Wednesday weak

I have nothing much to post, except to pass on this great link to a piece about searching for painted eggs among the Ukrainian community of Romanian Bucovina. And to report on the frozen saints (as mentioned a couple of days ago), who must have been on holiday this year. It turned out to be the hottest three or four days of the year so far - reaching 30 degrees at times, which for Csikszereda is August temperatures, not May. We're all doomed I tell you.

Random links, tags, and swearing

While I think about all the things I should write about (the Basescu suspension, more on Autonomy, the Rosia Montana gold mine, blah blah etc etc and so on and so forth), I instead will fill in the morning with a couple of unrelated and trivial observations and links

Firstly, from this weekend's Guardian, a piece about tourism in the Saxon area of Transylvania, and more specifically the village of Viscri. It's actually the second article in two years about Viscri (here's the first) so someone in that small village must have some kind of hotline to the paper. It's all a bit suspicious if you ask me.

Ages ago I was tagged to write something about a favourite computer game. Since I rarely have time for computer games - the other day I managed to spend the day watching a DVD in small bite sized pieces while Paula slep fitfully in my arms, the first DVD/video/film I've watched for ages, such is the lack of actual time to do these things - I can't really comment on anything very modern, but I do remember playing Football Manager on the ZX Spectrum for hours and hours back in the day, and playing it on that link brought back one or two vague flashbacks of those far off days. You try telling kids today that computer games used to be issued on cassette and they won't believe you. Before that I remember that magazines used to print the BASIC code for you to type in your own games. None of this DVD stuck to the front cover nonsense. (Thanks to 200 percent for the link)

Romania got creamed in this weekend's Eurovision song contest, which I didn't watch, and I haven't heard the entry (of anyone I think) so god only knows if it was deserved or not.

And finally, for today, a great language resource - The Alternative Hungarian Dictionary, from which you, the non-Hungarian speaker, can learn useful expressions which will either endear you to Hungarians, or earn you a smack in the face. I am familiar with quite a few of them, including all of the ones which involve equine genitalia (a very popular swearing device in Hungarian, for some reason), and some which are not included at all, but quite a few were entirely new to me. My favourite, I think, being Paksi mogyoró, which literally means "hazelnut from the town of Paks", but idiomatically would best be translated in English as "clingon". The site suffers somewhat from not rendering accents well (the Romanian dictionary from the same site is almost unreadable, so poorly does it deal with diacritical marks).

La Dolce Vita

Harrowing article from today's Guardian about the plight of migrant workers (Romanians among them) in Southern Italy. Driving through small towns in Southern Romania you see loads of these hastily printed flyers on lampposts advertising work in Spain and Italy. I often wondered what kind of conditions the people who signed up for these deals ended up in.

Finally

Over two months after his death, reported by me back at the beginning of October, a British newspaper (The Independent) has finally got around to printing an obituary of Sütő András. Better late than never, though, and it is well worth reading.

Music videos and Csik from above

An aerial view of Csikszereda (taken in winter obviously)

I wanted to share a couple of videos from YouTube with you, so I went along and attempted to blog them (this is a new verb meaning to stick them up here) but apparently I can't becase I recently moved this blog over to "beta.blogger" which means that it's more fully integrated into Google (or some such bullshit). This is, of course, in the week in which Google actually bought YouTube. It baffles me, frankly. (Plus my gmail account seems to be not functioning well at the moment). All in all I am significantly less well-disposed towards google than I was about a week ago.

Anyway, I can't embed the videos here, but I can give you some links:

Here is Iubire by 3 Sud Est, which you may recall me dissing last week. Now you can see for yourself the boys and their hard-as-nails image contrasted with their not-quite-so-hard falsettos.

Here is Erika's current favourite. Ghiţa by Cleopatra Stratan. Now I'm usually of the opinion that any record made by a child (or children in the plural) ought to be avoided like the plague. But somehow this one is kind of infectious and nowhere near as obnoxious as it should be.

And finally, Mahala Rai Banda, a gypsy band who are really excellent. This song is impossible to not start tapping your feet to. Mind you, they'll never make it on to MTV Romania, where I have seen the other two. It's a shame.

Links

In the absence of any content from me today, I'd like to point everyone in the direction of Dumneazu's post about the peasant market at Negreni this last weekend. Sounds fantastic. Having read it, I asked a couple of people here if they knew something about this peasant market "Oh, yes, Fekete Tó" they all said, like it was common knowledge and I should of course have known about it. I'm definitely going next year.

