A bit more positivity from New Zealand this morning. I got to see my nephew who is a very bright little boy indeed. He loves playing with toy cars, especially old British ones like Morgans, apparently. Then Dad said, “We’d better get onto booking our trip as soon as they’re gone,” meaning a trip to Europe. If they’re serious about ever seeing their younger son and grandson again, they don’t have a lot of choice. Dad’s been ill for too long for it to be a virus, so he’s been put on antibiotics. Mum, who I’m sure is greatly enjoying spending time with her grandson despite the stress, seemed to like my pictures of Slovenia.
After our Skype chat, and before my four lessons, I met Dorothy in town. We talked about how Romania is, slowly but surely, heading in the right direction. Every week I see a building being renovated or a bike rack conveniently added or an intersection modified to make it that little bit safer. Romania’s economy has grown substantially in the time I’ve been here. People are earning more in real terms. Unlike some of its neighbours, Romania has become considerably more stable. It’s still very imperfect – those imperfections really came to the fore during Covid – and I worry that Romania’s urge to modernise will compromise its natural and man-made beauty, but there are reasons to be optimistic.
I’m off to Vienna in under 36 hours. I’ll have three passengers, one of whom I’ve never met in my life. I have no idea how this will all pan out. I’ll reveal all in my next post.
Update: One thing that hasn’t noticeably improved since 2016 is Romania’s level of customer service. This morning I waited 45 minutes to withdraw some euros from my bank account. The woman at the desk (when I finally got there) must have had some pretty rigorous training. Never look at the customer or change your facial expression in any way. If the customer asks a question, remain silent. If he or she repeats the question, respond in an exasperated tone but whatever you do, never fully answer it. Consult your phone five times per minute and your smart watch ten times per minute.
The US Open is under way. I read that Birmingham-born Dan Evans came through the longest match in tournament history in the first round, beating 23rd-seeded Karen Khachanov in 5 hours and 35 minutes. Incredibly he was 4-0 down in the fifth set, but then won six games on the spin. He’s now a 34-year-old veteran; I saw him in Auckland when he was still a teenager. At only five foot nine, he’s struck me as a cross between Lleyton Hewitt and a typical British lad who never stops being a lad. A few years back he got a one-year ban for taking cocaine.
After three days in which things were getting dangerous (the day before I left was really shitty), I desperately needed to press the reset button. My short trip to Slovenia had that effect, so I’m putting it down as a success.
Maribor is hardly just up the road; it’s roughly the same as going from Auckland to Wellington. My outward journey weighed in at 645 km, almost entirely on motorways, and took me 8 hours and 50 minutes including breaks and two hold-ups – a queue at the Romania–Hungary border (the Hungarian border guard couldn’t speak a word of anything non-Hungarian, so that was fun), then a traffic jam around Budapest. I went back a different way, taking a slightly more countrified route through Hungary. That cut the distance to “just” 622 km; surprisingly I had no delays to speak of, and got back ten minutes faster despite going on slower roads. Coming back I stopped at a town called Balatonlelle, which is on Lake Balaton as its name suggests. I picked it practically at random, expecting to find a sleepy village by the lake, but instead it was a bustling tourist destination. Over the border into Romania, the motorway was eerily quiet.
In between I stayed three nights in Maribor, the second city of Slovenia, a country of only 2.1 million people. It sits on the Drava river, a tributary of the Danube (which I’ll see very soon) but a major river in its own right. My motel (that’s what I’d call it) was 4 km out of the city. Once I’d checked in, I drove into town (after I’d been convinced by a passerby not to walk) and was struck by how beautiful and peaceful it was. The river, the bridges, the buildings, the people milling around, the perfect temperature, it was all uplifting. I sat outside and enjoyed my pizza and Sprite, which I felt I’d earned after nearly nine hours on the road. (The pizza was very yummy indeed, come to think of it.)
That evening I called New Zealand. I hadn’t told them I was going to Slovenia. The line was terrible, as was the general mood, caused by everyone’s illnesses. The worst sufferers have been my sister-in-law and my father. Dad wrote to me in an email that my brother and his family have had a nightmare “holiday” in NZ and will never come back. Mum has escaped virtually unscathed, but her stress levels must have been way up there.
The next morning I took the bus into town and wandered around. Some cities look happy, others look sad. Maribor looked happy. The only negative was that all the touristy stuff like the museum and wine tasting were beyond what I was prepared to pay. I’d been looking forward to trying some Slovenian wines, but when a severe young lady at the entrance said it would be €20 to try three wines or €25 for four, I declined. (I bought a cheap bottle of Slovenian red at the supermarket instead.) Yep, Slovenia uses the euro; unlike some other ex-Yugoslav states, they’ve gone all-in on the European project. On the evidence of what I saw, it’s been to their benefit. (By the way, after the break-up of Yugoslavia in the early nineties, Slovenia adopted the tolar is its currency. It was replaced by the euro in 2007.) The only vaguely touristy thing I did was visit the aquarium/terrarium, which I didn’t expect to find in the city park. The aquarium wasn’t exactly Kelly Tarlton’s but the terrarium bit was rather good. I had another pizza – I’ll give kebab pizza a miss next time – and walked back to the motel.
