Day 27, Friday, July 17, 2015

I realized why I really have to put my thinking aside about so few attendees tomorrow. That’s because I remembered that my kids are putting on their major annual summer world music festival, The Manifestivus, on my old land in Cabot, Vermont this weekend. Had I known there would be so few people in Romania I would have cancelled so I could go to their festival.  My son’s old African rock band, Toubab Krewe, is reuniting just for this festival. You can Google them. They were great!

But anyway, this is one of those “Oh well” moments. It would make no sense to kick myself for that.

I haven’t really warmed up to Bucharest. Not my favorite city, although Gaspar took me to the old city today and that was pretty nice, although it apparently has been taken over by a lot of girlie clubs that are all competing for each other’s customers.

The hardest thing to get used to is there are apparently no restrictions on smoking—indoors or anywhere—and so many people smoke here! I am just not used to be surrounded by cigarette smoke, and I don’t like it one bit.

Romania is a pretty poor country and Gaspar (whom I have affectionately dubbed as Mr. Encyclopedia) tells me a study showed the poorer the country the more smokers. That’s a sad fact to me.

The other interesting thing was that we saw an ice cream place that I wanted to get back to after we ate lunch, but after lunch we couldn’t find it anywhere. We kept walking the streets looking and it had seemingly disappeared. So I gave up. Just then we turned a corner and there it was! There’s a lesson in that.

All that walking didn’t do wonders for my legs. My legs were hurting so bad two days after that steep hike that I had to break down and get a leg massage. The woman who did it was amazing. I never have had a massage therapist work so fast; it was like she was in a race. At first it was hard to get used to but she covered so much ground so quickly she was able to cover not only my legs but the rest of my body and go over it and over it and over it. She killed my legs, I could barely stand the pain on the top of my thighs (my going downhill muscles), but I knew it was doing so much good. It turned out to be a wonderful experience and I felt so much better afterwards.