I'm going to tell this story.
Usually, when I start to tell a story, it’s not easy for me to be precise and short, which constitutes a big problem when I have to make a reflection about the 6 months that I spent in Craiova, Romania. Throughout these 6 months I had a lot of new experiences and I learned a lot. I had my ups and downs and a lot of cultural shock moments but I made it to the finish line.
Portuguese people, especially the ones that go abroad have a special relation with the word “saudade”. There is no literal translation in english but this word describes the feeling you have when you miss someone or something. With that being said and in order to sum up my experience during EVS I decided to list the things that I miss the most about Portugal while being in here and the things that I think that I will miss the most when I go back to Portugal.
Things that I missed while being in Romania:
Portuguese food and Mediterranean diet – During these months I found out that Romanian cuisine is not for me. From soups, to main courses, to desert is hard to say something that I tried that I actually enjoyed. I’m a picky eater and that makes things harder but I definitely missed my fish and deserts with a right amount of sugar. And I can’t even put into words how much I miss a good coffee.
Cultural habits – It Portugal we appreciate a good meal especially on time and shared with someone. In Romania it’s usual to see people walking in a hurry, eating some kind a pastry. If not, it was common during my experience to see and live with people who have lunch at 16h or dinner at 18h. For me, these were moments for big conversations about my culture and the importance that food and also leisure time have in our lives. Also, mini markets in Romania are the equivalent of coffee shops in Portugal in the sense that they are everywhere. So I also missed this habit of being able to be in my house and just walk outside and have a coffee shop in the door where I could hang out and see familiar faces which is impossible to do on a minimarket.
Sympathy – In Portugal people always have a smile to offer and some kind of small talk when you go to a store, restaurant or coffee shop. It comes from the pleasure that we have in receiving and serving the others. In Romania I faced a lot of times silent professionals which made me surprised every time I found I nicer one or someone who paid a bit more attention and smiled more.
Sun – In Craiova it was really hot during the summer, with temperatures reaching 40ºC but while in September and October my friends kept posting pictures in t-shirts I was already dying in the cold weather and winter hadn’t even started.
Sea - There is no need to be a geography expert to know that Portugal has a big cost line. Although my hometown is not in this cost line area, Portugal’s rectangular shape and good highways enable you to not be very far from it. Usually I spent one month in the beach and I go every other weekend in Summer time so it’s needless to say that a summer with only a weekend in Black Sea was an atypical holiday for me.
(I also missed my family and friends but that was an given point)
Things that I’m going to miss about Romania:
Landscapes – Romania has amazing landscapes. Coming from a country that has to deal with severe florets fires every year the green area of Romania impressed me a lot. Traveling by train through the Carpathians area was also a fascinating experience due to its grandiosity. I also have great memories of Cluj-Napoca and I hope to go back there someday.
Helpful people – Although I said above that I missed the sympathy of Portuguese people, I found in Romanians a different virtue. Romanians seem to me to be always willing to help you and to help each other which is something that I learn to cherish and that I hope could be replicated in more places.
Lei – For my Euro brain, lei was amazing. Everything seems so cheap and in fact some things are really cheap when I compare to how much I pay in Euro for the same products. You also end up carrying a lot of bills that, even though, it will make you feel rich it wasn’t a practical situation for my small wallet.
My Students – One of my activities while in here was teaching good manners classes to high scholars. During these classes we talked about a lot of things and we got to know each other over a period of 3 months. Although was hard to think about interesting, educational and fun activities that kept their attention every week was also challenging and it pushed me to be creative. It was also nice to hear their opinions on society and their views of the world and to help them discover new things.
Organizing Public Events – Other of my activities while I was here was organizing public events that had to do with the promotion of book reading habits. It is rewarding to see more than 20 teams in our treasure hunt or people sharing their poetry and favorite writers in a Poetry Session/Creative Reading event and asking for a 2nd edition and also see my students interested in these activities.
It’s true that a lot of this points that I just made are fruit of generalizations that sometimes are not true to reality. But they are a sum of a part of my experience in here and they are based on my reality and on the people that surrounded me. Which leads me to the thing that I will miss the most:
Friends – I read in another volunteer’s article that EVS projects focus more on the volunteers and in what we can learn with this experience that in the target groups that we work with. This resonated with me and in the beginning it was something that I wasn’t prepare to, because I came with the ideal of impacting someone’s life through the work and in that process learn something about me. With the end of this experience I can guarantee that something changed in me and that I learned something not through my work but with the people who I shared this experience with. I don’t have many friends in general and I can count with the fingers of one hand the people that I will want to keep in touch and visit in the near future. But these people, sometimes with different points of view, different realities and different personalities made me grow and discover more sides of myself. It was with this people that I shared my best EVS moments and also my worse moments in here. When in the future, I think back about why I stayed here for 6 months it will be this people that this memories that I will want to remember.
To conclude this article, I am not sure if this was the right way to tell this story. I think I took the best that Romania and the EVS could give me: I came abroad for the first time, I spent 6 months talking English on a daily basis, I gained basic Romanian skills, I traveled, I hitchhiked, I worked, I tried new things, I took risks and I met people from all over the world. It’s only missing in my bucket list the experience of seeing snowing in significant quantities. After that, I’m ready to go back.
La revedere!