What to do on my second and last full day? It was Saturday. Probably the worst day of the year if you want to avoid plagues of tourists, which I always want to do. The lakes, Bled and Bohinj, were out for that very reason. I set off for Ljubljana but the motorway was chocka – rammed as everyone says in the UK now – and I couldn’t hack it any more. I got off the hellscape of the south-westbound A1 and decided to visit the town of Ptuj (a short way downstream of Maribor on the Drava) instead. The name is fun to say: think tui, as in the native NZ bird, with a p sound immediately before it. There were lovely old buildings, you could walk (or cycle) alongside the river, although when I visited it was wedding day. At least three of them. It had a castle which I chose not to take a tour of because it was just too hot.
The motel was quiet and had a simple balcony; it was nice to just sit out there and have a beer. One more night before the long trek home. I had €99 in cash when I went. This will do me. I came back with €3, and that’s after buying stuff like washing powder that I saw was cheaper over there. All in all, the trip cost me around £400 or NZ$800.
It’s incredible all the places I can see, now that I have a car. (It has added complexity and expense to my life too though, so I’d say it’s been neutral to my wellbeing.) Just think, Mum and Dad could come over next spring, or heck, next month, and we could go travelling for three weeks or more. What wonders could be in store for them. You can but dream.
Now for some photos of Maribor:
The Plague Column in Maribor, built after the plague of 1680. Ptuj had one too. Timișoara has one. Vienna apparently has a famous one. And when monkeypox really takes off…
I’ve mentioned these Roman numeral “puzzles” before. These were everywhere in Maribor. This is a modern one which was inscribed when the plague column was renovated (in 1991, if I’m not mistaken).
Supposedly the oldest grapevine in the worldWhat’s the mata mata with you? A freshwater turtle from the Amazon basinOrange iguanas
A bit better today, certainly. We topped out at “only” 35, so that helped, but still almost no energy or enthusiasm. Most of this flat is a mess. I was struggling in my four hours of lessons with various boys. The mother of two of the boys insists on me sending her sheets which she prints out and they fill in. This does not work, unless her goal is to make my life five times harder in which case it works perfectly. I can’t see what they’re doing.
Before my lessons I picked some plums in Mehala. One woman asked me if I’ve I’d got permission from her neighbour. They didn’t look like they were on her neighbour’s (or anyone else’s) property – the tree was on what I call a berm after living in NZ for 13 years – and anyway her neighbour didn’t seem particularly interested in them. They were fully ripe; three more days and they’d have had it. I said nothing and left. There were plenty more trees down the road.
I’m now going to scale the steep berm of language once again. About 30 hours ago a luxury yacht named Bayesian sank in a storm in Sicily, probably killing seven on board. The ship’s name comes from Bayesian inference and Bayes’ theorem, some nifty statistical stuff that Thomas Bayes came up with in 1763. In fact there’s a whole load of stuff named after the man. As far as I see it, Bayes theory is basically this: you have a “prior” or “gut feeling” about something probabilistic, then you get new information that may cause you to shift that feeling in one direction or another by a certain amount. For example, I have a coin in my pocket. My “prior” is that it’s fair: both heads and tails have a 50% probability. Then I toss it ten times and get nine heads. That probably won’t convince me to shift my prior much. Nine heads out of ten is rare, but not super rare. But then I keep tossing the coin, and after 100 flips I’ve got 85 heads. Now I’m convinced that I’ve got a seriously skewed coin. Getting that many heads from 100 flips of a fair coin is one in a squillion dillion, give or take. But what is the real probability of getting a head on this particular coin? The more flips you do, the less notice you take of your original prior (50% in this case) and the more weight you put on what you actually see (85% or whatever). Bayes’ theory tells you how much to weight your prior as opposed to your observed information, according to how much information you’ve observed. Anyway, it seems this Bayesian stuff is very lucrative for certain people, including the owner of the yacht, Mike Lynch, who is now presumed dead. He has had major court proceedings against him, and weirdly his co-defendant was killed by a car while running on Saturday. The word Bayesian has all of a sudden entered the mainstream.
