Emily and Russell's Travel Blog

On Saturday, we decided to drive back to Craiova via Sibiu, a beautiful city in Transylvania. It was supposed to add another 90 minutes to the drive, but we decided it was worth it.

If you tell a lie on Sibiu’s Bridge of Lies, according to legend, it will collapse. It is amazing that no one has lied on the bridge since 1859.

We went up the Carpenter’s Tower and connecting walkway.

We had lunch in a traditional Romanian restaurant which had cute outdoor huts. Romania has a lot of outdoor dining, which is really to facilitate all of the smoking. There is a lot of smoking.

Many of the roofs in Sibiu had eye shaped windows.

It was time to head back to Craiova. On both the way there and back, we passed houses with very elaborate roofs. Below is a poor picture taken from our moving car, but the houses are known as Palaces and are generally built by Romani families who have returned after working overseas.

The drive back went through the mountains, along the Olt River, and we hit terrible traffic resulting mostly from construction which reduced the highway to one lane. So we sat and sat and sat and inched forward. The delays allowed Russell to nap along with Marina, and to take some strolls along the river.

Russell did all of the driving, since the car had a manual transmission. It was also, in Russell’s words, an asshole, beeping at us constantly for obscure reasons.

We were all tired when we finally got back to Craiova after a wonderful, busy couple of days in Transylvania. We cobbled together dinner. And then it was time to say goodbye, as we had to leave early the next morning to drive to the airport in Bucharest and fly to Istanbul.

We had a wonderful time with Marina. We saw a part of the world that we had never expected to see, and we understood the joys and challenges Marina faces in her Fulbright better than we had before. And we just had so much fun together. It was hard to say goodbye. Emily joked about it being like dropping her at Camp JRF 15 years ago. We may not see Marina again until her Fulbright is over, but we know that she is doing outstanding, impressive work.

This point should not be understated. Marina has been dropped into an unfamiliar country, with an unfamiliar language, alone and far from friends and family. She has some support, but she’s learning to teach in a totally new context, with minimal advice and guidance, over 100 students who speak English mainly as a second language. She was told at the start of her fellowship that she would have to be flexible, since she would not know who her students were or, really, what the expectations for her are, until the term began and not even then. She has lots of students showing up for the first time after classes have been underway for weeks. And she’s doing amazing work, designing thoughtful creative classes. She has students giving speeches about monsters and what we can learn from them and thinking about rhetorical devices in Taylor Swift songs. Her students and colleagues like her. She’s taking intensive Romanian classes three or four days a week, in addition to her teaching responsibilities. She’s reaching out to new people to try to make friends and develop some community. And she’s learning to live happily in an unfamiliar city and to take pride in her hard work and her impressive successes already. She’s an amazing person and makes us very proud.