Crete is the word

So, I'm in Crete. Crete is ace. Crete is the word, as they should have sung (not that Greece in general is in any way shabby or unpleasant, but Crete's got it all).

Some things you might or might not know about Crete.

• It is the home of the Minoan civilization, which was around bloody ages ago (even before I was born). Yesterday we went to Knossos which is the home of the most famous Minoan palace. This palace was built (most of it) between 1700 and 1400 BC. That's a long time ago, and it was massive. It still is in fact, and it took ages to wander round. Here's the wikipedia article should you be so inclined. I won't go into details about it, since you can read it all there if you want to, but it's really impressive. The bloke most responsible for excavating it, Arthur Evans, reconstructed some bits of it, which seems a tad controversial, particularly since he really didn't know what it was really like when it was still standing and he just basically guessed and stuck rooms on where he thought they should be. Still, I guess it's better than just digging it all up and shipping it to the British Museum.
  
• The palace, having so many rooms, may or may not be also the site of the "labyrinth" which housed the minotaur. (With all due provisos about the fact that the minotaur is a mythical character etc etc and so on)
• Crete was also the home of Deadalus and Icarus as well as being the birthplace of Zeus (with all due blah blah etc you get the picture)
• Cretans seem like very nice people, despite the fact that in American English (as far as I can tell) the word cretin is pronounced the same way as Cretan, which seems a little bit rude. But in spite of this slight on their intelligence, they seem very friendly.
• Samaria Gorge (into which we ventured on Saturday) is said to be the longest gorge in Europe (though this expert local disputes this). We managed to see it the worst possible way, by just deciding to do the first 3 km or so and then going back to the car. The first 3km, though, are straight down hill, for about 6 or 7 hundred metres, which we then of course had to climb back up again. Still it was good exercise, and it was spectacularly beautiful
• The food on Crete is absolutely superb. And by absolutely superb I mean really amazingly wonderfully beautiful. Everything is so fresh and delicious. It's such a great change from home (I apologise to Hungarian and Romanian readers of this blog, but really food from pretty much every country on the Mediterranean sea walks all over yours. No offense. It walks all over English food too if that helps make you feel any better.)
  
• Chania is a great little town. Until a week or so ago, I'd never even heard of it. Now I'd like to live in it.
  
• Crete is so full of archeological sites that one day we found ourselves in Gortyna, the Roman capital of Crete, most of which is just a bunch of rubble lying in an olive grove. You can just wander around in it, tripping over columns and trying not to step on bits of pottery.
  
• Did I mention the food?
  

Most Dangerous Place in Europe

is, it would seem, Romania.

Take a look at the map here:


(Slightly bigger version can be found here)

Now, what this shows is the level of risk of death due to natural disasters. Green areas are lower risk, red areas are higher risk. Look at where the red bit of Europe is (Basically Albania and Romania). (I think if you look at the bigger map, you can just about make out that Bucharest is a huge angry red spot in the middle of a fairly orange country. I take it this refers to the expectation that there will, before too long, be a devastating earthquake in Romania, and Bucharest will likely suffer more than everyone else)

Taken from here.

Facts about Munich

Six things you might not have known about Munich:

