Z-town, Romania: Billiards & Cinemas

Howdy,

This blog will be a brief one. In the blog: our weekday excursions (still in Zalau), our weekend trip to Cluj-Napoca, an exert by Valerie, and some random facts.

Last Thursday:

A few of our friends were heading to Argentina the next morning for a month, so Thursday night would be the last night we would see them.....maybe ever in Alexandra's case. (Just giving her a hard time.) Before we went to Diesel (the pub where we would meet everyone), we went to a pool hall behind some buildings with Alex (Haegen's unofficial buddy). He is pretty good at pool, and taught those of us novice players a thing or two about the game (all of us):

Alex the Teacher

He taught us pool. I've played before, but I seriously got 5 times better that night just by a little instruction by Alex. After that we went to Diesel and hung out with the majority of our friends before 4 of them headed out to Argentina the next morning. They made it safely by the way. Our 4 friends interning in Argentina for Tenaris met them at some point on the other side. We told our American friends to give the Romanians a hard time, so I hope they live up to it.

Later that night, Leon got pulled over. Leon had nothing to drink, as he had just come to pick us up. (Leon was on Skype his parents while we stayed at Diesel.) He got breathalyzed and everything. The cops were pulling everyone over since it was almost 2:00 AM in a small town next to the only pub in town. But, after Leon failed to even use the breathalyzer correctly for a successful 5 minutes, the language barrier allowed us to slide by the cops and return to our hotel.

Weekend:

Over the weekend, we went to Cluj! Not as glamorous of a weekend, but we did go to the mall. We saw two movies. 7 of us went: Aly, Leon, Haegen, Valerie, Stef, myself, and Mircea (who met us in Cluj). We saw the movie 22 Jump Street all together. (Romanian subtitles) Then we all split up into smaller groups for other movies. Anyways, here are some pictures from the mall excursion. A couple fun things happen before that. My car (Aly, myself, Mircea, and Stef) arrived first and we ate McDonald's like it was our last meal on earth. We also found a photo booth for couples. Naturally, all 4 of us piled in it. The other group (Haegen, Valerie, and Leon) had to make some minor "adjustments" to the rental car:

Car "Adjustments"

Mircea being lazy before the movie

Photo Boot for 4

The next day (Sunday) Aly and I went out for breakfast in the town square. Mircea and Stef had slept at Mircea's brother's house, who lives in Cluj. They met us for breakfast a little while later. Then, we met with the others at a botanical garden. It was pretty. At one point, there were some Japanese looking structures, and we let Leon lead the group in a single file line while all of our hands were behind our backs and heads held high. It looked very official. Or not. We didn't really care. There was a large tower (5 stories maybe) and we climbed it to get a better view of the garden. The, we all went out to eat at a sushi place. It was good, real good, expensive too. Pictures:

Our best attempt at a prom pose (Stef & Leon, Josiah & Haegen)

Aly and I for breakfast in the square

Valerie, Aly, Stef, and Haegen in the garden

Leon and Valerie at the sushi place

Since the weekend, we have been vigorously planning our trip to most of Europe. We have also been pushing forward toward the end of our projects at work, since we only have 2 weeks left now. A fun surprise was seeing Amalia! Amalia is from the Galleria branch of Tenaris in Houston, Texas. She is originally from Romania and sat with us in Houston before we left. We sent her with a gift back for our HR reps in Houston, Ashley and Laura. The contents will remain anonymous.

Now, an exert from Valerie:
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The day after we arrived from Budapest I went over to Iulia and Ema’s again. I suggested we make bizcochos (aka Mexican wedding cookies) and watch a movie. At Kaufland we tried to find anise (essential ingredient in biszcochos), but apparently its really expensive and impossible to find here. When it was clear we weren’t going to find it I decided to make chocolate chip cookies instead because they are usually so simple and classically American. The process didn’t turn out much better.

1. Packed brown sugar and vanilla extract aren’t things here. For brown sugar we substituted the huge granulated kind for coffee, and for vanilla extract we subbed vanilla “essence”. It doesn’t really smell like vanilla at all and its clear.

2. We had to convert the recipe from imperial units to metric units, then English to Romanian.

3. There was a little bit of confusion with baking soda and baking powder. They use them interchangeably so even though the recipe called for baking soda, I’m not sure which was actually added in the end.

4. They don’t have measuring cups. Instead, they pulled out a recipe book where scrawled in the back it had how many spoonfuls equal a certain number of grams.

5. When it came to adding vanilla, we had a 25mL bottle and supposedly needed 15 mL (a HUGE amount for the size batch we were making) for the recipe. Iulia’s mom eyeballed it and added half the bottle.

6. I asked if we could set the oven to 175 degrees Celcius. It turns out their oven doesn’t have temperature control, it is basically an enclosed stove top burner. We set it on medium.

I’m the kind of person who follows recipes to the letter, so by this point I was trying to conceal my heart palpitations and shallow breathing. Ruxie (15, George’s sister) blended the sugar and butter, Ema measured the flour and baking soda, and George delegated everything as he read the directions out loud.

When we finished mixing everything, we had cake batter. I tried to explain to them that cake batter and cookie dough should be completely different, but they had never made cookies before so they didn’t understand what I was talking about. In the end we added more flour to thicken it up and hoped for the best. After playing telephone with the recipe I shouldn’t have been surprised when our chocolate chip “cookies” emerged from the oven as chocolate chip bread. It was like an entire batch of chocolate chip muffin tops. Fortunately, none of them had ever tried chocolate chip cookies (except for Cookie Crisps cereal) so they didn’t know how wrong our cookies were and everyone was very proud of them. Afterward we had pasta for dinner and settled in for a movie and sleep.

The next day I woke up bright and early so I would have time to walk to work. It didn’t seem far but a 1.5 mile walk first thing in the morning seems so much longer with a heavy backpack and poorly ventilated work clothes in 90 degree weather. Later in the week I took Leon back to their house so we could use Iulia’s sewing machine to have our workpants hemmed.

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Now, some random things: