Extreme Mildness

That's about as oxymoronic as it gets, I suspect, but in fact it fits.

We are experiencing a very very weird winter. As I may have gone on about at some length, Csikszereda is a very cold place.  Temperatures in January are regularly below -20 and in some years down as low as -30 and below.  By this time of the year, we should be waist deep in snow and wrapped up like michelin men. But we are not because we are in the middle of what ought to be termed a massive heatwave.  It won't be termed a heatwave of course, because temperatures of +3 are not really what one would call a heatwave.  But in terms of comparison with the norm, we must be at least 10 degrees over the average, and possibly more.  Which is a heatwave, of sorts anyway.

So, what to call this extreme mildness? The US media has gone way over the top with these kind of things of late, with this year's Polar Vortex beating last year's Perfect Storm and Snowmageddon, so I think we need a term for this year's incredible bout of mild and unusually bearable weather.

Some possibilities:

• Fair-to-middlingmageddon
• The Great 2014 Carnage of Tolerability
• The Four Horseman of the not-that-parky
• Temperataclysm
• Clement Void
• Actually-pretty-comfortable-to-be-honest-pocalypse

To be serious for a moment, it is having some serious effects on the local economy, as at this time of year there is usually a lot of snow (and this year there is precisely none).  The vast majority of the local ski runs don't have any snow making equipment so they have already effectively lost half their season (which typically runs December to March - we're now in mid January and they haven't even been able to open yet).  Then of course there is the fear of the possibility of a drought later in the year - since there has been basically no precipitation of any kind since October, we could be in some trouble later on down the line.

Health and Safety

One of the things that the Daily Mail reading knobheads who make up a dangerously large proportion of my countrymen moan about is "health and safety". You know, how people are much safer now and people care about the safety of people when they plan stuff.  I mean it's quite understandable why it causes these right wing dicks such pain, to see people taking "precautions".

Health and Safety in Romania is a very different kettle of fish though.  We don't really have things to sign, or long involved forms to fill in, or lots of paperwork.  If my daughter goes off with her class skiing for example, we have to sign something which says she can go, but nothing else. Once a week her class goes skating (this is a new town policy that all 1st and 2nd graders learn to skate and all 3rd and 4th graders learn to swim), and again, we just drop her off and off she goes.

Now, while I do tend to trust people and think that she is perfectly OK in these situations (and obviously if I thought she wasn't, I would find a way of making her safe), there are areas of life here in which I feel a dash of health-and-safety-ism wouldn't go amiss.  Driving, for example, in which Romania punches well above its weight in totally unnecessary deaths, due mostly to the fact that there are a huge number of complete arseholes let loose at the wheel in this country.  And the number of times that the news leads on the explosion of an apartment building somewhere due to a gas leak does seem somewhat excessive.  I mean one would be excessive, but here it's seemingly one a week.  And the number of buildings in this town which have some form of tiled entranceway, including tiled outdoor steps at the hospital, where tiles are the world's worse surface in icy conditions (conditions which are really pretty common here), is mind-blowing.  I mean has noone ever noticed and thought to themselves "That new public building we're constructing - I wonder if it would be safer not to tile the front steps?"

This morning however, as I crawled back and forth on my customary morning swim, noting the 9 year olds doing their thing at the end of each lap (that school policy mentioned above), wondering as I plunged back down the pool, what the ratio of swim teachers to children would be necessary in the UK (I'm pretty sure that the apparent 30 kids: one teacher ratio would be unacceptable), I realised that there is a health and safety culture here.  It's just a very different one.  It's not an officially sanctioned one, and it doesn't really rely on evidence-based safety features, but rather a kind of institutionalised old wives' health and safetyism.

I am sure I have already mentioned the fear of "curent", which is to say draughts. Get on a bus in summer, in 40 degree heat and dare to open a window to try and make the whole situation bearable, and instantly incur the wrath of the self-appointed health and safety inspectors who will quickly shout at you for your idiotic desire to not melt and will close the window despite your protests. Draughts make people sick, you see.

Go out with your child in a temperature of anywhere below 20 degrees C and have the self same health and safety inspectors will come up to you and tut loudly about her lack of a hat.

