Life in Semlac

The living situation(s)

So the actual site we're excavating is in Pecica, but the village that we live in is called Semlac. To be honest, calling Semlac a village feels like a stretch because there's really only one real street that passes through town (Strata Principala) and theres like 6 or 7 offshoot dirt "roads," none of which have names, and none of the houses have numbers. How do the houses get mail you ask? No fucking clue. This place actually has 2 separate schools though (!!!), a bar, two pharmacies, and perhaps the world's greatest pastry/bakery store. The bar is called the Black Cat (Cica Negru or something) and the beer on tap is 3 lei each which is equivalent to 75 cents. Also Romania sells beer in not only .3L six packs but also 2.5 L bottles. In six packs. Literally bigger-than-soda-bottle-sized beer bottles. And of course assholes that we are, we walk into the general store almost every night, thinking we'll stock up, and walk out with like 7L in our arms only to run out in an hour and end up at the bar. Fucking ridiculous shit. 

The house set-up of the American half of the crew is with a "host family"--the situation is hard to explain. Romanian families, quite like Indian families actually, live together with their extended family so the houses are often actually two or three self-contained units that are attached. Carmen and Nicu's home is one of those types of homes, except their son lives in Arad (the closest actual city to Semlac) so we rent out the other unit part while we're here and they buy us groceries and Carmen cooks us ginormous delicious traditional Romanian meal every night. She literally makes us fucking soup and a main dish AND side dishes ANDDDD dessert everyday. And for some reason she really fucking loves feeding us and makes so much more food than we are even capable of consuming. Of course, we end up eating it later when we're hammered so it never goes to waste, in case you were worried. 

The rooms are all connected. One long rectangle with doors in between, so in order to get from one part of the house to the other you have go through pretty much every room--keeps the crew close!!! The girls' room is on one end of the rectangle and the kitchen is on the other end, where the bathroom also is. The girl's room is about 1.5x the size of a typical dorm room, but five of us share it. Fucking unreal. I literally have a bed and a small bedside stand and that's it, the entire 5 x 2 ft of space I call my own here. All my clothes are jammed into the 2 drawers and under my bed in my suitcases. It sounds weird but honestly it's one of those backpacking type situations where everyone just has to get really close really fast and it doesn't matter that you don't have much space because you don't really need it. It's all about basic necessities here. Still, the living situation is better understood by pictures I would think. Also, my boss Amy Nicodemus lives in this room with us!!!

Directly adjacent to the girls' room is the boys room, which is about the same size as ours but only has 3 boys in it. Apparently if we want we can change the rooms to snoring v anti-snoring at some point instead of the separate gender set-up, but one of the girls (fucking PA) feels victimized by this and would be the only girl in the snoring room, so we haven't done that (yet). Anyway, the boys room is actually about a hundred times cleaner than the girls' room. We are literally all slobs, all of our shit is everywhere all the time, no one cleans up anything ever, and no one gives a rats ass about it. We're all happy to be living in our own filth--I mean I literally sleep with a mountain of dirty clothes at my feet and all my bathroom stuff near my pillow. The boys (Drewbee, Tim, and Mike) will periodically give us shit about our shiftiness but at the end of the day they always end up hanging out in here so they can back the fuck off thanks. 

The rooms both have prior residents, namely the giant stuffed hippo we've lovingly named Dirty Harry (cuz he's filthy) and the creepy human-baby-faced teddy bear doll thing. Someone puts the doll on someone else's pillow every night and then it gets moved around until at like 2 am when the last person comes back from the bar drunk, they see the creepy ass shit and freak out and wake everyone up and yeah. 

The boys' room is next to the kitchen, which is really just a giant table for more of our shit to sit on, a sink, a small not-cold-enough fridge, a small stove, and the coffee-maker (the coffee-maker and I have a love hate relationship that I will touch on later). The single bathroom that all nine of us share is also in the kitchen. The bathroom is pretty gross, but like. No one cares. The other day, PA (fucktard that she is) broke the door, so now we all actually use the bathroom with literally no door. No door. "Hey man taking a shit? Nice nice." Casually walking in a taking a piss while someone else is showering or brushing their teeth, or all three being done at once. Boundaries have completely ceased to exist here, and everything is always gross all the time. 

The main room is where we eat breakfast and the only room in the house that has wifi--er, the gazebo has wifi too actually. Outside the house we have the dinner table under this beautiful gazebo that's next to the giant garden/greenhouse area and we eat dinner outside everyday amongst the flowers and the fruits and it's amazing. We spend a lot of time out there because it gets hot in the house and also there's always someone napping inside the rooms because everyone's tired as fuck all the time from working. 

So that's the American crew. The European crew lives at what we called the Old School, because it's literally the older of the two schools in Semlac, but it's tiny as shit and dirty as shit and fucking shitty because it's shit. 

The Old School is also where we keep all of our wetwork (washed-to-dry artifacts, unsorted flotations and flotation machine, general field equipment). This is where I have to be honest and say that there are major discrepancies in the living situations of the Europeans and the Americans i.e. that theirs is so much shittier than ours. They do get paid more, but not nearly enough more in my opinion. They have to use these outhouses and to shower they have to walk to the New School (which I will explain soon too), they have to make all their own food, they literally sleep on beds in classrooms. None of them complain about it, but it's seriously not cool at all. However, they also don't have any of the house rules that we have (having to be to dinner on time, having to be quiet and live around our bosses, not drinking raucously and accidentally waking up Carmen or Nicu), so we go over there a lot to hang out with them because that way we feel less shitty about having better living conditions than them. 

There are two separate classrooms, one that Dejan, Iride, and Rob live in and the other has Sarah, Hajnal, Stefan, Ritchie, and temporarily the Bulgarian dude. Hajnal, by the way, is another crew member who arrived a little later and she's a really nice Hungarian girl. There's not much else to say about her. The room with the four of them is attached to a small pseudo kitchen where the fridge and silverware are kept, and right outside the door in the table with the stove where the hired cook makes our lunches for the field. The room with Rob in it is down the "hall" and is fairly roomy so we keep our unwashed artifact bags in there. This is also where Rob and I have 90% of our sex (an unnecessary yet necessary detail). 

There's a long table outside in the "hall", which is visible in all the pictures I uploaded from the other night, where we all sit around with our 2.5L bottles of beer and get wasted, and there's a bunch of beautiful grapevines twisting around everything on the ceiling. Right next to that is a moderately large open area with a bunch of chopped wood and the water pump hole. To be honest, I really like the sparse feel of the Old School and I've contemplated moving into the Dejan/Iride/Rob room so that I don't have to put up with all the rules of our house, but they also don't have wifi and I probably shouldn't live in the same room as someone I'm fucking (for now). 

Last but not least, the New School, where no one lives, is where we do all of our lab work and it's also right next to the Black Cat. It's where the Europeans have to walk to in order to take showers (shitty) and it's a nice little school actually. However, keep in mind that the nicest homes and schools in Romania would be below the poverty line in a south side Chicago neighborhood status. 

But yeah, this is how we live.