I watched a video on the sinking, or tried to – I’m finding it hard to take in new information. I was struck by the Italian journalist they interviewed named Alina Trabbatoni. Her English, which she spoke with a standard English accent, was extraordinary. Better than fluent. You’d never know she wasn’t a native. With one exception: her pronunciation of innovative when describing the yacht’s mast. She said i-NOV-uh-tiv, with second-syllable stress, pronouncing the “nov” bit just like in “novel”. My students have come up with this pronunciation too over the years; it isn’t a rare word. But as far as I’m aware, native speakers never say it this way. Brits (like me) go with IN-uh-vuh-tiv, while Americans say IN-uh-vay-tiv, sometimes even shifting the main stress to the “vay” part. I checked Wiktionary just in case, and it told me that in-NOV-uh-tiv was the default pronunciation for Brits! I don’t believe that for one minute. I checked Youglish, a very handy tool where they play short chunks of popular YouTube videos containing a word that you specify, and nobody, not even the Brits, ever said i-NOV-uh-tiv.
Finally, scone. How do you say it? I rhyme it with gone, just like about half of those surveyed in Cambridgeshire where I grew up. But I think Mum being a New Zealander made it a sure thing that I’d say it that way. I remember Mum’s mother joking one time about the rhymes-with-bone pronunciation, as if it was ridiculously upper-class for NZ. Mum, as well as her mother, often made scones, but I had to laugh at the bit about people’s preferences for putting the jam or the cream on first. Mum’s scones, though delicious, came with margarine. The idea of having either jam or cream with them, let alone both in either order, would have been absurdly decadent.
Three lessons tomorrow, leaving time for packing. Then a seven-hour drive (but I bet it’s more) to Maribor.
It’s all got a bit crappy today. I got up at 6:30 after nowhere near enough sleep (three hours? four? That’s been pretty standard in this heat) and then started shouting and crashing into stuff. It was like 31/1/23 (that date is etched in my mind), but not quite as bad. It’s been coming. Although I’ve been to places and (sort of) done stuff lately, I’ve been going through the motions. Yet again. I’ve got a sodding master’s degree in going through the motions. No enjoyment, nothing means anything, everything feels like an obligation or even a chore, and the cherry on the top is a complete inability to relax.
Today I did actually get some stuff done. Three lessons, totalling 5½ hours, including maths with Matei in Dumbrăvița. Last week he got his IGCSE results; he got a B in maths and maybe I could have got him up to an A but it was a question of too much to do in too little time. It didn’t help that the buggers at his school didn’t let me see his mock paper in which he got a D – that would have been invaluable to me. (By the way, a B is the third-highest grade; the top grade is an A-star.) This afternoon I had two hours with a 13-year-old football-obsessed boy who lives in Spain but is in his native Romania for the summer. His English is good. In other words, he’s pretty much trilingual. We went through a English textbook of his with instructions in Spanish, most of which I could understand without too much difficulty.
Something else I got done today was get my car battery replaced. It was dead when I got back from the UK – the heat doesn’t help. There’s no such thing in Romania (as far as I know) as the AA which I was always a member of in New Zealand. Over there my battery would die, I’d call them up, and a man with a van would be round in minutes. Here it’s more complicated and that stressed me out no end. I’m supposed to be going to Slovenia on Thursday. A man did come over with some jump leads and I drove to another part of the city where I got a replacement. It was early afternoon – already crazily hot – and I felt shattered.
On Saturday they had a free concert in Parcul Civic. I wish I’d known that Zdob și Zdub were the opening act because I really like their music. I did get to see Passenger though. Or kind of. He was a speck in the distance. Passenger isn’t a band, he’s just one Englishman with a guitar. And a distinctive voice. He shot to fame in 2012 with his Let Her Go. You only miss the sun when it starts to snow. Or however it goes. He had three or four other songs on his album that I liked, but that one hit was the making of him. (He talked about what an extraordinary lucky break that was for someone who was a busker up until then.) He started his set by saying, “Is this a normal temperature for you? I’m from England where it never gets this fucking hot.” This was after 8pm and it was 35 at least. The crowd never properly got into his stuff. I don’t think he realised that only 5% of the crowd properly understood him and all his idioms. Even though I really like him, I just wanted to get home. I wasn’t in the mood for anything. Certainly not Rita Ora who came on after Passenger. She’s British too, but her stuff isn’t my thing at all.
Yesterday I met Mark at Berăria 700. I hadn’t seen him for ages. It was great to catch up and have a laugh. That didn’t stop me from feeling like utter crap a few hours later, though. I wish I knew the secret.
It would help if it would just cool down. Being outside in nature or even among the architecture we have here is hugely helpful if you’re prone to iffy mental health. But when the infernal heat imposes what might as well be a curfew on you…
I had a rather brief catch-up with New Zealand on Saturday. Dad had a sore throat and could hardly speak. Everyone else was suffering too. As for Mum, she didn’t have a cold (yet), but she was exhausted. I hope their fortunes improve.
My first lesson tomorrow is at 11am, so I’ll get on the bike beforehand. That’s if I get some sleep first.
Yesterday I mentioned Lake Balaton, which I flew over the day before. Well, I’ll probably pass by it (it depends which way I go) on the way to Maribor next Thursday. It has an area of 600 km2, compared to Lake Geneva’s 580. I thought I’d check Taupo, and that turns out to be a fraction bigger, at 616 km2.
