My International Football Career

I am, to put it mildly, not one of the world's greatest footballers. As a child I would be one of the last people picked in playground matches, and as an adult this record has not improved much since (a) I don't play that often, and (b) I'm still crap. But, for two brief years I was, and I say this with a fair degree of certainty, one of the best players in the country in which I resided. (There is a topical point to this post, so bear with me)

For this we have to go back over ten years now to 1996 (cue twilight-zone-esque music and the wibbly wobbly blurring of the screen as the universal indicator of the flashback). I was living and working in Pohnpei, the capital island of one of the world's lesser known countries, the Federated States of Micronesia. Every evening just before sunset I'd meet up with a few people at PICS Field, which was the only football pitch in Kolonia, the main city, and play a match. Most of us were foreigners of various origins, though there were one or two high school kids who joined us. Among the regulars were a Ugandan guy named Charles Musana, and a wily veteran Ghanaian called Thomas who was over 70 and who could still play a midfield anchor role, standing near the centre circle spraying passes around with unerring accuracy. Other nationalities typically represented included Japanese, Fijian, French, Australian and US American. On one occasion we organised an island wide tournament on a weekend, and we had 5 teams that got together - three high school teams, a team of Fijians, and my team of expats, originally called "The Internationals". For reasons that I can no longer remember, we decided to organise the tournament in such a way that we started off with two first round matches (with one team getting a bye to the semis), followed by one semi final and another bye, and then a final. The flaw in this plan became obvious when we were drawn to play in the second first round match, which we won, followed by the semi final, which we also won. Meaning that we, a team of players almost none of whom were younger than 30 and some of whom, like Thomas, were much older, had to play three matches in a row in the intense strength-sapping 100% humidity that was not really conducive to running around. And to make matters worse we were facing teams of 17 and 18 year olds, who were actually getting a break between matches. However, despite our totally exhausted state we managed to eke out a final win against the Seventh Day Adventist team (the SDA school had some enthusiastic American teachers who actually trained the kids, so they were always seen as potential winners).

This epic achievement still ranks as my finest moment on a football pitch, and possibly (and without too much exaggeration) in life. A little later in my Micronesian football career, I caught my foot in a divot while playing and ended up breaking my leg, which was not such a great high point of my life, though I do like to play up the story where I limped around my house for an evening, and then drove to the doctor's the next day, before discovering that I had broken it, and being gently advised not to drive home since the pain I felt on accelerating and breaking was almost certainly caused by the fact that I had a broken leg)

Anyway, why this story and now? Well, I happened upon this story this week, which rather took me back as you can imagine. References to my former colleague and teammate Charles, "an expat from Ghana" and all the things I remember (especially the barefoot approach favoured by the kids). Good luck to the new coaches. I suspect the (obviously tongue in cheek) hope for eventual world domination in football mentioned in the last sentence maybe a little optimistic, but they might beat Chuuk one day.

They all look the same to me

It is said that people from one ethnic group cannot tell members of another apart. There does seem to be a grain of truth in that, though if people really say they can't tell two different people apart (assuming they're not identical twins) it seems to me that they're really not trying that hard. Anyway, before this post becomes something serious, let me get onto the not-that-serious point of this post and the reason I started down this dangerous little side track. This is that I have recently become aware of a certain group of (sort-of) people which I cannot tell apart.

My daughter, Paula, is a princess. Obviously as a doting father I sort of think this anyway, but this statement comes not from me but from her. She tells me, and anyone else who is paying attention, on numerous occasions every day. She also is a big fan of other princesses. And so, on my recent trip I brought back a Disney princess memory card game (the kind of game that we used to call pelmanism until that word was co-opted to refer to prejudice against Pelmans). In this game, there are pictures of many princesses from Disney films over the years. The definition appears quite flexible, so a character could have started the film a princess and remained as one, or the character could have started the film a humble woman who lived in a menage-a-huit with a bunch of dwarves, or a mermaid or what-have-you, but finished it shacked up with a prince.

The thing is, I get absolutely trounced in this game every time. Partly this is because my short-term memory is shot to pieces through age and youthful indiscretion, partly because Paula, despite the limited attention span of a three-and-a-half-year old, seems to have the recall skills of a small, blonde, cute elephant, but mostly (I contend) because all these bloody princesses look exactly the bloody same. You pick up one card and it features some indeterminate blonde-haired pink-clothed princess. "Aha", you think to yourself, "I've seen this before", and pick up another card bearing a similar, but crucially in the context of the game, not exactly the same, image. Every time.

