We left Cluj on a very damp Friday evening. The bus was supposed to leave at 8pm but it didn't arrive at the station until 8:15pm. Fashionably late, aka: Romanian Time. Roxana and I were lucky to get the two seats across the aisle from each other, it was a full-house otherwise. It wasn't a bad trip, but what sucked big-time was that the bus smelled as thought it was made out of a giant air freshener, the kind you hang up on the car's rear-view mirror. My brain was nauseated but otherwise we made it out fine after three hours of driving up and down serpentine roads in the fog. Ionuţ and his dad picked us up from the bus station in Baia Mare and took us home. It's worthy of note that up until a week before I'd never spoken to Ionuţ. Life has a funny way of bringing people together. A friend from Toronto put us in touch to discuss an initiative being carried out by a Romanian students association -of which Ionuţ is vice-president of development. We met to talk about ...