An apology

Loyal readers might have noticed that I haven't written for a while. On the other hand, I suspect I don't really have loyal readers, so maybe they (the non-existent loyal readers) haven't actually noticed.

Anyway, I'm in Krakow working on an intensive teacher training course and I really don;t have a great deal of time to write. So that's why. I'll be back in Romania the week after the US election to either drape myself in gloom and despondency about the fact that the world is coming to an end, or mildly celebrating the election of John Kerry. They won't let that happen though will they? This election will be as bent as a whole truck full of 2 dollar bills.

OK, that's all I have time for right now. See you in a fortnight. (That's two weeks to those of you living under the iron grip of what my friend Gavin refers to as "The Taliban with better dentists")

Contexts Part II: Transylvania

Transylvania is known the world over as the home of vampires. In the time I have been here, I have to confess I haven’t seen a single one. If my attractiveness to mosquitoes is anything to go by this is not because I have badly tasting blood. But I admit that it’s possible that mosquitoes and vampires are likely to have different tastes in blood.

So, aside from the vampire angle, what else can I tell you about Transylvania? Those of you with the dubious benefit of a classical education will know that Transylvania means “beyond the woods”. Over the mountains might be a better description as the area is practically surrounded by mountains on all sides. It’s a very fertile region, Transylvania, and was once referred to (by Stalin, I believe, or at least someone in his government) as the breadbasket of Europe. Indeed he (Stalin) saw that as the role for Romania in the Warsaw Pact, but this pissed Ceasescu off, who thought the subtext was that Romanians were being described as peasants, and as a good communist he wanted a country full of proletariats. So rather than building up agriculture he instead filled the country with large ugly polluting factories. Thus, now, Romania’s agriculture is working at a 19th century semi-feudal level. And more surprisingly, in view of the fact that every town appears to have a tractor factory in it, there appear to be very few actual tractors in the country. I’ve mentioned before about how many horse carts and cows you see on the roads, and this is no exaggeration. I don’t think I’ve ever been stuck behind a tractor on the rods here, but horse carts? Every couple of miles. In fact one just went past the window of this apartment, despite the fact that we live more or less in the centre of a city. Well, large town. Ok, town.

Transylvanians regard their part of Romania as the “rich” part of Romania, with hard working people producing the food and other goods that keep the rest of the country in the lazy style to which they have become accustomed. Every country I have ever been to has these kinds of regional stereotypes. There are workers and those who live off the work, and this can be divided into class or they can be divided into regions. People from Lisbon for example barely ever bother to get out of bed if you listen to the people from Porto. Likewise the Sicilians are just a bunch of layabouts to the Milanese. For Transylvanians it’s the Wallachians. The Moldavians appear to have gained a kind of honorary Transylvanian status in all this. They’re not Transylvanians you understand, but at least they understand the role of the wallachian parasites. I should put all that in quotes, so you know it’s not me talking, but perhaps this sentence will do instead.

As I mentioned in the Romania post, Transylvania has something of a long and checkered history. You can read all about it on the Internet somewhere. I’ll start at about the 10th century because before that point nothing 9aside form during the Roman occupation) is very well documented, and so it’s difficult to know what really was going on. This also avoids getting into the tricky question of who the “real” Transylvanians are. So, after loads of invasions from various tribes, Transylvania started to be colonised by Magyars in about the 10th century, and by the 13th century it had become part of Hungary. (Do you se how I cunningly skipped 300 years there?) The Hungarian king, in an effort to stop various invading forces coming in and pillaging bits of it, invited two groups of people to move in and provide a buffer protection area. In the South/Southeast of Transylvania it was the Saxons, and in the East it was the Szekely. I’m not 100% sure who the Szekelys are, “a Hungarian ethnic group” seems to be the common consensus. They were renowned warriors hence their selection for this role. So there are areas of Transylvania where until recently there was a sizeable ethnic German population, and areas which are still Szekely (and there are still a lot of Hungarians in Transylvania). The Hungarian word for Transylvania is Erdely (pronounced Airday), and the German is Siebenburgen (7 towns, although one website I looked at suggested that this didn’t in fact refer to the 7 major towns of medieval Transylvania but was a Germanification of Sibiu, one of those towns, which is the most pronouncedly German still.)

