My village has two main schools, a ten minute walk away from each other. On Mondays, I teach one class at the first school, and then rush the ten minutes to the other school to teach another three hours. A math teacher at the school has a similar schedule as mine and we usually hurry to the second school together, buna ziuaing people along the way.
One day I said that it was inefficient it is for us to have to walk to a second school.
"As a new teacher, I taught in Vatra Moldovitza, (a 25-minute-away-by-bus village).
"When I got married, I moved to Vama because my husband lived there, and I commuted to Vatra Moldovitza every day.
"That's a ways to commute every day," I responded, calculating in what I have heard of getting places during the 70's in Romania.
"It took about an hour and a half to get there, so I would get up every morning at 5:00 and got on the bus at 6:00."
"mmhmm." I respond, dodging a pothole in the sidewalk.
"But y'know, during Ceasescu's time, gas wasn't very plentiful, so some days the driver of the bus would tell us he couldn't drive the whole way to Vatra Moldovitza, and would let me off in another village 11 kilometers away. I would start walking. A few times a logging truck would pick me up, but there were a few times I would walk the whole way. It took me about 3 hours, especially if the road was really snowed-under."
"So there were some days when you didn't get to school until 2 1/2 hours after it started?"
"Yeah. My colleagues understood and would cover for me."
Suddenly the not-even half a kilometer walk to the second school seemed piddly.
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