Beyond the Palin

So, to sum up:

The USA looks quite likely to elect a man as president who's main qualification appears to be that he spent part of his younger years dropping bombs on innocent people, and then subsequently got shot down and spent some time in jail (not that I want to belittle his time in jail, which I'm sure was not exactly a bed of roses - and since in the last 8 years the US has managed to acquire a reputation for torturing people, this might actually prove to be of some use to him). This man is a bit off the wall, and regularly loses his temper quite spectacularly or goes into some kind of bizarre mental loops where he says he can't remember anything and people should stop asking him difficult questions. He is also 72 years old. He looks healthy enough, frankly, but, should the worst happen, then power will transfer into the hands of...

Sarah Palin. A religious fundamentalist who doesn't believe in evolution, who thinks that the war in Iraq was God's will, and who urged people in Alaska to pray to get a gas pipeline built. Someone who claims that she is "as pro-life as any candidate can be" yet believes that gay people shouldn't get health care, and that capital punishment is a good idea (and presumably the right to life doesn't extend to Iraqis). Oh, and she thinks the environment is just something that gets in the way of making money. Drill for oil, and kill polar bears, appear to sum it up.

She is billed by the Republican party as a "typical" American. Well, you know I lived in the US for 6 years, and in all of that time, I never met anyone mad or stupid enough to believe in creationism. I never met any of these vocal but minority fundamentalist nutters who hate gays and oppose Roe vs Wade. I never met any fervent gun rights advocates, and most people I met were very concerned about the environment. She is in no way typical. She's typical of the extreme religious right of the Republican party, not typical of anything else. The only way in which she's a "typical" American is in the fact that she's white, which is presumably what they're not-so-subtly getting at here.

With this lot with the very real possibility of taking over the White House from the previous bunch of fanatical cretins, with Putin/Medvedev in charge in Russia and with bigoted warmonger Benjamin Netanyahu likely to take over in Israel before long, I reckon we're all doomed. And not because of the large hadron collider either.

Roman Conquest

Blimey. Well that was, errm, unexpected. I've never seen CFR Cluj play that well, not even last season when they won everything. Roma were pretty clueless but even so.

We'll gloss over the more important results of the night in the English second division, but for a minor competition the Champions League made up slightly for the less-than-happy night in real football.

The only downside is that I now have a "Gangster's Paradise" earworm

Smoking

I am regularly flabbergasted at the ways advertisers find to insert naked or scantily clad young women into their work, but this one takes the biscuit.

What was the thinking that went on behind this? The anti-smoking campaign isn't working well enough, we need to attract people's attention - we need...naked women. Yes, that'll do it. This is bound to stop people smoking.

It's not, by the way, in case you were wondering, going down the well worn, and I suspect quite successful route of highlighting the link between smoking and impotence (somehow in the minds of most blokes the following thought processes occur "Suffer a slow and lingering death? Hmm, C'est la vie. But not be able to get it up? OK, I think I'll stop") No, the headline reads (roughly, and bearing in mind that my Romanian is rubbish) "Is smoking your only pleasure?" (To which presumably the answer would be "No, but it's one of them")

I think they'd have got a lot more interest if they'd put the other, secondary line at the top "Now there is help for you to quit". That, with the picture, would have had people flocking to call the number.

Grandstand

Time for a short Transylvanian sporting update.

Starting, obviously, with Ice Hockey, since that's what Csikszereda lives, breathes, and gets vaguely enthused by. After two seasons in which Sport Club Miercurea Ciuc have taken part in both the Romanian and Hungarian leagues, and one season in which the other team, HC Csikszereda, did the same, it became clear to everyone that Romanian teams participating in the Hungarian league got much better from the increased competition, and so to be competitive you therefore had to be taking part in Hungary too. An invitation had been on the table for the other big club in Romania, Steaua Bucharest, to join up too, but they'd always refused. This year however, having failed to qualify for the league final for the first time since ice was invented (by Gunther Eis, an Austrian physicist, in 1902), Steaua realised that they needed to be in it. However, somehow they managed to convince everyone else to turn the league into a combined Hungarian Romanian league.

With me so far? Good, because now it gets really confusing.

