The Melbourne Cup

I never finished writing about my mega trip across the globe, and it actually did take on some extra twists and turned before it finished, but that will have to wait for another day.

Since then I have been in Brisbane, a city which is great (so great that I get to commute to work by catamaran), but also, more of that later too.

Today is Melbourne Cup day. The Melbourne Cup is a horse race that is so culturally ingrained that some of the states here actually get the day off for it. (I actually don't know how many do, and it may just be Victoria, which is where Melbourne is). Anyway, even those that don't everybody bunks off for a while in the afternoon to watch the race. To me, it's basically just a horse race, and I don't tend to find horse racing that interesting.

However, since I'm here, I feel I need to get into it a bit, if for no other reason that then the cultural-anthropological sight of seeing an entire nation getting wasted on a Tuesday afternoon. There is, though, a better reason for getting involved. And that is that one of the participants in the course I'm training is from Melbourne, and his girlfriend is the sister of someone who owns and trains a horse in the race. He told me this last week, and while for me it was sort of one of those vaguely interesting facts, it was clearly very very interesting for everyone else. I have since discovered that this horse is the joint favourite. So, I feel I have a connection (however tenuous the my student's girlfriend's brother's horse connection may seem to you). I think the horse is joint favourite because the story is what the media tend to call a fairytale (small town farmer, has a horse which used to be a polo-refereeing horse, and which came out of nowhere, etc etc) Anyway its name is Alcopop (crap name, but you know) and I am about to head down the pub to have a bit of a flutter (the betting shop is actually in the pub) and watch the race and have the experience of being in an Aussie pub during the Melbourne Cup.

I will report later on this field mission into the equine heart of Australia

[Just back. Sadly the horse came 6th, but it was an enjoyable afternoon watching people dressed up to the nines* getting plastered in a suburban pub at 2pm]

[*Though that was actually just the women. None of the blokes seemed to have bothered]

Onwards, upwards, downwards (repeat x5)

Currently, I am on the mother of all trips. Was in Riga (that’s Latvia in case you don’t feel like looking it up) for the last two days, and left the hotel there at 6 this morning. Flew from there to Prague at 8.15 and changed planes to Bucharest, from where I am typing this (though I can’t get online despite the promise of free wi-fi in this cafe, so I’ve no idea when this will actually be posted). I now have to hang around here for a few hours before beginning what for ticketing purposes is the second trip, but what to my body is the same trip. Flight to Athens leaves at 7.15pm, and from there I go to Dubai. I’ll be in Dubai for 6 (probably) joy-filled hours in the wee hours, before boarding a plane to Brisbane, where I will end this approximately 42 hour trip on Friday morning. It is, quite possibly, the most ridiculous trip I’ve ever taken (and I’ve lived in the Pacific, where trips were routinely ludicrous with stops at remote atolls/chemical weapons dumps). I intended to do some kind of live blog of the trip but internet access appears to have stymied that slight “can I make this trip vaguely fun” attempt. So at least you, the long-suffering reader of this blog, are spared this less than thrilling experience.

I’m not quite sure when I will actually sleep on this trip, but we’ll cross that bridge when it becomes a major issue. I will be on business class from Athens onwards, so it might be easier than the worst case scenario. On Friday I actually have to go into work in Brisbane, which will be an interesting experience, as I imagine by then I will be a gibbering wreck. Still, it could be amusing, in its own way.

My carbon footprint from all this will be larger than one of those massive meteorite craters. Sorry, world.

5 places that tourists to Romania often visit but shouldn't really bother with

1. Bucharest. Let's face it, it's a dump. OK, it has almost certainly the best nightlife in the country, and great cultural events, and reasonable shopping (by Romanian standards), and nice people. But it's a dog's breakfast of a city (and is, in fact, a city apparently ruled by swarms of feral dogs). Ceausescu absolutely devastated it, to the point where the only really interesting building is the hideous monstrosity of the Casa Poporului, Old Nic's most ludicrous folly. The traffic is diabolical and the roads are awful. I've had more than one person tell me, when they hear I live in Romania, "I hear Bucharest is a beautiful city". Where did they hear this? Or more importantly when? 1927? [To be fair, I've also heard people describe it as Europe's ugliest capital. Of the ones I've been to, I'd have to agree - though I haven't been to Tirana, Minsk, or Chisinau, and I suspect one of those might come close]. Basically, if you want to come for Romania for nightlife, then Bucharest is probably the place to go. Otherwise, avoid it.