This is one of those occasional posts where I focus on language. I’m more likely to do that if I’ve just been away or I’m about to go away or, as is the case right now, both.
On the plane back from Luton I took this picture of an ad by Babbel, a language learning app. You get six months free but only if you pay for the first six months. If you have to buy A to get B free, B is not bloody free!
There’s plenty to unpack in these translations, which aren’t always exact. Something that monolingual English speakers don’t appreciate is that, more often that not, English is just weird. Look at the translations for “There’s sand in my mouth”. They all say “I have sand in (the) mouth.” The verb have is always there, and there’s no sign of the possessive that we use in English. You could say “I’ve got sand in my mouth” in English if you wanted to, but in all the other languages “have” is the default option. English is the odd one out, as it is so often. In fact, other languages (including Romanian) use “have” in all sorts of ways that we just don’t. This morning at the market, a lady asked for the price of some flowers. She asked “Ce preț au?” or “What price do they have?” In Romanian, as in many other languages, you say “You have right”, “This doesn’t have sense” or “I have 44 years”. Another thing to note here is that the Spanish for sand is “arena”; that comes from Latin and is the source of “arena” in English – ancient amphitheatres were covered in sand.
Now look at all the words for shark. It’s one of those weird words, like “butterfly” and “left” (the direction), which translate completely differently even in similar languages. Butterfly is papillon in French, mariposa in Spanish, farfalla in Italian, Schmetterling in German, and fluture in Romanian. (At least the Romanian for shark, rechin, is basically the same as the French.)
Another thing is punctuation. Here English is in the majority, for a change. We put our question marks and exclamation marks directly after the last word in the sentence. Spanish does too, but they also write an inverted question (or exclamation) mark at the start. ¿Flamboyant, isn’t it? ¡Olé! French differs in a more subtle way from the norm: they make do with just the one mark, but put a space before it.
Now Slovenian. At first glance it seems less interesting than Serbian, the last language I took a keen(ish) interest in. Both languages are Slavic and therefore related. However, Slovenian is always written using the Latin alphabet, whereas Serbian can be written in either Latin or Cyrillic. Slovenian also lacks one or two letters that Serbian has. (For instance, there aren’t both hard and soft equivalents of the English ch and sh sounds.) A very funky feature of Slovenian, present in Maori (I think) and very few other languages, is dual number, in addition to singular and plural. Just like Serbian, nouns can be masculine, feminine and plural, and masculine nouns are also grammatically dependent on their animacy or inanimacy. The Slovenian numbers are similar to Serbian and most other Slavic languages, with one big exception: in numbers above 20, the tens and units are reversed, so for 24 you say “four and twenty” just like German and Dutch do and English used to do (sometimes at least), as in the nursery rhyme in which four and twenty blackbirds are baked in a pie. Perhaps the most interesting feature of all is the number of dialects Slovenian has, considering how geographically small its catchment area is.
How should you pronounce Kamala? Americans say, look it’s easy, it’s just “comma” + “la”. But that does not work for British English speakers like me, nor for Kiwis and Aussies for that matter. This video explains all. (Geoff Lindsey, who made the video, is brilliant by the way.) I dearly hope we hear a lot of that name between now and (at least) 2029.
Finally, a word I’ve been hearing a lot lately: performative. I can’t remember hearing it ten or even five years ago, but now I can’t get through a news article without seeing it. If I look at the definition on Wiktionary, I see it does have an original meaning: “being enacted as it is said”, such as when you say “I do” in a wedding ceremony. But the modern meaning is rather different: “being done as a performance in order to create an impression”. I’ve sometimes seen the word in the context of “performative work”: work done not to achieve anything important but purely as part of a game. In my experience of the corporate world, a lot of performative work went on and it was exhausting. Here’s a Google ngram showing the frequency of performative over time; my instinct that it has greatly increased in frequency was correct:
In a first for me, I managed to fall asleep in a lesson yesterday. It wasn’t face-to-face – I’m not that hopeless – but an online session with an eleven-year-old boy. I got him to do a written exercise in the present continuous, then a couple of minutes later I heard my name. Repeatedly. How embarrassing. We finished the lesson, then I had a session with his little brother. Please just let this be over. I then set an alarm on my laptop so I’d wake up in time for an online lesson in the evening, in case I fell asleep, which I did. The alarm made me jump out of my skin; I thought I was still in St Ives.
Getting back home was brutal. My bus arrived at Luton Airport at three minutes to midnight. I hardly slept a wink there. At 5:30 I blew £4.50 on an extra-strong coffee, then I had to think about my flight which was due to leave at 8:05. At gate 21 there was a picture of Timișoara taken right where I used to live, along with an up-to-the-minute weather report for the destination. I could see the temperature climbing into the 30s. We were stuck on the ground and took off from runway 07 an hour late, meaning it would be even hotter when we arrived. I had a window seat on the very back row. I got a great view of Lake Balaton which is the largest lake in Central Europe and marginally larger than Lake Geneva. There’s something amazing about seeing a major geographical feature like that in its entirety. I was one of the first off the plane; as I stepped onto the tarmac it was like walking into an oven. I got the bus to Badea Cârțan and from there I walked home in the heat. That and the lack of sleep just buggered me. Next time I might try the Ryanair flight from Stansted to Budapest followed by the train; I won’t put myself through that again.
