silentnights' VirtualTourist Home Page

Hi...Thank you for visiting my site...I am a Peace Corps volunteer living and working in the city of Ploiesti, Romania. I have been here since June 4, 2002 and if everything works out I will be here until June 30, 2004. I am currently teaching at a high school and working on other projects within the community of Ploiesti. Since my arrival, I have learned and experienced many Romanian customs, ideas, and language. I have traveled to a few cities and town here. Perhaps I may be of assistance to you if you are going to be traveling to or through Ploiesti, Romania!!!
I arrived in Romania in June 2002. The first impression that I got when we drove from Otopeni Airport to our hotel in Ploiesti was the "dirty" look of the buildings. We drove straight through to Ploiesti and we were welcomed by large apartment blocs and oil refineries. We stayed at the Hotel Prahova for about a week before we moved in with Romanian "host-families" that the Peace Corps had arranged for us. During the week that we were staying at the Hotel Prahova, I would walk the streets of the city and explore every street and area. One of the things that affected me in the first week was the amount of pollution in the air. After walking for a few blocks, my chest would feel tight and my eyes would be burning. Obviously, air quality standards were not a high priority. The smoke belching buses and oil refineries did not help. After one week in country, I moved in with a Romanian family in a town 13 miles north of Ploiesti named Plopeni. The family was nice and hospitable, but they did not speak English. I was fed the regular Romanian dishes and we drank tuica together during the 3 months that I lived with the family. Plopeni is a small town with about 20,000 people. During World War II, the German occupation forces built the town from "scratch" and started a weapons factory there. After the war, the factory was taken over by the Romanian government. Before 1989, it was a "weapons town" which had a factory that made rifles and bullets. It was also a "closed-town" that officially did not exist. From my understandings, before 1989, there were checkpoints to get into and out of the town because of the sensitivity of the place. I was told that the town did not even appear on the maps. Since the fall of communism in 1989, unemployment has slowly risen to 40%.