1. In Spring they have a mini-version of the Oktoberfest called the Frühlingsfest. It's in the same place as the bigger version, and only has one beer tent, but compared to my recollection of the Oktoberfest (which to be fair was 19 years ago, when I was young and somewhat less wary about my overall consumption as I am these days, so my recollections are liable to be of fairly mixed usefulness) it seemed much better. It was, for the most part, a Bavarian event, filled with your genuine Muenchners, as opposed to the Oktoberfest, which seemed to be an Australian/New Zealand event as much as a German one. Regardless as to the accuracy of this impression, there is something uniquely appealing about an event so unconcerned with modern-day health concerns that the only size of beer that can be purchased is a one litre mug.
2. Bavaria (or possibly just Munich) has a "strong beer season". (I swear I am not making that up). This season runs from Ash Wednesday until Easter, which you'll note is not a million miles removed from the season often called Lent by some people. I'd like to think that Lent is the season when one is expected to give up normal strength beer in Bavaria, and thus strong beer season was born. Bavarians are, in fact, fairly devout Catholics, so they presumably do recognise lent in some form or other. But it might explain one or two things about their own brand of Catholicism - When the current Pope (who is, you see, a Bavarian) says something like "Condoms cause AIDS", we might cut him some slack and see it as a result of his Lenten diet of large mugs of viciously strong beer, rather than a theologically highly developed philosophical outlook. Or maybe not.
3. In the Marienplatz, the central square in the city, is a fancy clock (a glockenspiel in fact) which three times a day does this elaborate 10 minute bell ringing thing, involving the small mechanical puppet based reenactments of various important scenes that are vital to Bavarian culture. In one of these, a knight clad in blue and white stripes wins an epic contest against a knight clad in red and white stripes. This fantastic vignette repeatedly reminds us all (tourists and Bavarians alike) of the gloriousness and importance of the FA Cup Semi-final of 1993. You can see this at aboout 2.15 into this video.
4. Rumours that have sprung up around the coincidence of my visit immediately preceding the sacking of Jurgen Klinsmann are not to be taken seriously. And anyway, was he actually sacked or did he take a dive?
5. It is forbidden to build anything higher that the twin towers of the Frauenkirch in Munich. These towers, which are more or less in the middle of town, survived the second world war, when pretty much everything around them was flattened. From that moment an unwritten rule appeared which said nothing could supersede them. Sadly, being unwritten it was ignored at some point and there are therefore two buildings that broke it, but after that there was a referendum which made the unwritten rule, written.
6. One of the beers that I tried (and tried, tried again, just to be sure I really did like it as much as I thought I did) was weissbier. Not like the first time I'd ever had weissbier, but anyway. Weissbier means "white beer", and oddly you can (and I did) also get something called "dunkel weissbier", which means "dark white beer". It is extremely good, if a little oxymoronic in name.
   

Welcome to Romania

Flew back into Romania yesterday afternoon after a project meeting in Munich. We'd parked at the airport (which will remain nameless, but is a very nice one serving a particularly German Transylvanian city, and bear in mind that neither Brasov - yet - nor Sighisoara have airports). So once the bags had come through and we'd left the building (all incredibly fast), we went outside to stash the bags in the car and work out how to pay for the parking. The bloke by the ticket machine informs us of the price, but then says "If you don't need a ticket/receipt, you can have it for half price".

I think encountering petty corruption within 15 minutes of getting on the ground in this country is a new record for me. Of course, we took the deal, and so I am not about to moralise about this - I just thought it was funny.

Piece of crap jailed

So, I go away for a couple of weeks and all hell breaks loose. Moldova turns into some kind of mini-Ukraine, and apparently Romania is to blame. Or Romania and twitter anyway. And the Internet in general. And who knows what else? But it's all a series of dark outside forces anyway.

And then, to cap it all, I learn on my return that the world's most obnoxious Romanian, Domnul Gigi "tossface" Becali, is in prison. It all sounds good and great until I learn that he's not been banged up for being an utter wanker (sadly still not a crime anywhere in the world. When, oh when?) but for illegally detaining some blokes who stole his car. And somehow he's gone from being a declining non-entity whose political career was down the toilet and whose football team were imploding, to being some kind of national hero, presumably for acting out some kind of vigilante justice. (Before you, too, start wondering whether taking the law into his own hands was maybe justifiable, you should be apprised of the fact that he did not act alone, but in fact 5 of his "bodyguards" have also been stuck inside. In short, this wasn't some mild act of getting ones own back, this was a fucking lynch mob posse that was drummed up. But, of course, this doesn't matter, and like some kind of latter day Travis Bickle, he's a hero all of a sudden).