2. Bran Castle. Bran castle is actually quite an attractive place, in a beautiful setting. But why people flock there in their thousands is beyond me. Romania has tons more and better things to offer than it, and Bran Castle as a tourist trap is mostly notable for being a triumph of marketing. Bear the following things in mind if you are thinking of going there: (a) There was no such person as Dracula; (b) the Romanian scenes in the book of that name take place nowhere near Bran; (c) Stoker based his character on a number of different historical characters, one of which may have been Vlad Ţepeş; (d) Vlad Ţepeş may, possibly, it is speculated, have spent one night at Bran Castle. If you want to visit a relatively attractive small castle in a nice mountain pass, then Bran might be for you (though Sinaia is much better, and easier to get to). If someone tells you that it's Dracula's castle, then snort derisively and tell them to spin that line with someone more gullible.

3. The Black Sea Coast. Awful. Rubbish-strewn, over-priced, ugly, over-developed eyesore. Just skip it. If you are here and need to go the beach, hop over to Bulgaria.

4. The spas. There are a fair few spa "resorts" in Romania, but all the ones I've been to are really really run down. They need a lot more work doing than a lick of paint. The abundance of mineral water here means that one day Romania will be the envy of Europe with its spas, but that day is a long way off. For now, they're really only of interest if you are one of the people who enjoys the whole masochistic "medicinal" spa treatment vibe thing.

5. Cluj. I want to like Cluj, I really do, but it's really never grabbed me. It's got one or two nice things to see, but as with many cities here, the whole Communist project was fairly destructive, and has left behind the sort of city centre in which you end up looking round thinking "I bet this used to be really nice". For a city with an attractive Hungarian architectural style, which is less of a mess, I'd definitely recommend Targu Mures over Cluj any day.

5 places tourists to Romania should visit

1. The monasteries of Bucovina. Absolutely stunning places. If you have to pick only two then I would recommend Voroneţ and Suceviţa. Really you cant fail to be blown away by them. They'd be stunning if they had been created last week, but to think these paintings were done 500 years ago and have been exposed to the elements ever since, then it's impossible to fail to be impressed.

2. The Saxon villages (and especially the fortified churches) located in the old German dominated area roughly demarcated by Sibiu to the west, Brasov to the east, Sighisoara to the north, and the Fagaras mountains to the south. Again these places are incredible. Biertan in particular is just out of this world, but many of the others too are simply spectacular, and unlike anything you will find anywhere else in Europe.

3. Maramures Beautiful traditional villages, great scenery, interesting wooden churches, people wearing folk costume just because they damn well want to and not because it attracts tourists, weird stuff like the "Happy Cemetery", and possibly the best museum in Romania (The Memorial of the Victims of Communism and of the Resistance).


4. Sighisoara Arguably you could include this as being part of no.2, but I think it's worth giving a section to all on its own. Stunning mediaeval city, that would only be improved if they stopped allowing traffic up there. Wander round the German cemetery, the church, the clock tower, sit on the walls, eat a delicious meal in one of the restuarants up there and then stay in one the expertly renovated old houses in the main square. Central Brasov and Sibiu are also very nice, but something about the quiet atmosphere of Sighisoara makes it, for me, the best city to be in in the country.

5. Driving around Now there are lots of downsides to driving around in this country, not least the fact that it's really hard work (bad drivers, bad roads, horse carts, cows, drunk people on bikes, villages with no pavements so children etc are all walking on the road etc etc), but there are also a lot of upsides. These include some spectacular views and scenery, gorgeous villages, and the fact that because there are no motorways to speak of you see it all without zipping by it in a blur (that's a bit of a double edged sword obviously). I recently drove up the Bistrita valley and over the Prislop pass, for example, and it it just amazing. Then there are all the other passes over mountains (Bicaz Gorge being possibly the most incredible). If the difficult bits scare you, then perhaps get someone else to drive you. Whatever, it's worth it.

Other places which might make the list but I haven't been to them - the Danube Delta, The Iron Gates, areas of the Apuseni mountains, and more.

Next up: "Places that tourists often do go to in Romania but shouldn't bother with" (liable to be significantly more controversial)

Summer summary

I have, you will have noticed, been away from this blog for a fair while. Partly that's to do with having being working a lot, but mostly because two weeks ago, just over two weeks after suffering a brain haemmorhage and being rushed to hospital (well rushed is a massive exaggeration, this is Romania after all), my brother-in-law died, leaving me and especially Mrs Musings and her parents utterly shell-shocked.

So that's why. Normal posting will resume in due course.

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.