And, to prove my point, after my hydro-exertions, I was reminded of the other aspect of the kids' swimming lessons. The hair drying. As the kids come to the swimming pool in their regular class time, they are accompanied by their teacher.  I presume the teacher is allowed to swim, but usually they just sit around watching.  Their real duty at the pool is the making sure everyone gets changed successfully on arrival and departure, but most importantly to make sure every child's hair is totally and utterly dry before they leave the building and return to school. Because going outside with wet hair is so so much more dangerous than racing through a village at 120 km/h, or jerry-rigging the wiring of your house, or asking old people to walk up ice stairs to get into a hospital.

To cap it all, have you seen how much hair 9 year old girls have? Each one of them takes about half an hour to dry it to the exacting standards required.  This means that for a one hour swimming lesson the children are out of school for getting on for all day.  (I exaggerate slightly, and I do think making sure all the children of the town can swim is an excellent idea and even contributes to actual health and safety).

I tend to get changed, slip on my coat and walk out, wet head held high. I have no idea how the teachers explain that to the kids.  "You see that man, leaving with wet hair? Obviously having wet hair as a child has made him crazy as an adult to the point where he doesn't even dry his hair!"

Clowntime is over

Norman Wisdom has died. One of the people who has actually made it into the blog before: http://szekely.blogspot.com/2006/02/wisdom-of-ages.html There's probably some "Mr Grimsdale" type line that I could use here to conclude that otherwise meaningless comment into something with gentle pathos, but so unfamiliar am I with Mr Wisdom's oeuvre that it's beyond me frankly

Frost last night. Bollocks. It's too soon for winter for me.

This blog post can safely be ignored.

Before the fall

It feels like summer didn't happen this year. May and June were appalling weather-wise, and I spent July and August out of the country working. And now it's September and all of the signs are that winter is on its way

1. The storks have gone*
2. People have started harvesting potatoes
3. We picked a barrel full of plums off the ground in the garden this weekend (we measure plums in barrels because that's where they make their transition from small fruits to delicious winter warming palinka)
4. It's already pretty cold (though thankfully not yet as cold as it was in England 10 days ago when I was freezing my arse off)
5. Trees have started changing colour
6. The kids go back to school next week
7. The ice hockey season starts this evening with Sport Club playing Steaua. On September 7th! Ice Hockey! Bloody hell. (Apropos of which, I've just discovered a new English language Sport Club blog)

See what a rural nature-based life I lead? Apart from the ice hockey and school bits obviously.

Thankfully here we don't have the arrival of Christmas decorations in the shops until much much later in the year (unlike the UK where apparently this year they started in August), but it does feel like we're on the slow slide towards winter. I like autumn, really, and it's especially beautiful here in Transylvania, but it just feels too early. I'm not ready for this yet, I need to have a summer first. Please.

(*Storks seem to be the primary measure of weather and seasons here. In addition to their arrival and departure dates being of interest, this year, I'm told, the early summer was so rubbish that their eggs didn't hatch, and so they laid a second batch. These did hatch, but the resultant young are not big enough to fly south for the winter, so they will stay here and die. This tragic tale would be more convincing were I to have seen any of these poor doomed orphan storks anywhere, but I haven't, so I'm not sure whether it's of any validity)

Microclimates

I occasionally forget that I live in a microclimate. It is well known (at least within Romania) that Csikszereda is the coldest place in the country (though locally, that title is hotly contested by Gyergyószentmiklós (Gheorgheni). [In fact the official coldest place in the country is Gyergyóalfalu - Joseni - which is near Gyergyó] When I watch the weather forecast on Romanian TV, if they don't mention the projected temperature here (and they rarely do, since it's not exactly a big place), I have to take the temperature they give for Brasov, and subtract a few degrees to have a rough idea. But I do tend to forget that we really have different weather here. A couple of weeks ago, we drove over to Székelyudvarhely (Odorheiu Secuiesc), and I was stunned to realise once we climbed over the mountain pass at Tolvajos-tető (no idea what that's called in Romanian, I'm afraid, I'm not even sure it has a name), suddenly there was no snow. A few patches in sheltered north facing nooks, but basically nothing. And that's just 20 kms from here. We, then at least, still had tons of the stuff lying around everywhere. It's slowly going now as it's been warmer for a week, but there's still a fair amount. Elsewhere? Not a flake.