So there is a league (the MOL League) comprising ten teams - 6 from Hungary and 4 from Romania - as well as the three mentioned above, Romania's fourth representative are Progym Hargita Gyöngye, from Gyergyószentmiklós (Gheorgheni) (another town in Harghita County). There is still some kind of rump Hungarian league in which the 6 Hungarian teams will participate in after this league has finished, and which will be based in some way on the league positions obtained here. I'm not really sure. As for the Romanian league, I have no idea. I can't find information about any plans whatsoever, so perhaps this league will be it. There doesn't seem to have been a cup this year either, and normally the season opens with the Romanian Cup. Just to complicate matters still further, one of the Hungarian teams in the league is the reserve team of Alba Volan who actually now play in the Austrian league.

Flushed with excitement at all these incomprehensible rule changes, the Romanian clubs have gone out and brought in players of a calibre not previously seen in this part of the world. There are Swedes playing for both of the teams here, and they are supposed to be good. I haven't actually seen any obviously Swedish people walking around with broken noses - the sign of a hockey player - but I presume they are here somewhere. I'd guess they were living it up in some gated community of millionaires and celebrities, but this is Csikszereda and we don't have one. Steaua have gone one better and brought in a Canadian who once played in the NHL (the first former NHL player to have ever been signed by a Romanian team). I'm not quite sure how much this bloke played in the NHL, and possibly it was just once for five minutes at the end of the game his team was winning 7-0 at the time, but still. It's all very high powered (I'm told). The season has already begun (another sign of encroaching winter) and the Romanian teams are already all at the top of the league (albeit after only two games).

Meanwhile in football, this evening sees the debut of CFR Cluj in the Champion's League, which since I'm nominally a CFR fan, I ought to be excited about, but I'm not really. they're going to get seriously bulldozed by all three teams in the group and it's just going to be fuel for the likes of Becali and the compliant Romanian media to rail against anything that doesn't come from Bucharest. Broadly speaking football in the country (at least in terms of the media) is Steaua (with some attention given to Rapid and Dinamo, and everybody else merely obstacles between those three and each other). it's really dull, and CFR Cluj's rubbish start to the season (they've already sacked the manager who got them the league and cup double last year) means that this will be a disaster. (I ought to point out that Gigi Becali, the main reason I despise Steaua with such passion, is not in any way associated with the ice hockey team of the same name, so they are in no way as abhorrent as Steaua the football team)

Meanwhile, the League is currently being led by a bunch of upstarts from a scruffy little town (Urziceni) which is on the road towards the beach. They are managed by Dan Petrescu who used to play for Sheffield Wednesday, and so, in the absence of the "Dirty Hungarians" of Cluj ((C) the repugnant Becali family), having them at the top is the next best thing. Anyone but Steaua really.

Updates

Some small notes about this blog

You may have noticed I've been a bit more active this week. I hope to keep it up. I've also made a couple of changes elsewhere - on the right hand side, near the top, just under that Dopplr thing that takes forever to load and tells you where I am (just in case of the remote possibility that you give a shit), there's something called a Twitter feed (I think). It's basically a one sentence thing saying what I'm doing at that moment (well, or at the moment when I last updated it). The advantage of it is that I can update it by text message, so I can sort of add stuff to the blog when I'm in weird places far from the Internet. I suspect i'll get bored of it soon, but for now, it's amusing me.

Further down that column near the bottom is a representation in flags as to where the visitors for this site are coming from. I put it on a couple of days ago, and at the moment the first place appears to be a straight fight between Romania and the USA. Not quite sure why I'm getting so many hits from the US, but I do have a fair few of friends there, so I suspect that's got something to do with it.

This blog also exists elsewhere (and has done for a while) on wordpress here. I put it there ages ago, thinking I'd go the whole hog and put all of it there, since I like the way it looks more. But then I thought it was a bit unfair on the people who've been kind enough to link here to force them to change the link, so I haven't done so. It gets updated much less often than this one and with exactly the same content, so you're not missing anything.

I'm still tinkering, so expect to see a few more changes in the next few weeks. That photo I've put up is bugging me, for example, so I reckon I'll take it down fairly soon (as soon as I can locate a replacement).

Brush strokes

Yesterday I did some gardening. It's very rare that I've ever been in a position to proclaim such a thing, so I'll just ponder it for a moment...

...Ok, that's done. Yes, me, gardening. This wasn't, however, the gentle and sedate clipping the heads off roses or picking tomatoes type of gardening that my mother does, but more your kind of slash-and-burn industrial strength gardening.

