Update: Back Home
Feels weird not having an itinerary so that I can check what we’ll be doing every day. "After breakfast at the cafeteria, we will trundle down to the office and click through a few dozen emails, picking out the fun and/or interesting ones. Depending on time, it may be possible to actually do some work this morning. After a short break for lunch, there will be an optional expedition to the east wing of the building, taking in spectacular views of the fish tank and that uncompleted fountain-thing-that-no-one-knows-what-it-is-and-will-probably-never-open-because-it’s-a-health-and-safety-hazard, construction of which began several millennia ago (funded by tax-payers money). There will also be an opportunity to purchase over-priced Pepsi from a vending machine. Dinner will be at your parent’s house."
So… we’re back home now. And yes, it feels very weird.
Y’know when you have one of those dreams where it feels like you’ve been inside the dream for ages and ages? And then when you wake up it’s like it never happened at all? That’s exactly what it was like with Romania. If I didn’t have three now-empty Murfatlar bottles and the world’s largest collection of photographs, then I’d probably be having problems believing that it ever actually happened. It seems like a completely different world.
When I got back to Ronaldsway airport on the Isle of Man, I will admit that I cried like an absolute baby. I spotted Jacob waiting on the other side of the window and just burst into tears. I ran out of the baggage reclaim area without waiting for my stupid suitcase (leaving KT to pick it up for me – oops, sorry kitten), and made like the biggest drama queen in the world in the middle of the airport. It felt so good to be home, I can’t even describe it. All I wanted to do was curl up on the back seat of the car with Jacob and sleep all the way back to my own house (although I decided instead to start talking about the holiday to my long-suffering family… and didn’t shut up for about three hours). As we were leaving the airport, KT hugged me and told me very firmly, ‘now, don’t you DARE call me for at least two weeks’.
I’m still in touch with a few of the people that were on the trip – Stella, Mucky Mick, Lisa, Ginger Dave and Tubby Mark have all been exchanging emails with me, and Becky actually sent me a letter (gargh, what century are we in?? I can’t write letters! My pen-writing hand has been forever moulded into the shape of my keyboard!). In an attempt to keep contact, I’m going to try and get to London at Christmas in order to meet up with a few of them, but that’s a very vague and tentative plan at the moment. It might not even be a good idea – what if ‘The Romania Effect’ only actually works in Romania? At the moment I can’t think of anything better than getting back with my little Stella and continuing our drinking session where we left off, what happens if we get there and can’t think of anything to say? Okay, I’ll admit that’s not very likely, but still. I always get nervous before meeting up with new people, and I’m beginning to suspect that I also get nervous when meeting up with the same ones all over again.
Settling back into everyday life wasn’t nearly as hard as I’d expected, because as I say it was really like just waking up from a dream and going off to work. You feel disorientated for maybe half a day or so, but then you just snap back into normality. I’ve tried to drag out the immensely fun feeling of the holiday by babbling on about it to anyone who was even remotely interested (and quite a lot who obviously weren’t) for the past few weeks, and there’s been plenty of stuff to keep me thinking about it: photos to scan in, video footage to edit together, etc. etc. But I’m still missing actually being on holiday and hanging around with all those guys. There’re times when I think… y’know, if I was in Romania at this precise moment, I’d be halfway through my second bottle of dark beer right now…
If I had to pick out my favourite moments from the holiday, what would I pick? Location-wise, I’d have to go for Poienari, Prejmer and (of course) the salt mines at Praid, because between them I think they justified the entire trip (at least in my opinion). But the other, incidental moments… wow, those would be harder to choose from. I think I’ve picked out most of them during the course of this diary, but there were a dozen other moments that still make me laugh out loud when I think back to them – Stella trying to carry around her suitcase that was larger than she was; Debbie’s face as she tried to figure out why ‘Bear’ was so funny; some sadistic bastard feeding me and Stella slices of raw garlic when we were immensely drunk (‘it’ll be good for your cold!’); Disorganised Mick mistaking my bottle of plum brandy for water; Rosie singing ‘My Rottweiler’ (to the tune of ‘Delihla’) at a random interval on the coach; and about a million more daft pointless moments like that. It was just such a classic holiday.
Even now that I’ve been back for a while, I keep having ‘Romania moments’. For instance, there’re about a dozen different songs that set me off giggling like a moron. Quite apart from ‘All Around My Hat’ (which I mercifully haven’t heard since we got back) songs like ‘Highway to Hell’ by AC/DC (Helen and Mucky Mick drunkenly headbanging on the balcony in Sibiu), the State Capitals song from Animaniacs (me and Debs trying to learn it, Klif sitting nearby and wondering why the hell he ever put the idea in our heads), and ‘My Baby Shot Me Down’ (admittedly not one that was played much on holiday, but I heard it the other day and it just made me think of slo-mo gun battles – ‘you wore black and I wore white, you would always win the fight…’). I guess that just about everything I hear or see suddenly relates back to our holiday, and it leads to me bursting into random fits of laughter all the goddamn time and looking even more retarded than usual.
(Also, as a side note, I have had to put a sign above my desk saying, ‘Thank You For Not Discussing Star Wars’. These people have given me complexes, I tell you.)
Something that makes the whole thing seem even more surreal is that I keep dreaming that I’m back on holiday. This is especially weird because I never, ever dream about people I actually know. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of dreams I’ve had that involve my friends or anyone I can really put a name to. But I’ve had more than a dozen dreams about the Romania people since we got bakc. The dreams have ranged from really mundane (me and Stella arguing about wine in a supermarket) to surreal (me, Lisa, Stella and KT chasing albino squirrels through a forest near Sighasoara) to utterly surreal (me and Becky laughing at Dave because he’d cut his hair really short, only to find out that he was actually EVIL ALIEN IMPOSTER DAVE and had tricked all the Romania people onto his spaceship that looked strangely like a big grey flying Portaloo). Weird. Any theories as to why I’ve suddenly started dreaming about real people (and these people specifically) would be gratefully received.
So, how to round off this remarkably epic diary? (I really didn’t mean for it to end up so long, BTW, it just kinda happened – sorry bout that.) I’m not sure. This holiday probably ranks as one of the most fun that I’ve ever been on in my life, right up there with the epic family holidays that my dad organises (which involve less wine but just as many random epics and driving around strange countries not knowing where we’re going). Would I go again? Now that’s a tough question. I would love to do it again, but I honestly don’t know if I could leave Jacob for that amount of time again. Maybe when he’s a bit bigger and I’ve stopped looking so much like ‘caring mother’ and more like ‘oh God mother, please leave me alone and stop making such a fuss over me’. Of course, Disorganised Mick swore that this is the last time he’s ever doing the Romania trip… but apparently he does that ever trip.
It was definitely one hell of a ride though.
So, to everyone that was on the trip – Stella, Becky, Mark, Dave, both the Micks, Debbie, Sal, Klif, Vix, Helen, Duncan, Robert, Kylie, Paul, Lisa, Andrew, Rosie, Ali, J, Sue, Jim, Jane, Tim, Ernestine, Lawrence, Darren, Tara… oh yeah, and KT too:
I LOVE YOU GUYS!!! Thank you for making it the best trip EVER.
See you guys in my dreams (if that’s not too scary a thought).
Love and Hugs, from
Rakie xxx
THE END!