Csíkszereda, you see, lies in a depression in the mountains. We're 700m above sea level, which means, for example, that we're way higher up than the Tan Hill Inn, which bills itself as the highest pub in Britain at 1732 feet (which in real money is just under 530 metres). However it doesn't feel like that as we are surrounded by montains on all sides, most of which are getting on for 2000m high). Thus we get our own little microclimate. Sometimes in the winter all the mountains and even nearby towns are blanketed in snow, and we've got none. Or the other way round (like now). We have very cold winters*, and pleasant summers (while the winter here is pretty brutal, we are a haven for people from all over the country sweltering in deeply unpleasant summers). Famously, you can't grow tomatoes in Csíkszereda. (To be honest this is not exactly true, because (a) obviously you can in greenhouses; (b) you can grow them outside too, they just don't get ripe; and (c) increasingly these days as the climate gets warmer you seemingly can).

[* This has been a fairly tough winter, and temperatures dropped below -30 a few times, but I have lost count of the times so far this year that people have told me about 1985 when it got down to -41. I live in a world where people measure their worth by the ability to withstand cold]

Skistone Cops

Last week we went skiing more or less every day. It was half term for the kids, so each day I drove them up the mountain to our local resort Hargitafürdő / Baile Harghita, and Bogi had an hour long lesson while Paula got pulled around on skis by me, and then went down shallow slopes on her own. Except on Saturday when she went down a much faster slope and I had to grab her and lift her off her feet before she careered into a tree. After that she didn't want to go again.

Anyway, things at Hargita have improved a lot over the last few years. There are far more places to stay, cafes, and there is even a new small ski lift for kids and a tubing place (where people sledge down the hill on an inner tube and then get pulled up by some kind of special lift). The other thing that has changed is the demographics - when I first went up there 5 years ago, one only ever really heard Hungarian spoken, but slowly over the years it's become far more of a Romanian resort, to the point now where you barely hear any Hungarian, and the majority of the cars are from Bacau or Neamt or places. Having said that though, it was pretty quiet last week seeing as it was a school holiday nation-wide, and it's a very good winter for skiing. I guess that's a visible indicator of the crisis.

Saw two new kinds of police up there too, to add to my collection of various different Romanian police forces, of which there appear to be a huge number. This time I encountered Mountain Gendarmes (Jandarmeria montana) (not sure what they do exactly, but since I've never been really sure what the normal lowland gendarmes in Romania do, this is par for the course). There were also a bunch of blokes in a thick brown uniform skiing around, who were part of the Brigada Antiterorista. Which of course raised the question in my mind as to what the hell they were doing there. Were they on a work outing, and if so, did they really need to wear the uniform? Were they there to counter some specific threat that had been made to the small Csipike ski run? (live webcam here) Which as you can see is not exactly the kind of place that you'd think would be high up the Al Qaida hitlist (they were there all week too, before Romania had announced it was going to spend money it doesn't have installing some bizarre American missile defence shield. Not sure why the US can't pay for all of this, but there you go. Perhaps it's part of the oddly lopsided and with no corruption at all no sir Bechtel deal) . Or, were they there to reassure Romanian skiers that they were being protected from some previously unknown violent Hungarian secessionist movement?

(In the course of checking some spellings for this bit, I have discovered that there is a "Special Intervention Brigade" within the Jandarmeria who go by the name "Vlad Ţepeş" (Vlad the Impaler). I swear I'm not making that up. Look.)

This week there will be a big event up there. The world cup in ski orienteering (round 3) is being held here. (You can find it here and here), and this is apparently the biggest winter sport event held in Romania for many decades. Personally I'd never even hear of ski orienteering (though now I have, it does sound like an event that makes perfect sense), and we've had short course speed skating championships and Junior Ice Hockey world championships here since I've lived here, so that does sound quite a claim.

Just to finish off the winter stuff, we had another big snowfall this weekend, but everybody seems to be managing. Unlike in Bucharest where the city is apparently paralysed, schools closed and all sorts. Soft southern jessies.

Poster boy

A bit of a follow-up to last week's rant about Cameron and co.



You too, can have fun with modifying the wild-eyed, slapheaded, "look at me I'm not wearing a tie, I'm that cool" Dave Cameron poster here.

Bloody cold today, of the "hairs on inside of ones nose freeze up within 3 seconds of stepping outside" variety. If you're not familiar with the hairinnose scale of temeperature it's about -28 at the moment, and it's nearly noon when I type this.