So the next few hundred years is characterised by that history that goes something like “In 1479 King Wankdorf formed an alliance with Prince Mouflon of Cantaloupe, which led to the combined forces defeating the Wingnuts at the battle of Trouserpress. When Mouflon suddenly died of scrofula, his son, Prince Mouflon II joined forces with the Niblicks and turned against Wankdorf. Wankdorf immediately made peace with the Wingnuts and married Princess Lentil of Yucca. The three way alliance thus formed was too much for the Cantaloupe and Niblick forces who were pushed all the way back to the River Handcream.” Etc etc and so forth ad nauseum. You know the kind of thing.

In the grander scheme of things Transylvania was handed from empire to empire (Ottoman, Habsburg, Austro-Hungarian) Until about 1848 when the revolutions sweeping Europe engulfed Hungary and Transylvania, and ended up with a ruthless quashing of the uprising, and a subsequent policy of Magyarisation of the population of Transylvania. Under this regime, the Romanians in Transylvania, who previously had merely been disenfranchised, were now oppressed quite overtly and denied basic rights. All designed to undermine the Romanianness of the region. Language, culture, religion, you know, the whole works. It’d be nice to think that the end of this period would be the end of such oppressions anywhere in the world ever. But unfortunately not. In fact that Magyarisation has sprouted many bastard offspring all over the world in the 20th century and it’s still going on in various places.

In the First World War Hungary sided with the Germans, while Romania sided with the British/French/Russian alliance. At the end of the war, then, Transylvanian was effectively handed over to Romania, a fact on the ground which was confirmed by the Treaty of Trianon in 1920. Then of course the entire process of Magyarisation was reversed and replaced with Romanisation. Hungarians were stripped of their land, property etc, and Romanians from other parts of the country were brought in to ensure the Romanian majority. In the 2nd World War, Hungary made the same mistake again and sided with Germany - mostly it seems to get back Transylvania. It did for a while, until Hitler and Stalin fell out and then Romania sided with Russia, eventually leading to being again on the “winning side”. Transylvania reverted to Romania after it’s brief bit of Hungarianness (in reality it was more like part of a greater Nazi empire, but since that empire only really existed under war conditions it’s a bit of a weird one (describing the nazis as weird is I suspect setting myself up for abuse, so I’ll just add in here that the empire and its status as a constantly fluctuating entity is the bit that’s weird. What happened within its expanding and contracting borders goes beyond weird and into the realms of fucking awful. Just to clear that up).

Post war and under Ceasescu, the Romanisation continued. Romanians were moved in from other parts of the country, Hungarians were often moved out and moved to barren bits of land or to work on one of Ceasescu’s grand projects (like the Danube Black Sea canal). People couldn’t have Hungarian names (Erika’s dad for example, born Laszlo, is officially Ladislau the closest Romanian equivalent to his real Hungarian name), large Romanian Orthodox Churches were built al over. The most prominent building in Csikszereda for example is the Romanian Orthodox church – even though the town has very few Romanians in it. I imagine the congregation is dwarfed by the interior of the church. Also under Ceasescu much of the German population of Transylvania left for West Germany. Germany has apparently always had a policy of offering all Germans anywhere in the world citizenship, and paid to “repatriate” their countrymen from Ceasescu’s Romania. Ceasescu wanted the money so was happy to let them go. Thus now, there are almost no Germans left in Transylvania.

After Ceasescu’s fall, and the general collapse of Eastern Europe many Hungarians fled to Hungary (these days you see thousands of Hungarian registered cars touring the countryside in summer, as people come back to visit their families). There are now about 1.5 million Hungarians in Transylvania. The population of Romania as a whole is 22million, but I don’t know what proportion of that is in Transylvania. So what’s left is a land of probably about 75% Romanian, 20% Hungarian and 5% Roma and a few surviving Germans. I’m making these figures up, but they’re a relatively informed guess.

God, I’ve gone on a bit there haven’t I? What I really ought to add is that Transylvania is gorgeous. Hills, mountains, forests, attractive and traditional villages, attractive gothic cities, rivers, lakes, gorges, and valleys. I perhaps ruined the effect of that final statement by wittering on about the divided history of the region. But really you should come. And visit.

