Romania

[tamisevens]

Manning and I arrived at the Bucharest train in the early evening on October 25, remarkably well-rested after our 19-hour train ride from Istanbul. Arriving in a new country at a new train station is always a little bit stressful - I'm partly looking for an ATM machine to get the local currency as soon as possible, part checking my phone to see if

Comments

[littlewashu]

Man, wonderful write-up yet again, Tami. Romania sounds wonderful, and now I want to hear what the language sounds like. I don't think I have any idea.

Nu vorbesc Romaneste (but I wish I did)

[tamisevens]

It sounds like Italian! It's a romance language, so it looks a lot like French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese... there's a lot of shared words. ie: legumes for vegetables, "hello" is buna ziua (which sounds a lot like "buenas dias!"), bread is "paine." One, two, and three are "unu, doi, trei."

My Romanian friends told me that even though they weren't taught Italian, if they go to Italy for a week, they'll totally pick it up - the languages are very close. When I said "Gratzie," I got a lot more "hey, I know that word!" type of reactions than I did when I said "Thank you."