Climate, weather, and revolutions

Happy Anniversary
Today is December 16th, which means it's the 20th anniversary of the beginning of the revolution here, which began on this day, 1989 in Timisoara, before spreading to Bucharest and elsewhere. This is inevitably being covered by real journalists and media outlets, so I probably don't really need to go into it (and anyway, I wasn't here). Here are some of those news pieces:

• The best one (IMO) in the Financial Times
  
• The Irish Times
• Something called International Security Watch (no idea who they are)

I'm sure there will be more to come between today and December 25th, when Ceausescu was executed, ending the revolution (in the same sense of "end" as the war on Iraq "ended" when Bush appeared with a banner saying "Mission Accomplished" or when they pulled that statue down)

Hó Hó Hó
It's been snowing here for getting on for 36 hours now. It started sometime on Monday night (not really sure when, because you know I was all like asleep and that) and it's still going. It's not as deep as you might imagine after such an extended period, because it's not that kind of snow. I'm sure the Eskimos have a word for it, but in the less snow-based language of English I refer to it as that-light-powdery-snow-which-is-oddly-dry-given-that-it's-made-out-of-water-and-is-quite-difficult-to-make-into-snowballs-because-you-really-need-to-apply-a-huge-amount-of-pressure-to-it-to-compress-it-enough-to-stay-together-meaning-really-only-adults-or-older-teenagers-can-make-snowballs-from-it-which-exacerbates-the-already-slightly-unfair-military-strength-advantage-of-the-father-in-a-snowball-battle.

No hope
We're all going to die. Well, you knew that already I presume (if not, sorry to break it to you), but what I mean here is that as a species we might not be long for this world as we increasingly quickly destroy it. It seems likely that in the current talks in Copenhagen, virtually nothing is going to get done, with the developed world refusing to offer much help to the less developed bit (which is a little unfair, to say the least, as the less developed bit is the bit which is going to suffer the most from climate change, with some of it disappearing entirely, and it is also the bit which has contributed least to the problem), and the USA and China being particularly obstreperous in some kind of "we're determined to be the richest country when the world ends" fight-to-the-death.

Now in the grand scheme of things the amount of money that is being asked for to help out here is basically nothing. Currently on the table is an offer of $10bn a year, and there is debate over whether to try somehow to increase that to $100bn (which is very clearly the maximum it's ever going to be). Many rich countries are balking at this, and obviously it does sound like a lot of money. But let's compare it with the amount of money that has so far been thrown at or promised to the banking and financial services sector to bail them out in the wake of the credit crisis. Want to have a guess at how much that might be? Well, I'll tell you. You might need to sit down (you probably are already, but who knows in these days of iphones and the like). Oxfam estimates this figure to be...$8,424bn. Or, if you like, 84 times the absolute maximum that anyone is expecting to be promised at the current summit, and 840 times the amount that has been currently offered. As it stands the argument is whether they can come up with $40bn. 200 times less that what the banks got. (OK, the banks thing is supposed to be a one off and these are annual sums, but I think we're still looking at a massive disparity here).

So, as the sea levels rise, and the crops fail, and farmland turns to desert, and there is a massive global refugee crisis, and traumatic economic, physical, cultural, and environmental changes, at least you'll be able to go and make a deposit and know that the head of the bank will get a vast Christmas bonus. it's a comforting thought, isn't it? Isn't it?

Spring springs

Spring made a brief appearance here back in early February, decided it didn't really like being out so early and went back in to hibernation for a while. This Saturday, March 21st, the date when it's actually supposed to show up in the temperate northern hemisphere it decided once again to poke its nose outside and have a look-see. It did so in a very flamboyant way, unusual for this normally reticent season, which prefers to dip its toe into the year bit by bit*. Last week there was more snow and some fairly cold nights (and by fairly cold here I mean sub -10). On Saturday, though, we headed up to spend the weekend in Vármező (Campul Cetatii), a small village in the middle of nowhere, of which a little more later.

