Jana Eyssel visits Ramnicu Valcae for Global Footsteps!

Jana Eyssel from Gottingen, a long time member of Global Footsteps and part of the Footstep 12 conference management team paid a visit to our Romanian link, here is the first of four reports on her Global Venture.

Morgan Phillips had asked me to help with organising the next Global Footsteps conference in Cadca, Slovakia, in August 2010. My job was to visit communties, which are part of the Global Footsteps network, to identify community capacity building projects and to invite project representatives to the forthcoming Footstep 12 conference. Therefore, I prepared myself to travel to Ramnicu Valcea, representing Romania in the Global Footsteps network. Irina Sandulescu, whom I knew from the Footstep 10 in 2005, was my contact person in Valcea and organised my stay on ground. She is working for the municipality and thus has a good knowledge of projects in her town. Before my departure, she presented me a list of projects, among which we hoped to find one or two, that could be part of the conference and the future network.

First day in Romania, 14th March 2010

After a very long ride on the coach from Leipzig to Romania, which took about 26 hours and served as a nice introduction to the country of my destination, since I was the only German on the trip and everybody spoke Romanian, I finally got off the coach in Sibiu. Irina's husband was in town and picked me up. Since we had to wait for Irina’s brother who would arrive a few hours later from Italy by coach, we went for a drink to the historic centre of the town.

Sibiu is situated in Transylvania and for a long time has been the centre of the Saxons living in Transylvania, or Siebenbürgen, as they call it. This German heritage is still apparent, for instance in the architecture. Some streets reminded me of old German villages, which seemed very paradox to me, as I was quite far away from home and was being prepared to discover a country and a culture very different from mine.

The town also hosts a great deal of sights and has an important cultural heritage. In 2007 it has been the European Capital of Culture and therefore the picturesque historic centre is very well renovated. To profit from our time in this nice place, we visited the Brukenthal Museum, which exhibits a large collection of paintings and beautiful furniture from the 18th century.

In the afternoon, having picked up Irina’s brother, we left Sibiu for Ramnicu Valcea. Irina had prepared dinner for us and later brought me to the room where I could stay during my days in Valcea.