Sophie À La Carte!

I'm interspersing this post with pictures of my most recent Romanian adventures in lieu of writing about them outright. Voronet Monastery in Bucovina When I initially planned this trip, I thought I would be gone six months, max. Three months in France and Italy, three months in Eastern Europe, home. Then, I decided to add Turkey to the list. Then, I decided to add Spain and the UK and Central Europe. When I left the United States, I didn't have a deadline to go home, but just to see what happened. Since then, my plans have changed constantly. My Google Drive is littered with random timelines and budgets. How long can I go without running out of money? How many farmstays do I need to do in order to stretch out my more expensive travel days? In Cluj-Napoca I knew I'd need to start earning money again at some point. I also want the opportunity to live somewhere for a longer period of time, instead of hopping from country to country. I thought I could transition f...

The old saying goes, "all good things must come to an end," and I can definitely place my house-sitting time in Bod as one of those "good things" that I'm not quite ready to leave. When I left for my trip, I wasn't exactly sure what would happen after December. This awesome 2-month opportunity landed in my lap last fall, and it's been a great break from hopping from one city to the next and working on farms. View of an eastern part of Brasov One of the things that I miss most about my life back in the United States is routine- knowing when you're going to wake up each morning, when you're going to eat/work out/go to work/etc. Traveling has helped me worry less about routine, but throwing my backpack in a closet and sleeping in the same bed for two months has definitely filled some sort of yearning I had for consistency. I can wake up in the morning, drink my coffee, and know then pretty much what the rest of my day is going to be like....

This week, things got a little more interesting in Bod. I came across a new challenge that I wasn't expecting to face until later this year- getting some teeth pulled. But, of course, things don't always go as planned, and I write today minus two teeth/plus two new holes in my mouth (can I call them cavities?) A little background. Way back ago, my Kansas City dentist told me that my wisdom teeth came in all right, so there wasn't any need to remove them. A few years later, my Minneapolis dentist found a couple of small cavities, and did some filling work. Fast forward to last fall, when I was having occasional problems with one of my wisdom teeth, which would become inflamed every once in a while, and it was really painful, and frustrating. I decided that upon returning to the U.S., I would get my wisdom teeth removed. This is when I introduce you to my next segment, which I'd like to call a step-by-step guide to dealing with tooth extraction in a foreign country. ...