On Saturday I went out and purchased a tool that is described on the box as a "brushcutter", and I suspect that's as good a description as I could come up with - basically a lawnmower for people who don't have lawns, but have brush. Serious brush. We basically have a bit of land which is covered in fast growing vegetation ranging from what I suspect are young trees to clumps of thick grass to nettle plantations to some kind of creeping vine like thing and everything in between. It's not, shall we say, suitable for golf. Anyway the brushcutter is a machine in which a two stroke engine powers a rotating drum from which two lengths of plastic wire protrude, which as you might imagine whip through the vegetation with some force. It's quite fun, though also fairly noisy and somewhat physically strenuous - my muscles are complaining bitterly this morning, and it may be that soon my arms will seize up altogether curtailing all blogging until further notice. (Nettles, by the way, are great fun to slash to death, vanishing in a deeply satisfying blur of shredded greenery. The vine thingy and the grass are much trickier, being tough and unyielding and requiring repeated butchery to cut them down to size).

As I cut, I uncovered vast troves of ripe plums. The trees which are all over the garden are heavy with fruit, and as we've been away (coupled with the whole nettle thing) , harvesting has been neglected, and so we have a garden full of plums buried in the vegetation. One branch on one tree has actually broken under its own weight which seems a bit excessive - that tree must be feeling very foolish for having miscalculated so spectacularly.

In a bit of fortuitous synchronicity, though, we had discovered on Saturday what we could do with all these plums (other than making enough jam to flood the market and bring the price of plum jam plummeting to its lowest levels since records began). It seems that in Csíkszentgyörgy (the next village, which is effectively the same village - Ciucsângeorgiu in Romanian), there is a palinka distillery. We haven't fully worked out the system yet, but it seems that it works like this. You pick your plums and stick them in barrels and mash them up a fair bit. You then leave them like that to ferment until sometime around Christmas at which point you take them to the distiller and he converts the fermented plum mush into palinka for you. (Not free I presume - I guess we either have to pay him in palinka like farmers used to pay the miller in sacks of flour, or, as this is the capitalist 21st century, possibly in cold hard cash). So, at some point in the not too distant future we will have our own palinka, which is a very exciting prospect. (Lest I get too carried away with how exciting this all is, apparently a 100 litre barrel of plums produces about 10 litres of palinka, so we're not talking about massive amounts of the stuff, but I reckon we'll be able to fill 2-3 such barrels, so it's not nothing - as people round here are fond of saying)

Our neighbour, from whose well we are at present getting water (until such time as we have our own), is 95. Yesterday she and her young (probably around 80) friend engaged me in what might be described charitably as conversation talking about Csikszereda (a full 16 km away) like it was the other side of the world. Telling me about people they knew who had been to Csikszereda and even someone they knew that lived there nowadays. It occured to me that when she was born, Bankfalva wasn't even in Romania, and I would love to sit down and talk to her and ask her loads of questions about her life and how stuff has changed, but the fact that (a) she's pretty deaf; and (b) while my Hungarian can stand up in predictable situations like in restaurants and shops, it's not even close to being adequate for the task at hand; means that the communication difficulties will probably be insurmountable. I'll have to stick to brush clearance.

Bosnia Meg

It was quieter this morning, my local noise polluter only indulged in a sport of impromptu hammering at 6.53 and then stopped soon afterwards. So, it may be time to briefly (you'll be delighted to learn) relate some points of limited interest about our recent trip to Croatia. We once again went to Brela as last year, and as I've already written about that (and it hasn't changed much), I won't bore you with any more. I also wrote (at length) about the trip to get there through Romania, Hungary and Croatia.

This year we chose to take a different route, and eschewing the easy-breezy motorways of Hrvatska, went via the most direct route: Csikszereda - Timisoara - Belgrade - Sarajevo - Brela. Now we had been specifically warned off travelling through Bosnia with reports of terrible roads and lack of infrastructure. Everyone I asked for recommendations looked at me with an exaggeratedly raised eyebrow and an "Are you sure you want to drive through Bosnia?"

Before reaching that dangerous land though we first had to go through a minor (but potentially disastrous)mechanical failure that mercifully becalmed us not in the middle of Bosnia or even in Deva or somewhere, but still within the safe confines of Szekely Land, where we have people we know who could help out (and they did - hugely). So after a short but worrying break wondering what Plan B was of 5 unscheduled hours in Székelykeresztúr (Cristuru Secuiesc), we were back on the road.

