It's a long story

My Romanian friends know now to dread these four words.

"Hi, what did you do last night?"
"It's a long story..."
"Oh no. Just please tell me this does not involve schizophrenics, crazy old men or the like"

Last night, I left work much later than I intended. I wanted to go home, eat and then sleep. As I walked out of the building, I noticed a crowd of people at the far end of the street. Then I saw what was making them gape.

Huge metal...things.

I still don't know what they are. I walked up the street to the crowd (well, if you consider groups of two or three drunken men a crowd) and surveyed what was rolling down the street.

Two huge (I'm talking five metres high by ten metres long) canisters on trucks. They were so high that there was a man on each cannister raising the power lines so they could pass under.

I asked the others if they knew what they were. No one spoke English. I had to settle with "Ce e asta?" but no one knew anything. One person told me it was for agriculture. Another just gave me a blank stare.

I thought they were nuclear reactors or WMDs. Later on, a friend suggested that they were for holding beer.

Soon, a young man on a bicycle road up and started talking pictures. I regretted not having my camera with me, so I asked if he spoke English. He didn't, so I tried communicating in Romanian. I ended up giving him my email address and asking if he would please send me the pictures.

He asked where I was from. I prepared for the onslaught of "My neighbour/nephew/cousin is in Canada" but instead he invited me to a party.

Through a lot of body language, he explained that he's an artist and that he and his friends were having a small get-together and I was welcome to come.

It was 11:30 pm. The streets were deserted. I was curious but also reluctant. He seemed nice, and as he hadn't tried to touch me or ask for my phone number (and the fact that the party was 20 metres away) I agreed.

We walked there, talking the whole time. He led me through a door into a coutyard and then through another door. Inside were about ten people smoking, drinking beer, talking and laughing. Except for two people, no one spoke English.

I still had a great time. They called me "Quebec" the entire evening. I guess "Karla" is close enough to "Quebec".

It's always a pain describing where I'm from. If I say "east of Quebec", no one knows where it is. When people ask if I come from the French part or the English part, I say "Bilingual" because New Brunswick is the only bilingual province in Canada. I don't like confusing people.

I had to speak Romanian almost the entire time. They laughed at my bad pronounciation, lack of grammar and accent but it was good-hearted laughter and I didn't feel embarassed. When they asked if I was a student and I responded "Nu, sunt terminat", everyone burst out laughing. Apparently, "terminat" means "terminated" in the dead sense, not finished. Even I laughed at myself!

I stayed there till 3:30 in the morning. There was traditional Hungarian folk music, Russian gypsy music, some Bach and even Pachabel's Cannon. Towards the end of the evening, they played traditional French music and people got up and started twirling each other around.

I had actually seen the work of one of the artists there. When Delphine arrived, we went downtown together and checked out a gallery which featured pictures of cows, sheep and bull terriers with chandeliers (seriously). While I didn't much care for the exhibit, the painter is very nice and I got to see other examples of his work which I preferred much more.

One of the girls was Serbian and spoke good English. We started joking about my bad Romanian and then we made a deal. For every swear word that she would teach me in Serbian, I would teach her something in Swedish.

I learned a tonne of words last night but I can't remember a single one. I hope she remembers mine!

They invited me to a movie tonight by some Russian director. I'm looking forward to it but I bet it's Russian with Romanian subtitles. We'll see!