And for one more link of the day, the website of Hans Ven der Meer, Dutch photographer, who has managed to put together a fantastic series of pictures of football being played in various different settings. Doesn't sound too promising, I know, especially if you're not into football - but believe me, it's worth a look. There are two pictures from Romania, in case you need local interest, and for Hungarian readers at the end of the strip are some fascinating shots (unfootball related) from mid-80s Budapest.

Move along now, nothing to see here.

Back from a quick visit across the Carpathians to Bucharest, but since I didn't get home till about 3am, I'm a bit spaced out today, and not really able to craft the post I want to about one of my experiences there, so instead I'll regale you with some mere trifles

I came a creditable, but distant, second in the AFOE "Best SE Europe weblog" to Dragos's @rgumente which has been around longer and is a lot more "bloggish" and deserving of the award. Felicitarii to Dragos, and gratulalok from Ţara Secuiesc. If you'd like some reading from the region, I'll recommend taking a look as well as at Catherine's Illyrian Gazette which was also nominated. I haven't had the chance to look at the other two, but will do soon. I came nowhere in the best expat weblog one (I have questions about what "expat" actually means, but maybe I'll come back to that later)

The Ice Hockey final is going very badly. Steaua Suki (as they now seem to be called) are 3-1 up in the best of 7 series, and are likely to wrap the thing up in the next game in Bucharest. They don't deserve it (a) because they get only half the number of fans to their games as we do - and that's from a huge city whereas we're in a small town; (b) the decisions have tended to favour them (two disallowed goals in the last two games may have turned both of them in their favour; and last but not least (c) Steaua are owned by the foulest most repulsive man in Romania, that corrupt, racist, bigoted egomaniacal cretin with a Jesus complex, Gigi Becali. The only man in the country who can make Vadim Tudor look like a well-rounded and balanced individual.

In a couple of weeks I'm heading off to Germany to buy a car. I'm not the buyer, I'm just accompanying a friend who is, on some kind of spring road trip. I anticipate lots of crazy hollywood style episodes and adventures, possibly culminating with us driving off a cliff into the Grand Canyon (or Turda Gorge, at least). It's because second hand cars in Germany are reasonably priced, whereas in Romania they are insane - in Bucharest I saw a 20 year old Oltcit driving around with a sign in the window offering it for sale at 1500 Euros. You've probably never seen an Oltcit, unless you've lived in Romania, but trust me, a new one would be barely worth that. There's a 1992 Opel Astra on our street for 4000 Euros. I mean really. It's utterly insane. Even with flying out to Munich, accommodation for a night or two, all the petrol and road taxes involved in driving home, and the tax you have to pay to the Romanian government to import it, you still end up about 1000 Euros up on the deal compared to Romanian second hand prices.

Number 5!

You'll be excited to know that this blog is the fifth most influential expat blog in Central Europe. I'm not 100% convinced that Romania is actually in Central Europe, but there you go.

Don't believe me? Look here.

Still a fair way behind Doug and Claudia in Bucharest, mind you.

Sacked

I saw this story reported on the TV the other evening, but thought it so bizarre that I didn't trust my on translation of it (and thankfully there were no graphic images to accompany it). But now, I see that I did get it broadly correct. I didn't know it was a sack of grain that he had dropped on his, ahem, member, but other than that I'd got it pretty much spot on. Not much to add, but I hope I'll be able to uncross my legs in an hour or so.

Going to the dogs

The counterpoint of the following two sentences from
this article, is fantastic. I'm glad to see Bush is finally getting the press he deserves...

George Bush, Adolf Hitler and Nicolae Ceausescu are being used to persuade people to adopt stray dogs in Romania

"Our idea is to make people sensitive to what an animal can offer in terms of affection by showing them that even the most hated dictators on this planet received love from their dogs.

[Disclaimer added for those on the right who are determined to read everything completely literally: I do not think George Bush is the equivalent of Adolf Hitler. I just thought it amusing that this article appeared to be implying that. Apologies for not treating anyone who reads this as a complete imbecile.]

Remembering Virgil Sahleanu

This month marks 5 years since the assassination of Trade Union leader Virgil Sahleanu in Iasi under the apparent orders of the former manager of his employer TEPRO. It's a sad, but powerful story that probably never made it outside Romania and the Czech Republic (the company that owned TEPRO were Czech).

