March first is big day for a Romanian Peace Corps volunteer, as it is both Martisor and the Peace Corps anniversary. This year was particularly important as it marked 50 years of Peace Corps. In celebration, my Peace Corps neighbor, Jenny Ball, joined me in hosting an event at the American Corner at the Baia Mare library. Sixty plus kids show up, eager to practice their English and learn about volunteering. Jenny and I decided to use this as an opportunity to both teach and fulfill two of the Peace Corps goals. The first, being to share information about The States and our culture with people from the host country, and what better way than with a game of audience participation jeopardy. The gem of all our questions had to be, how many Romania’s would fit in the USA. The answer is 41, or 42, I forget. The second goal that we focused on was sharing things about Romanian culture with American. We did this by passing out papers and having the students write one thing that they thought Americans should know about Romanian and Romanians. Here are some of the answers we received. Warning, I didn’t fact check al of these.
-Christmas is very important in Romania, and there are many traditions (hopefully I showed that a bit in my last entry)
-Oina is Romania’s national sport. It resembles baseball.
-March first is known as Martisor. It is the first official day of Spring, and t is customary. for people to give woman pins that they wear until the 8th.
-Bucharest is the capitol of Romania, not Budapest (no offense).
Hope you learned something!