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).