EVS Express

“Why Romania?”

If I would get 1 leu for every time I´ve heard that question, I would earn at least the same amount of money as I get for food and pocket money as a volunteer here, in Arad working in EVS Express project Powered by corporate social responsibility.  But I try to explain that as shortly as I can:

I found myself in Romania in July, exactly, found myself, because I left from Estonia with no plan what so ever. I decided to quit my job and go for a trip and decide everything on the way. First we were 3 Estonian girls and one old Audi. No one of us had ever gone so far with a car, oh, yes…I forgot. First we had some kind of a plan to go to Balkans, but the day we left Estonia, one of my friend didn´t find her passport.  So, we were restricted with EU´s countries because she had only an ID-card.

Somewhere in Slovakia we decided – we must reach to the Black sea, it´s not so far anymore. We would have never made that decision in Estonia, from there the Black sea in Romania is about 3000km, but in Slovakia after some more experience in road tripping, we felt comfortable with that.

The first strange thing for us was the speed of travelling - in every other country we passed, with one hour we usually managed to get as far as 100km at least but in Romania we were lucky if we hit the 50km. Villages, villages, villages…one village ends, another village starts. Why to put another name at all? Mostly it felt like one long village with people sitting outside their houses looking cars passing because there was nothing else to do.  But what lovely houses there were, colorful and grapes growing on the fences, haystacks in the back yard and the fields of sunflowers (somewhere in the middle of villages where one village really ended before another started)…yellow endless and beautiful.

And the horse carriages, I still don´t get enough of them, trying to take pictures of every one of them. I love horses and I love that there are still some people who choose horse instead of a tractor. Well, probably they don´t choose it, they just don´t have enough money. But still somehow horses are more romantic then tractors like candles are more romantic then electricity.

And then, in one village we saw a lot of empty silver castles, bigger than churches, shining houses with lot of towers but looking quite dead at the same time. The houses of rich Roma people as we heard later, they show that they have money to build these kind of houses but in the end they live only in one room of the house or back of the house in the tent. Strange.

After visiting a lot of wonderful places in Transilvania – Sibiu, Sigishoara, Brasov – and stopping in the huge and overpopulated Bucharest, we were on our way to Constanta, on one of the 2 highways there is in Romania.

After some kilometers we noticed that our gas is finishing but well, we were on a highway, we were thinking that sure there must be some gas station soon. But no, after 50 km there was still no gas station and things started to get critical. We used our GPS to look for the nearest gas station, but after driving another 20km to the place the GPS sent us, there was no gas station, there had never been a gas station and the road was the same highway but back to Bucharest and with a wall stopping us from turning back to the way to Constanta.

In the end the situation worked out fine but I have heard that we weren´t the only ones who have found themselves in that situation in that highway. All the Romanian people don´t know also that for 60km there is no gas station. Ironically 1 km after the point we turned off to find a gas station, there was a gas station and after 10km another one.

The black sea coast I fell in love with was in Vama Veche, in a small hippie village. There I made my decision to stay in Romania.

I welcomed the sun rises in the sea, went hiking to Retezat mountains with Romanian friends, made a longer visit to my favourite city in Transilvania – Sibiu,  spent wonderful time in the University city Timisoara and came to Arad to the concert of one of my favourite musician and film director – Emir Kusturica.  I had wonderful time. But the decision to work in Romania as a volunteer I made already in Vama Veche. One of my reasons of leaving Estonia was to do something for others not to get stuck to this nowadays money-making-wheel. And in Romania I knew that this is the place to stay, because I love the sea, the mountains, the people here and well, even the different understanding about time and efficiency because I feel I have something to teach or at least try to teach.

That is my answer to the question, why Romania. And believe me, the real story is so much longer.