In 1998, TEPRO, a Romanian producer of steel tubes and pipes, was privatised and bought by a Czech company, Zelezarny Veseli, who were one of TEPRO’s competitors prior to the buyout. The parent company then allegedly started out on a program of asset stripping TEPRO, running down the factory and preparing to shut it down. Ioan Hariton, the secretary of the union which now bears Sahleanu’s name said “The Czechs took our products and stuck the Zelezarny label on them selling them as if they had produced them. Moreover, they refused orders for certain products, recommending that potential partners sign contracts with Zelezarny Vesely. They actually wanted to occupy the international markets where TEPRO was selling its products and lead our factory into bankruptcy.”

The trade union, now headed by Sahleanu, started fighting in the courts (on the basis that Zelezarny weren’t abiding by the agreements they signed in buying up TEPRO) and demanding the reinstatement of 1200 sacked workers. For his trouble Sahleanu himself was fired and had to continue fighting from outside the company. But fight he did, and successfully, winning the reinstatement of the workers, and eventually an agreement to reverse the privatisation. The company sued him and on his way to court one day he was attacked by two men and stabbed three times.

Charged and convicted with involvement in the murder were (as well as the two assailants themselves) the former manager of TEPRO, and the manager and employees of a private security firm. In addition, Frantisek Príplata, a Czech investor/businessman who was acting as adviser to the new management of TEPRO, was convicted by a Romanian court of “inciting murder”. Even after his appeal was turned down, he remained out of jail on the grounds of ill-health, during which time he fled across the border to Hungary on foot, and thence home to the Czech Republic. The government in Prague won’t extradite him, saying "Czech law forbids Czech citizens from being extradited. The only exceptions are EU countries, and Romania is not in the EU." I'm not sure what that means come Romania's accession, but I imagine Mr Priplata is a tad concerned.

Links to the latest versions of the story (and frankly from where I culled more or less all of the above information) can be found here, from Romanian Indymedia, and here, from the Prague Post.

Bandwidth

What exactly is bandwidth? The reason I ask is that I'm here working in Barcelona and the apartment I'm staying in, aside from being very nice, apparently has free Internet access. I turned on my laptop in order to plan my workshops and there was this little blinking icon telling me that there was a wireless network in range, which I of course connected to. So here I am posting this on someone else's internet connection.

I have a firewall (whatever that is) which means I reckon I'm pretty safe from whatever unscrupulous things people can get up to on people who don't have such a thing (the little warnings that Windows gave me led me to worry that this entire network in some residential quarter of Barcelona had been set up merely to entice suckers like me into connecting to it at which point the online bandits controlling it would swoop in and steal my powerpoints on project management or organisational behaviour).

So, as far as I can tell, this is basically a victimless crime. The only thing I am stealing is this mysterious "bandwidth". Will this band now be narrow? Will some irate punter come knocking on every door in the area until he finds the thief responsible for his internet surfing experience opertaing at only 95% of full speed? Frankly no. So, there's no reason to be concerned about this, I'm assuming. (Also the network is called "3Com" which as far as I know is that company that makes post-it notes). [Rest assured I am not downloading the full Directors Cut of "Once Upon a Time in America" or something, merely checking my email and the message board I frequent.]

Meanwhile, some websites for your viewing pleasure:

First, you may remember last year my post about Numa Numa Yay the famous Romanian song which was sweeping the continent (and it appears the world). Well, that particular post is the one on this blog that gets the most hits, and I was inspired to google up why. At which time I found the following lego version of the video. Lego-zone. It's bloody brill. (Apparently the reason I got so many hits was this video of some kid in the US singing along to Numa Numa Yay -real title Dragostea din Tei- which has become what they call an Internet sensation. That video is actually here, but I reckon the lego thing is better)

On another tack entirely, if this website is to be believed, Chistopher Walken is standing for President in 2008. Better than Arnie, I suppose, though the quote at the top "If you want to learn how to build a house, build a house. Don't ask anybody, just build a house", sounds suspiciously like some half-arsed philosophy you could imagine Dubya living by. "If you want to learn how to piss of the entire world, piss off the entire world. Don't ask anybody, just piss off the entire world".
[Later edit: I have discovered that this is not actually for real and is a hoax by a bunch of hilarious pranksters called General Mayhem. Sorry for misleading anyone]

Last post for a while

I'm starting a one-month intensive teacher training course tomorrow so will probably be offline for a while. Should be interesting, though, I enjoy training this course and this time I'm doing it for a bunch of people I know (one of whom is Erika, assuming she's physically up to it).