And then on top of this, for the upcoming European elections he's dumped his own party (the PNG, which was a personal vanity project anyway) and hooked up with Vadim Tudor's equally racist and extreme-right wing PRM party. And he's second on the party's ticket meaning that he's almost certain to be an MEP (and there's absolutely no danger of national shame there for Romania, not at all). Apparently in the past Becali has called Vadim Tudor a "venomous cancer" and "possessed by the devil", while Vadim has in his turn called Becali "fit for the straightjacket", a "piece of crap"*, and an "electric monkey" (No, I have no idea what that last one means either). But all's well that ends well, and when it comes to representing the views of the small number of Romanian nationalist scum in the European parliament they have put aside their differences and come together in common cause. So, hoorah for democracy. Luckily, Steaua are still crap.

(*I presume he meant a piece of crap in the English sense of crap, rather than a piece of carp, which is what crap means in Romania. I'm not sure being called a piece of carp would be that insulting. Though I suppose if it were the swim bladder, maybe)

Ceausescu's excrement

I'm in the UK this week, and probably not likely to be here much, but I just wanted to mention that on Saturday night just after I arrived there was a documentary on BBC2 about Ceausescu, which was a bit less fascinating than I hoped, but still had some interesting nuggets of information. Chief among which was that Nicolae employed someone to destroy his excrement so that foreign agents couldn't get hold of it and analyse it to check on the state of his health. How do you destroy shit? Blow it up? Fire it off into space? Throw it against a fan? Flush it down the toilet?

He also insisted that Romanian TV never filmed him doing anything normal - like eating, drinking, wiping sweat off his brow, coughing, that kind of thing.

I'd tell you to watch it on BBC iPlayer (the title of the programme was "The Lost World of Communism"), but because nothing in the world makes sense you can only watch BBC iPlayer in the UK (which also happens to be the only place in the world that you can actually watch the programmes on TV in the first place - go figure). I believe you can trick the BBC iPlayer into believing you live in the UK, but it's beyond my technical abilities, so I've never done it, and can't pass on the way of doing it to you. But if you manage it, let me know.

Putting on the breaks

OK, so I’ve had a go at Hungarian TV and its love of dubbing, and now it’s the turn of Romanian TV. Not for dubbing (they don’t, they subtitle *roars of approval*), but for the advertising breaks. It’s not so much the content of the adverts themselves, which are rubbish, but no different from anywhere else (loads of really crap ads for things you don’t want, with one or two funny ones mixed in as well as the standard highly produced ones telling vomit-inducing sweet little stories to a cutesy indie backdrop for mobile phone network providers), as the length of the advertising breaks themselves.

In the UK people typically use the ad breaks to nip to the toilet and have a slash. Or, occasionally, go and put the kettle on. In a football match for example, you might make trip to the fridge to get a bottle of beer. All these activities are doable within a normal sized break, allowing one to settle back down in one’s chair just before the action restarts. In Romania, you can not only go to the toilet, you could run a bath, lie in it for half an hour until the water gets too cold, get out, shave, trim your nose hairs, get dressed, go to the kitchen, cook a large dinner, go out and buy a bottle of wine, invite your friends round, eat the dinner, play scrabble a couple of times, and then clean the house from top to bottom, before settling back down – and you’d still have time to make serious inroads into A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu (to be fair you probably wouldn’t get past the first book of the three, unless you were a really fast reader) before the programme restarts. It’s insane. I have no idea how people stand for it.

Not only are the advert breaks interminably long, but they are also placed in such a way as to really really disrupt the film or whatever you happen to be watching. Some exciting, nerve-wracking piece of the action? The crux of the plot, in which the dying old men begins to explain what has gone before? The moment when the hero is halfway through cracking the code? This is when the ads cut in. By the time the film returns whatever tension has been built up has gone, and to be honest you’ve forgotten what the film was about in the first place. Not only that, but on a number of channels they’ve decided that the best time to have one of these endless breaks is 5 minutes before the end of a film. I actually, out of interest, timed all this the other day – just before the end of a film on Pro TV, the ads cut in. The break was 22 minutes long. 22 fucking minutes. Twenty-fucking-two fucking minutes. Then the film came back for the denouement – 4 minutes. But if you’ve got that far in a film, you really need to watch those last 4 minutes. And that of course is what they’re counting on, that you will have to wait and wait, and started plucking your own eyes out in frustration until you get to watch the conclusion which you knew was coming anyway.

