More photos
Categories: random, phd, places
Tags: photos, Sibiu, Romania, phone, fieldwork, phobia, culture, diary, home
Date: 24 May 2007 14:25:58
A couple of days ago I did the tourist thing and wandered round Sibiu taking pictures. Lots of pictures. Here are a few of them:
These first two are posters advertising Sibiu as European Capital of Culture, I really really like them, even though I think the headline is hilarious:
Next up are a picture of the exhibition I got filmed looking at the other week (see 12 May entry for details), and a manhole cover, which seems to be suggesting that there's something happening in Sibiu this year ... (the manhole covers are all over the city centre):
The next two feature the Evangelical Cathedral (Evangelical as in German denomination, not as in "Evo" if you know what I mean) - the first is a typical view, there are these kinds of views all over the centre, and the second features yours truly doing the tourist thang:
Finally, four pictures showing some of the random culture that's all over the place here. As you walk through the city centre, there is pretty much always something either going on, being prepared for, or being packed up. On this particular day, I saw puppets doing the can-can in the morning, young kids ballroom dancing in the street in the afternoon, a lifesize cardboard Trabant in a cardboard box in the early evening (apparently it was art), and then a heavy rock (or rather, raaaarck) band doing their thing later on in the main square. No idea who they were, they sang in Romanian, looked a bit old for that sort of thing, had big hair and trousers that were too tight. And they were very very loud.
Please feel free to add your favourite Trabant/Skoda/Lada joke in the comments, I'm sure I will have heard them before but they will make me smile. My own favourite, told me by one of my students when I taught English in Romania many years ago: Q: What do you call a Trabant with seatbelts? A: A rucksack.
The research diary at the moment would be more accurately described as the repository of outtakes, as there's more of that than proper research-y stuff so far. Here's some examples:
May 14th
From today I'm going to try to be more disciplined about writing in this book daily and using it as a more useful research tool....
(Before I go on to the heavy-duty research diary thing though - I ran out of pants yesterday and so yesterday and today I've had to wear pants I retrieved from the dirty laundry*. Yuck yuck yuck - I'm so glad I'm not a boy, they do this all the time! Yuck!
[* reader, it was the weekend so all the pants shops were shut. I would normally have enough initiative to just go out and buy some more, but circumstances conspired against me this time]
May 17th
So much for daily disciplined research journalling. I've gone through some questions and my information sheet with my teacher though, so although the questions I've come up with so far might not be great, at least they're grammatically correct.
May 20th
So much for daily disciplined research journalling (again). (The rest of this entry is about me feeling more positive about the number of interviews I have to do after thinking about them differently from having to do x number of interviews in y number of weeks - instead I'm thinking x number of organisations, y number of clients and z number of staff from each to be interviewed, and even though the end number is the same, for some reason thinking about it this way is less daunting).
May 24th (ie today)
So much for daily disciplined research journalling (redux).
I have however today decided that I'm going to try to do at least one brave thing (ie tackling something scary on my to do list, usually that will mean making a phone call) per day. I will count meetings and interviews as that day's scary thing. Also, if I don't have anything scheduled to do, then I will try to be more organised in reading the articles and books I have brought with me (work-related, I hasten to add), so that at the end of each day I can feel like I have done something productive even if I haven't had an interview or something that day - hopefully it will give an ongoing sense of achievement, as at the moment I feel like a bit of a fraud, I really have no idea what I'm doing with this research!
Yesterday and today have been spent kitting out my new flat (hooray!). It had the furniture I need, but nothing at all in the way of bedding, cutlery, crockery or pots and pans. Fortunately I managed to get to one of the out-of-town hypermarkets and picked up some cheap stuff, most of which I'll leave behind (although I rather like the sheets, pillow cases and duvet covers so I'll hang on to those). I did have a slight mishap - one of the things I bought was a dustpan and brush, but by the time I got home I only had a dustpan and handle, the brush had fallen off somewhere between me getting off the bus and arriving at my flat. So I have a free brush handle going to anyone who'd like to collect it - never been used, one careful (well, obviously not that careful, otherwise it would still have the brush attached) lady owner.
I still don't have any curtains though - I only have two windows, but both look out onto a walkway used by the neighbours, and most of my meals so far I have had an audience, as the little old lady next door seems quite curious. The estate agents keep promising me the curtains, and at least do sound embarrassed when I keep phoning - the latest promise is for them to come sometime today. In the meantime I have one of my new sheets up at the bedroom window, so at least I'm not going to shock the neighbours too much (well I might shock them with the view of my culinary habits but at least they won't see me undressing or doing my Pilates exercises!).
The only thing of any substance in my diary today is the following:
"6pm - collect laundry"
Don't ever let anyone tell you PhD fieldwork abroad is glamorous. It so isn't.