Calling All Brain Studiers

I'm starting to get a little worried. I've talked to a few other people about something I've been experiencing here, and no one else has experienced it, which worries me, despite my enjoyment of feeling unique. I frequently doze off while traveling on trains, buses and maxi taxis - not enough to be considered asleep, but enough to do the head-jerk thing every few seconds. When this happens, every conversation I hear is in English, even the conversations of my Romanian or Hungarian compartment-mates. As I start to doze off, the foreign language conversation will morph into English, but an unintelligible English. An example: Person 1 "The cat's bread went for hair but did it go under something yesterday?" Person 2 "Well I don't swim and there people break into holes and turkeys. Do ladders make songs with sidewalks taking pictures." and so on. It's very confusing. So confusing, and a bit startling, that I'll snap out of it and try to figure out what they're talking about. But, the moment I start paying attention and open my eyes, poof! Back to Romanian or Hungarian. The conversation's too hard to follow, so I drift back into doze mode and the weird English returns. "Becky's car split but your mom's drinking the lamps. They said wait without holding a note and I can buy the whole blue for reason." Stuff like that. Nothing that makes sense. I think it might be similar to how I saw people I knew in the faces of strangers when I first arrived. English is so imprinted on my brain that it takes the first opportunity to turn everything into something somewhat computable. Maybe my brain misses English, though I do hear it fairly regularly. Maybe it can't handle learning a foreign language. I'm jealous of all those volunteers gushing about the dreams they're now having in Romanian or Hungarian, or those who are speaking it in their sleep. I can't even hear Romanian when I'm asleep. What's wrong with my brain?

Behind Door Number 1

I spent last week sleeping in a tent, barely showering in a wooden box with unheated water and contorting my body to find an un-lumpy patch of earth to curl up on. Despite the discomforts, I've never felt so ok with camping. As mentioned in previous posts, I often count down the days until such events are over, but this time around, I somehow managed to simply enjoy the newness and slight adventure of it. Maybe some things do change.

One of last week's tasks included making a map of all the traditional homes in the village Grosii Tiblesului (don't ask me how to pronounce it) and I, being of the map-making type and feeling a bit unenthusiastic about the remaining scrub-the-dust-off-the-house task, jumped at the opportunity. It took me and my two friends two days to walk down every street, determine the traditional-ness of every single house, take a picture of those deemed most traditional and briefly chat with whomever happened by. In all, we recorded 296 houses. Just as we finished up our final street and started heading back to the museum, a man approached and asked us to come with him to his house. There had been a tv newscast the night before about what our group was doing and he had heard about the project and wanted us to see something, but I couldn't understand what. Now, I try not to be a judgmental person, but when a man with red eyes, sour looking clothes and alcohol on his breath starts pulling on my arm rather forcefully and telling me that I have to go with him, I get unhappy. We all said that we were tired and we needed to get back to the museum because our friends were waiting for us and we couldn't go with him, but he wouldn't have it and his grip on my arm tightened as his persistence increased. Reluctantly, we let ourselves be led away from the trail towards home and into a strange man's yard. He led us past the house and to a small, padlocked shed in the back. With slightly shaky hands, he undid the lock and opened the door and, as he fumbled for the light switch, gestured for us to step inside. Still feeling uneasy, but knowing that, with the help of my two companions, I could easily kick this guys butt, we stepped inside the little, plain shed. If you have read the Harry Potter series, you are familiar with the magical tents they use for camping, the ones that look simple and small on the outside, but are vastly ornate mansions on the inside. This felt a little reminiscent of those. Though the shed did not increase in size once inside, its beauty was the utter opposite of the plain, white outside walls. The man is a wood carver and stores his crafts in this shed. Intricately carved wooden chairs, tables, cabinets, frames, spoons, plates, coat racks, toys, etc covered every square inch of wall space and as much floor space as possible. In an instance, my unease sheepishly fizzled away and was replaced with awe. He's hoping to turn his little shed into a museum and bring tourists in to see his work, which I think is a great idea. He'll just have to work on his greeting and tourist hook a little. No arm-pulling allowed.

Two years seems like a long time

Over the past year, I've been bottling up my homesickness into a small chamber located a little above my stomach and a touch below my heart. It's a decent sized chamber that has been able to hold quite a lot of the tar-like homesick goo, but it has recently reached its limit and has begun to overflow. At first, the goo seeped from the bloated walls of the chamber slowly, releasing its toxins into my chest cavity at a manageable rate. At a rate that allowed me to press it down and to the side, into a place where I could digest it when the lights went out and no one could see the goo seep from my eyes. But it seems to be overflowing at a faster rate now, poisoning my stomach and piercing my heart and pressing against my throat. And it no longer always waits until dark to seep. I hope that either the chamber bucks up and increases its capacity or the goo cuts me some slack soon because I like it here and I want to make it here and I don't want to be a failure.

But I no longer feel like me.