Saturday, June 8, 2013

quote-of-the-day

The packing continues and I've bagged up a bunch of books to give to a family and an English-speaking school in Bucuresti and in the process was going through some of the ones I really liked to copy down the things I underlined. This from the end of Father Fiction (a very very helpful book for me a few years back):

"Sometimes human life can seem no more meaningful than a fish flopping on a shore. Writhing. Out of its element. And I would love to tell you that the real problem in life is we believe we are writhing when we aren't, but that's not true. My spirituality, that is Christian spirituality, doesn't tell me to close my eyes and pretend life is beautiful and there are no problems to confront. I'm told, instead, I am out of water, and if I want to find water again, I must go in search of a different kind of water. All of us have been washed on the shore. We all have issues, we are all broken."

Wednesday, June 5, 2013

hail storm adventure!

Well it's my last week living in Pitesti and it's sending me out with a bang. It's been mostly rainy and sometimes stormy the last few weeks here, one or two big thunderstorms in the afternoon. But they've been short-lived and nice to watch and anyway I'm from North Carolina so it doesn't bother me to get caught in one, so when I left for the grocery store (a fifteen minute walk, ten if I'm hurrying) and it was getting dark and windy, I just grabbed a raincoat without thinking much of it.

Made it to the store and halfway back before anything happened. The wind had gotten cold and it some random fat cold drops were falling when just like that, the whole sky fell. Pouring really cold rain, and then the hail started. Small at first, then quarter-sized. I don't know why I didn't stop. Some construction workers even yelled for me to come join their little huddle, but I elected to press on, taking off my glasses so they didn't get cracked or anything. And mind you, I can't see anything anyway because I've got to keep my head bent down and face covered, meanwhile giant hail is bouncing off my head and the front of my legs and those suckers sting.

Not to mention just how cold the rain was. By the time I could see my apartment my jeans were falling off me from being so soaked and my legs felt frozen, kind of how your skin feels when you've been playing in the snow and you're wet and it's twenty degrees outside. So I didn't realize until a few minutes after I'd changed out of them that the stinging wasn't just my skin thawing but little welts on my legs. They're going away pretty quickly though.

And then! I'm trying to get everything soaked off me and out of my purse and hung up in the balcony and realize my glasses are gone. Think I must have taken them out of the bag and set them down somewhere because I'd shoved them in without the case. Well I search the whole apartment and they're nowhere to be found. Half an hour later I'm searching the stairwell thinking either they didn't go into the bag when I tried to stick them in and that's why the construction workers were yelling or maybe they fell out when I took my keys out. A neighbor sees me searching, asks me if I wear glasses, I almost fall onto him I'm so relieved. He's found them and given them to my neighbor. Amazing.

One more fun thing about this story: my hair looks super nice after it's been rained on--gets curly in a way it won't do any other time. So I'm fleasca in this picture but soon I'll have cute hair... :)


Monday, June 3, 2013

...cognates?

The other day I was having lunch with a friend, and don't ask me how we got onto to this topic, but he asked me how I wanted to die. I turned it on him, and without pausing he says:

"Vreau sa fiu rapit."

Understand rapit as kidnapped. Blink. Remember who I'm talking to. Realize he's saying raptured. 

What makes it crazier is if you don't know Romanian you probably thought he was saying raped since as far as I know it comes from really similar (or the same?) Latin. The funny thing is that if he had meant kidnapped, he'd surely have a story ready for you about sharing the Gospel with them as the last thing he ever did.

Anyway. Two and a half years later and this stuff still happens every week.