I just spent the last 20 minutes queuing to get ballet tickets for this Sunday. Although such an activity would seem and actually be quite boring, I was quite entertained! Just in front of me there were an American guy of about forty and his younger twenty-ish Romanian friend. The older one was waiting to buy tickets for the Troubadour and was very frightened he wouldn’t get the seats he wanted. What he didn’t now was that this was practically impossible in Romania, especially on the first day the tickets were sold, this being weeks before the actual show.

Suddenly, both of them get distracted by a very nice looking girl that had just come in. As the older guy had no interest in hitting on her, he subtly recommended it to his younger friend (while winking his eye, of course). He advised him to go check out the seats in the hall that were displayed close to where she was standing in line. The advice was of course given in English (probably using the “Show off your foreign friends/connections” principle without knowing that wasn’t highly uncommon, especially in Bucharest and especially with young people; but I guess he forgot to consider exchange students and foreign teachers, although, as I found out later, he actually was a foreign teacher at the Law School which is by the way the next building after the Bucharest Opera).

I couldn’t help laughing while hearing the things the young one said to the girl and seeing the happy hopeful face of the teacher. What I do regret is the fact that I didn’t tell the teacher “I’ll bet you 10 of your all-American dollars (no offense to Americans, but I was kind of annoyed by his attitude – we all, including the girl, heard him talking in Romnian and we were all quite able to figure our he was a foreigner and probably 90% of us would have placed him somewhere in the US) she will say no”! Which she actually did, explaining that she was way to busy. That must have hurt! “I’m not currently seeing anyone, but I’m so not into you that I will use the workaholic way out and also be quite nice to you!”

So, after being so mean for previous three paragraphs, I’ll just continue by saying that yesterday I finished Paulo Coelho’s Manual of the Warrior of Light. It was a very good book to read because it reminded me by some very simple, common and yet so important aspects of everyday life. It’s a great choice if you just want to relax and to start trusting people and yourself more!