Thanksgiving Plans!

Today I tackled (what turned out to be) the monumental task of cleaning the bathroom. Though I am without my favorite bathroom cleaning tool, Bleach Wipes, I was able to clean most of the bathroom with Mr. Proper (Mr. Clean to those of you at home-it's even the same logo and everything) and Romanian version of Windex. However, the challenge came when it was time to mop. I had seen a mop and bucket in the hall outside our door, so thought - no big deal. Unfortunately, I underestimated the funckitude of the mop and bucket. Apparently whoever used it last decided not to clean it out and so it took not one, but TWO buckets of soapy water to get the mop clean enough just to use. Meanwhile, I realized I had to use the shower (newly cleaned) in which to empty the dirty water and that because we are in the basement and things tend to stay humid down here, it would take extra long to dry. So ... what I thought would be a quick clean before a shower, became a two hour process before the floor dried, I re-cleaned the shower and finally got to get clean myself ... sheesh! What a process.

After this, there was endless Internet searching and some continued rearranging of our stuff. As I mentioned before, our apartment tends to get pretty humid, so we have to open our windows for a few hours everyday in order to make the place bearable (Brr!). Unfortunately, this means we have a lot of debris in the house and now I am realizing that it seems we will need to sweep daily in order to get the leaves, etc out. Fun!

Although all of that is pretty dull, we did have a bit of good news: we have found a place to have Thanksgiving dinner! Before we arrived in Romania, B had been told by a couple of his colleagues who have been here on Fulbrights in the past that the Fulbright folks were invited to a Thanksgiving dinner at either the Fulbright office or Embassy, so we assumed this would be true this year, as well. Unfortunately, in the previous years, the director of Fulbright here was an American woman, but she has subsequently stepped down and now the director is a Romanian. So, this year the Fulbright folks have arranged a "holiday get together" on Dec. 6, leaving Thanksgiving day gapingly without any plans. We were told, though, that sometimes the American owned hotels in town host a Thanksgiving dinner. After many calls and emails, we were able to secure a reservation at the Hilton for Thanksgiving dinner. We are pretty excited and cheered up. We were getting worried that we would not be able to make any plans and both down about it, so we are glad to have set plans now. A good end to an otherwise frustrating day!-S