Is there a Monoathlon?

To my surprise I have found myself getting into the Winter Olympics of late. Partly because this is because we have a genuine bona fide local hero(ine) to watch competing. This is Eva Tofalvi who is a biathlete and, despite the Romanian biathlon team having barely a ski to rub together, has done superbly well. She's finished 14th, 19th, 11th, and 24th in the individual events she's been in, and 10th in the relay, which is a great set of results.

Biathlon, by the way, is a great sport. I've really enjoyed watching it. It's a race where every now and again they have to stop and shoot targets and then do extra bits of racing every time they miss one. It's a fantastic spectacle, and I reckon all races should have this extra bits tacked on. Formula One, for example, would be improved immensely if the drivers had to parallel park 5 times every 15 laps, and if they made any mistakes they'd have too do an extra lap, while horse racing could have a stop every mile during which jockeys would have to find some oats and feed the horse. No idea why these sports don't learn from the biathlon's greatness. I've even got into cross-country skiing (though it lacks the crucial penalty bit of the biathlon).

What baffles me is the fact that it seems like the sports which are most popular to watch in the Winter Games are the ones which are most tedious. Ski-jumping, for example, is incredibly tiresome. I also find the whole bobsleigh/luge thing to be as fun as watching paint dry (they used to have a little frisson around the possibility of crashing, but now that someone's gone and very publicly died doing that, this pleasure has gone out of the window). The less said about figure skating the better.

I haven't managed to point you in the direction of the biathlon in time, I'm afraid as I think they've now finished all the races, but watch out for it on Eurosport or similar in the future.

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.

Muddy ethics

Vármező (Campul Cetatii) is a small village of no great interest (mostly famous among vaguely local people as being the location of one or two well-known trout restaurants) on the intermittently rubbish road between Sovata and Reghin (see map, up there ---^)

We went there not because we have an insane desire to visit obscure and out of the way places, but because Erika's cousin's daughter and her boyfriend live there (my first-cousin-one-removed-in-law?) and work in the local pension. On Friday night a chance online-bumping-into-one-another on Yahoo messenger (I think) and before we could think it through for too long we'd made a reservation at the pension and were working out when to leave in the morning.

The place they work at and that we stayed at is called History which is an odd name for a pension, but there you go. (Erika thinks that it's a dodgy translation of something that would be better rendered as "Reminiscences" or something). The off-season rate was an extremely reasonable rate of 99Lei for the room (in which all 4 of us could comfortably sleep). It was, with no shadow of a doubt, the best hotel room I've stayed in in Romania. Not that I've stayed in that many, but I have done a fair few. Really well designed and well furnished, and the restaurant is superb too. So, if ever you're looking for a place to stay in an out of the way village in the middle of nowhere, then this is the place for you.

We also, as this is the role of my firstcousinonceremovedinlaw, borrowed three ATVs and went out with them. I would have said rented, but family connections and all that meant that we didn't actually pay anything for the privilege. Now here I have to confess some slight moral quandary. You see, I hate ATVs. (By the way, by ATV here I mean "All-Terrain Vehicle" rather than the ITV Midlands TV channel from the 70s). I think they probably trash the environment, and they certainly cause a lot of noise pollution which can be very irritating if you're off out for a nice quiet walk in nature. I feel the same way about snow mobiles - you're off out for a nice walk in beautiful scenery and then someone comes zooming past on some ultra-loud monstrosity. Now, we weren't disturbing anyone's weekend nature ramble, partly because almost no-one in Romania actually goes walking in nature just for the sake of walking in nature (I mean some people do really get out there and out into the wilderness, but the kind of leisure area in between hardcore hiking and sitting around at home is, broadly speaking, unoccupied), and partly because being "mud-season" it's really unpleasant to walk anywhere much.

However the fact that it was muddy, must also mean that we were churning stuff up more than usual. We did stick to the forest roads used by loggers, so in fact we didn't tear up anything that wasn't already being torn up in a much worse way by dirty great trucks lugging out half the trees. In the grand scheme of things then, we weren't really ruining the environment to any great degree (at least relatively), but on a think global, act local basis, I have some serious qualms.

But you know when you're zipping along a muddy road with your three year old daughter wedged between your legs shouting "woohooo" and laughing uncontrollably, it's pretty hard to be that self-flagellating.

Le Tour du Monde

Way back when the Internet was new to me, I happened upon a website which was following something called the Whitbread Round the World Race. This was back in 97/98 for what it's worth. At that time, it was by far and away the very best website I'd ever seen - it was interactive, it was well designed and it was addictive. Every day I went back to see how far the boats had gone, which one was leading, whether they'd become becalmed in the doldrums, etc. It successfully made a sport which is completely spectator unfriendly (since it takes place in the middle of the ocean between boats separated by hundreds of miles) into one which was gripping and involving and watchable. [By the way, I remembered the name of the company which had created and designed and maintained the site - Quokka Sports - but a quick web search would suggest that they went bust once the mainstream corporate media caught up with what they were doing and copied it, which is, I suspect, how these things go. But anyway, I digress...]

Obviously things have changed on the internet, and there are now loads of well-designed and interesting sites (and a hundred times more which are neither), but I still remember looking at that site and being able to marvel at not only the content but the concept and the technology that went into the site itself. So, it was kind of a nostalgic moment when I discovered that as well as hosting me last week, Alacant was also hosting the beginning of the 2008/2009 version of this race (and there were signs and ads all round town directing one to the race village - and significantly fewer such signs directing one to the author of Csikszereda Musings, for some reason)

The race, now no longer the Whitbread Round the World race, since a not-very-good brand of beer only available in the UK was an illogical sponsorship partner for such an event, is now called, much more logically, the Volvo Ocean Race (I suppose Volvo are at least a global brand, though that's about as close a link as I can work out. The race will stop briefly in Sweden I believe, so that's another tenuous link). It starts on October 11th, but the race village opening party was on Friday, and everything's gearing up for the off - there are sponsors buildings where you can play games and look at stuff about Volvo, Puma, Telefonica and so on, should you be completely at a loose end and have finished counting the grains of sand on Alicante beach or any other more interesting activities. You can go and look at the boats, and see what kind of conditions that the race takes place under - there are 11 people on each boat, and let me tell you, they're not very big, and there are no showers, and you could be away from port for 35 days at a time, and you might even get swept overboard. I was left with the impression that the people who participate in this race are both extremely brave and somewhat mentally deranged.

Anyway, it's no longer run by the innovative Quokka Sports, but I'm guessing the website for the race will be worth watching once it gets under way. We were staying in the same hotel as the Eriksson 4 team, so I'm "supporting" them (by which I mean, I'll keep a vague eye out for their position in the race).
The race village as seen from the castle - the bit with the white tent like things at the top left of the jetty is it.

The Puma and Telefonica boats. 11 people in those things. For weeks at a time. Nutters.