It was a pretty good trip in all. I saw a lot of my family friends. Plenty of walks and meals – either homemade ones, or pub ones that didn’t come with enough chips. On Sunday, after my trip to Cambridge, we had a three-course meal which involved vegetables from their garden and seemed to take for ever. Conversation sometimes strayed into politics, which is never a good idea. When I suggested that young people have it harder than the older generation, I got the usual spiel about 15% mortgage interest rates in the 1970s and 80s. At least I was spared any mention of the threat of nuclear war, which is the other one that usually comes up. On Monday we walked to Houghton where we met one of Dad’s old friends. He lives with his wife in a beautiful old house; he had a selection of anti-woke posters in the windows including “I (heart) JK Rowling” and “Keep men out of women’s sports”. They’ve both had varying health complications. On Tuesday we went to Wetherspoons for their happy hour which runs from two till five. I had fish, nowhere near enough chips, and mushy peas. Then I tidied up the flat (someone is staying there on Friday) and took the guided bus to Cambridge where I got some provisions for my trip home. I got two Scotch eggs; I was years since I’d last had one.
What did I think of Britain this time? (It always changes.) Maybe I’m biased because that’s where I come from, but the people all seemed great. Calm, considerate, happy to help. Everyone doing their best. The problems are systemic; people’s lives are dominated by unavoidable systems and processes that are failing to function. To that point, the bank I photographed in my previous post is closing down in January and St Ives, a town of 17,000 people, will soon be bankless.
In New Zealand, my brother and his family are suffering with a bug they picked up on the plane. Even Mum has come down with it.
Lloyds Bank in Cambridge on Tuesday nightSunset in Timișoara on 24th July
My brother is now a few hours from landing in Christchurch, but for a minute there it was doubtful they’d get to New Zealand at all. On Friday I spoke to my brother who was in a panic (I don’t blame him) because he’d just found out while trying to complete an online check-in that his wife (and probably the little one too) needed a sort of visa to enter NZ. It would take days – which they didn’t have – to come through. But somehow they got themselves sorted. I think if you’ve applied for the visa thingy you’re OK, even if you haven’t got it. These nasty surprises are common now in the no-travel-agent book-and-hope era.
I haven’t been that active since I arrived in St Ives; in other words, things have gone according to plan. On Friday I didn’t do a lot apart from look at the lots for sale at the auction (the bottom has clearly dropped out of the antiques market) and go for a bike ride around the Hemingfords and Houghton.
St Ives high street and its pleasant mix of three- and four-storey buildings
The only bank left in St Ives. Having the bankiness set in stone has probably helped it survive. It has the same beehive motif that we see, on a larger scale, on a bank building in Timișoara.
Merryland. Great name for a street.
Back in 2002, this sandwich bar on Merryland did a range of so-called “barmy sarnies”. I think (hope!) this flood was isolated.
This early-18th-century house is on the market for £895,000
Bugingham Palace is a cute name for this insect “house” in this wild area by the river, but the lack of another G has been bugging me ever since I saw it.
A three-wheeled Reliant RobinThis trunk was estimated to sell for just £50, max
Yesterday my family friend decided she fancied doing a tour of Houghton Mill, but when she saw it required an advance booking, she decided instead on a tour of Lucy Boston’s manor house by the river in Hemingford Grey. Would I like to come? Sure. We walked through the St Ives meadow and past a large house and colourful garden that was once the site of a waterside bar where my friend had a summer job in the sixties. She caught sight of the owner; they had a longish chat which involved much reminiscing on her part. Soon after that, we went past the manor house and saw they had a tour at 2:30; she made a booking for the two of us. We stopped at the Axe and Compass pub in Hemingford Abbots where we had a pint each and a shamefully tiny portion of chips that cost £4, or roughly 15p per chip.