There is still a lot of snow on the mountains on the way, and even as late as Friday night it had been snowing in Sovata/Szovata, the nearest place of any size to our destination. But on Saturday morning it was sunny and crisp and beautiful. We chanced upon a meadow full of snowdrops, and by a stream there were as-yet-unblooming crocuses (or is the plural croci?). The next day (yesterday) they had all burst into purple and orange life. Then on our way home we saw a stork. There is no clearer sign of spring in Transylvania than seeing a stork. So all is good. Spring has sprung, and I imagine fauna all over the region are frantically trying to get off with each other (I'm imagining that this is what is happening, not actually conjuring up scenarios in my own fevered perverted imagination, just in case you wondered)

In other nature news, there seems to be a glut of eagles this year. Driving along, you see loads of them, sitting in the still bare trees by the roadside, floating lazily over the fields, swooping menacingly. When I say eagles, I mean birds of prey really, since most of them are not, I think, actually eagles, but some kind of hawks, or buzzards, or what have you. I think the technical ornithological way of distinguishing them is that eagles are "really fucking massive" whereas other birds of prey are just "very very big". I presume this means that there are also loads of mice and voles and shrews and that, but I haven't actually seen any of them. Or it could just be that the smorgasbord of small rodents was laid on last year, causing all these young raptors to make it through their first year, but now having feasted heartily last year, this year will see slimmer pickings and they'll all start buggering off to somewhere with more food in it (or die).


*I understand that winter hates mixed metaphors, so I'm attempting to force it to stay away with all that. It's not that I'm a bad writer, at all , no sirree.

[A few short hours later after posting this... It's only frigging snowing now.] Bloody weather.

It's Global Warming Gone Mad

Being English I have to constantly keep in check my instinctive desire/need to write and talk about the weather. I do manage it for the most part, but occasionally I have been known to slip into it (f'rinstance when I talk to my parents on the phone). It's not that talking about the weather is a bad thing exactly, just that it sort of implies you can't think of anything else to talk about (which, obviously is often the case, at least for me). Also, living in the Coldest Place in Romania (TM), in which winters are brutal and vicious affairs, having previously lived in Vermont, USA in which winters are etc and so on, there is always the tendency to look down upon other people's weathers as being sort of a bit weak and pathetic (which I'm quite sure is more than a little irritating, at least judging by the "why don't you just shut up" reactions I get).

Anyway, because I have nothing else to talk about, and because I am not currently in a position of being able to poo-poo the mild and temperate weather of the rest of Europe, I feel it is time to comment on this so-called winter. For while the UK shivers and grumbles contentedly under severe snowstorms and people stocking up for the ice-age in Tescos, Csikszereda (and the rest of Romania, but it feels more noticeable here) is sitting around twiddling its thumbs in what appears to be spring. Which began about three weeks ago. There was a cold period at the beginning of the year when it was down to the standard -20 ish, but since mid January it hasn't dropped below zero. This weekend we picked snowdrops, for god's sake. Snowdrops in early February.

Every year, on February 2nd, as everyone who has seen the Bill Murray film will know, a groundhog (which appears to be some kind of large rodent, not dissimilar to a wombat) is dragged out of hibernation in the town of Punxutawney, Pennsylvania and asked to predict when winter will end. He's not terribly specific and just limits to his predictions to either "6 more weeks of winter" or "less than 6 more weeks of winter", which always baffled me when I lived in Vermont since the winter finishing in mid-march would actually be reasonably early, but there you go. I have no idea what he said this year, or indeed why I started this paragraph at all, but that's blogging while doing a number of other things at the same time for you. By the time you come to finish a thought, it started so long ago that you have no idea what it was you wanted to say, but being too lazy to delete the whole thing (I mean and waste all those words), you just plough on regardless.

So, the weather, then. It's errm a... thing, isn't it?

(If anyone happens upon this post while searching for the best blog post of 2009, I'm hereby nominating it as my candidate. )

Fogbound

I am fogbound in Tashkent airport (at least I am at the moment I am writing this, when and if I finally post it I won’t be, because there is no internet here at the airport, so it will have to actually go up later)

Last night I left the hotel here at 1.30 and got to the airport in good time. After various bureaucratic procedures (Uzbekistan is very bureaucratic as that’s as good a way as any to control people), I made it to the departures lounge and sat down to sort of doze and wait. After an hour or so, a Turkish Airlines man showed up to inform us that the plane would be a little late (the actual phrase he used was “a little untimely” which was, I thought, a nicely euphemistic phrase for “late”). When pressed he confessed that he didn’t know how untimely it would be because the plane was circling above us, hoping that the fog would lift enough to let it land.

