I'm happy to report that I have gotten into a much better rhythm this week, with a good balance between my thesis and the program.
Here's a general idea of what I do every day:
Wake up ~ 7:30 am and eat a delicious egg and tomato omelette at the student university restaurant
Take the tram out to the city center and research -- mostly gathering data from pharmacies, occasionally interviews at campus buildings with professors doing similar research
Go to language class, 10 am - noon
Eat lunch and/or go shopping with the other study abroad students and the program tutors (students at Babeș-Bolyai)
Afternoon program activity or research, depending on the day
Delicious extravagant four-course dinner at the university restaurant (breakfast and dinner is included in the program)
Relax in the dorms, usually with a bit of thesis-related reading or sending emails to set up interviews
Language class is actually the most fun part of my day, even though it has little to do with why I'm here. I know all the greetings and goodbyes, plenty of classroom objects, some prepositions, a few basic verbs, numbers up to a million, how to talk about the weather, and a lot of other miscellaneous conversationally-useful words and phrases. It's really exciting to test them out in the city -- today I bought a tram pass entirely in Romanian.
By the way, Cluj is a beautiful city, much more modern and pleasant than Bucharest. Babeș-Bolyai is the biggest and best university in Romania, so Cluj is more or less a college town -- something like one-fifth of the population is made up of university students. It's a very young, friendly city and I definitely feel settled and at home here.
A brief note on my research -- my preexisting research questions and hypotheses are almost funny now, because so many new possibilities and branches have been opened up by being here and interviewing people here. The other day I interviewed a professor who told me about mandatory religious education for all Romanian students from grades 1-12 -- how did I not already know about this? -- and how that plays into sexual education. I could probably write a whole thesis just on that!
I wish it was feasible to just stop everyone on the street and ask them all the questions I have. Nevertheless if there's one thing I'm not worried about, it is having enough material to write a thesis, even though I'm sure it will only scratch the surface of everything there is to learn.