We had hoped to get to Timisoara by mid afternoon to spend the time with some friends, but obviously that didn't happen, so we just had to get the benefit of their munificent hospitality for a few short hours before collapsing exhausted. The next morning it was up and on to the former Yugoslavia. We reached the border on the road from Timisoara to Belgrade and it was there that we encountered our second problem of the trip - the car insurance green card that we had purchased for just this international out-of-the-EU eventuality was shown by a smirking Serb border guard to not actually include Serbia. So we had to buy insurance at the border - for €135. For about 4 hours of being in Serbia. Were we annoyed by this eventuality? Somewhat. I was even tempted to use exclamation marks there to underline the upsetting nature of the whole experience.

Anyway, we swallowed our irritation, bought the bloody insurance, and trundled onwards towards Belgrade. I have very few skills of which I can be proud, but one of the ones which I do have is the uncanny ability to navigate my way through unfamiliar places. Give me a map for a few minutes pre-arrival so I know roughly what I'm heading for, and then let me loose. Thus it was that through the chaos of downtown Belgrade after crossing the Danube that I amazed my passengers and the car following us, by exactly getting onto the road we wanted to be on leaving the city, without backtracking once and despite the fact that there wasn't a single sign to be seen anywhere. I might be crap at most things, but if they made urban navigation an olympic sport I could be in TeamGB (TM) at the 2012 Olympics.

Onto a motorway (our only one of the trip) and into the top end of Croatia, before cutting south into the badlands of Bosnia. The first bit we were in was the "Republika Srpska" and it did look a bit trashed up to be honest, with loads of still gutted and burned out houses. It kind of oozed post war poverty, and to add to the feeling it had started raining the moment we crossed the border from Croatia at Slavonski Brod. The road was fine though, the only slight difficulty being that the road signs were all in Cyrillic (unlike Serbia, for example), as some kind of continuing statement of non-Bosnian-ness. As soon as we saw the first minaret as we approached the non-border between the two semi-partitioned bits of the country, the sun came out and the rebuilding seemed to have come on much further. I presume, though don't know for sure, that the Muslim-Croat bit of the country has been getting aid from various sources since the war and the Serb bit less so (and perhaps the burnt out houses were previously owned by ethnically cleansed Muslims anyway who understandably weren't that desperate to move back in). Anyway, it was quite a contrast in the two regions.

However, despite the dire warnings of people from all over the place the roads in Bosnia were perfectly fine. They don't have motorways (but then neither does Romania for the most part), so everything is single lane winding roads along gorgeous valleys - you can't go fast, but in scenery like that who'd want to? The roads themselves are perfectly fine and comparable with the better ones in Romania. (As we approached Sarajevo, mind you, we did actually find ourselves guided onto a brand new motorway, causing Erika to bury her head in her hands and mutter about the shamefulness that a country so recently torn to pieces by civil war should have managed to get itself together enough to start work on infrastructure projects that Romania still talks and argues and does bugger-all about. Someone is getting very rich off the mysterious Bors-Brasov motorway, but there is precious little evidence of anyone actually doing any work).

I did my 21st Century Magellan bit in Sarajevo again, skipping through the city with ease and finding our hotel on the first go. We then wandered into Bascarsija, the old bit of the city, and had a delicious Turkish style dinner, with copious beer, before retiring. The next morning we saw it all again in daylight and without the beer. All very attractive and like a mini-version of the Sultanahmet district of Istanbul. We then headed off along more gorgeous valley roads to Mostar. Mostar was even more war ravaged than Sarajevo (and of course Mostar was a city ripped apart by its own residents who now still live side-by-side, which is not exactly the case in Sarajevo), but it seems to have a lively tourist industry going on centred on the old town and the famous bridge which was recently rebuilt and reopened (luckily from a distance and from on it, you can't see that the keystone is carved with the words Red Bull on the outside).

