cute

Oh, duckies!!


found them here

At my University in the States suddenly were some ducks living on campus, too! It was a very pleasant surprise everytime I saw them. They started to swim in the puddles that appeared after the rainstorms.

Key Ring Bracelet

Well, yes, this is not a fashion blog, but I knew about this blog-"flashmob" initiated by Anna*Frost of Fashion Diary but didn't have any idea what to contribute to it.
But then I came back home and while bringing everything back in order after 4 month of absence, creativity hit me and I made a bracelet out of key rings.

All you need is about 9-10 silver key rings (I don't have enough golden ones to make this, do you??) in various sizes and forms. I just took the first ones I could find in my key chain collection (yes, I collect key chains, I'm a little nerdy, so what ;-P ).
Put them together so you get a ring of key rings. Of course,, it should be wide enough to fit around your wrist (an above your hand if you don't want to open and close it all the time when you want to wear it).

As you can see, mine loosely hangs on my wrist and it moves up my arm a little, too. And I added a 5 Danish Krones coin, which has a whole in the middle so you can winde it through one of the key rings, although this was very hard to do, uff. The coin is silver to and has little ornaments on it as well as hearts (yes, Danemark has beautiful money, no wonder they don't want the EURO). It was the first thing I could find on my desk and has been there for a year, as a souvenir from the sailing seminar in last April( yes, my University takes us sailing if we want to!!). and I always wondered what to do with it.
But you can add any kind of coin or pendant, whatever you want.
Now I'm consicering making more stuff out of key rings, maybe a necklace, we will see.
Have fun trying it out, I really like it and it doesn't look cheap or self-made at all.


:-)
Vio

Foto -Collage

In between, something quite different but very lovely:
Some of my favorits things, put together with this funny recipe

-use Google image search to search for the answer of the following questions
-pick an image from the first paige of the results
-use this webpage to put together you collage
1.name?
2.favorite dish?
3.hometown?
4. favorite color?
5.favorite movie?
6.favorite drink?
7.dream holiday?
8. favorite dessert?
9.one word that decribes you best?
10.how do you feel right now?
11.what do you love the most?
12. what do you wanna be when you're grown up?

This is mine, although I did only use some questions:

(also seen at it's loveable, mirror world and Teilchenwelt )

RO- food and coffee culture

Ah, I somehow really didn't get to taste many Romanian dishes. The only time I went to a traditional restaurant with some other AIESEC trainees I tried Samale, which is a traditional Christmas dish, I was told. Basically it's cabbage rolls stuffed with rice and meat, served with polenta. I'm no huge fan of it, but I liked it and I'm a very picky eater, so probably not the best person to write about foreign food.
But another thing I got to try was homemade cheese from goat milk I believe, which was similar to greece feta, but much more salty, because the salt is used to preserve the cheese while it is stored which is about some month if I recall correctly. It was very good and I got a great piece from Christina, who was my AIESEC buddy (thanks for everything again, lovely!!) but I never managed to eat it up before I went back.
Other things I tasted were syrup made of berries (homemade again by Maura's grandmother) and some juice made of sea buckthorn, presumably, at least it reminded me of its taste and it was orange, so I guess it must have been it. These were all incredibly tasty.
I guess Romanians eat a lot of meat, but what I know for sure, they love pastries, in any imagineable form. Supermarkets tend to have an amazing variety of chocolate or marmelade croissants, slices with poppy seeds, balaclava, lokum (both Turkish sweets) and last but lot least cakes!!
Then you find small cake shops everywhere, well at least in Cluj, with windows displaying a variety of cakes, cupcakes and pralines in the brightest colors which invite you to come in and eat as much as you can (remember the small prices!)!! Oh, it was so tempting, but I managed to resist for 6 six weeks, but then, during my vacation time in Romania, I finally ended up there (twice in one week*sigh* ;-) )!!

RO - architecture and religion

ok, what else do I want to tell you?
Hmm, what I really liked about Cluj were the old buildings from the beginning of the last century, although many of them were in a terrible condition. I really like this architectural period, with a lot of floral elements and small spires and oriels on the facades.


(top: corner to the famous mirror street in Cluj, and bottom: the Romanian national theater)

As far as I know, and I'm no expert on this, Cluj has buildings from many different epochs, the important churches are about 1000 years old and mainly gothic, I believe.