To be honest, there are one or two of them which I can tell from the others, but these are the one or two princesses from different ethnic groups. Ariel, for example (ethnic group: mermaids) is clearly different from the others, as is the princess (whatever her name is) from Aladdin (ethnic group: non-threatening Middle Eastern. More belly dancer than burka). But those two aside I'm lost. Why? Why do all princesses have to look the same? Is there a rule? They even all dress the same (exceptions: mermaids and belly dancers). Are there no individualists in the princess world? It's a rum do, and no mistake.

Things that irritate me about Romania

(part umpteen in an occasional, but almost certainly infinite, series)

If you try and change money here they only accept perfectly pristine mint-condition bank notes. Any rumpledness? Sorry, can't accept it. The slightest imperceptible tear in the side? Nope. Any indication that the note has in fact been used at all and has not just been issued by the European Central Bank? No can do.

Why? For the love of god, why? They're still legal tender, they're still banknotes. I'm not talking about something that's been torn into pieces and sellotaped back together, I'm talking about perfectly healthy banknotes that get rejected like they've been taken from a Monopoly set. Romania is not quite the only country that pursues this ridiculous policy, but in Europe, it only seems to be here and Bulgaria. I've asked bank employees why they refuse these notes and you either get a look that says "It's internationally normal for us to do this, you fool" (that's from people who've never travelled and don't realise that it really isn't), or "Sorry, that's just the rules. No idea why, but we've been told". It must be a national law, since it's across the board - every bank and change office follow the same ridiculously strict and unnecessary guidelines. It drives me bloody mental. (As may be obvious)

Le Tour de Ciuc

I've always been a big fan of the Tour De France. Well, I say "always", but obviously that's an exaggeration, since for many years of Le Tour, I wasn't actually born, and even when I was it didn't feature on British TV until I was in my teens (a quick check of past winners would seem to suggest I first watched it in 1983, when Channel 4 started showing it). More recently two major factors have lessened my enjoyment somewhat - the knowledge that most of the riders are on drugs, and the overshadowing of the race by the vast and obnoxious ego that is Lance Armstrong. [On a venn diagram of those two factors there is a significant overlap, allegedly]. But I still kind of get into it, despite suspecting that any results could be changed at any time in the next 6 months as someone or other gets busted.

Anyway, this weekend I was able to witness first hand professional top drawer road-race cycling. Well, maybe not top drawer, because that would be Le Tour and other major races, and probably not second drawer because that would be other races that might occasionally get a mention on Eurosport or somewhere, and maybe not even the third drawer from the top, but at least the fourth drawer down. Which on most chests of drawers is the bottom one, I guess, so bottom drawer professional road race cycling.

This was because it was the "Tour of Szeklerland" (It exists! Really! Check out the mention of it on the website of the "Union Cycliste Internationale" if you don't believe me). Pretty much every stage started and finished here right outside our apartment so it was fairly easy to keep track. There were teams from all over (well all over Eastern Europe at least - Romania, Hungary, Slovenia, Slovakia, Czech republic, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Turkey, Israel and probably others I missed).

Professional cyclists are fast. I mean really quite ludicrously fast. Yesterday the final stage of the race involved 17 longish (5.5km each) circuits of the town, which meant they zipped by on a regular basis, while the official cars following them struggled to keep up. The first stage of the race involved a route which took them from here up to Gyergyo/Gheorgheni, across the Bucsin pass to Parajd/Praid, down to Udvarhely/Oderhei and back here. 193 kms, and a fair few serious hills including Bucsin which is 1300m high and is a right brute even in a car. If I were to set off to cycle that route, I'd take a week off work. They did it (in the pouring rain) in under 5 hours. (Report on that stage and the others - when they are posted today I presume - can be found here) And these are the fourth division journeyman pros of cycling world. Your Alberto Contadors must be just a blur when they pass.

Sadly the little guide which we got for the race which includes the stage profiles and routes and everything doesn't tell me how the hills they climbed relate to the categories that they use on Le Tour. Bucsin is listed as being category A - does that mean it would be a first category climb? I'd really like an idea of how close the hills here which I know very well are to the climbs that they do on the telly. Yesterday morning in "halfstage 3" they did a time-trial up to the Harghita ski-resort from down the bottom here. 14 kms of cycling with an ascent of slightly over 600m. The winner took 28 minutes. That's just insane. I'd struggle to get one-quarter of the way up in 28 minutes.

For the record the winner was a bloke called Vitaliy Popkov from Ukraine. Yesterday's final stage was won by a French guy (Aurelian Passeron) who rides for the local Tusnad Cycling Team who are based here. I presume that means he sort of lives here, which means that I'll have to add him to my mental list of "foreigners living in Csikszereda". He apparently has ridden in the actual Tour de France (last year it would seem, though I don't think he finished it).

