I have to tell you about this before i leave Romania and every memory loses it's focus and grows hazy. My whole experience here has been marked by the people i'd like to nickname the "weed pickers." Everywhere i go it seems people are picking grass or weeds from the side of the road. Sometimes it's an old man browsing through the overgrown fields which sit neglected next to each apartment building, occasionally stooping down to pick up some leaf off of a weed or a hunk of grass. Then there are the old women straight out of an eastern european anthropological magazine of fifty years ago (head scarf, apron, weathered faces) furiously shoving grass into a bag choosing fistfulls with no aparent rhyme nor reason. One in a while I will catch a young mother a bit more discriminate, picking through the strains of nut grass and dandelions choosing only specific leaves or flowers. Very rarely do I see young men out there harvesting the weeds. But when i do they disregard the flowers and grass and go for the more heartier weeds; weeds that have grown brown little trunks and tower over the rest. Why? It is so seemingly random. Some people choose grass, some leaves, some flowers, there is no pattern that i can discern. This practice of the weed pickers has marked my journey in romania from beginning to end. Maybe i am just started to wax sentimental since yesterday was my last official teaching day (fun how easily i can pack my frustrations away), and this morning i saw a woman picking leaves off of the side of the main intersection in valcea and I almost cried. Well, maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration but i did get choked up. I asked my kids once why people did this? My kids told me that people make teas from the things they pick up on the side of the road. Okay I could see that, tea from dried flowers, even leaves maybe, but tea from grass?!! They also shook their heads and professed an ignorance to the old women's passion for grass picking. It will be the great mystery of my Romanian experience perhaps. What do you do with a bag of grass? Woops, let me rephrase that...What do you do with a bag of weeds in the shape of grass that you pick from the side of the road? That doesn't sound any better. Anyhow what the hell are the old women doing?!!