Monday, July 23, 2012

Teambuilding in Brasov

This weekend we had our first team building at Kilpatrick in Romania. Bucharest and Timisoara, along a small part of Milan met in Brasov for a weekend of fun. And needless to say it really was fun.

I left Bucharest later than everyone else and traveled by train to Brasov. I must say that I haven't been in a Romanian train for a long time...and I was utterly impressed. Clean, not crowded, restaurant wagon, air conditioning...that does not sound like the trains I used to know.

We didn't spend much time in Brasov, but I can say that we went to the best part of it: Park Aventura. I have heard about this place before, but it was my first and surely not last time here. Not very expensive for the fun you have: 39 ron/ 3 hours of adventures. You have different levels of difficulty: yellow (kiddie ride); green (very low difficulty); 2*blue (low difficulty); 2*green (difficult); red (very difficult); black (extremely difficult) and a zip line over a small lake.

In three hours we did 1 blue, two greens and the lake zip line. Not only our time was up, but we were also really tired and didn't have enough strength to do more. To do the difficult ones, you need to save up energy and maybe have a jar of honey like Yogy :)

Every "game" was different and exciting, and you were getting higher, and higher above ground. You cannot quit or stop, and you have to really push yourself even when you think that you can't do it anymore. For me one of the games really pushed my limits, mind and body. It took me half an hour to travel from one side to the other on 10 logs, but it was worth it...the others seamed piece of cake. For everyone in our team one game was the hardest...

The rest of the trip was really quality time spent together, unfortunately we were all too tired to party all night long and crashed early. But still we had walks and talks, we played games and enjoyed a cool weather from the mountains before heading back to the concrete jungle. 

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

My civic spirit prevailed

In June last year I tried acting like a responsible citizen of Romania. Long story short I tried to convince authorities to come and clean a piece of land in front of my parents flat house.

http://serendipitous-doll.blogspot.ro/2011/06/lulu-acting-responsible-towards-garbage.html

One year later and it's been done. They identified the owner of the land and made him clean it. I was super surprised when I went home this Monday to see all the garbage picked up and well as the bushes trimmed.

Now this is one small step because this was just in front of our flat house. Similar pieces of land are surrounding this place and hopefully they will manage to force the other owners to clean them. I also hope that this isn't just a one time thing and they will pursue in the future, maybe not just but threatening the owner, but also fining the ones who are throwing garbage there.