Colorful Confusion

So there are plenty of things about Romania that are different from America (and plenty of things that are similar). But occasionally something strikes me as different in a way that just makes my brain really confused. Particularly when it comes to color. I just don't know how to process it. Take for instance this bus:

And this pumpkin:

I'm sorry, a purple bus? A grey pumpkin? It just Does. Not. Compute. I literally spent 10 minutes at the market trying to figure out if it actually was a pumpkin. My crap Romanian was no help in this. Do they just grow grey here? All the buildings are grey, so maybe they're just following suit. And will it taste like pumpkin to me? Do you even know if something exists here that is LIKE this but orange? Aye yae yae. And of course I go to the market without looking up the Romanian word for pumpkin. That would have been quite helpful, so I thought. But as it turns out, they have one word for all squash-like substances, so it wouldn't have helped anyhow. And then the lady was trying to sell me another kind of squashy thing that I didn't think was a pumpkin, but she insisted it was what I wanted for baking sweets (which is what I conveyed in my broken Romanian). It was about this gray color, but it had webby/wrinkly skin more akin (oooh rhyme!) to a canteloupe. I didn't think it was right, and I even picked up some of the pumpkin seeds she was also selling and asked WHICH they came from. She shook her head and said, "No no no, you don't want those." No, I don't, I want the squash from which they came! So finally I just bought this one and was done with it. Turns out it's dang good, if dang hard to cut open.

In any event, just wanted to share about a few of the colorfully confusing moments I've had in recent weeks. Surely there will be more.