Itt vadyok! Here I am!

My vocabulary has expanded to a handful of complete sentences, and lots of little words that I incorrectly string together to try to communicate. For instance, if I want to say "let's go quickly," I'll say "Medjunk nem lassan" translates roughly as "We go not slow."

Kelemes husvetot!

That is, Happy Easter! (My spelling is probably off, and I'm missing some accent marks.) I finally mastered "Happy Easter" just in time for the second day of Easter (ie, Monday), when it's more appropriate to say Happy Holiday. The second day of Easter is a big holiday at least for Hungarians and Romanians (most of whom celebrate the orthodox Easter, which happens to coincide with Western Easter this year). The tradition for Easter Monday, besides a holiday from work and school, is that the men and boys visit the women and girls to "water" them. They come and recite a poem about flowers and women and cutesy funny things (that they often make up), then spray them with perfume. In return, the girls give the boys a colored egg (and the women give the men a drink-preferably palinka or wine). Unfortunately, I qualify as a woman in this case, but fortunately I didn't get a headache from all the perfume. Some of the boys were super cute, and many of the eggs were gorgeous (that is, before 4-year old Zsolti got his hands most of them).

Today is the third day of Easter--still a holiday here in the villages (and yet ANOTHER church service--which I did not attend but instead babysat the kids). Tomorrow I think life returns to relative normality.

Itt vadyok - Here I am.

In a house with 4 young kids, I often hear cries of "Anya!" ("Mom!"), which is usually answered with this phrase. My answer to you, though, is this map showing this tiny valley where I am.

View Homorod Valley in a larger map
Click on the blue markers to see Szentpeter (Petreni in Romanian) and Okland. You can see how rural this place is, and mostly agricultural. Today I climbed up the hill (mostly fields not yet planted) directly to the west of town; from the top I could see Szentpeter, Szentpal and 4 other small villages nearby. On the road outside the house today, I saw bicycles, horse-drawn carts, minivans, old sedans, semis, small trucks, and of course people. Most folks here work locally - raising cows & chickens, herding sheep, butchering, growing crops (mostly corn I think, but I could be wrong), or working in the school or small heater factory. Kinga-reka obviously works as minister, and her husband is a software engineer (working partly from home, and partly from Udvarhely nearby - Odorheiu Secuiesc in Romanian).

You'll note that the google map has only Romanian names, yet folks I'm with use exclusively the Hungarian names - this can get confusing (but luckily I have a bilingual map). Yesterday we saw a map of this area from the late 1700s, and it looked much the same as it does now (I think then it was under Austro-Hungarian rule, but my history is pretty bad).