Summer Net-working

One of the really great things about TFAS is the fact that we have so many international students. It opens up opportunities for me that I wouldn’t have otherwise known about. Take last night for example. My friend Victor is here from Romania for the semester, and he heard through his network here that there was a Romanian Folk Concert in Rockville, MD… just an hour Metro ride away. So when he invited us to go along with him, we didn’t think twice.

The concert itself was really cool. It was put on to raise money for building Romanian Orthodox churches, and the entire thing was done in Romanian. Victor translated some of it for us, so that we had a basic idea of what was going on, and not being able to focus on what was being said allowed us to to really appreciate the music itself. I have to say this was the first ensemble that I’ve listened to that consisted of an accordian, a trumpet, a clarinet, a saxophone, a keyboard, and a fiddle. It made for an interesting sound, that’s for sure.

At intermission at 9, we decided to check into the bus schedule to get home. And that’s when the fun really started. You see, Victor hadn’t thought to check the return trip when he got directions on how to get to the Rockville High School, where hte concert was held. And the bus we took to get there stopped running at 7:30–and hour an a half ago at that point. We didn’t have access to a computer, so we couldn’t look up how to get back on the Metro, and everyone else at the concert had driven there so they didn’t know anything about the bus schedule. My roommate wound up calling her mom to get directions to another bus stop, and we used another friend’s phone as a GPS to make sure we were headed in the right direction. However, that plan backfired as we walked about 2 miles in the dark in the wrong direction, through a heavily wooded, not very well-lit area before finally concluding that we were going the wrong way.

We turned around to head back, and finally decided that we might just have to fork over the cash for a cab. So I called one of our contacts at TFAS to ask him for the number for a cab company. However, not thinking, he gave me the number for a DC cab company, which did us no good as we were in Maryland. So we continued walking, hoping to find the bus stop.

About 20 minutes later, we were walking through a subdivision, when we saw a woman backing out of her driveway. Victor ran up to the car and asked her how to get to the bus stop and she told us–thankfully it wasn’t far. Even better, after a moment, she offered to drive us to the bus stop. So after about an hour of wandering around in the dark, lost in Maryland we finally were on our way home. What a night.