ROMANIA?????? WHY ROMANIA??????

After two years of inexcusable absence from Blogging it's about time to start again.

I have it in mind to compose a series of roughly chronological anecdotes taking our story right back to the very beginning of our exodus to Romania, all under the general title of...…..
……………………..ROMANIA????? WHY ROMANIA??????

II hope the answer to that question will become clearer but it is the question we are most often asked when a Romanian discovers that we have moved here permanently.

A large number of Romanians seem to simply want to leave this beautiful country which has so much to offer, but they can't see it. All they see is a 'better' life abroad in countries like France, Germany, Italy. Spain, the USA and of course the UK...…..until recently that is. Emigration to those countries has been in such high numbers that as a result Romanias' population has reduced over the years we have been here.

My standard answer used to be "Because life here is so real" (that will hopefully become clearer in later ramblings). Or another answer I have used is "Well someone had to try and balance out the numbers of you lot going to Britain!!!. 
At least now I have a new answer....…………...….....BRITAIN????? WHY BRITAIN??????

{I am, of course, hinting here at the national embarrassment of the debacle of Brexit and when I first tried to compose this introductory page it became a rant about my true feelings about this shameful waste of time that the UK has put itself through and it will take many many years for Britain to recover from the total loss of respect that is the result. Britain has become a laughing stock around the world...…………………………………………………….. After a calming beer and a cigarette though I threw my soap box onto the pile for firewood and decided to leave well alone...…...for now}

Alison has had Permanent Residency of Romania for a number of years and now I have that honour too. The natural next step is Citizenship which we both greatly desire, but I have to learn a lot more of the Romanian language, learn all about its' rich history and also every one of the eleven verses of the National Anthem! 

Enough of a re-introduction, better get on with it.

Steve

BENI AND JERI

We now have five dogs.
Our original three girls:

Joli a Romanian mongrel who was abandoned on our property as a puppy, she is now 7 years old and everybody's strict Auntie.
Plus the two litter sisters, German Shepherds called Florica and Natasha. They are about 2 1/2 years old now but they both still think and act and bounce and jump like 3 month old puppies and can at times tease their auntie to distraction.
Then there are the two boys:

Younger days when they got along

Beni, now one year old. A Romanian terrier-like bouncy mongrel who grew to be a little bit bigger than we thought he would and who is unfortunately now getting a  bit too big for his boots.

Jeri, about 9 months old now, he is a Romanian Shepherd Dog, (Ciobanesc Mioritic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_Mioritic_Shepherd_Dog). He is a big, massive-pawed ball of white and grey fluff, full of fun and love.
We got Beni to try and give the two German Shepherds a younger play pal tin an attempt to give Auntie Joli a little peace and quiet.
Jeri wasn't planned, he just arrived.
I will tell their full stories over the next few Blogs, but our aim is to try and find good homes for them both individually.
Although they loved each other and were inseparable as puppies, they have decided that they can't get along and need to be kept separated.
Their dispute with each other is affecting the girls to the point where they are very guarded with both, so, much as we are really going to miss them, they need to move on to be with new people who can give them all of the love, time and devotion that they both deserve.
They get on wonderfully with people, and it seems with other dogs, but only when they are outside of the 'pack' environment that we seem to have created at home.

Read on.

SOMETHING REALLY WORTH SEEING

A short video made for us by a great friend all about Volunteer Romania's fantastic work with under-privileged children/ 
It says it all without need for further words https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-XwAISHsys&feature=share
Enjoy!

www.volunteerromania.co.uk

HORSES AND CARTS - A COMMON SIGHT IN OUR VILLAGE

Horses and carts are a common sight in the village we live in, just as they still are all over Romania.
The horses are hard working.
They take families and workers to the fields, then plough or draw other farming equipment while they are there, and then they bring whatever has been harvested home again.
These ones though are special and These are just some quick snaps that we took of them yesterday evening.
they belong to a friend of ours, who bred these horses, just as he has done all of his horses through his lifetime. he carried on where his father left off and these two are his fifth generation.
They are so perfectly matched. Unlike many other pairs of horses that you see.
When these two trot down the road, only one horse can be heard, they are so perfectly in unison.
Here they are happy, it is the end of their working day and they are bringing their winter feed home.

