Habitat for Humanity Trip

This weekend was my first official trip outside my training city! A group of us went to a neighboring city to help out at a Habitat for Humanity site. We took a train from Ploiesti to Bucharest, then another train from Bucharest to Pietsti. Pietsti is a great city with a lot to do and a beautiful downtown area. We even found a Guinness Pub, but oddly enough they were out of Guinness! I spent Saturday morning and afternoon hammering nails, using a table saw and digging ditches at the Habitat for Humanity site. They are building a Bloc style apartment complex and barn. Are group was in charge of the barn...I think this was on purpose, because it is pretty tough to screw up a barn!...but anyway we were able to pretty much roof it, divide it into 10 separate rooms and put doors on each unit. It was great to get some fresh air, sun and dirt under the finger nails! Sunday morning I woke up early and took the first train to Bucharest (the capital city of Romania) and did some exploring. It is a very large and busy city with a lot of concrete. With in the city, you can find many museums, fashion shops such as Gucci & Lacoste, pizza huts and coffee houses! Unfortunately, not many of the stores or museums were open on Sunday but it was nice to in a large city. The Parliament building, which is the second largest building (square footage, I think) next to the Pentagon is very impressive! Naturally you can see it from all over the city! Bucharest is very modern with a lot of young people and the traffic makes New York look tame! The Rolling Stones will are coming to Bucharest in a couple of weeks and naturally I am trying to gather some troops to head down and check out my first European concert experience. It was a great weekend after a long week of training and language classes. Now that I have the train system down I plan on taking full advantage of it and exploring new areas of this great country in the near future!

"Love the Madness..."