Visitors

Visitors


There are many options for me to write about this time, including a day out harvesting a field of corn by hand, and Nancy’s successful project to install bird houses, feeders and explanation panels in the parcul centru in Cluj, but I think instead that I’d like to write about our visitors this summer and fall.

A few days ago we sent Susie and Rich off to Budapest, Vienna and Prague. They had been with us for a week and we’d toured Cluj and Maramures in that time. Susie is Nancy’s close cousin and Rich is her husband. Rich himself had been in the Peace Corps thirty or more years ago in Africa. They are both active in the returned Peace Corps volunteer group at the home in Rochester, N.Y.

In August my niece and her new husband Mathew made it here for a visit. They were celebrating a postponed honeymoon with a tour of parts of Europe and included us on their itinerary. The first of July my brother Joe and wife Harriet were here for a short stay. We accompanied them on roughly the same tour of the region of Maramures as we this month made with Susie and Rich.

In June we traveled to Budapest to meet with Lennie and Mary Lou, friends from Harrisonburg. They did not have the extra time to get to Cluj but it was good for us to get away ourselves to see the Hungarian capitol. When we were there it seems such a pleasant and peaceful place, hardly the center of turmoil and political confusion that has filled the television recently.

Our apartment here in Cluj is fairly large by Peace Corps standards and the city is a railway hub so we have also hosted a number of volunteers as they come through town. We have a pull out couch, and those of you who have slept on it know that it’s not the best, but otherwise the accommodations are pretty good. Breakfast often is included in our hospitality and that can mean peanut butter toast and Nancy’s homemade granola. I’ve kept a log book of our overnight visitors and in the year we’ve been in our apartment we’re up to 28 different guests – that counts Linda, our most often housemate only once. Perhaps we should open a bed and breakfast when we get home. I know that if we’d have stay out in the village of Luna de Sus where we were stationed for our first two months here at site, we might not have seen anybody.

It’s nice to have the visitors from America. One reason is that they bring us things we can’t find here, but mostly it is good to know that family and friends have gone to the expense and effort to come to a corner of the world that ranks somewhere below the usual tourists destinations. Parts of Romania are a beautiful places and we love to show them off, but we also know that London, Venice, Paris, Prague and other more traditional tourist destination offer much to see as well. We also enjoy sharing out apartment with fellow Peace Corps volunteers, because we’re all in this together. So, if you’re travel plans call for a trip to Eastern Europe…………