December 02, 2004
Day off
Yesterday was December 1, Romania's National Day. This day commemorates Romania's unification with Transylvania after the First World War. I blogged about it in a little more detail last year.
(Hm, rereading that post, I see that I said I'd write something about Romania's experience in the First World War sometime. One year later... well, it's been a busy year, is all I can say.)
National Day is a day off for Romanians. But it's not a vacation day for me, the employee of a foreign firm. So I went into the empty ofice and rattled around with the other two expats. Fair enough; on Thanksgiving, it was the other way around.
In the evening, Claudia and I went to a movie. That's right! We got a babysitter and we went to a movie, like two civilized human beings. It was at the Bucharest Mall (which is a place that really deserves a blog entry of its own), at the top floor multiplex. Before the movie, we shopped a little. Then we bought a couple of calzones in the food court. By the time they were ready, the movie was starting, so we stuffed them into Claudia's handbag and smuggled them into the theater.
"You know," I said, nodding at the handbag, "I bet we'd feel a lot worse if we did this in a German movie theater."
"Oh, we would never do this in a German movie theater," said Claudia. "It wouldn't be allowed."
And we sat in the movie theater and ate our calzones and watched the movie.
In other news, the boys are adjusting to life without pacifiers. Unfortunately, this adjustment seems to include staying awake for at least two hours every night. It's almost 10:00 pm here, and Alan has been in bed for nearly two hours. But as I write this, he's standing up in bed talking loudly to himself. And this is fine... because last night he woke up at half past midnight, and didn't get back to sleep until two.
The Romanian parliamentary elections are still sort of up in the air. Oddly, there's not much change since my post of a couple of days ago. PSD is still just short of a full majority. Opposition Presidential candidate Basescu is claiming fraud... not massive Ukraine-style fraud, but just enough to pip the opposition out of being able to form a government. More on this in a bit.
Oh, and a cat has sort of adopted us. The cat also deserves a post. Cat... mall... elections... Romania in the First World War.
Maybe I should go to bed now. Good night, all.
Posted by douglas at December 2, 2004 10:51 PM