For the next couple of days I recommend the video that you can find here on the Euronews page (the one about Ethnic Hungarians in Romania). The first village shown, Makfalva is between here and Marosvasarhely/Targu Mures, which we drive through everytime we go and visit Erika's family. The second third of the clip is in Marosvasarhely itself. It's quite a good little clip for seeing how things are here. I don't know how long it will be available online though. No longer than this week, I'd imagine.

Yesterday I was in our local corner shop buying bread. The assistant typed in the cost in new lei (RON), had to mentally multiply by 10,000 to tell me the price, I paid in ROL(old Lei), and she had to once again mentally change what I paid her into RON so she could put it in the till, which then told her how much change I needed in RON, but she only had ROL to give me, so she had to do it again. If nothing else it will make the shop assistants of Romania highly proficient in multiplying and dividing by 10,000. I still haven't seen any of the new currency.

Some websites you might be interested in:
200 Globes
Google Earth. This one's a piece of software to download and play with, you get to "fly" around the world "visiting" places from above (through satellite photos). If you want to look down on me type in Miercurea Ciuc, Romania and fly in (after you have done it the first time, fly somewhere else and then come back - once the pics are all loaded in it looks much better the second time)

I'll try and post something each weekend for the next four, but probably that will be it. Cheers all, and have a good July

Life in the blogosphere

There is such a thing as the “blogosphere”. I’m not entirely certain what it is, exactly, but it is referred to, so it must exist. As a blogger (which I am), I am part of this blogosphere. I’m not an important or famous member of this world, something like a New Caledonia or a São Tome & Principe.

I don’t really know how it works, but it seems that bloggers link together and read each other’s work. Frankly, I have no idea, but I do know that of late bloggers have started to contact me, and even, on occasion, link to this page. Recently, for example, a bloke called Deek Deekster (possibly not his real name) linked to my diatribe about the Tory party’s racist electioneering, on his UK election blog. I don’t know if there’s some kind of reciprocity arrangement, but in order not to be rude, here’s a link to him. I have no idea how he came across it, unless there’s some kind of advanced blogosphere search tool of which I am unaware. I have also been contacted by a woman in South Africa who writes a blog entitled “My Life as a Carrot”. She was nice enough to tell me that she likes my writing style, and that is good enough for me to recommend her in return. I think of these as the blogosphere’s equivalent to bilateral agreements. I‘m not really in favour of bilateral agreements in the real world as they tend to be used to avoid signing on to genuine international agreements (yes, USA, I’m looking at you), but for a small and insignificant player such as myself they make a certain kind of sense. If I were someone with an ounce of gumption I’d probably attempt to form a non-aligned movement for the blogosphere, but who really has the time?

I think to be a serious player in the blogosphere, to have a permanent seat on the Security Council if you will, you have to have an angle. Like you have to devote your blog to exposing the Bush administration’s vile activities, or to delving into the world of grime music (for those not in the know, grime music is very much a genre de nos jours and is taking music critics and the world -or London at least- by storm. I don’t know what it is either, but from the descriptions it sounds like people making recordings of their digital alarm clocks and mixing them with a rhythm tapped out on a stylophone . Here, in case I have piqued your interest, is the grime blog of a friend). Since mine is just a load of ego-driven ramblings on any subject which takes my fancy, it’s too “eclectic” (in the sense of random and directionless) to really build a following. Still, I’m not desperately bothered by that, as I’m not sure what I’d do if I suddenly found I had followers. Possibly explode in a cloud of self-regard.

Well, just to cement my place on the far fringe of the blogosphere, here are a couple of other ones that I have been alerted to:

Baghdad Blog - a bloke who had a Blog in Baghdad all through the invasion and subsequent occupation
Iraq Dispatches: Another (brilliant) Iraq one
I fucked Ann Coulter in the Ass, Hard. – Hilarious, but you possibly have to know who Ann Coulter is (an extreme right wing US media whore)

And some people who I vaguely know who also have Blogs:
A Sassenach Soliloquy
The Scope

So, you see, if you too have a blog, and wish to enter into some kind of mutual admiration agreement, you too can be linked to on "Csikszereda Musings" the most visited English language site originating in Csikszereda. Don't miss out.