A Romanian Easter #2 - Preparation

As we were preparing for our trip to Romania, we tried to take some time to look up different traditions and cultural information about the country.  One of the traditions that I was fascinated with was the tradition of egg painting.  We read about egg painting and also about their traditions of painting their eggs red to represent the blood of Christ.  After coming here I learned that this is an old art of painting and very few people today still share this art and many of those who do live in the villages away from Timisoara.  Though I wasn't able to actually see any of the traditional eggs being painted, my new friend Alexia found this video for me to see how they do their eggs.  It is facinating!

As we were packing I was trying to think about special things that I wanted to do with Ella while we were here.... one was decorating eggs, since that is a family tradition we do each year the weekend of Easter (which by the way Snyder family - we really missed the fun and of course the snacks).  Below are a few pictures from our decorating time at our apartment.

Rubber bands make great lines on your eggs

We also had the fun of helping Mariana and Alexia color the eggs for Easter dinner.  They do things a little bit differently from how we do.... first they like their eggs soft boiled - so they can only be put in for 6 mins (we do ours 12) and they color them right from the hot water into the hot dye.... I did however convince them to let me cool off a few so I could actually decorate them... since I really wanted to try to do one that at least looked Romanian :)  A few things I noticed..... their egg dyes are so much darker and stronger than ours.... I am definately going to try to stock up and bring some home to use next year.  They use brown eggs as we do sometimes as well so that helps the color over here but sometimes at home it makes them more difficult to color.  You can see from the colors above and the colors below the difference.  Also their other secret to great looking eggs... they rub them with oil when they are finished.

Learning the Romanian way

Joel was testing out one of the soft boiled eggs.

Vibrant Colors

Ella got a little bored with egg decorating, so she took Elliot the pug dog for a ride

Ella was making lots of swirls

Ella's swirl egg is the purple one in the second row

Here is my Romanian style egg that was done with an egg decorating crayon (basically just a wax crayon..... I must say I was pretty proud of myself.

So excited with how it turned out... can't bear to think someone might eat it.

This was definately a fun time and a tradition that is shared between our cultures... however I did learn from Alexia, the other missionary serving here from France, that they do not color eggs in France.  And that concludes another egg decorating adventure.