A Bookish Place: Bookstory | Cluj, Romania

Not sure if y'all have noticed or not (I hope you have!), but Lesley Anne and I have been seriously MIA this past month. Okay, more like past 6 weeks, but who's counting? We have not forgotten about the blog but it has not been a priority due to other, overwhelming projects, a.k.a my thesis. Y'all. It is so hard to write a thesis. I finally had to knuckle down and write or it was never going to get done. Research is much more fun than actually writing. Anyways, my rough draft is with my committee at the moment so I am (kind of) free to catch up on life.

I have been in Oradea, Romania these past 2 weeks visiting my best friend and her sweet family. Actually, the only sweet people in her family are her children. The rest are very sarcastic and like to make fun of people, but they kind of grow on you. Anyways, it was the best trip. I happened to be over there on Women's Day, which pretty much everywhere else in the world celebrates except America. I have never been given so many flowers in my life. It was great. True story - we were pulled over in downtown Cluj by police officers so that they could give us flowers and our picture was taken for the paper. They also gave us a voucher for a defensive driving course which we pretended was not sexist at all. You win some, you lose some.

(Geez, sorry I'm so chatty. Apparently I missed blogging.)

Ashley and I left the kids with Kalep (thanks, Kalep!) and drove to Cluj, a city that is about 2.5 hours east of Oradea and it is seriously beautiful. It is exactly what you picture when you think of a European city.

Ash and I were walking along one of the streets and came across a book store. Of course I made her go in. She is not really a reader but she is a great friend, so she humored me. Turns out the bookstore was a hidden gem. The English section was small, but I was not even expecting them to have an English section so it was a nice surprise. In addition to Romanian and English, they also had books in Hungarian and German. As you can see, it was really cute on the inside.

Ash and I spent the most time in the children's section because her family runs an after-school program for the kids in the village they live in. The education system in Romania is not the best, and the farther you are from the city the worse it gets. In addition, they work with Roma (gypsy) children, too, who are severely marginalized. Education is the key to changing not only these kids' lives, but their communities, society, and country.

Ash was telling me how they have not been able to find a lot of good books for the kids when we went downstairs (yes, it was a two-story bookstore!) and found two walls, covered floor to ceiling in kids and teen books. We literally spent 45 minutes down there just going through books. I have never had as much fun picking out books as I did in that store. Ashley wants to build a library for the kids but has had trouble finding good books that the kids could actually read. This bookstore was, literally, filled with books for these kids and I got help pick some out. Going through the books and helping to decide which stories these kids should hear, should read was the best.

Of course, I had to go with the fantasy classics. Ashley was telling me that these kids do not have much imagination because it has never been taught to them. I was floored. Most of their parents can't read, and if they can, they do not have the money for books and it is not cheap to travel to the city where they library is (and some of them probably would not even be allowed in). The majority of them never leave the area surrounding their village so they do not know how big the world is. This is unacceptable. To help start the library I chose The Little Prince, Prince Caspian, and The Hobbit. I was especially excited about The Hobbit because it is the same edition I got for my niece and nephews.

I can honestly say it was the best time I have ever spent in a bookstore. There were tons of books I wanted to get for the kids but did not have the money on me to do so. I will be talking with our book club about how we can help build their library and if you, too, want to help let me know in the comment section and I will tell you how. I could write post after post about my trip, but this was definitely one of the highlights. If you would like more information about the after-school program and other programs my friend and her family run, please check out their website here.

I hope this post made you want to travel, buy books, and help out kids. I mean, how much more perfect could life get?