It was a good event. I hope they do it again next year.

Police 2.0

Just got back from two weeks working in Barcelona, from where comes this heartwarming story of modern day technology in action...

One of the participants on the course I was teaching was a Chinese bloke from Xi'an ("A small city. Only about 8 million people"). One day while going back to where he was staying he had his pocket picked on the Metro. He felt something but thought nothing off it until he realised, too late, that his wallet was gone. Not only was there a fair aount of cash in it but various other things which were of no little importance. He called a friend and asked what he should do, and whether he should maybe go to the police. To which his friend responded that he could if he needed the report for insurance purposes but otherwise he would be completely wasting his time.

Less than 24 hours later, though, to his (and to be honest everyone else's) surprise, the police sent him an email letting him know that they had his wallet - with everything in, including the cash - and he could come in and collect it.

Apparently two plain clothes policemen had witnessed the initial pickpocketing, and had followed and arrested the thief (with Peng's wallet as incontrovertible proof). So far, so good, but of course they also needed to reunite Peng and the wallet. A wallet which contained some forms of ID but which of course were of no great help in finding him in Barcelona (not to mention that they were all in Chinese anyway). A Chinese speaker in the Barcelona police was found, and having found his name, they eventually located him - on Facebook. From which it was a fairly quick process to get an email to him.

Not only was I extremely happy for Peng that he got all his money and cards and everything back, but I have to say I'm very impressed by the attention to detail and resourcefulness of the Barcelona police force. I guess, deep down, that it's not really all that amazing, but it is one of those things that seems very unexpected, and therefore notable.

Bobby Robson

When I was an English teacher in Porto (many years ago), me and another English teaching friend rang up FC Porto and asked if we could bring our football-mad teenage students to meet Bobby Robson, who was then managing the club. Obviously we fully expected a no, but to our surprise, the club put us through to his office and he picked up and agreed right off the bat. We got to see a closed training session in the Antas Stadium itself (the old one), and then we went down to the offices and he sat and chatted and answered all of their questions for close to an hour, before taking us on a tour of the trophy room. He just seemed genuinely happy to offer whatever he could to us.

A smashing bloke and a real gentleman. RIP

Cultural False Friends

You are probably already familiar with the ideas of cognates and false friends. Cognates are words which are related to each other in different languages. English and Romanian, for example, contain a fair few cognates, since Romanian is Latin based, and English has tons of Latin based stuff in it. English and Hungarian on the other hand have very very few cognates, because Hungarian is just bloody weird. (And because they have one of those academies which insists on creating new words for new things, they don't even have easy-to-grasp words for things like "The Internet" or what have you).

False friends, are words which you think are probably cognates, but turn out not to be. The most famous example of this is the Spanish word embarazada, which means pregnant (and not embarrassed as people tend to assume). Though my personal favourite is the Portuguese word constipação which actually means "a cold", and so (because I have a puerile mind) makes me imagine Portuguese tourists going to the chemists in the UK while on holiday and asking for medicine for their cold, and getting something else.

Hungarian to English has one or two false friends - trafik, for example, actually means kiosk or tobacconists (there must be a "My hovercraft is full of eels" joke I could squeeze in here, but I can't work out how). Akció, on the other hand, means "special offer" or "discount", and not anything like "action". (This is also a Hungarian/Romanian false friend, as you sometimes see shops here with signs in the window saying Akció/Acţiune, which makes the same error. A slightly ruder example is the Hungarian word Szakadék which means cliff or abyss, and nothing like how it sounds (which is more or less "suck-a-dick")

Between English and Romanian there are one or two which come up all the time - nervous being the most obvious. The Romanian word nervos actually means angry, and this causes people (not least me) a lot of confusion. I think the Romanian word mizerabil means something like filthy, which is also a tad confusing. Then of course there's the common menu item crap (fillet of crap, fried crap, grilled crap, etc).

But, I have come upon a new concept here, and that is the cultural false friend. There is a Romanian word imediat, which you hear very often. How long will it be? Imediat. When will you be finished? Imediat. When can I expect it? Imediat. Now, in theory, imediat is a cognate. It means, as you might expect, "immediately". It's just that in English, immediately means "right away", or "I'll drop everything and get it done right now". It doesn't really mean that in Romanian. It means something more like "soon-ish" or "when I get round to it", or "in a week or so". So, I've had to mentally redesignate it as a false friend, or otherwise it just gets too confusing, and more that that, it creates unreasonable expectations (for me).