(top: church of St. Michael with statue of Matei Corvin; bottom: the Orthodox Cathedral)

Speaking about churches, there is a church on litterally every corner and Romanians are very religious in general. I have seen people making the sign of the cross while passing a church in a bus and on sundays the mass in the Cathedral is so crowded that people are standing in front on the plaza to attend it even oif they don't get in.
I took one of my favorite pics in the Cathedral and it also shows how faithful Romanians are:


Unfortunately, I never visited any of the monasteries in the North of Romania, but they are said to be very pretty.
Oh , this reminds me of my roommate and good friend who is currently living in Romania because he is working for AIESEC there (whooohooo, MC VP OGX Romania!!!!), have a look at his blog!! He will be there for a year so he will really have to tell something about the country and the people there and he has visited the monasteries or at least one ;-)

Economy in Romania

Romania, one of the poorest countries in the EU, has now not only major problems because it is close to bankruptcy, but at the same time faces a corrupted political elite resistant to reforms and even willing to fight back in a way hardly imaginable.
I did some research on the topic for one of my international business classes (check out some of my sources) and personally was shocked that something like this is possible with the tolerance of the EU. And that I didn't really came across anything like that, although I officially only worked as a volunteer, because it is so hard to get a permission to work apparently. Now I know why.
I found this video very interesting and it summarizes the situation quite well. Still, it's just crazy.

Working and Living in Romania

So, finally I continue this again. I fight the urge to make this become (another) fashion blog, and although I love this kind of blogs, I will stick to my more travel oriented way. Nevertheless, I will have to make comments about the culture and the lifestyle of course.

However, as my internship in Romania was last year, I tend to forget a lot about it, but I will try to recall some special moments:

At first, let me tell you about the public transportation in Cluj-Napoca. You have to know that cars are a really big thing in Romania and the city is cramped with them, during the rush hour everyone goes crazy and even early in the morning (starting at 6am) the street in front of our apartment was jammed with cars as was the whole city center. An Romanians tend to honk a lot and to drive fast and dangerously; so I saw quite a bit of road rage there ;-)
Well, as I have mentioned before, Cluj has trams (which make a lot of rattling noises and are the reason why you can see so many cabels above the streets as you can see in the first pic; sometimes one can even see sparks, when a tram passes on of the switches on the cabels above, if you know what I mean, it's hard to explain, because I'm no expert on cabel cars) and busses, a lot of them.
The system is very nice and you can get everywhere easily and it is very cheap, too. Two rides cost 3 Lei, which is about 0,7€ or even less these days. However, the busses are really old, most of them fall apart and make noises all the time, some doors never really close properly. But they have some newer ones, I have seen old German ones, I'm pretty sure! And you have to know where you want to get out, and then you have to be fast. Yes, I ended up between two closing doors once, but I got out finally!!!;-) Of course, the busses are not on time, but one will arrive enventually, you only have to be patient! I had to take one bus from one of the bigger bus stations on plaza Mihail Viteazul(in the picture above with the equestrian sculpture) to get to work in a suburb which was close to the great mall they have there and which consisted mainly of very expensive one-family houses, all very new, and multiple-family apartment buildings that were in the middle of nowhere and not inhabited yet. Which made it look like a ghost town, kind of.
Back to the busses, there were even free busses to the bigger super(hyper in Romania) markets like Cora or Auchan( I have fogotten how it is spelled correctly, it's the french chain , though). These really carried the masses to the markets, which are on the outskirts of the cities because they are so new (same with the malls). When arriving for example at the Cora market, everyone would get out of the busses and follow the marked path across the parking lot to the main entrance, like sheep on their way to the butcher ;-)

As you can maybe read out of my remarks, I'm no fan of these big supermarkets like WalMart and especially not if they are as crowded as they were in Romania on a Saturday afternoon or on Sundays. That's why I preferred to do my grocery shopping at the smaller supermarket in the city center,and because it didn't take me so long to get there after work in the evenings. Another reason is that I don't like to leave a supermarket with 20 plastic bags, that I throw away afterwards. Although, my roommates Christina and Maura were very responsible and used these as garbage bags, which worked really well.
For me , living in Romania was really cheap compared to Germany or the United States now, but not as cheap as for example Mexico is. This means that food and drinks and apparel items (Shoes!!I successfully fought against buying any!!Yeah!) are very cheap or not cheaper than in an average German city (Koblenz, my hometown for example).