Good Company

This week Erika and I began the process of becoming a company. This is a modern method of marriage free from the scourge of same sex coupling. Ok it’s not, and neither do I think that same sex marriages are a scourge or a “virus” on society (as one Spanish catholic bishop/complete bastard said this week). No, we really are becoming a company. This is partly because it allows me to do various training courses here and anything else that comes my way. Partly it’s because it means I pay less tax when I do so. And it’s partly a step on the process of becoming a legal alien in Romania. The first method we tried of legalising my status here (not that it’s illegal yet you understand, but it won’t last for ever and I can’t work officially in Romania yet) was an interesting one. I was going to become freelance, but in one of those catch-22 situations beloved of bureaucracy, I needed the permission to live and work here to get the freelance status and I needed the freelance status to get the permission to live and work here. I think people coming to Romania without a job and without the immediate intention to marry are uncatered for in the law as the state hasn’t yet got around the idea that anyone would actually want to do that. The story goes that lesbianism was never made illegal in the UK because Queen Victoria could never believe that it would be practiced by anyone. The same goes for moving to Romania it seems.

Anyway, the upshot of all this is that becoming a company is the best way of living and working here. The two of us make up this company and we were asked to supply three possible names of our company in case the first choice sounded too much like an organisation already in existence here. We chose “Training in Education and Management” as our primary choice, and were very pleased with it – after all the acronym would be TEAM, and that sounded dead good. I was already imagining our website our logo and everything else. But we failed to get our first choice. The second was the more prosaic but still fairly professional sounding “Education and Management”. Again no. When we were told that we had to have three, we thought the last one could be something faintly amusing as clearly we wouldn’t get down that far – after all how many companies could there possibly be registered in Romania with long English names? So our third and final choice was “Hox and Erix’ (an ancient nickname of mine and an ancient nickname of hers). So, as you have no doubt gathered you are talking to one of the partners of Hox and Erix SRL. I’m actually beginning to warm to it already. It has a nicely peculiar quality to it. Like Google. Or Bang and Olufson. As you can see I’m already setting my sights high – thinking of the day that Hox and Erix is a multinational corporation, even though it has been set up in order to administer teacher training activities in rural Eastern Transylvania. I think I may need someone to give me the occasional slap in the face.

The legal papers were also funny. Having been awarded the name, our lawyers (i.e. the people we hired to take care of all this stuff for us) printed out the official paperwork of the company which we had to sign. This names Erika and me as the associates in the company and requires us to call a general assembly every year – to be made up of the two associates. That general assembly has the responsibility (if need be) of firing the administrators of the company. The administrators of the company are, you guessed it, also Erika and me. It’s a very labyrinthine and complex organigram. I’d draw it for you, but (a) I can’t, and (b) if I did so the whole thing would implode on itself and create a wormhole in the space-time continuum.

The upshot of all this is that Erika is now my partner in a sense other than the romantic. She’s also my administrator. (this is not some kind of bondage code word). And my co-assembly member. Oh and we sleep together too. Nepotism? We got it. I’m thinking of hiring Bogi as our accountant.

Oh and one more thing

I just wanted to get this off my chest before I left (I think I will have well and truly exhausted Krakow's comic potential by then - and I have to spend a whole month here in October/November, so as you can imagine anything that gets blogged during that time will truly be scraping the bottom of the barrel)

Krakow old town is policed by a private security firm. Now I know that after 40 years of a failing command economy the Poles wil have been anxious to jump on the free market bandwagon, but a private police force? They don't even do that in the US. Every store has the sign up in the window, indicating presumably that they have contributed to paying. The cynical side of me (and having spent most of my life in a capitalist society, I have a fairly well-developed cynical side when it comes to privatisation) wonders what happens to the places which refuse to pay. Do they get visits by baseball bat wielding "advisers" who suggest that they join in? Do they get robbed with impunity while these mercenary policemen stand around watching and sniggering? I'm a bit stunned. It seems to only be the old touristy bit of Krakow, as I've seen regular police elsewhere. This security firm is named "Justus", which is presumably derived from the same route as "justice", but obviously sounds slightlky more comical to an English speaker. When they kick your door down in the middle of the night for non payment of protection monies, oh sorry I mean security tax, do they say "It's just us!"

Oh, and Sheffield Wednesday just won 3-0 at Wrexham in their first match under Paul Sturrock, you'll all be glad to hear.

Poland continued (and a clarification)

Firstly to clarify something. The Polish big nose syndrome identified yesterday is of a specific variety. I realise that you may be picturing Poles with noses like those that members of the House of Lords sport. Huge gin and port fuelled monstrosities with prominent veins. Not so. Nor is the Polish nose reminsiscent of the large alien looking protruberance worn by celebrities like Barbara Streisand or Celine Dion, the effect of which is to make the wearer look like their face has been occupied by an invading power. No, the Polish nose is a long and slender affair. protruding proudly from the face in a haughty yet almost elegant way. A nose you could do things with - pointing, turning on the TV, dialling on your mobile, that kind of thing.