Obviously it didn’t because an hour later he appeared again, looking stressed (or perhaps “a little untranquil”) to inform us that we should all return to our hotels because the plane would not actually arrive that night and had been diverted to Ashkabad (for those unfamiliar with Central Asian geography, that’s the capital of Turkmenistan). We should come back to the airport at noon. First of all we had to retrace our steps through the bureaucracy, since when we showed up again later (feels like the next day, but technically it isn’t) we’d need to hand over all the various forms we’d presented just then – so it would be necessary to reclaim the forms (the hotel registration card, the customs declaration and various other ridiculous bits of paper). That took a while, and eventually I ended up at the Turkish Airlines office to work out what my options would be regarding onward connections from Istanbul – obviously the plane to Bucharest I was supposed to catch was out of the question, but it also turned out that by the time we eventually get to Istanbul (fingers crossed) I’ll have missed every feasible connection for the day, and I’ll have to spend the night there.

After reconnecting with two Iranian colleagues who were fogbound with me, we got back to the hotel (after taxi haggling, and the realisation, upon emerging from the terminal, that the fog was in fact very very thick – somehow that was a piece of good news, since it meant that we weren’t being dicked around for no actual reason) , had a short argument with the hotel regarding the fact that we knew the rooms had been paid for for the whole night, and yes, while we had actually checked out, that they could put us back there for a few hours, so we could have a kip (by this time it was well after 5, so everyone was a little frazzled and not really in the mood to deal with the problems caused by Uzbek bureaucracy – once you’ve checked out, you’ve checked out). They relented eventually, and I was able to sleep for about 3 hours, before getting up at 9 to sort out various problems caused by this unscheduled extra half day in Tashkent (and consequent 24 hour delay in my eventual arrival home). So, here I am, back at the airport, knackered and hoping that the plane eventually comes (the fog has lifted mostly), and that I will be able to catch a few more hours sleep on board (unlikely, I fear).

I appreciate that these destinations may sound evocatively exotic to many people (Tashkent, Ashkabad, Istanbul), but you’ll have to trust me that spending three hours at Tashkent airport in the wee hours is not in any way glamorous. However, to try and find a silver lining, there are people in this story worse off than us – the plane load of passengers who after circling Tashkent for 2 hours, were directed back to spend the night in Ashkabad (and I’m having a guess that Ashkabad airport makes Tashkent look like a comfortable and uncomplicated haven of tranquility).

In theory we take off in one more hour from now, but I’m not holding my breath.

[Update: Am now finally in Istanbul, after 5 more unexplained hours at the airport today. Rather intriguingly when they fed us at about 5.30pm local time, they decided to stick with the plan and give us breakfast, which was somewhat taking-the-piss I felt. It's not often I have breakfast with red wine]

Random thoughts

I'm just back from England, where I attended the annual IATEFL conference in Exeter with Erika and something like 1600 other people. It was a good trip, though I wasn't feeling at my best, since the cough I had a few weeks ago turns out to have been pneumonia (or at least some similar non-specific lung inflammation, of similar levels of intensity). I am waiting today to have another delightful visit to Csikszereda's hospital so that I can work out whether or not more treatment is necessary (this possibly will involve spending a few nights in the aforementioned building while I get regular injections of antibiotics and/or monitoring of rampant blood pressure which has risen in accompaniment of the lung thing. So if I don't post anything here for a while it is likely because I am stuck in hospital and hence offline.

One of the things that I have complained about often in Romania is the fact that people are so incredibly nesh here. If I dare to take Paula out in 20 degree temperatures without a hat, I get older people especially looking at me like I'm inhumane and ought to be arrested. You see people wearing cotton wool in their ears just to keep the draughts out (and also sounds and other such troublesome things). But I think there has to be some kind of happy medium between the approach to temperature in Romania and the approach to temperature in England.