Then it was time for the tour. Lucy Boston was the world-famous author of the Green Knowe series of children’s books. I never read them but I did see some of the TV adaptation. She died in 1990, aged 97. When I was at Hemingford School – this would have been in the spring of 1988, I’m guessing – our teacher (Mr Wright, my first male teacher) gave us all an outing. Half the class were lucky enough to go inside the house and meet the most famous resident of the village and perhaps the oldest too, while the other half (including me) got to draw cows by the river. Other than being the home of Lucy Boston, the house is renowned for supposedly being the oldest continuously inhabited residence in the country. It was built during the Norman period, almost 900 years ago. Diana Boston, Lucy’s daughter-in-law, lives in the house, and it was she (now in her mid-eighties) who gave us the tour. I loved how expressive she was as she showed us all the church-like windows and arched doorways and the changes that were made between the Norman and Tudor periods, and pointed out the features that gave Lucy the inspiration for her stories. In the early 18th century the whole frontage was replaced, and not very well it seems, but a fire at the end of that century did for that. Lucy’s patchwork quilts also became famous, so we got a good look at them as well. Surprisingly, Diana even gave us a tour of her own bedroom. At the end of the tour, we (there were about a dozen of us) sat in a fantastical-looking room which WW2 airmen used twice a week to listen to gramophone records. The colossal gramophone is still working; she has a collection of 150-odd boxes of records. She played us the airmen’s favourite, Abide With Me.
This barn next to Lucy Boston’s house wouldn’t be out of place in Romania
I only took limited photos of the manor house
The tour cost £12 per person; that wasn’t terrible value (unlike the chips). My friend and I then spent some time in the garden, which is itself impressive with its chess-piece topiary and bright colours. It is home to some of the world’s oldest roses. Then we walked back to St Ives. We discussed her daughters, my parents, and a potential trip to Romania.
Today I went to Cambridge. I spent a good chunk of my time on Mill Road; I was born at the maternity hospital there, just like Douglas Adams was. (The hospital closed in 1983.) I’d never explored Mill Road before, and I wish I had, because it’s absolutely fascinating. More than a mile long, it’s made up of two distinct parts, with a railway bridge separating them. The western end, where the hospital used to be, is in the suburb of Petersfield, while the eastern end is in Romsey. Mill Road is brimming with independent eateries, international food shops, bike shops, and community centres of one sort or another. I went into a couple of the food shops to see if there was anything Romanian in there, and sure enough there were tripe to make soup out of (no thanks), trays of mici, and even cans of Ursus and Timișoreana beer. Outside these shops were watermelons, costing about twice what I’m used to paying. It was 28 degrees, unusually warm for here, so I felt right at home. (Tomorrow it’s forecast to reach 33.)
The top one is going for £800k, the bottom one for £675k. Maybe there’s a Cambridge Road in Oxford.
The western end of Mill Road
Romanian produce in one of the shops in the western end
The eastern end of Mill Road
The new mosque at the eastern end
Update: I’ve just spoken to my brother. They all arrived safety after an uncomplicated journey which had a single stop in Singapore.
Yesterday morning I was woken by a four o’clock alarm. The start of a long day. I got a taxi to the airport. Flights to Schengen destinations now leave from the fancy new terminal, leaving just a tiny number (like mine) to depart from the old one. The attention-grabbing split-flap departure board has finally succumbed – it was still there but totally blank. The whole place was eerily quiet. As always we were held in an inhuman pen-like room before it was time to board. The flight was uneventful; I even managed to doze a bit.
At the other end the e-gates weren’t working so we all had to be processed manually. I had a wait for my coach, so I got a £4.20 coffee from Caffè Nero. The lady asked me if I wanted chocolate sprinkled on it. I might as well, I said. (At that price you take whatever you can get.) Then I thought, how would I say “I might as well” in Romanian? I’d have come out with the equivalent of “Why not?” or even a simple yes. Even though I get by in Romanian, it’s like having one hand tied behind my back.
The bus station outside the airport terminal consists of 18 bays, with buses (or coaches, as they say) going in all directions. A short, stocky, bearded, heavily tattooed guy of about thirty seemed to be running the show. He wore an orange hi-viz vest. He could handle any question about any bus going anywhere, with handy gesticulations and the odd sympathetic “sorry, mate” thrown in. He had a ticket-issuing machine strapped to his waist, and also transmitted information to his colleagues (some hi-vizzed at the station, others in the terminal) via both a phone and a walkie-talkie. “Victor Zulu Foxtrot [referring to the bus’s number plate] has just pulled in.” I got the impression he’d been doing this since he left school. I thought, this bloke is worth his weight in gold. We’re still a very long way from AI replacing (properly) someone like him.
Our bus driver was cheerful; he introduced himself as Pat. Midway through the journey to Cambridge he had two problems at once – a door that didn’t shut properly and a road (the A602) that was closed by the police. Pat spent some time communicating with HQ about the door issue but fixed the problem and after taking a detour we arrived only half an hour late. The trip only cost £10. My subsequent bus to St Ives cost just £2. Very good value. Measures were put in place in 2022 to help with the cost of living; poorer people use buses disproportionately.
St Ives is quiet, a much nicer temperature than Timișoara, and generally an enjoyable place to spend a few days in the summer. I had a nap in the afternoon and woke up pretty discombobulated. Where exactly am I? I have internet access here in my parents’ apartment – I’ve managed to get the password from the people who live above. I don’t know how much longer Mum and Dad will keep this place. Having the internet meant I was able to give two online lessons in the evening. When they were over, I could hardly believe it was still the same day that it was when I set off.
