Romanian Epiphany

The thing about epiphanies is they’re supposed to be singular, right? You have them once, and that’s it. But after I flew back to Romania yesterday, I inhabited a cycle of one recurrent realization.

It came as I walked down the first street, amazed again at the architectural beauty of the buildings, elegant decorations on semi-palatial workaday houses. Some of them are crumbling under the weight of age and the rudeness crudeness of global economics, but the sheer ubiquity of careful details on buildings built with pride shows the bone deep heritage in this land. I know a photo of it would be dull and ineffectual, utterly failing to capture a sense of the street, but I took one anyway. It’s an act of appreciation. Walking down the sidewalk, I had a familiar epiphany: Romania is a great country.

Minutes later, standing in Sibiu’s main square, the Piata Mare, where children splashed in the fountains, water and youthful forms sparkling in the golden evening light of a late summer day, their laughter resonated with my grin and sang the epiphany again.

A hundred meters down the road I tasted it in the flavor of a melting tower of ice cream, luxurious dark chocolate paired with “wisky” that blended the liquor with sweetness to make a kind of grown up’s frozen eggnog.

Over dinner of hearty chicken in a mushroom cream sauce with savory roasted potatoes, sun-grown tomatoes in the crunchy cobb salad, and a glass of hearty red wine that holds its bold own against more familiar Burgundian vintages, there it was again. Appreciation burst in me like a pleasant emotional sneeze, far from a new experience yet somehow a modest shock every time.

And on the way home the park was ringed with food trucks, the grass invisible under dancing feet, and the leaves of the trees shook with the singer as he belted out fan favorites. I was peripherally aware of my bag and the money belt within it, passport, cards, currencies, all that, but far from concerned. These are not the hectic streets where the ends justify the means and if it’s in your pocket maybe I’d rather have it in mine. No, this was where neighbors come to dance, familiar with every food truck, to sing every word of the songs they all know, and I was welcome to join because why on earth not?

So maybe it was no surprise that as I lay down to sleep, feet and belly happy, considering whether to start today with a great museum or recently renovated church, I had an epiphany.

(This year’s Guided By Tim tour of Romania starts this Friday! I will try to post small updates during the tour.)