There is a chain of newspaper shops and kiosks here called "Kolporter". There is also a regional confectioners called "Jawjgerschwin" and a fast food franchise named "Bertbakarak". I may have made two of those three up.

[The next section may be of no interest or even understandable to many of you. I apologise and ask that you skip to the next paragraph - if I end up writing one].

Chris Turner was sacked by Sheffield Wednesday this week. Personally I think it's a great shame. I think he made a lot of good changes to the club and was moving things in the right direction. Once again, we have had to hire a new manager in the period between September and December, and once again no doubt, nothing fundamental will change. The real problems affecting the club seems to exist in the boardroom and not in the dugout (I'm getting into this cliche stuff). The chairman is a complete tosser who only looks good in comparison with Ken Bates who wants to wrest control of the club (the comparison I could make here is Tony Blair/Michael Howard - it's clear that Blair is a total and utter bastard who has been a complete disaster for Britain, yet who stays in power merely because next to Michael Howard he looks like a paragon of virtue and good sense). We have had a succession of terrible chairmen, either by virtue of them being self-interested wankers and not in the least interested in Sheffield Wednesday (Dave Richards, and the Dave Allen the current incumbent), or by virtue of them being ineffectual nobodies (all the others- whose names I forget, but that always seemed to rhyme with gully). So now we have Paul Sturrock who has the advantage of having failed at his last club. Normally we get managers who have been a great success and then they proceed to fail at Wednesday before being fired and going on to much better things elsewhere - Paul Jewell is the prime example. This time we've picked up someone who has already been through phases 1 and 2 of this process and could possibly be ready for phase 3 - the second successful bit. Under this wildly optimistic theory, Southampton become the new Wednesday and we become, erm, the new Wigan. Clearly, in reality, Sturrock will be sacked at around about November 12th 2005 with Wednesday just above the third division relegation zone (and in the case by third division I mean the third division, the third level, the division that contains the 45th - 68th best teams in the country. Just so you know.)

[You can all come back now]

I feel like I ought to offer another paragraph here for readers who were forced away but by wilful insertion of a Sheffield Wednesday paragraph, but I'm really not sure what to write about. I leave Poland tomorrow and return home via Budapest (by the way I have noticed that most excitingly Hungarians speak Hungarian! On the train out there I was greeted by the passport control man with a cheery "Jo Reget!" - good morning- and so staggered was I to see an official in uniform speaking Hungarian, that I almost failed to respond. Luckily I pulled myself together and managed it in the end.) One thing that I can tell you about Budapest is that it contains an astonishingly high number of lingerie shops. Every second shop seems to be offering sexy underwear. What's that about? Are Hungarian women the most erotically clad under their clothes? Or are there some kind of special tax breaks for purveyors of scanty feminine undergarments? I think we ought to know.

Ok that's your lot. I'm off to enjoy the sights and sounds of Krakow - the old town which is where I'm staying; Kazimierz - which is a basically Jewish quarter and also the first name of a Mr Deyna, famous footballer of the 1970s; and Podgorze - another poorer Jewish quarter where the ghetto was under Nazi occupation and the site of Schindler's factory (and where much of Speilberg's film was made). Quick quiz for you. Name off the top of your head 5 famous Poles.

(I just did it and came up with Lech Walesa, Deyna, Boniek, Lato and the Pope. Which I think shows that my obsession with football is unhealthy)

Until whenever.

More things about Poland

Polish TV dubs stuff in a very odd way. They have the original soundtrack and then some bloke speaks over the top of it like in a simultaneous translation. He does all the voices - men, women, children. It seems to be the same bloke every time. It seems very cheap, and comes across as very cheap too.

The word "pub" in Poland seems to refer to a bar which is underground in a kind of cave or cellar. If it's on the ground floor it's simply a bar, underground and it's a pub. I have no idea whether this is a universal rule, or whether it's just the places I have been to so far. I could ask someone, but the research is rewarding in it's own way, so I won't bother.

