The camping

So this weekend, eight other peace corps volunteers and I climbed up a mountain next to Bushtin, a town here in Romania.
The trip was fairly unplanned as we are a bunch of invincible peace corps trainees, and the hike almost killed me. As we were climbing the mountain, part of which was pseudo rock-climbing, my knees were killing me and another climber, Meg, described the pain in our calves as the burn of success.
At one point Chase collapsed at a break point, gasping, "where are the bears! I want one to come and take me out of my misery!"
Despite the grueling hike, we arrived at the top before dark and asked around for a good place to camp. The mountain was covered by a cloud, we were all shivering from the cold wind on the top of the mountain blowing into our soaking wet hiking clothes, and we were hungry. The mountaintop was above the tree line so we could not find firewood for a fire. Some people who live up there warned us against camping since there were some recent bear attacks in the area, but it was too foggy and dark to find the cabana (camping cabins) so we eventually gave up and found a flat space to set up our three tents.
After gorging on provisions, we took the food out of the main tent and crowded in for a fireless campsite experience, complete with i-pod, speakers and the wind knocking our tent half-way down.
We had just gone through a round of "what is your biggest fear," when one of the guys heard a noise and peeked out the tent.
"There's a bear out there," he whispered loudly. Immediately all nine of us jumped toward the center and stayed huddled there for the next hour and a half while we listened to the bear eat all our food 5 feet from us. We could hear it crunching down on the hard-boiled eggs and licking the cartons of juice. A bear cub circled our campsite, making little cries ever few minutes.
When the bear left, we jumped out of the tent and threw everything the bear would remotely want to eat as far down the hill and away from our tent as possible. It had ripped the other two tents so all nine of us spent the night in a 5-person tent. Needless to say, not much sleeping happened that night. But, to quote my fellow Peace corps trainee, Tyler, it was "probably the best experience in Romania yet."
This is one of the tracks we found in the sand near our tent.