Steve
www.volunteerromania.co.uk

THE MOMENTS THAT MATTER WITH VOLUNTEER ROMANIA

Although every minute of the time I get to spend with the children at the children's home is a real pleasure, there are the odd moments, just like this one, which are so special, and which remind me why we are really here in Romania with Volunteer Romania

Steve

BEST LAID PLANS

Our weather has changed.
After a long long winter, and a hardly existent Spring, summer has arrived, with a bang.
Sunshine all day long and temperatures up to 30 deg C.
The weather forecast told us it was coming so we planned for it.
At last we could get out into the garden and plant all of those oh so essential crops for this year.
At last we could get outside and do some of the essential maintenance work that need to be done and start to build our greenhouse and the chicken run we have decided that we need.
In Romania though, nothing ever seems to go to plan,, so we should have known better.
On the first day of the sunshine our hot water heater decided to go wrong and started delivering steam through the taps instead of hot water. A little investigation and a little common sense told us that it was the thermostat, which is a relatively easy job to replace, and we did so. Whilst doing it though we discovered that about 6 of the joints in the hot water pipework were leaking badly, apparently having been melted by the overheated water passing through them!
They are still dripping away, soaking our basement floor, for reasons that will become apparent if you read on.
That evening we discovered that our website had gone down down. It didn't only go down, it disappeared completely. It transpired that our Hosts servers had crashed, and by the time we discovered it (because they couldn't be bothered to inform us of the problem) it had already been down for 6 days.
This is an important time of the year for Volunteer Romania as it is just about the busiest time for bookings onto the programme, so having the site down for so long was no joke.
A large number of irate e-mails later and an apparent lack of willingness by HostSo to treat the problem as an urgent one, we decided that we had to change our Host provider. Not quite as simple as it sounds because as our old Hosts' servers were constantly down we couldn't just copy the site over to a new Host and re-launch it, it had to be completely re-built, from scratch!
Now, I am no computer genius, and neither is my other half, but she had already built the first site and she set about doing it again. if you have ever tried this you will know that it requires a knowledge of 'coding' which to the uninitiated viewer looks like complete gobbledegook. It's coming along though, and we would love people to take a look and let us know what they think of the new site Volunteer Romania. We have now received a very generous offer of help from someone who is far more expert than we are, so Ali is busy putting all of the information that he needs together so that he can take over and allow us to get on with the rest of the jobs.
Then, to cap it all, on our first day in the garden, I fell over, stupidly. trouble is I fell right on to a pile of metal that we had moved, badly cut my hands and ended up with a cut on my leg and on my stomach. The cuts in my hands are so bad that I have been unable to wield any tools to get on with things, so I, just like Ali, am stuck back here on the laptop all day long, just doing whatever I can to help move things forward.
John, our friend and co-worker who lives with us has done a stirling job keeping everything going in the garden and cutting the grass that was just getting longer and longer and without his efforts we really would be in a mess right now.
We will perservere though. The information for the website will take a couple of days to complete and my hands are healing, so soon we really will be able to get on with things properly and achieve some of those goals that we have given ourselves for this year.
Keep an eye out, hopefully it will be interesting.

Steve

A TASTE OF OUR HOUSE, VILLAGE AND SURROUNDING AREA

The Castle overlooking our nearby city, Deva

This is the front of our house

This is the small house that 8 of you will sleep in bunk beds.
It has it's own wet room,with stand up shower as well as a small sitting room

These 2 pictures are of our guest bedroom, which has it's own
small en-suite bathroom

This is Hunedoara Castle, that you will be visiting

this is a typical daily view in our village, and this would constitute a traffic
jam where we live

This is the Casa de Cultura in Deva

This is our lounge with it's open fire, hopefully we won't need it. This is
overlooked from a galleried landing between the two upstairs bedrooms

This is our painted village church which sits high on the hill overlooking
the valley

Another typical sight in the village, this, or the odd escaped pig!

This is the second room that 5 of you will be sleeping in, as you can
see we still have to put the beds back after it's Spring clean

The en-suite bath that 5 of you will share