Krakow is obsessed with the Pope. I don;' know if he is from here, or just because he is Polish. But the airport is named "John Paul II" and you can get a map from the tourist office which directs you around the city in a walking tour in which you can "follow in the footsteps" of his Holiness. Surprisingly this is not merely a ten yard zimmerframe track from the cathedral to the parking space reserved for the popemobile, but in fact a quite extensive tour of the old city. He must have been here a good few years ago, or else the "following in the footsteps" is poetic licence for "walking along the route which the motorcade took"

Polish pronunciation is dead hard. Those of you who, like me, enjoy the early rounds of the UEFA cup so that you can follow the progress of Excelsior Mouscron and Odd Grenland, are alomst certainly familiar with the team Widsew Lodz. It may be that you mentally prononce this name "Vidsev Lods" or something similar. But in fact Lodz is pronounced more like Wooj. I have no idea how Widsew is pronounced. Vidsev, Vidshev, Vidshoe are all possibilities that I can imagine. But it's probably more like "Throatwobbler" or something.

Polish people have big noses. This of course is an insane generalisation, but I've seen more massive conks here in the space of the last couple of days than in the rest of my life combined. It must be a slavic/germanic/jewish combination gene which extends the nose to a large degree. I am reluctant to ask, in case people are offended by my observation. Or else just tell me to "fuck off you small nosed bastard".

I am trying to develop a post-dictatorship theory. What makes a country succeed or fail, or move or progress following the ending of dictatorship? In the last few weeks I have been in four countries (well 5 if you count the few hours I spent in Budapest on Tuesday) in which a dictator has been ousted in the last 30 years. Spain, Romania, Serbia, Poland. And they're all in different stages of development. This was primarily brought on by the fact that Serbia is about as developed as Romania despite being bombed by NATO only 5 years ago, and overthrowing its dictator a year or so later. Is it cultural? Is it related to the extent of the dictator's reign and madness? I can only conclude that Ceasescu was particularly backward and it's taking Romania that much longer to pull out. Or that since those that took power after his overthrow were basically the same people who were in power before he got the chop. I'll keep working on it and come back to you when I have a theory worth analysing. Right now, you'll notice it's a work in progress. And not much progress either.

Poland

I have just 5 minutes left on my internet cafe thing, so thought I'd just pop off a little note about Poland. Hopefully I'll be able to add more tomorrow. I spent yesterday in Katowice and will be in Krakow until the weekend. The difference between Katowice and Krakow is like the difference between Sheffield and Cambridge. One an industrial town in a coal mining region, the other an airy-fairy, artsy fartsy twee tourist destination.

Some points about Poland> There is a band here called "Pink Freud". I can't decied if this is crap or inspired. If they are a covers band doing little twiddly versions of "Money", the it's crap. Although actually given the name I'd quite like to hear them doing that one that goes "Come on here dear boy, have a cigar"

Shit time's up. More tomorrow

Some bits just so you know I'm still alive

I left Csikszereda on Saturday for Serbia. This involved a long involved train journey the likes of which I hadn't done since I was a young and dirty interrailer. First to Brasov by "Accelerat". Accelerat is a category of fast train in Romania which is not as good as an Inter City or a Rapid, but is still much faster than a "Personal". Yes, the slow trains in Romania are known as "Personal"s, possibly in relation to them stopping for everyone. Shepherd's hut next to an empty field? Probably we ought to have a station there. After that an Inter City to Bucharest (which in fact although newer and fancier was much less comfortable than the Accelerat). Then I had 5 or 6 hours to kill in Bucharest so I wandered round looking at the city. Can't say I was tremendously impressed, although I did quite like it after dark. One day I'll spend longer and enjoy it as a city rather than as a tourist destination.

From there it was off to Belgrade on a 13 hour "rapid" international train. Most of the journey actually takes place in Romania, and we only got to Serbia & Montenegro at about 7 or 8 the next morning. I had a "couchette" to reflect my enhanced status since my inter-rail days when I would sleep on one of those benches that kind of pulled across and hoped all night that no-one else would want to come into the compartment. (That was on good trips. Once I slept in the corridor near the toilets. Not one of the most amazing experiences of my life, I have to confess).

Things you notice when travelling by train in Romania: 1. Most people don't bother to buy a ticket, and instead bribe the ticket collector. This is done in a comically "discreet" manner, which I noticed on the very first trip and then subsequently with 75% of the other people around me on all the trains. I guess this makes train travel much cheaper, and helps the ticket collectors out no end. I have no idea how you'd go about stopping such a practice. 2. Kids by the side of the tracks give the train the famous one-finger salute. What happened to those far off innocent days when children would happily wave to the train as it rattled by? 3. Despite the bribery practice, the trains still seem to run on a classlike basis. On the personals you get drunk guys and farmers who smell strongly (and y'know ordinary normal people too). On the Accelerats you get fewer of the Chavs as I believe they're now called in England. Maybe there's a sliding scale of bribery and you're expected to cough up more on the higher speed trains. Who knows?

