Since the plane ride from France to Ukraine, that description of Romania was all I had to go on, and then the reports of flooding, well I wasn’t too excited to come here to say the least. After the adventures in immigration that occurred on the train I was fully expecting a miserable, horrible, no good, very bad month, and then we saw the IMAX theater.
We took a very clean and well organized bus to through the city, passing readable signs and familiar establishments like McDonald’s, the city reminded me of Torino or maybe some Latin American country I have yet to visit, we stopped at Casa Shalom, which was GLORIOUS. It use to be an orphanage but is now mostly used as a stop over for stray Christians traveling through Romania. The house was 4 stories, huge and comfortable, and could easily sleep 100 people or more. My bed, on the 3rd floor, consisted of 3 or 4 mattresses stacked on top of each other, each night was a study on softness and balance. We were fed an extravagant mix of vegetables, meats and starches and best of all, we were all together. The entire squad and our squad leaders.
On the 2nd day a lot of us went to the mall. There are 2 malls in close proximity to the house. The “old mall” where a bunch of girls went to see twilight and have starbucks, and the “big mall”, which we later learned is the 2nd biggest mall in eastern Europe, it had an ice rink, swimming pool, every store I could think of from back home and many I had never seen before, and best of all they had an IMAX movie theater playing toy story 3 in 3D with Romanian subtitles since it was in ENGLISH , score!!!!!!
The only “bad” things were that we had military style showers and Romanian mosquitoes think Americans are a delicacy. Romania is great!