I don’t plan to do much. I won’t be seeing my brother or my university friend. Sadly I don’t even have my aunt anymore. I’ll go for the odd bike ride, do some reading, catch up with my family friends (gently suggesting they come to Romania for a second time), and probably make a trip into Cambridge which will only cost £4. Not doing much is basically the whole point.
Thinking about the title I’ve given this blog post, I’m reminded of a maths test I was given at the age of six. The teacher, Mrs Stokes (who sadly died very young of cancer just a few years later), read out the ten questions. For one of the questions, we had to solve the riddle “How many were there going to St Ives?” I tried to calculate 7 × 7 × 7 × 7 by hand and missed the next few questions entirely.
I’d been to Maramureș twice before, and it still felt a world away. In every village you saw babe – old ladies who probably weren’t even that old – dressed almost identically in dark clothes and a shawl. Once I saw a woman spinning wool with a spindle and distaff like I’d seen in videos. But on Friday morning I left the region and made my way to Turda (which is nicer than it sounds), only 30 km from the major city of Cluj-Napoca.
It was a three-hour drive or so. The first half of the journey, which took in the beautiful county of Bistrița-Năsăud, was a pleasure, but after hitting the town of Beclean it all became dull and industrial. I reached Turda earlier than I’d told the apartment owner I’d be there, and tried to park in the city but the payment on my phone didn’t work. I wished we still had self-explanatory coin-operated meters. Then I found a Dedeman which is one of the most useful things in the whole of Romania. As well as being a hardware store which sells anything you could possibly want in that vein, you can also park for free, pee for free (a big deal in Romania) or get a coffee for not far off free. The apartment was in a pretty seedy part of town to be honest, full of brutalist blocks and semi-derelict shops. I hung around a bit more, finishing my book, before calling the owner who let me in. As is often the case, it was much nicer on the inside than the outside. It had everything I could possibly have needed.
We don’t want your dirt here
That evening I watched a bit of the Olympics which I haven’t otherwise bothered with. They were showing the athletics. Mixed relay – what’s this? The British stadium announcer did a great job. The world and Olympic records for the women’s 800 metres appeared on the screen. Some Russian set those records in the early eighties and they haven’t been equalled since. All totally undodgy, nothing to see here, according to the Romanian commentator. The event I got into the most was the decathlon high jump. So far Romania have claimed seven medals (three gold, three silver and one bronze), all of them in water – five in rowing and two in swimming.
From the museum. On Sunday morning I tried to visit the Roman site – the castrum – but it was closed off.
On Saturday I visited a museum in town; I was the only customer which meant I was watched the whole time. Turda was conquered by the Romans, at which point it was called Potaissa. I was impressed with the presentation of the museum, and the translations into English were excellent. My only gripe was a lack of way-finding signs; this meant I was constantly told to go this or that way, to my slight embarrassment. After the museum I tried to get a coffee from a bakery, but the woman there was spectacularly unhelpful. Olympic-level stuff. Eventually I did get my hands on a simple coffee.
The main reason I visited Turda was to see the salt mine. Salt was extracted there over centuries; the mine closed in 1932 but was opened as a tourist attraction in 1992. After standing in a half-hour queue, I entered through a tunnel and descended into a cavern which is now a sort of theme park with a ferris wheel and assorted games, then went down another 13 flights of stairs to the bottom where you could row boats on a salt lake. I guessed it was 200 feet deep in total, but in fact it’s about twice that. I read Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series 20-odd years ago and the whole place seemed somehow Pullmanesque. I rushed back from the depths of the tunnel to avoid going into a third hour of parking fees. I had lunch in the car on the hillside just outside the town centre; it was pretty there in a Romanian sort of way. Then I hung around the town for the afternoon; I had a very nice boysenberry-like ice cream.
I bought a melon from one of the least helpful stallholders I’d ever encountered (this anti-service still takes me aback after all these years in Romania), then grabbed a shaorma for dinner. I ate it in front of the judo finale – France beat Japan in a sudden-death tie-break to win the team event – then it was back to the athletics. I couldn’t get properly into it. I realise how anti-big I’ve become in the last eight years; the Olympics, the Champions League, the soon-to-be-expanded football World Cup, it’s all got far too big for me. (Olympic controversy has erupted here in Romania – I only knew about it when a student told me. The 18-year-old gymnast Ana Bărbosu won bronze and celebrated with the Romanian flag, only for the Americans to successfully appeal a minute later. The American got a 0.1 boost to her score, shunting Bărbosu down into fourth. She was in tears. Now we’ve got Nadia Comăneci weighing in and the Romanian prime minister boycotting the closing ceremony.)