To set the scene we flew into Luton last Sunday in the middle of a raging blizzard. In April. In southern England. No idea what's going on. Anyway, it only really snowed on that day, but the temperature never really got very warm - most nights there was a heavy frost, and the daytime temps never rose much above 7 degrees. But in the midst of this hardly summery weather people walked around wearing not much more than their underwear. Mostly these people were teenagers, and especially teenage girls, it is true, so one can put some of this masochistic lunacy down to the vagaries of fashion, but it is a fashion which seems remarkably long-lasting. Whenever I go back and find myself wandering round an English town of an evening I usually find myself marvelling at the lack of warm clothing on those out carousing. This year, if anything the phenomenon has either got worse, or prolonged exposure to Romania has made me more sensitive to it. Perhaps I am becoming assmiliated and before long I, too, will be tutting concernedly at parents whose children are not buried in a vast heavily-lined, multi-layered, all-over burqa; wearing large clumps of cotton wool in my ears; and furiously closing every window in the train.

Dubai the by

So in a miracle of rapid reorganisation, my Afghanistan trip has been placed in Dubai. That means that not only do I have a new destination, but so do a bunch of Afghans, Iranians and Kyrgyzstanis. Within 3 days of the bomb going off (and I mean that literally) more or less everything bar a few last minute visa hitches had been put in place for the new venue.

Hence I sit here in the Emirates lounge at Munich airport, bound for the highly peculiar city of Dubai. (I was actually the first person in this lounge so I got the run of the place including the TV remote, meaning I am sitting here sipping a very nice "Schneider Weisse" beer, watching Tunisia vs Senegal on a big screen TV and pootling about on my computer. It's all very civilised. To begin with I was outnumbered 10-1 by staff, but now others have arrived to disturb my center-of-attention status. None of them have ventured into my zone though, finding themselves uninterested in African football - which is sad for them as it is a cracking match.)

I had been hoping for a spectacular temperature differential between Csikszereda and Dubai so I could flaunt my destination in people's faces and tell them I'd be on the beach while they shivered in sub -30 icy chills, but in a curious turn of fate, on Monday this week it reached 11 degrees in Szereda (that's PLUS eleven) while the temp in Dubai was a mere 18 (and even dipped as low as 9 at night). So, my heartless gloating was put on hold. This morning was much better though as we drove through a raging blizzard to get to the airport (much better from a "ha ha I'm going to Dubai" perspective, rather than a safe driving perspective).

Last weekend we went up to the local ski resort, amid the slowly melting snows in the unseasonal thaw. You may not be aware but in your house you have an almost perfect sledge. Slick, glossy, plastic, slightly cambered for minimum friction. Know what it is yet? Well, I'll tell you. It's a toilet seat. We found one on the mountain (presumably used by someone else for the same purpose - at least that's what I'm telling myself), and zipped down the snow in our virtually frictionless way (note to any scientifically minded pedants whose fingers are as we speak hovered over the keyboard angrily composing a response - yes I know it's not frictionless or even close to being so, but it's poetic licence. If you'd flown down the side of a mountain on a toilet seat you'd use the same level of hyperbole. Honest). More sedately, I went cross country skiing for the first time in bloody yonks, and remembered how much I like it. In Dubai apparently there is a shopping mall with a ski resort in it (that's Dubai for you). I wonder if they have any cross-country sections?

Transylvaniara

When one arrives at Luton airport to take the plane to Cluj, there is no mention of the city to which the plane flies - the departure boards and the check in lines all read "Transylvania" - I am struggling to think of any other place one could fly to in which the city is not mentioned. Malta is one, but then Malta is a small island which is (to all intents and purposes) one city with lots of bits. Transylvania is very large, and, well, you could be landing anywhere from Oradea to Brasov, two cities that must be getting on for 500 kms apart.

Anyway, it turned out to be a very good thing that we were flying back to Transylvania on Thursday, since, if we'd tried to fly to Bucharest we'd have been up shit creek without a paddle, as it appears the entire south of Romania was blanketed in a blizzard of epic proportions that day, and both of Bucharest's airports were shut for hours (and hours) . So, hurrah for Transylvania, in which the roads were clear, the sky was blue (though it was - and still is- colder than a witch's tit) and the parking was miraculously free at the airport (and the car started first time despite sitting outside in sub -10 degree temperatures for a week).

The upshot of this is that I am now back home and will resume blogging in a 2008 stylee very shortly.

Viva Zapada

It is snowing. It has been snowing since before we woke up. So far today (October 21st, let us not forget) we've had more snow in Csikszereda than we did in the entirety of last winter. I'm never really keen on heavy snowfall before the leaves have all fallen off the trees.