Once we had gone "south of Brasov" (see earlier post for more details) I found myself pathetically happy whenever I got sniffs of "home". I heard someone speaking Hungarian on one train, and on another I saw someone reading the local Csikszereda paper (Harghita Nepe). Then after leaving Bucharest for the west of the country we passed a goods train each wagon of which was stamped (something like) Statia de Domiciliul: and the name of a town. I'm sure I've spelt that wrong, but it means something like "home station". This in itself is fascinating enough, that goods wagons have "home stations" and are not itinerant wanderers, the hobos of the rolling stock world. At the end of the year do they all have to go home for Christmas so that they can be counted up and checked that one of them didn't make a break for Bulgaria or somewhere? Anyway, we passed endless wagons that had made their home in Cluj Napoca, and then, suddenly, there it was- Statia de Domiciliul:Miercurea Ciuc. It was from my town! One of my homeys. I was so excited. It was somehow better than the standard Cluj wagons. More proud and resolute. Even it's rust seemed more earned, more real, than the University-town over-educated foppish wagons from Cluj.

Anyway, I'll tell you all about S&M when I get around to it. And I might cover Serbia and Montenegro too. Ho ho.

Context pt 1: Romania

I thought I ought to provide some context, as you probably don’t know much about Romania. I am basing this assumption on my own ignorance before I came here, and as some of my readers are actually Romanian, my contextual writings here will probably be pulled apart as naïve uninformed bollocks. And rightly so. But uninformed bollocks are what make up his blog (and the vast majority of the entire Internet to be honest). The only question I have is whether to start big and go small (i.e. Romania -> Transylvania -> Szekelyfold -> Csikszereda) or to go the other way around. As you will no doubt be painfully aware by now, my writing style tends to leap clumsily from topic to topic like a drunken mountain goat, so this concern about how to organise my writing is a complete waste of my (and your) time. Apologies. I ‘ll try to have more respect for your precious minutes in the future.

So, we’ll go big to small, and hang the consequences.

Romania

As all of you are probably aware (unless the Foxnews morons have already got here), Romania is a fairly large country in Eastern Europe, the capital of which is Bucharest. It’s kind of hexagonal (bear with me here), and on the six borders (i.e. the six borders which I have just created with this arbitrary and frankly ludicrous attempt to geometrize the nation) you will find in order (running in clockwise order from the top one first): Ukraine, Moldova, the Black Sea, Bulgaria, Serbia & Montenegro, and Hungary. I’d draw you a picture of that to make it clearer, but I don’t think I can in this blog. Instead, here (is a link ) to the Lonely Planet’s map.

On the hexagon you have drawn (you did draw it, right?) draw a vertical line down from the right hand side of the top to the middle of your diagram and then horizontally left across to the middle of the left hand side. This represents the Carpathian Mountains. Everything in that top left corner is Transylvania. The bottom half of the diagram is Walachia. And the bit you have left (next to Moldova) is Moldavia. Try not to get Moldavia and Moldova mixed up as there’ll be a test later. This more or less represents the division of the country into its constituent three regions. One expression I have learnt while here is “South of Braşov”. This refers to things which are, how can I put this, less than perfect. If you put Braşov on your hexagon diagram at that Carpathian elbow, you will see that what “South of Braşov” actually means is “Walachian”. I’m sure people from Walachia don’t refer sneeringly to things “South of Braşov” for obvious reasons. Possibly for them, it’s “North of Braşov” which is a mark of contempt.

