Dedication, Laguage and Transportation

Piata Unirii heading toward Palace of Parliament
This month has been a busy one for us as we are getting ready for the dedication ceremony of the new Ruth School building. There will be people from many different countries to help in celebrating this exciting time. But like every event, there is planning and organizing to be done. Our posts have been so spaced out and delayed because most our time is devoted to this work. We are steadily busy, plus nothing new to write about. While there is a lot happening, it seems to continue to consist of adjusting to Bucharest, understanding our roles here and trying to learn the language. We have successfully found a language tutor which you will read more about in our upcoming newsletter (out on Nov. 1-ish).

By the way, "ish" is a term quite commonly used here in Romania. Many of you have heard of this, but it is a term to refer to close to the time or amount specified.

We have met with our language tutor 2 times now and feel like this will really help us. We already noticed an improvement from the first lesson to the second. Incorporating tutoring lessons and being immersed here really goes hand in hand. There is still a lot we need to know but at least we are starting to recognize words in conversations and able to have a semi-conversation with people here at the school. As we posted earlier, we spent 2 weeks in Colorado Springs at MTI. I am finding that what we learned there is not only practical and doable it has been very, very helpful. We recommend it to anyone that is going to be learning another language or has already started.

A little information about the pictures above and below: At the end of the street is a building called Palace of the Parliament, aka the People's House. It is the 2nd largest in the world next to the Pentagon. It's construction began under Ceausescu. For five years, over 700 architects and three shifts of 20,000 workers laboured on it for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week while industry in Romania came to a halt, food was scarce and hospitals were short of medicine.

Palace of Parliament