car.

As a peace corps volunteer, I have signed my right away to drive a vehicle in Romania for the next year and a half.
And Romanians have cars and Gabi has a car that I ride to school in some mornings. But they are their cars and since I can't drive, I can't borrow their cars and no one wants to be an unpaid chauffeur.
So I have refined my thumb-waving skills and rarely travel after dark. And it gets dark at a depressingly early hour, which means that unless I'm spending the night somewhere else, I rarely leave my village during the week.
On Tuesday, a group of 4 mechanical engineering students from America who were doing a semester abroad in France, decided to visit Romania during their week off. So they rented a car and drove around Romania.
And they came here for an afternoon and we had great conversations in our mutually native language and I got to play show-and-tell with my village and then they drove me to the nearby city to meet up with other peace corps volunteers. And it was after dark and then they drove me home after dinner.
For all their fume-belching, asphalt hungry selves, privately owned vehicles are really a wonderful idea.