Oreada, Romania

Well, I finally made it to Oradea, Romania. I took a train from Baden, switched in Wien Meidling, got off in Budapest, Hungary and transferred to another train from Budapest to Oradea. It took around 9 hours. Going from Austria to Hungary there was no passport control, so we just rolled right into Budapest. Every time I write that word, I still can't believe it is really Budapest. I was here two years ago teaching a class. You can go to one of my early posts to read about it.

Anyway, just before the Hungarian Romania boarder the passport control from Hungary was checking passports. When they got to me, they looked at me and then looked at the passport several times (Yeah, the mug shot IS me... who else would want to claim that picture?) and then said several things to each other in Hungarian. One of them looked at me and then told me in Hungarian that he was taking my passport and going inside the station. All this time I'm on the train at this stop and everyone is looking at me. It's because of me the train is not moving again! Well they came back, it was stamped and we were on our way.

But not for long. As soon as we crossed the border into Romania we made another stop and this time the Romanian border control looked at my passport, looked at me several times (Insert the same material here) and said to me in Romanian that he was taking my passport inside the train station. Again, I'm getting all the looks. And the other thing that was funny was that after we left the Hungarian border and I got my passport back everyone in the train started talking again like it was earlier and it was rather loud. We stopped, the Romanian passport control guys took my passport and it got real quite! All I heard were whispers. Well they did come back, my passport was stamped and we were on our way... again ans so was the talking. I can't wait to see what happens on the way back on Saturday!

The class went well today. We started at 10:30 went to lunch at 1, picked back up again at 2 and went to 5:30. I actually stopped a little early today because we were able to cover a lot of material. Kovacs Jozsef (for the rest of the world that's Joesph Kovacs) is my translator/interpreter. He excels in this. That's one of the reasons that we are doing so why we covered so much material today.

Here's a picture of the class.

It is a very interesting situation here in Oradea. The city is in the western part of the country. because of all the wars during the past couple of hundred years, this section of the country has always been a part of other countries. During WWI it was part of Poland. During WWII it became part of Romania. And because of it's close proximity to Hungary there are a lot of Hungarian speaking Romanians here. Where I am teaching is kind of like a compound. there is a huge door from the street that leads into the compound. Once inside everything is in Hungarian. there is a church here, a building that the church uses for its children's ministry, a multipurpose building, and a building that has several small apartments all over looking the commons area. I'll have more pictures tomorrow.

Everyone speaks Hungarian, they have Hungarian names, all the churches that are represented by the different students are all in the Hungarian Baptist Conference from Romania. And they are under the umbrella of the Romanian Baptist Union, with it's head quarters in Bucharest. It's really like I'm still in Hungarian and not in Romania. I hope to get 'outside' the wall here and get to see a little of Oradea before the week is out.

John