The concept of the half-time show in football is unknown here. There is no half-time show. There’s just 15 minutes of adverts. The broadcast stops when the ref blows his whistle and restarts when the match does. No half-time analysis, no highlights, no review of the action. I have no idea if they have any of that stuff at the end of the game, since I have never bothered staying on the channel that long. Perhaps after the obligatory 30 minutes of ads, they do actually have a post-match analysis. But I’m not waiting around for it.

And finally, he says, taking a deep breath before launching into the last element of this angry angriness, many of the channels have this weird propensity to do a kind of mini-skit as the link between the programme and the ads. I have absolutely no idea why, unless it’s just to add a further minute or two on to the break. National TV have this odd “fat policeman walking down a catwalk” thing going on, which I guess (though it’s difficult to really know) is supposed to be amusing. It’s not. Not even the first time you see it. It’s just bizarre. Prima, on the other hand, have this protracted thing with loads of blokes sitting in a company boardroom when two sexy window cleaners appear and put on a little dance. Why? Who the fuck knows.

So, I’ve given up. From now on I have resolved only to watch films and shows of interest on one of the State TVR channels, since they at least never put breaks in the show itself. They do have a lot of ads between shows, but at least the programme is left untouched. (They also show the best programmes anyway, so this is no great hardship)

Between the Woods and the Water

Ages ago, a friend of mine urged me to read “Between the Woods and the Water” by Patrick Leigh Fermor, which is the second volume of a three part book describing the author’s journey walking to Istanbul (from the Hook of Holland) in the 1930s. I had understood that the book was written in the 30s and therefore assumed it was really difficult to get hold of. However last time I was back in the UK I noticed it in a bookshop, bought it, and discovered that it had actually been written and published in the 80s.

So, anyway, my knowledge about the back story to this book is a bit limited because I haven’t read the first one of the series, just this one, the second of three (and I think I understand that the third has still to be written). This book begins with the author crossing the Danube from Slovakia into Hungary, and finishes up with him, again on the Danube, at the “Iron Gates” in southern Romania. In the meantime he crosses Hungary and spends most of the book in Transylvania - hence the reason it had been so highly recommended to me.

As I understand, the 18 year old Fermor set out to walk as much as possible all the way (only accepting lifts in really foul weather), and (I think) to mostly camp out as he did so. However, somehow he has managed to hook into a network of mittel-European aristocrats and he in fact seems to stay far more often in opulent luxury than he does under the stars. I have to confess that my inner class warrior was greatly challenged by this, and by the idea that here we are in the 30s and Fermor is able to put off his Sandhurst/Oxford schooling and take a proto-gap year staying with counts and other landed gentry as he goes. But, pretty quickly, I found myself discarding this struggle and instead allowing myself to be carried along on the enthusiasm, incredible range of knowledge, and wonderful writing style that Fermor has. It is, I’d say, impossible to do otherwise. He’s an absolutely superb travel writer and manages to effortlessly weave into his story vast tracts of history, observations on people and fascinating conversations, as well as seemingly being able to recognise and catalogue every tree and bird that he passes as he goes. It’s an epic achievement. He does all this with such infectious enthusiasm and such conciseness, that I am left somewhat in awe (He manages, for example, to sum up the historical Hungarian/Romanian debate over the history of Transylvania in two pages. Something it has taken me 4 years of writing this blog to not even come close to managing)

Indeed it is one of those books which leaves the reader wishing he had a fraction of the skill that Fermor has in conjuring things up so effortlessly. I have, at occasions in the past, allowed myself a small passing fantasy that I could one day take some of the bits of this blog and form a narrative out of it that might make a reasonable book in the “A Year in Provence” mould, but after reading this book, I feel that I couldn’t even start to do justice to such an endeavour. Perhaps I need to re-read “A Year in Provence” which memory tells me did not quite demonstrate the same level of literary mastery, so that I could remember you don’t have to be an absolutely superb (and absolutely superbly well-informed) writer to get such a thing published.

