Weekend cancelled

The weekend got cancelled. Well, not literally obviously, since I'm typing this at the weekend. But in the sense of our romantic trip to Sighisoara. This is because Bogi got sick. She woke up on Friday morning complaining of a headache/earache, and after school Emoke Neni (the "neni" - lady- who looks after her while we're at work) took her to the doctors and she was diagnosed with a middle ear infection. No, middle ear, not Middle Earth. Not having read Lord of the Rings nor seen the film, I am not sure what a middle earth infection would look like, but I suspect it would involve orcs.

Anyway, when we got home yesterday afternoon, the infection was in full effect. She was obviously in a lot of pain and was crying more or less constantly. When Bogi is ill, I get this wave of something that washes over me. I am not sure if there is a word for it exactly. It's a mixture of emotions - powerlessness, desire to protect and fix things, love, and some kind of realisation of her vulnerability. The best word for it might be compassion, but I'm not 100% sure if that does it justice. Most of the time, Bogi is a human being who I share much of my life with and with whom I laugh, play, joke, argue, watch TV, love, and tease. Then when she's sick, I realise how small and weak and vulnerable and, well, childlike she is. I know she's a six-year-old girl the rest of the time too, but only when she's sick do I feel it, I suppose. Kids, eh? (He adds, desperately attempting to distract attention from his unenglish, unmale, revelation of some kind of emotions, however ill-formed, patronising, and ill-expressed)

We will have the chance to have a weekend away next weekend instead, when we are off to Cluj for a conference. Cluj (Kolozsvar in Hungarian) is the only major, interesting sounding city that I have yet to visit in Romania, and I'm looking forward to it. And eventually we will do our Sighisoara weekend, but it might now have to wait until after the little one is born (she has now graduated from some kind of aerobic kick boxing routine, to doing some kind of extended stretching to investigate exactly how far she can push Erika's belly).

Since we had the day here, and since it was a gorgeous autumn day, and since Bogi, feeling much better today, was helping Emoke Neni make cakes for her son's birthday, Erika and I went for a walk along a path I'd never been on before, across the fields the back way to Zsögöd, which is a village that in effect is these days a suburb of Csikszereda. It's a really nice place, with a great Szekely church. (If I've done this correctly, and you click here, you can see some pics I took. Let me know if it doesn;t work).

We even went in the Nagy Imre gallery. This is an art gallery devoted to Nagy Imre, an artist who was born and lived much of his life in the house attached to the gallery. I knew it was there but had never actually gone before. I liked it - and much of his work, which is very local in many ways (lots of very recognisable landscapes and street scenes). There's an article about him and a couple of his paintings here, in case you're interested. (He's not to be confused with the politician of the exact same name who was prime minister of Communist Hungary in the 1950s and was leader during Hungary's short-lived anti-soviet revolution in 1956).

And finally, you'll all be happy to hear that the Ice Hockey season has started. The level of competitiveness doesn't seem to have changed much though - in Sport Club's first two matches they have won 17-1 and 15-3 "away" to HC Csikszereda (the other team from the town), while traditional rivals Steaua Bucharest have won 10-1 and 15-5 at home to Galaţi (the new team in the premier division). Possibly Progym (from Gheorgheni, about 60km north of here) will be the challengers to these two, as they have won their first two games impressively 5-1 and 13-3 at Sportul Studentesc of Bucharest. I bet you're excited aren't you? I know how much updates on the Romanian ice hockey league mean to my readers.