Any other cultural false friends? Or even just amusing linguistic ones?

Paper View

I have a nascent theory of the "it came to me while lying awake one night/while I was drinking a beer" variety, that you can judge the quality of a holiday destination by the British newspapers on sale there.

The highest quality such destination is the one that doesn't actually have any British newspapers on sale at all - as that means the place doesn't actually attract enough british people to make it worth while (note: this only actually applies to holiday destinations - you can't buy English newspapers in Csikszereda, but this doesn't imply a high-quality place, merely remote and uninteresting to any outsiders)

However if the number of UK visitors does create enough demand to stock newspapers, then you can start wondering about why and how decisions are made to order which papers. In Malta a couple of years ago, for example, where I was working, the only papers available were The Sun, Mail, and Express. The three worst mass readership papers in the country. The thoroughly downmarket, Murdoch owned Sun, and the two extreme right wing anti-immigration/anti-foreigner rags Express and Mail. Frightening. What had Malta done to deserve this little slice of little-englander hell in it's corner shops and kiosks? Sure the vast majority of English people there were elderly people seemingly escaping the British winter, but not all such people are obnoxiously right-wing, surely? Or are they all in Malta not so much to get away from the weather but to get away from all those foreigners?

Thassos, which is what made me think of this half-baked nonsense in the first place, had the following British newspaper options - Mail, Express, Sun, Mirror and Times (to add to the English language newspaper options it was also possible to buy the International Herald Tribune). Not sure what message this is giving us about Thassos. That tourists there are somewhat right of centre in general (and in the case of the Mail/Express saddoes, completely off the chart). That there was no place for the middle ground Guardian/Independent reader? It's a rum do and no mistake. Wonder what you get in Chiantishire? Guardian and Telegraph?

So, I bought the Times once. I'm not proud of it since it's a Murdoch paper, but I could justify it to myself since the newspaper's online presence does boast the most consistently funny podcast that I know of - The Bugle. I learned that the Times is the official newspaper of The Ashes, whatever that means (it obviously means that the paper contained ludicrous amounts of coverage of said cricketing event), and that it's editorial team have obviously decided that the solution to all the world's problems is David Cameron. One of those "If the answer is David Cameron, it must have been a particularly stupid question" type things. It's a bit like imagining the problems of the world's entertainment industry could all be solved by James Blunt. Another bland vapid inoffensively rubbish toff.

I also bought the IHT (as we seasoned travellers know it). It's not a bad paper all round (though it does give airtime to idiots like Thomas Friedman), but why oh why do all US newspapers do this thing where they start a load of stories on the front page and then ask you to turn to another page to finish each one? It's mad. You have to go front page, page 3, front page, page 5, front page, page 3, front page, page 4, and so on for ages. What possible advantage does it serve? Why don't people complain? It drives me mental.

Greeced Lightning

Back from our too-short holiday in Skala Potamia, Thassos, Greece. Lots of sun, sea, sand and errrm, well that's it for obvious words beginning with "s", since we were in a small two room apartment with three kids. Salad, I suppose. There was a lot of salad.

You know those brochure style images of couples walking hand-in-hand down a moonlit beach? Sitting in candle-lit restaurants slowly sipping wine and eating delicious food? Frolicking playfully (yet with the obligatory hint of sex) in the foaming waves? None of that stuff happens when you're on holiday with children. Or at least not with our children. Perhaps others have some foolproof sleeping-pills-and-ouzo concoction by which they cleverly create space for themselves, but not us.

Anyway it was a good holiday and I wouldn't like my obvious need to spend a week on holiday just with Mrs Musings to overshadow that fact. The sea was perfect - warm clean clear water, gently sloping beach allowing kids to play without fear of going under, fine white sand. Food was Greek (which means fantastic). The Mythos was cold. We didn't do much besides hang around on the beach, but that was fine.

Driving to Thassos is also easier (and quicker) than driving to Croatia as we've done in the last couple of years. It's just a straight shot down to Giurgiu in Romania, across a ridiculously unkempt border post and run down bridge over the Danube (especially ridiculous given that this is a majorly important border crossing in EU terms, and beyond - the route from Turkey to the west pretty much has to go through here), across Bulgaria, and then into Greece at the the three way Bulgaria/Greece/Turkey border area. From there you hit "developed EU" and the roads are superb all the way to Keramoti, the port for Thassos.

