A day in the life of my August

August is vacation month for Romania.
Where I live is where some people go for vacation because it is in the mountains and cool in the summer, and because it is quaint and rustic.
Every day is different and I never know what I will be doing when I wake up in the morning.
My window faces the east, so I am learning how to sleep with covers over my head. After laying around for a bit, I climb out of my enormous bed and make my way down the deep stairs that keep old women and dogs from climbing up to my apartment and would be appropriate only for the Easterlund house. I shuffle around making tea and buttering bread for breakfast before I head outside to walk the 20 minutes to school with my laptop.
The first part of the walk is down a dusty road where I will probably have to stand aside for a horse cart or a BMW driving past and a Bunica (old woman/grandmother) will probably start walking with me and asking me if I'm a tourist. After the dirt road, I turn onto the only cemented highway in town and walk down it, past stray dogs and multiple little stores that sell the same thing. It's etiquette here to say "Buna Ziua" (hello, good day), so I exchange "buna ziuas" with the women out shopping and the men watching the cars drive by from inside their fences.
When I get to the school, I hook up my laptop to the internet and spend several hours doing the internet thing before I head back home. This time I normally stop by a store and pick up some tasty pretzels with sesame seeds or strawberry wafers, my current favorites.
When I get home, the Stefan, the baby, is up and the grandma is taking care of him, so I talk to them while I heat up my lunch. After lunch there seems to be an understood siesta time, so I read for a while before I go back down the deep stairs. Yesterday I learned how to do laundry in their washing machine and then Cipri, my host families son who is eleven, asked me if I wanted to go to the river with him. So he showed me where the swimming hole at the river was and we picked up another family member on the way. When I came back, it was time to hang my clothes outside to dry and then go back to the magazine to buy some chicken and potatoes for dinner.
Everything takes longer because I walk everywhere and I am trying to figure out how things work. Gabi, whose kitchen I use, helps me make dinner. For now, we are eating dinner together and I make meals every third day. While we're waiting for the chicken to finish, mama-itza the bunica who lives next door, comes over with a cake for me and we talk about her pension and how village people are nicer than city people. She doesn't wear her teeth very often and it takes me a couple sentences to figure out what she is talking about, but she always greets me with a smile and calls me beautiful miss.
They showed me how to use the well yesterday and while we were there another neighbor came by, "you will find a rich romanian boy, yes?"
Then he pointed at Gabi holding her baby, Stefan, and said, "That will be you in the future."
For the older generation, it seems that the only plausible reason for a single woman to move to a different country is to be looking for a rich man.
My tata, Gabi's dad, laughingly told me, "Romanians are rich and Americans are poor, that's why you are here to find a rich man."
By then, dinner is ready and Ciprian, Gabi, Cipri and I sit down to eat. Over dinner we talk about corrupt mayors and lack of money for projects. After a bit Ciprian brings out a watermelon and it isn't ripe yet, so I learn the Romanian word for ripe. By now it's eleven o'clock and I head off to bed, for another day of who knows what.