43 students and a bus

Last weekend, I was invited to go on a school field trip with students from grades 5-8 to Cluj, a city in Transylvania, the western part of Romania. "Meet at 6:30 in front of the Mayor's office," the profesoara in charge of the field trip told me on Friday.
"How are we getting there?" I queried.
"By Autocar."
"Autocar?" I imagine a caravan of cars driving over the Carpathians towards Cluj.
"A very big Autocar which we are renting."
I figured I'd just wait until Saturday morning to figure out what this autocar business was all about.
So on Saturday morning I arrived at the Mayor's office, breathing frosty air and with my English Romanian dictionary handy. After waiting for 45 minutes with 43 students and their mothers in the dark, I discovered that an autocar is a tour bus. After securing a seat in the front of the bus with the other chaperoning teachers, I put in my earplugs and began to doze as we passed through little villages and cows.
"No no." Anucu, the profesoara that reminds me of Mrs. Teapot from Beauty and the Beast, points at me and shakes her finger. "This is new for you. You must talk romanian with us and look at the country side"
I try my best to not speak Romanian for the first hour of my day...it never comes out right that early. But if Anucu really wanted me to speak with them, I couldn't argue with that shaking finger.
After the first hour, we had gone beyond familiar territory and were climbing up the mountains on drum cu serpentin (winding road). The fir trees were covered by a haze of fog. We stopped for coffee at Dracula's castle hotel where students flooded the souvenier shop and bought multicolored neon wigs and scary masks. Then we took the students in two groups to the "museum" which was walking down a narrow, unlighted corridor into a small room with paintings of dracula on the wall and a small old-style coffin. The tour guide described the pictures and then simultaneously opened the casket lid, turned the light off and screamed. Immediately the lights came back on, my students looked fearfully around from the protection of their huddle and we were done with the scary museum. In the narrow corridor a hand would come out of a hole in the wall and scare the students as they walked back up the stairs. Because of that hand, I had to almost carry one of my terrified fifth graders outside.
The rest of Saturday was spent stopping at "museums" of famous romanians, mostly poets and writers. The museums were their parents houses where they grew up. At 9 o'clock, I figured we were almost done, when the bus pulled into a monastary and the students and their teachers did their thing in the monastary and lit candles. Several older women were crawling on their knees around a tiny church near the bus. Some of the kids saw them and decided it would be funny to do it as well, so a couple rolled up their pants and crawled their way around the church, with the other students pointing and laughing, after which they also rolled up their pant legs and crawled around the church.
We finally got to our pensiune (kind of like a motel) by 10:30. My students spend the night running around the halls, smearing toothpaste on each other, not sleeping, playing cards, calling their friends in the next room with their cell phones and being yelled at by the other teachers. I got out of policing the students because that would mean I would have to yell in Romanian and being yelled at grammatically incorrectly...well, it's like if someone yelled "you sleep immediately!"...doesn't quite have the right affect.
Sunday morning after a breakfast of coffee, bread and the ever-present ham, we finally made it to Cluj. For the morning and most of the afternoon we went to another museum, the botanical gardens and then a quick tour of the city and a couple famous churches there. I slipped away from the group for an hour and walked around the big city by myself. Big cities are great for feeling anonymous and no one cares if you're foreign. Needless to say, it did my soul a lot of good.
Finally, late in the afternoon we climb back in the bus, all the students talking about how tired they are and all the teachers glad that the students are finally tired. We didn't get back to Vama until midnight where the bus dropped me and the students that live near me at our road. We walked home together, talking about our favorite parts of the weekend. The stars were bright against the frosty night air and wood-smoke permeated the air. I was exhausted.
But now I finally know the names of class 5a and I had something to talk about for the week. My life is surprisingly not dull.