What’s even more incredible that having walked through this world in the 30s as a late-teenager he doesn’t end up writing the books until fifty years later, based on his notes and memory. I can only observe that this is a man with a superb memory and amazing notes.

After what sounds like a spectacular summer in Transylvania, he eventually crosses the Carpathians and ends up at a place called Orşova on the Danube. To be honest this area of the country had never really crossed my consciousness before – we know someone from Drobeta Turnu Severin, but aside from that it was just that bit of Romania near Serbia that was further east than the Timisoara-Belgrade road/rail link. But he makes it sound incredibly spectacular and worth visiting – the Iron Gates (Porţile de Fier / Vaskapu) in one direction and the Kazan in the other, which are both fast moving narrows (relatively speaking) of the otherwise (by this point) incredibly wide river. Off Orşova he describes the fascinating island of Ada Kaleh, which was kind of a last remnant of the Ottoman empire, mostly Turkish in population (though politically part of Romania). As I was reading I was mentally making plans that this must be the next place in Romania on my visiting wish list. And then you reach the epilogue in which he bemoans the fact that it’s all gone now, thanks a hydroelectric dam constructed as a joint project by the Romanian and Yugoslavian governments in the communist era. Crushing. (Though Mrs H has been since then and hiked around the valleys and canyons nearby and she says it’s still incredibly spectacular)

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.

Spring springs

Spring made a brief appearance here back in early February, decided it didn't really like being out so early and went back in to hibernation for a while. This Saturday, March 21st, the date when it's actually supposed to show up in the temperate northern hemisphere it decided once again to poke its nose outside and have a look-see. It did so in a very flamboyant way, unusual for this normally reticent season, which prefers to dip its toe into the year bit by bit*. Last week there was more snow and some fairly cold nights (and by fairly cold here I mean sub -10). On Saturday, though, we headed up to spend the weekend in Vármező (Campul Cetatii), a small village in the middle of nowhere, of which a little more later.

There is still a lot of snow on the mountains on the way, and even as late as Friday night it had been snowing in Sovata/Szovata, the nearest place of any size to our destination. But on Saturday morning it was sunny and crisp and beautiful. We chanced upon a meadow full of snowdrops, and by a stream there were as-yet-unblooming crocuses (or is the plural croci?). The next day (yesterday) they had all burst into purple and orange life. Then on our way home we saw a stork. There is no clearer sign of spring in Transylvania than seeing a stork. So all is good. Spring has sprung, and I imagine fauna all over the region are frantically trying to get off with each other (I'm imagining that this is what is happening, not actually conjuring up scenarios in my own fevered perverted imagination, just in case you wondered)

In other nature news, there seems to be a glut of eagles this year. Driving along, you see loads of them, sitting in the still bare trees by the roadside, floating lazily over the fields, swooping menacingly. When I say eagles, I mean birds of prey really, since most of them are not, I think, actually eagles, but some kind of hawks, or buzzards, or what have you. I think the technical ornithological way of distinguishing them is that eagles are "really fucking massive" whereas other birds of prey are just "very very big". I presume this means that there are also loads of mice and voles and shrews and that, but I haven't actually seen any of them. Or it could just be that the smorgasbord of small rodents was laid on last year, causing all these young raptors to make it through their first year, but now having feasted heartily last year, this year will see slimmer pickings and they'll all start buggering off to somewhere with more food in it (or die).


*I understand that winter hates mixed metaphors, so I'm attempting to force it to stay away with all that. It's not that I'm a bad writer, at all , no sirree.

[A few short hours later after posting this... It's only frigging snowing now.] Bloody weather.