Travelings...

Hey everyone! We have been having a "yellow-zone" experience here thus far. By "yellow-zone" I mean in between green (comfort) and red (panic), and are in the learning and experiencing zones. A couple of the experiences our group has had thus far to put us there is the traveling. A couple weekends ago Anne, Hollyann, and I traveled (by train...I felt like we were going to Narnia) to Timisoara. Timisoara is where the protests that began the downfall of Ceausescu began, and is an all around beautiful city. We called our weekend "The Weekend of Angels." There were many times when we received help from local Romanians to point us in the right direction to churches, the train station, great restaurants, and site-seeing places. The picture above is just one side of the beautiful square where the protests took place. On Sunday we attended the Othrodox Church in the center of town (to the right) which was also pretty beautiful.

Other places our group has gone to were various places in and around Hunedoara, and area about 45 minutes from Lupeni. Last week we went, as a class, to the oldest church in Romania still holding services (dating back to as early as the 13th century), a monastery, and a castle. For our Romanian Language, Culture, and History class we are to give a presentation on various historical sites within the country. The beauty of the assignment is that we get to do these presentations on site. Hollyann gave her presentation at the church, while I presented on the castle.

The castle was originally a small royal citadel, but when Ioan of Hunedoara was given the citadel, he transformed the small fortess into a castle through two major constuction projects. The first ended when he became the Governor of Hungary (at this time Transylvania was part of Hungary) in 1446, and the second when he died in 1456. Ioan of Hunedoara plays a major part in the area's history. The castle was ruled by others, part of his family and then sold to the Torok family, until 1724 when it became part of the Austrian State. There are great traditions and myths which accompany the castle and play a large part in Romanian history, and it was very interesting to see where they originated from.

We are now getting ready to leave for our fall break. Solita will be spending her time in Budapest with some wonderful Calvin friends studying abroad there. The rest of us are going to spend a day in Bucharest with Kailen, then going on to spend 2 1/2 days in Sofia, Bulgaria. We will then go on to Athens, Greece, and spend some time with friends I made during this past summer when I was there for 8 weeks. We are asking for your prayers during our traveling!

Hugs and Hope,

Chelsea