue for obvious reasons...;)) Maybe they hate tourists...or maybe that's the way they are...sad!

RIP forever with the angels...

Today a student in our school was killed. She was run over by a garbage truck that was was going backwards...She wasn't my student, but I knew her sweet face, I've often met her on the school stairs, she was always struggling to climb...she had a disability at one leg and she had had several surgical operations on it...I would always admire her for the determination she had in regards of her disability...She was a 7 grader and she looked so sweet...This tragedy has just left me speechless. These kind of things should never happen...I don't know what Turkish people say in such circumstances (she was of Turkish descent and a Muslim)...I'll just say rest in peace, sweet child, fly with the angels...

My necessity room

This is me back in 1994. It feels like it was taken ages ago, worlds ago and so many mirrors ago...which have kept intact through the years but have been blackwashed somehow and stored in an attic where I can't seem to be able to reach anymore...Sometimes reflecting flashes show me the way to that attic where all my mirrors found refuge. I never look for that attic even though I'm sure if I tried hard enough I could...because you see that attic is some sort of a Necessity Room, like the one at Hogwards (pour les connoisseurs), all you have to do is really wish to be there and bang! You're there!:)

Lately I have been reminded of things I did and said in the past and even though they're all ME it still feels like they all belong to someone else whom I admire but who's seemingly lost forever...somehwere while working, while trying to become conventional, shallow, boring, polite, a face in the crowd, while trying to fit in, while worrying about money, my job, while shopping, buying mobile phones, losing friends, making friends, loving, getting my heart broken into a million pieces, while moving on and walking on with no apparent time for old or new mirrors for that matter...well, during this so natural and commonest process I've lost my way to that attic...It's definitely time to find it. I've had enough of this mirrorless me.

The silent caller

Well yes, dear readers, I've got a silent caller and I've finally decided to take the most adventurous voyage  and explore my two mobile phones options in search of a rejection method for calls generated by unknown numbers...And that's not easy for a non-technical person such as myself...

I can't really remember when these phone calls started, maybe last fall...Anyway, I answer when anyone calls me, the only reason I don't pick up is when I can't hear it ring or when obviously I can't pick up because I'm in the middle of a class and the phone is set on silent mode. I always turn my phones off during the night, bad past experience taught me that too...So I answer the phone, especially because an unknown number could mean a payphone or even a call from abroad...Sometimes I don't even take the time to check who's calling on the phone screen...

So I can't remember when the calls started because they didn't really bother me. They were coming once a month, maybe sometimes every two weeks...First I thought they might be that type of silent phone calls automatically generated by some companies that don't have enough personnel to deal with all the calls...That's because there was no noise in the background, no anything whatsoever...Yesterday I got one of those calls the minute I got to the countryside where I spent most of the day. I had just gotten out of my car and entered my aunt's yard when the phone rang....I felt annoyed because my phone does not ring very often, especially during school breaks, the people I usually talk to are just a few...So I was annoyed, thinking "I surely hope it's not work related!" Then I saw the number was a private one and thought "Come on, maybe this time you'll have the guts to speak!"...I said hello twice or three times, no one spoke as usually...My aunt's dog started barking though, he must have felt there was a stranger on the phone!;)

So  getting that phone call didn't bother me. Instead I was thinking...whoever that is, I trust one of these days they'll come out clear and state their name...or at least use articulated sounds put together in words like "Hello"...I know, what planet do I come from? I wouldn't know, I can't remember...

Today I was pissed though. Where in God's name are those two weeks break between the calls? All the other calls came during the day, I remember one time I was on the school corridor during the break and when the phone rang I was wondering how was I going to hear what the other person was saying? Not a problem, it was just the silent caller. Boy, he had  the unique chance to hear the kind of mayhem children make during breaks...ha, that is sweet revenge!;)

So no speaking today, but a definite background noise, it might have been a train, tram or even underground...Constanta doesn't have trams anymore, not to mention we don't have subway. Whatever, I hung up. It called back the next second, I picked up and asked in Romanian "Who is on the phone?" thinking "yeah, sure, and pigs fly, they won't tell ya, silly!" And then wow, like in the bad horror/thriller movies I heard THE breathing! bwahahahahahahha! For Christ's sake! Duh! So yeah, after several months, they finally got to my proverbial calm, I'm slightly pissed, hence this entry. Now I need to find someone to show me how to set both my mobile phones to reject these calls...Oh yeah, the weird thing was that the last calls came on my other mobile phone...and not many people know that one!

Anyway, if my silent caller gets to read this (which I really doubt) I would like to say that there are so many wonderful hobbies he could choose from....bird watching, for instance!;) It's a beautiful world out there. Get out of your box and enjoy it. Seriously.

Healing Spring

The first Friday after Easter we celebrate here the Healing Spring day, a very important religious festivity. It reminds Christians of a healing spring in Constantinopolis the waters of which used to heal people, with at least one documented healing. The Healing Spring started being celebrated the second half of the first christian millenium and people go to churches and especially monasteries that have a spring nearby to take away water on this day and drink it so they can be/stay healthy...The significance of the celebration is deeper though, it comes within the week after Easter when Christians have eaten and drunk too much to remind them that the spirit is more important than matter represented by their stuffed bodies...

Anyway, part of my family chose to spend today outside Constanta, at an aunt's house who lives near a small new monastery which has a spring nearby:

Then we had a nice barbecue and talked and laughed...It was sunny and they had a swing and I swang in it looking at the bright sky and imagining I was touching it, just like when I was a kid...It was a rare occasion to see all four sisters (my mother and her three sisters) together...It's a long story, maybe I'll tell it some other time...here are some snapshots of flowers, cows and geese I took today...I really enjoyed a day in the countryside...:)

people here call these easter bells

short irises

wax cherry tree flowers

the most peaceful cow

we went to buy some flower seeds from an old lady and she was leaving on this dusty lane, it seems a photo taken a century ago...

neighbour's geese