From there it was on to Medugorje for the Catholic members of our party to get their religious kicks. Medugorje being a place of pilgrimage since the 80s when a group of teenagers started chatting to Mary of an evening. Not a local resident called Mary, you understand, but the mother of Jesus - that Mary. Anyway, I discovered that one of them is still having a chinwag with her every year and she does this kind of annual message thing, rather like the Queen at Xmas, or the headmaster of a school at the beginning of the academic year (to choose a topical analogy). No idea what she says, but it seems to be of the "Greetings my children, keep going to church and you will find my son in your hearts" variety. Because the place is so new (or at least it is as a tourist destination) it's not really very interesting to the non-follower, being essentially just a huge great modern church stuck in the middle of a nondescript village which is now filled with loads of shops selling religious paraphernalia and kitsch (though I didn't see anything quite as fantastic as the Jesus-on-the-cross snowstorms or the moving eye pictures of h(H)im with his crown of thorns and everything - look his eyes are open, no closed, open, closed - that they sell at Bom Jesus in Braga, Portugal.)

From there it was on through the world's most laid back border crossing (Bosnian guard on deckchair cleaning nails with large knife grunts and moves head very slightly to indicate "go on", followed by Croatian guard who does actually check that you have things that look like passports from a distance before waving you through similarly) and down to the sea at Makarska. It was a great drive, honestly, and tons more interesting than the faster "zipping through Croatia by motorway" approach. (And if your ever need to drive through Bosnia, it's completely fine and extremely pleasing on the eye).

See, I'm back to my long winded and tedious best - it's like I never went away.

Driller killer

This morning was hell. One of our neighbours decided to start doing some drilling work at about 7 o'clock. In any normal country this would be a situation in which you would feel completely justified in calling the police and having them tell him to show some respect for those living around him (though the apartment in question is next to ours, I have no idea who it is as they have a different entrance to the building and a different set of stairs, landing, etc etc). However, for understandable recent-historical reasons the idea of grassing up your neighbours to the authorities is pretty taboo here, so I didn't. Plus it would have taken energy I didn't have, so I instead resorted to just lying in bed wishing that he would be electrocuted by his drill, and then latterly (and in an indication of how knackered I was) falling asleep and incorporating the torturous noise into a dream . Luckily not a dream of dentists or trepanning, but one in which I was staying in a good hotel and someone in the next room was drilling and so I went all the way to the other side of the hotel grounds to locate the customer service people and tell them how pissed off I was, and being able to tell them "Listen, you can even hear it all the way over here". (They gave me a free dinner as a way of making up for the disturbance, which was fair I thought)

Still it's not the best way to wake up. It's bad enough struggling out of sleep thinking of all the unending lists of things you have to do that day, but to wake up and wish painful and juddering electrical death on someone you haven't met (or even, I dare to suggest, someone you have) is not a great frame of mind in which to start the day.

In other recent flat related irritations news, just between our two recent holidays (to Croatia and the UK, since you ask), we had a three day window at home. There was a paper affixed to the door of the building warning us in both Hungarian and Romanian that the hot water would be turned off on one of the days as some repairs were done. Since we don't use the hot water from the central system, but instead have our own gas heater, this was of no great concern to us, so we did nothing about it. In the morning in question, the taps were empty. All of them. Nothing, not a drip nor a drop of water could be found anywhere. I went back outside to check the notices, and discovered that overnight some bureaucratic scamp had been by to cross out the word "hot" in both languages and write in (in pen) "cold" instead. Oh, how we laughed, and didn't get at all annoyed at this little prank, no sirree.

Open

So, I'm back from my holiday and have decided on a slight change of direction for this blog. Or more like a return to its original direction,which was kind of directionless in the first place. By which impenetrable sentence I mean that, my initial idea was for this to be a place where I could file my rambling thoughts, many of which would be thoughts about what it's like to live where I do in Romania. As time went on, I have kind of got distracted by the latter, and began to feel like that was probably the main "purpose" of the blog, which in turn meant if I didn't feel like I had much to say about the whole "living in Romania" bit, I wouldn't write anything at all.

So anyway, my intention is to be somewhat more active than I have been of late, and not to feel limited by some internally imposed boundaries. Not that I'll disregard the "living in Romania" stuff since, after all, I do, when it comes down to it, live in Romania, but that I'll just ramble on aimlessly and to no great literary value about some other subjects too. So, lucky you.

I'd start now, but I got up at 4 o'clock yesterday morning, drove to an airport, flew to Budapest, and then got an overnight train to Csikszereda (all the time accompanied by justifiably tired and fractious children and a remarkably calm and patient wife) , before going straight to work to write an article and a conference proposal and to catch up on my email, so I'm a bit buggered to be honest, and my opinions on Sarajevo, Sarah Palin and, errm, saracens will have to wait.

Closed

I'm on holiday. Back in September