Historically, I’m on much more shaky ground. Ask me to describe countries in terms of geometrical shapes and I’m your man, but ask me to sum up thousands of years of history in a few pithy sentences without offending anyone, and I am definitely not your (or anyone else’s man). Basically, the first civilization that was here was the Dacians. Most of the country was occupied by Rome (hence, “Romania” and the language being Latin based). Where it gets complicated and the capacity to upset comes into play is in the history of Transylvania (which I’ll try and cover in my next contextual update). Basically it has been contested by Hungarians and Romanians for centuries, and still is. Historians on both sides produce vast works of research proving that either the Magyars colonized a largely empty region and were welcomed by the people that did live there* or that the Romano-Dacian population of Transylvania were the original and populous inhabitants of the region and that they were occupied and oppressed by the Hungarians. What is clear is that over the course of centuries Transylvania has been ruled by various empires. At the end of the First World War the three provinces of Romania were “unified” (Hungary was on the wrong side in that conflict), and since then (aside from a period in WWII when it was occupied by the Nazis) has remained largely the same country – although some bits ended up in the USSR after WWII. The Communist regime was overthrown in 89 in Eastern Europe’s only bloody revolution (only about 1000 people died, but that’s way more than in all of the other countries’ rush to the West). Ironically given that fact, it was the country that changed least following the revolution, as the members of the communists who had been plotting to overthrow Ceauşescu and take the party reins in order to preserve their power, used the opportunity presented by the popular uprising to take that power instead. Now I’m getting onto shaky grounds, and probably setting myself up for trouble with the authorities so I'll stop.

Here’s a fairly brief and unbiased account from the Lonely Planet - history

Here’s a longer and more comprehensive but much more Romania-centric history http://www.rotravel.com/romania/history/index.php

And one more, from encyclopedia.com:
encyclopedia

(* I have to say that I'm broadly sceptical of this account as it sounds suspiciously like the Zionist contention that Palestine was basically empty until the Jews arrived. A position which I know to be utter bollocks)

Cartoons

It's been a while since I watched cartoons. I still don't really watch them as such, but they do flit past my consciousness more often than they have for years.

We have two cartoon channels here: Minimax, which is Hungarian (or at least this version of it is), and Cartoon Network in Romanian. As Cartoon Network is filled with fairly violent and over the top animated gore fests, Erika has removed it from the list of available channels. One day Bogi will have enough English and be literate enough to read this and murder us both in our beds with a carefully sharpened powerpuff girl doll. So, we really have one that tends to get a lot of airtime. I don't really understand much of the dialogue (or none of it really), but that's not desperately important as I can understand the gist of the storylines.

Here is a run down of some of the cartoons that exist these days, for those of you without children:

Marsupilami: A large hyena like creature with a spectacularly prehensile tail rescues his jabbering offspring from various poachers, scientists and assorted humans. Every epsiode is the same. Marsupilami says "Hupa" a lot.

Petyke: An actual Hungarian cartoon. Patyke is a policeman with a dog who does all the work for him. It's basically a more innocent and pleasing version of Hong Kong Phooey.

Pamukli: A German carpenter lives with a cartoon boy who only he can see. The boy goes around breaking people's wooden furniture so that they have to go to the carpenter. each week he gets mad at the boy and criticises him severely for being so bad, but lives handsomely off the profits that he brings in.

Fair Play: I'm not exactly sure what the title of this one is but it centres around the FIFA Fair Play handbook. Seriously. Each week two teams of stereotypes come together to play a game of football. One of them is usually a team of hardened criminals, who race into an early lead through cheating or being dirty. Like Chelsea or Arsenal, maybe. Unlike in real life, the appearance of the FIFA Fair Play guy with his manual saves the day, and eventually the dirty London bastards are beaten by fair play. The production crew all have Spanish names so it's either from Spain or somewhere in South America.

Power Puff Girls: This is on Cartoon Network, so I'm not really sure of the plot, but I do know that there are three grisl with amazing superpowers who do loads of cool stuff. They were created by their "dad" who is known as "The Professor". the reason I am aware of this one is because one of the girls is called Buttercup and Boglarka (Bogi's full name) is Buttercup in Hungarian, so she identifies strongly with the character. Occasionally we have stilted English converstaions in which I am The Professor. (These go - without fail- "Hello Professor, how are you?" "I'm fine thanks Buttercup, and you?" "I'm fine thanks. What are you doing?" "I'm smoking/watching TV/trying to sleep" - at which point the conversation is more or less over as we have exhausted Buttercup's English.)

Rescue Heroes: A group of rugged firefighters, policemen and other agents of good, live together inside a mountain. They are paged regularly by their flashing belts and go and save lives soemwhere in the world (from natural or man made disasters).

Bogi's favourite cartoons are actually Donald Duck (who she refers to as "Dodo") and Tom and Jerry, so I don't feel too much like and an old fogey. Donald Duck is so much better than that squeaky little bastard Mickey.