Monday, March 3, 2014

Cheeses, Breads, Soups... Oh My!

So I grab my luggage from the round about, casually walk into the main room and pray that my friend has honored his word and he is just sitting there waiting on me. So I take a deep breath and raise my head from my phone. VLAD!! I've never been so happy to see a familiar face in my life. He grabs my luggage and head to the car. Finally. I sit in the car feeling ecstatic and relieved that I am now in his care. Haha. But seriously it was a huge relief.
So at this point I am starving and I just want to crash, but he insists on showing me around, taking me shopping and getting my Romanian number finalized. Great. So we get to this big shop and it's called Carrefour, but Americans call it Walmart.

 Okay, it's not really Walmart but it's just like it. So we go inside and there are a bunch of local vendors selling smoked pieces of pig. I'm anti-pig so this doesn't appeal to me at all. Then I keep walking and I see a table with cheeses and I LOVE cheese. So I try it piece by piece hoping to buy some Romanian cheese. No. Not this one. Maybe that one. How about the purple one? Okay so 10 cheeses later I don't like sheep cheese, I don't like goat cheese and I don't like Romanian Cascaval.


So we bypass all the rest of the vendors and go into Carrefour to pick up supplies that I need.
Just before leaving Carrefour I see the bread section. Hallelujah! There was sugar breads and salt breads and chocolate breads and onion breads..... Breads Galore!! So I go on a taste binge but this time I like them all. I mean this place makes American bread taste like cheap writing paper. The brown kind that nobody wants. So I buy some onion bread and some chocolate bread and we head to the register.
I did not realize that there wasn't anyone bagging up my things until it was finished and she is asking me if I wanted to but bags. So I buy some bags and slowly bag my stuff up while other Romanians just stared at how inefficient I was. I grab my wallet and pay for my things, 280 LEI. I'm impressed by this price considering that I bought slippers, towels, a comforter, food, drinks, and other random things for only 85 USD. This is no longer like Walmart.

We wander around the city for about three hours and right before I am introduced to my student hostel we go to a traditional Romanian restaurant called Oscar. This is a Picture of my awesome friend Vlad who studied at UM-Flint with me and picked me up from the airport. Across the table from here is my first dish and traditional Romanian sour chicken soup, and his dish is a pig belly soup (with pieces of pig bell inside)..
before you cringe, it was delicious.


This is a picture of my second dish at Oscar, it's called cassoulet, it is a french dish but somehow it is considered a traditional dish here. It's just beans and sausages.

So we leave there and head to my student hostel. Finally in Guadeamus.

I walk in, and my roommate is absent. YES! I throw my luggage down tear open my comforter and hit the sack. What a long day.

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