Charmed in Romania

It is the evening of our first full day in Romania. Yesterday we arrived midday and were greated by Marco and his girlfriend Tanja. Marco is the son of Emilian Taranu's (Emanuel's father) best friend from Romania. He and his sister Cristina live in an apartment near the Universitatea de Vest and this is where we are staying. Marco, his girlfriend, Cristina and her husband are really accommodating and such a sweet group of people. We went out to dinner with them (save Marco, who was still at work) and then went into the city centre--all cities are absolutely gorgeous by night. This was no exception.
When we first walked into the room we would be staying in, which is Cristina and her hubby's room, we were amazed by the lighter collection, or altar, in the room. Totally weird. We learn later, at dinner, that Cristina and her husband work in sales and work for JTI, Japanese Tobacco International, under which products like Camel and Winston operate. The lighter collection now made sense. Cristina's husband used to work for Coca-Cola, turns out, and he hated his job. He worked long hours (would often come home around 8-10 pm) and the work was difficult. He eventually quit because his schedule was so terrible. There is a large Coca-Cola plant here around 10km outside of the city. This was really my first time hearing from a real person right in front of me, the terrors of the Coca-Cola industry. I had been educated about it at Oxy, but this was the real thing. It's true--Coca-Cola is a moral-lacking company that cares little about its employees. I am glad that he was able to find another job. He seemed quite unhappy and a shade of gray came over him when talking about his previous job. I wonder if there was more there than he spoke of. I kind of got the feeling that there was.
Also at dinner we chatted with Tanja about bikes. Tanja is in the Green for Bicycles Club in Timisoara, which promotes biking and campaigns for infrastructure and city development that is bike-friendly! She was very proud of her bike and passionate about promoting bike riding. It seemed like the organization contained a lot of young people, but she also mentioned that there were some older folks who came out for the group bike rides and attended the weekly meetings. She claimed that there were around 3,000 members on their Yahoo page. For more information about biking movements in Timisoara: http://www.greenpacks.org/2008/10/24/romanias-green-side-bike-counting-in-timisoara/ . I get the sense that Timisoara is a more progressive city, with the large influence of the University and all of the young people. It also has a history which seems to paint a picture of this type of character. The first city in central europe to use electric street lamps, the city in Romania where the people rose up and overthrew Communist dictators (http://www.timisoaraguide.com/history/revolution.html - some illustrative photos here). We also saw an art exhibit on the second day in Romania (today) that promoted environmentalism in the country and critiqued the disdain. [Also on the note of environmentalism, go Europe for having airdryers in bathrooms rather consistently instead of paper towel.]
The second day in Romania, Alison and I took care of personal chores like washing clothes, etc. and then had a picnic in the park with an excellent bottle of romanian wine, walked to the centre of the town, tried on Italian designer clothing (why not?), spent a lot of time at the tourist office trying to figure out how to get into the mountains and how to make our trek to croatia.
We are now sitting in a square in town near a museum surrounded by a bunch of cafes. Birds fly everywhere here which is really poetic, and the church bell has been ringing for a good three minutes. Not sure what that means.
We leave for the Retezat Mountains tomorrow, stay for 3 days and then make the epic, long trek to Croatia. Wish us lots of luck.

Fun? National Poet of Romania, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mihai_Eminescu , http://www.romanianvoice.com/poezii/poeti_tr/eminescu_eng.php . There's a statue of him near the town square.