I’ve always known that when I travel and hear all the details a tour guide is offering up, that I retain only a portion of it. Especially in countries with long and often tortured histories like Romania and Bulgaria, where they fought the Ottoman Empire , the Astro-Hungarian Empire, and most recently Communism, there was a lot to take in. I learned all this in addition to taking in local life and how Dracula isn’t really what Bram Castle is about, when I took the trip with Overseas Adventure Travel, Eastern Balkans Discovery: Romania and Bulgaria. I just never expected the trip to have a surprise ending.
After the base trip concluded, on the Northern Romania post trip to the region of Moldova (different from the county), we stayed in charming farm houses and really took in local culture. We heard it was sour cherry jam making season, and just prior on the main trip, we rode in some rudimentary transportation which I figured with it’s horses and wagons was from a bygone era. I got a real life experience with both when I had to depart the post trip early after I accidentally missed a step and fell while talking a picture of the charming country home where we were having breakfast. I really couldn’t fly for a couple of days, so I opted to stay two days extra before flying home to let the swelling go down in my foot. I was told I had fractured it, but it was more of a bad sprain I learned once I got home, and I was healing quickly.
But the two days I spent in the country home where the incident occurred were almost the highlight of the trip for me. As I was eating breakfast the first morning I was with the family hosting me, I saw a neighbor bring in a huge grey vat, and she and the woman of the house started washing a big vat of sour cherries. I loved the authenticity of the moment, and took a photo of it which I sent to my trip leader. She reminded me that it was sour cherry jam making season (a fact I had forgotten until I was living with it for two days). I stayed away from the goings on in the house as I rested my foot, but these two women were going on about the business of making sour cherry jam for the two days I was there.
After the cherries had been cleaned and cooked for at least a full day, I was invited to come into the kitchen and watch them put the jam into jars. A plate of very hot sour cherry jam was placed before me as well, but I was warned not to eat it too quickly since it was piping hot. So I waited a bit, and put it in some yogurt, which was quite literally the best yogurt I’ve had in my life. Not because of the yogurt, but because of how the sour cherry jam enhanced everything. I wasn’t particularly hungry when they gave me this goodness, but I loved every minute of the sour cherry jam experience. From watching them make it in a country home in the middle of the forest, to eating it when I was already way too full from eating the fresh food this family was offering up, I loved it all as I hobbled around.
When my ride came the following morning to take me to the airport in Moldova (the country this time, not just the region), I was taken aback by the countryside and sites I saw along the way. I’d been in Romania and Bulgaria for 2 weeks, and had already determined the countryside and it’s fields of sunflowers, lavender, wheat, corn, and other vegetables growing in the fields was so much what the agrarian region was about. But as we passed even more of it on the way to Moldova, I saw the horse drawn wooden carts for real and said to my driver, “Wait. They still use these today?” I saw one after another in fact, filled with locals going on about their business with the transportation they could afford in these very poor countries.
While we as a group enjoyed the horse drawn cart experience as we were taken to taste home made jams, it wasn’t lost on me how starkly different the tourist version of it differed from experiencing it as part of life in the countryside. I don’t really think I recalled enough to ” connect the dots” as part of the tourist experience. But when real life cane calling, and the only sensible thing to do was to ask to stay for two days in the country home while my tour group moved on, I realized I was truly experiencing the ” real deal.” Overseas Adventure Travel tries to specialize in this on every tour. I realized on the flight home that the tour prepared me for all I saw and experienced on my own.
As we were driving to the airport, I asked my driver if there was the expression,” When life gives you sour cherries, make sour cherry jam.” He sighed and said yes, he’s heard that too many times. I just laughed, as I did throughout much of my recuperation time. Travel, like so much of life, is really about perspective and what we make of it when the unexpected comes our way. I will remember the joy of the sour cherry jam making and watching locals being drawn by horse and cart long after my foot has healed.
As for the scheduled rest of the post trip? Our group got to cross the Ukrainian border the following day for about an hour, as part of the trip, aside from seeing another painted monastery and the Merry Cemetery . I was so looking forward to crossing briefly into Ukraine since I am Ukrainian in heritage, and my great grand mother was born in Romania. It was disappointment I traded in for an unforgettable Romanian experience. My coffee date with Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky will just have to wait for another time.
Travel the World with Passion 