in the community: lost and found

For some of our Thanksgiving preparations, I’ve been looking for cheesecloth.  I’d looked in the supermarkets and kept my eyes open at stores with kitchen stuff.  No luck. I know it exists because tons of people make their own cheese here. I was chatting with one of my English students about our preparations and this hunt for cheesecloth.  He told me to check out the milk/cheese place in the piata as those ladies must know.

So today, David and I headed over there on a quick break armed with nothing other than a brief description I’d concocted in my head of the kind of material I was looking for — un fel de panza pentru facerea branzei (a kind of canvas for cheese making).  The place was pretty empty, but two ladies sat there looking at me curiously.  I opened my mouth and said what I was looking for and the woman said: Cautati pe tifon. It took a few tries as I couldn’t tell if she was saying tifon or tifor. Regardless, I had the gist.

Unde pot cumpara tifon? (Where can I buy cheesecloth?), I asked.  Then came a string of directions to help me navigate the piata — go straight and when you get to the jars go this way and the when you get to the buckets go that way and there’s a store and a girl there has it.  I nodded and said thank you.

Honestly, I wasn’t quite sure I had understood all the directions. People talk fast; it’s tough to remember every turn when you’re using cans and buckets as landmarks and your destination is a nondescript store.  But we followed them as we understood them and as we faced a string of little stores, we opted to go into the one with fabric (an obvious choice). I hesitantly asked for tifon, and POFTIM (voila) cheesecloth!

Living in another culture surrounded by a different language, you get used to feeling lost, used to not understanding everything that’s happening.  At first everything’s like a treasure-hunt — there’s excitement in the hunt for things you need but you hit a time when it gets downright disheartening to still feel lost.  But today, exploring, finding and buying my meter of cheesecloth, I felt proud.  Don’t get me wrong, it was still a treasure-hunt — it is Romania afterall.  But after a year here, I’m less lost! I’ll count that as a win.