There is a bit more too it than that obviously. For example when I say "just a straight shot down to Giurgiu" I have conveniently left out the need to get past Bucharest. This is no easy task. I asked on a Romanian forum before going for advice, and got lots of helpful answers (which of course all contradicted each other as is the way of these things). Based on that, on the way down we decided to try the "centura" (belt) which is the sort of ring-road thing round Bucharest. My god, what a road. It's more pot hole than road, has incredible traffic and baffling road rules (all the "spokes" going in and out of the city have priority over the centura, so you have to crawl across these mad, churned up junctions every couple of kilometres, dodging cars, being squeezed by trucks, just generally living on a knife edge). On the way back, as it was a Saturday, I decided to instead try out the "driving through the middle of the city" option. Arguably this was better - the roads were in better condition, the traffic was still heavy, and complex, but at least there was slightly more logic to the road junctions. On the other hand, they have obviously banned signs in Bucharest - the only directions point you to the various barrios. This is all very well if you actually want to go to cartier tineretului or wherever, but not much use for the outsider. It wasn't until I had somehow negotiated myself to the road leading out of town from the Arcul de Triumf that I first saw a sign pointing to the airport. I mean surely this is information that might be useful to people? Madness. I think it's some massive scam to try and sell more GPS systems (it's certainly the first place I've ever driven in which I've felt I could have used one. Though such is the disregard shown for out-of-towners that it wouldn't surprise me if the City Hall jammed the signal of Satnavs within the city limits).

Bulgaria, like Romania, is a bit of motorway free zone. But unlike Romania, the other roads are actually pretty good. Even roads marked as minor white ones on the map are in good shape (you'd never venture onto one you weren't familiar with here for fear of spending three hours negotiating a 10 km section of untarmacked hell). It's helped by the fact that almost nobody seems to live in Bulgaria, meaning that you only pass through a village every 20 kms as opposed to every 3 kms here. And when you do it's empty of the horsecarts, dogs, cows, drunk blokes, cyclists, children, and wandering people of all varieties that you get here. (This allows for fast driving but it is slightly disconcerting. It was almost a relief to get back to Romania and it's colourful vibrant chaotic villages on the drive home). The other border, at Svilengrad is the starkest contrast you're ever likely to see within the EU. You cross from organised, fast, clean, well-kept Greece, into shabby poverty-stricken mayhem of what appears to be a major Rroma shanty town in Bulgaria.

Finally, a recommendation. If you're ever driving thorugh Bulgaria (either from N-S or E-W or any combination thereof, and you want a place to stay somewhere in the middle, try the Shipka IT Hotel. Fantastcially helpful and friendly owners, great hotel, good value, in a really nice village at the bottom of the mountains in the Valley of the Roses. Even if you've no plans to drive through Bulgaria, then make some, just so you can stay there. We stayed there both coming and going and felt like we were saying goodbye to friends at the end.

Csikszereda: going to the Blogs

A few weeks ago, I reported on the blog competition that was going on here. Well the competition closed yesterday and the winners were announced. It turned out that I was one of the judges of the competition (I didn't know I would be when I wrote before) so I did read all of them in great depth, and they are a fantastic bunch of very different, very interesting, well written, well put together blogs.

There were 10 entrants and 6 of them would all have been worthy winners. In the end the winners were:
Under 18 category:

First place- Visit Csikszereda! This one is great and really has some superb photos on it, and has used the visuals in a very good way.
Second place- Aagota's Hometown Again very good, a nice variety of stuff and a different kind of format.

Over 18 category:

First place- Csixereda!? Another really excellent blog. Some really nice pieces of writing (and excellent English). I urge you to watch the video by local band "Los Colorados"
Second place - Ikarosz Grocery Different, varied, great design, very original. Good mixture of items

Public online vote:
A Piece of Harghita. I loved this one, and actually it was my top choice for the competition, so I'm glad it won the public vote, after being pipped in the under 18 category. Very interesting, well written, great design, I loved the way he uses video. Highly recommended.

Not to forget:
Zsu's Blog. Sadly there were only 5 awards made, and as it turns out there were 6 really excellent blogs, so this one missed out, but it is still worth your attention. Well thought out, good design, nice writing and presentation. Good use of pictures.

So, I'm actually about to go on holiday for the next ten days or so, and anyway, it's not like I've been around a lot of late, so, I'd like to recommend that anyone who is in the vaguest bit interested in Csikszereda/Miercurea Ciuc take a look at these blogs. And I'd like to urge the authors to keep at it, since they're doing a great job and they shouldn't stop when the competition is over.

To finish, shamelessly ripped from "A Piece of Harghita" a video presentation of this town. Manages to achieve in 4 minutes what I have failed to do in 5 years of incessant rambling on here