It’s been a whirlwind few weeks, which is why you haven’t heard from me in, well, two months now. I am indeed still alive.
There’s been much ado since my last post: I found out my site, took a verbal mid-term in Romanian class, finished up practicum, and much, much more.
However, most importantly, I visited my site last week. It’s a place called Tulgheș (pronounced TOOL-gesh) in north-central Romania. It’s in Transylvania but only about 15km from the Moldovan border. It’s a village of about 3,500 people nestled in the mountains at about 650m, but there are a few peaks nearby that reach almost 2,000m.
This is where I’m going to spend the next two years, which explains the gravity of finally knowing this and seeing the village. I’ll be teaching 3-8, and there are quite a few adults in the town who want to learn English, so I’ll most likely be doing some adult classes as well.
The town is 40 percent Hungarian, which means, by the time you read this, I’ll most likely have had my first Hungarian class… and possibly my first emotional breakdown. (Hungarian is supposedly one of the hardest languages. The train station signs on my way to Tulgheș were in both Romanian and Hungarian. The Hungarian ones were like 19 letters long. Two months ago, I never would have imagined a scenario where the Romanian signs looked easy.)
There’s more info in the video, and I also took some footage of my journey from București to Tulgheș, along with quite a few still pictures of both the journey and my town. Enjoy!
PS: I’ve made getting Internet at my site a priority, so hopefully, once I’m there starting July 9, I’ll be updating more often.
PPS: See above, and believe it when you see it.