I have the strong sense that this winter is going to be a brutal one. If El Nino meant an easy, mild, and snow free winter, I suspect his sister will herald a hard, cold, and precipitous one. Balls.

The Good Life

There are days when it is very good to live in Csikszereda. That's not to say there are days when it's bad to live in Csikszereda, it's just that most of the time one doesn't look around and say to oneself "Csikszereda is the most exciting place in the world/Romania in which to reside". As I've said before it has many things to recommend it, and other things that may make one think twice about choosing, voluntarily, to move here.

One of the latter points is usually the temperature. It is well known within Romania that this is the coldest place in the country, and when the mercury drops to -35 in the winter, it can cause you to question your judgement, sanity, and appendages. Currently though, this negative is most decidedly a positive. Romania (and other countries in the region) are still gripped by an oppressive heatwave which has sent temperature soaring towards 40 degrees. In the shade. That's pretty seriously hot. Here today it got up, I think, to around 33. That's still pretty hot, and out in the sun was fairly oppressive. But, it's better than everywhere else in Romania. A couple of weeks ago i did a teacher training workshop here in the town, for which people came from various different destinations, mostly within Transylvania. One woman came all the way from Galati, and was so happy to be in the relative cool of the mountains. OK we don't have the Rolling Stones playing here, but we do have Boban Markovic playing just down the road this week (and to be entirely honest I'm actually more interested in going to a concert of the latter rather than the former).

So this evening as I survey the temperatures afflicting the rest of the country, I can sit here sipping my ice cold Bere Ciuc, and truthfully say "This is the best place to live in Romania". Long may the heatwave last.

From Székelyföld to Sheffield

At opposite ends of Europe dramatically different weather conditions. Romania sweltered yesterday in +40° temperatures (not here as such, but it did get well above 30), with the news showing that in the sun in Bucharest it was over 60°; with news reporters, from all stations it seems, frying eggs on parked cars (can't somebody find a new and creative way to illustrate the concept of really really fucking hot?); and with (again on all stations) high heeled shoes sinking into pavements.

Meanwhile back in the UK, it's really raining. And I don't mean it's just raining in the traditional daily English sense, I mean raining in the apocalyptic noah's ark sense (I may have mixed my biblical references there, but who really knows).

Here, for example, pictured yesterday, is a place in which I have spent many happy hours (and, let's face it, a fair few miserable ones too):


For those unfamiliar with this most beautiful of locations (not that there should be that many people that applies to, since being unfamiliar with this place is a bit like being unfamiliar with the Taj Mahal), this is not some expensive water polo arena, but in fact, a football stadium. Or THE football stadium to be strictly accurate.

(I believe "Time to bring on the subs" is the humorous caption you need here)

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.

Frozen Saints

It was cold yesterday, much colder than it has been for ages. I went out for a bike ride in the afternoon, and actually needed to work harder just to stave off the chill. Then Erika mentioned that she thought that it was one of the frozen saints' fault.

The frozen saints "Fagyos szentek" are Pongrác, Szervác, and Bonifác (and possibly Orban). I'm still trying to work out what those names translate as in English, without much success, but since they're Saints, they must have equivalents - Bonifác is, I believe, "Boniface" and Orban "Urban" but I have never heard of anyone actually called these names, so probably Pongrác and Szervác are even more obscure.

Their relevance to the weather is that in May there are 3 or 4 days which are (according to folk wisdom) always cold - and in fact it is advised that you don't put your crops/plants that could be damaged by frost out until after the last of them has been and gone. These days are the saints days of Pongrác, Szervác, Bonifác, and Orban. But having done a bit of checking it seems like the first three are actually May 12th, 13th and 14th (ie not yesterday but this weekend). More details (in Hungarian). Orban is on the 25th.

So now you know. If tomorrow is cold it's the fault of that bloody St. Pongrác. Who, having done a bit more googling, seems like he might actually be St. Pancras. One of those saints (perhaps the only one) who is more commonly known as the name of a railway station. In fact, until that moment I hadn't stopped to consider that there was someone around once who was called Pancras. Amazing what appears when you start aimlessly looking stuff up.

A tale of two winters

This time last year the temperature in Csikszereda was minus 32. Today it reached plus 15. That's a swing of 47 degrees. (Or 85 degrees Fahrenheit for those you still living in the 19th Century). This winter is mental.