Bon Azewa!

So this past weekend we took a trip up north to Maramures county, a more traditional part of Romania, well known for its woodwork. Each house in the region has these great big wooden gates in front, carved with rope motifs and, more often than not, religious symbols. It's amazing how intricate the designs could be, and they were all handmade. We also visited what was, up until a few years ago, the tallest structure completely made of wood in the world. It's a wooden church, no metal bolts, nails, or anything, standing 74 (i think) meters high. It was recently beaten out by another church, also in romania, that stands 102 meters. We planned on stopping to see that one as well but we got caught by a torrential downpour sunday afternoon and decided to skip it since we've already seen about 5 of these.
Sunday was pretty busy...we stopped in Sigethu and visited the communism museum that was erected in an old prison where political prisoners were kept. It was really interesting and kind of creepy, each prison cell was devoted to a different topic such as women prisoners, the arts in prison, etc. THey showed how one prisoner sewed a poem onto his bandage in morse code. Way cool. We also visited Elie Wiesel's childhood home, which was recently converted into a museum. It was pretty small because they're trying to renovate around water damage right now but since we spent so much time talking about it in school it was neat seeing more about his early life.
After Sigethu we drove for a few minutes and then took a short walk through some woods to a big river. "Hey, look across the river... see that? That's Ukraine! Let's throw rocks at it!" None of us actually hit it, but throwing rocks in a river is always fun :)
We continued driving and went to a town called Sarpeda, where they have the "Happy Cemetary." All the grave stones are painted blue and have caricatures of how the person died. Some of them are really funny and, though some were kind of sad, it's cool to see that they're willing to laugh about life, death, and everything in between.
Other than that there isn't a whole lot more to report. Trench work is pretty slow since Alexandru is going into crazy-mode, insisting he have total control over every decision made. Still opening new trenches so I spent all of yesterday with Bridget and two Romanians, Cris and Adi, digging and shoveling. Hardest work I think i've ever done! Over the past week I've also drawn a plan of a big rock pile (had to stay after work for 3 extra hours because it needed to get done ASAP and the doctorate students, Rob and Zsolt, needed help. Today I drew a profile which gives the strata of the trenches, and I also worked total station last week which uses GPS coordinates to plot exact points for each of the trenches and important features (it's what you see them use along roads when they're surveying land... same concept and equipment).
We also had a photo shoot yesterday! Some touristic magazine came by to do an article about Porolissum so we had to get back in the trenches and pretend to work (it was already technically lunchtime so we only pretended to work). That brings the count up to 3 Romanian publications so far... I already have one newspaper article from 2 weeks ago and i'm hopeing these other 2 articles come out soon so I can bring them home!
This weekend we're going to Simleu (pronounced Shim-lay-oo) Days, a festival in a nearby town. From what I've heard it's a lot of food, live music, and carnival-type activities. Eric (our director) has said it's a lot of fun so i'm really excited. Sadly, it's going to be out last weekend already!

Hope everyone is well at home!

Pupici! (Kisses!)