On Sunday morning I drove back home. The super-fast motorway made this the easiest trip of the lot. (Romania’s motorways are great. There just aren’t very many of them.) My Peugeot was very happy bombing along at 130 km/h. On the way I stopped at Deva. Back in 2016 it was the first Romanian town I visited after Timișoara. Its main feature is the fortress on the hill. Eight years ago I took the lift to the top, but this time I walked up. If there was a proper paved track, I didn’t see it. I practically hiked to the top, then when I got up there I bushwhacked 300-plus degrees around the wall of the fortress before eventually finding the entrance and other people. Then I scaled 240 (?) steps to the actual top, took a few pictures, and walked down via the paved track like I did in 2016. A couple of hours later I was home.
Two students have so far raised eyebrows at my decision to go camping alone. Boring? Ever so slightly dangerous? (At 30 lei per night, it was certainly cheap. It was basic but it had a hot shower, a fridge, and even low-G internet. I saw a deer but no bears came near the tent.) The trip as a whole was fine, but I never felt I could fully relax. Very early tomorrow morning I’m flying to Luton; relaxation is the entire goal of my stay in St Ives. Very few places to go or people to see; it should be great. (Unfortunately I’ll miss my brother who flies to New Zealand on Saturday.)
I got back yesterday from my latest trip. It was interesting in many ways but I struggled to relax, probably because a trip like that requires a certain level of organisation, and being organised is always something I have to work at.
On Tuesday I did 487 km getting up to Bârsana. A few more than I needed to; for that I can blame crappy signs (or lack of them) and myself for not using GPS. The campsite was two kilometres up a steep lane from the town of Bârsana. It was basic and when I arrived it was pretty empty. There were three host cats; the woman at the entrance was slightly surprised that I didn’t have a dog. I pitched the tent between apple and plum trees. My first night was starry like I hadn’t seen in years – I wish now I’d stayed up to watch the meteor shower – which also meant it was much colder than I’d bargained for. There was the pleasant clang of cowbells, and in the early morning the sound of cockerels. Over breakfast the next morning I chatted to a French couple, using a mix of English and French. After speaking French for a bit, or trying to, I then had to talk to the campsite owner in Romanian; what came out of my mouth was pure gibberish, as it often is when I have to switch between two foreign languages.
Just up the hill from the campsite, shortly before sunsetThe nearby cemetery. The big shots from the Bârsan family are buried there.
On Wednesday I visited the 600-year-old wooden Orthodox monastery in Bârsana – there was wooden everything for miles around, making the whole region visually distinctive. There was a lot to see outside the engine room of the place which was closed to visitors. I then drove to another, much smaller, monastery on the other side of the Iza river; not much to see there, so I sat for a bit by the river and read my book – Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. The author is a clever bugger. After that I spend a couple of hours in the town of Ocna Șugatag, whose name conjures up images of a childhood game. (An ocnă is apparently a salt mine; I’d visit one of them a bit later.)
The monastery had a pair of peacocks
I was more prepared for the cold on the second night. The following morning was the most strangely fascinating part of the whole trip as I visited Cimitirul Vesel – the Merry Cemetery – in Săpânța. A well-known tourist attraction, this consists of an ornate church surrounded by hundreds of brightly painted wooden gravestones.
Each “stone” has a naive picture of the deceased, usually illustrating what they did for a living, and below that a poem giving the story of the person’s life, sometimes in informal dialect rather than strict grammatically correct Romanian, and always in the first person. These poems could be amusing (merry if you like) but often they told tales of great sadness. Accidents, long illnesses, lost loved ones, the running theme that these people did everything they could. They died young, or they lived to a good age but saw their friends and family die young. One or the other, mostly. Worst of all might have been a three-year-old girl, together with an illustration of the tractor that ran her over. It was interesting to see people’s jobs – there was the occasional picture of a teacher at a blackboard but for the most part they worked on the land, as they still do now. No management consultants, no business development managers, no actuaries. And no pure housewives either; the women did (and do) hard physical work, just like the men. (It’s a very common sight in a village to see women carrying rakes and scythes.) It isn’t clear how this unusual tradition of painted stones came about. They’re made in a workshop nearby and each one takes considerable time.
Above is one of the happier stones. Irina was a part-housewife who weaved woollen cergi (rugs, I suppose) as you can see in the picture. She taught her children, enjoyed her time with her grandchildren, and wishes nothing for the best for them all. She hopes they grow old like she did. She lived to 93.
All the saints’ days, including (in this shot) my birthday
I spent the rest of the day at Sighet, or Sighetul Marmației to give it its full name. It was my third time there. I visited a small museum and read more of my book in the park.
Above are just some of the tennis trophies in the museum. There was a local champion in the over-70s.
Above is a selection of locally produced board games. They all got published; presumably they were crowd-funded. One of them uses a whopping 72 dice.
A scaled-up version of those 72 dice. Yes, I counted them.
A few pictures from Sighet. Dogs in doorways seemed to be a theme.
After a third night in the tent, in which it rained, it was time to make tracks.
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