by Poiana Cerbului was peaceful and relaxing. I had sunny weather the whole time I was there, and thankfully it was never too hot. On Friday evening a group of eight French tourists arrived in their two cars. Again I had dinner with the old ladies. After the meal I drank two glasses of homemade vișinată, an alcoholic drink made with sour cherries. Luckily it was pretty weak. I went out for a walk that evening and met two farmers who asked me in three languages (if you count “moo” as a language) whether I’d seen their cow. Unfortunately I hadn’t.
The next morning, after being given vișinată as part of my breakfast, I chatted briefly with the French people. I tried to speak French, but I was mixing it with Romanian the whole time. And of course, I’m so out of practice with French now. I’m sure it would come back pretty quickly if I spent some time in France. I’m envious of people who can switch between multiple foreign languages. Both parents of one of the families could speak English fluently, and the father wasn’t far off fluency in Romanian; in the nineties he’d spent 18 months in Romania for his civic service in lieu of military service. He told me all about his time hitchhiking on horse-drawn carriages, and how much the country has developed in the last quarter-century or so.
To save the taxi fare I decided to walk to Sighișoara. It was about ten kilometres, four along the shingle track and the rest on a main road. When I arrived in Sighișoara I found a very pretty and old town, if a bit touristy, full of cobbled streets designed so that all the water flows through the middle of the street if it rains. Sighișoara’s history is German and Hungarian, and the centre of the town is very well preserved. I walked up the clock tower, around the fortress, and up a covered wooden staircase. And down lots of cobbled lanes, and eventually into a park where I could just sit down for a while and check the news online (the guest house had no access, apart from in a small corner, and to be honest I liked that). Then it was time to trek back to Deer Meadow. After all that walking I was pretty tired and hungry. I have blisters on my feet as I write now.
My stay at Poiana Cerbului was certainly worth it, even if it took me an insane amount of time to get there and back on the train. (Next time, I’ll consider hiring a car.) I got to speak a lot of Romanian and realise, hey, I’m not actually too terrible at this. I might recommend the place to my friends in St Ives, if and when they next come to Romania. The talkative lady took my business card, saying she might want some English lessons over the phone. I wonder if she’ll actually call me. Yesterday morning she got me to write down some useful English phrases for guests, along with a pronunciation key. For “welcome”, for instance, I wrote “uel-căm”. On Friday she gave me a book about reiki to read. Many of the pages had been annotated with what looked like the ravings of a madwoman – political commentary interspersed with bits of astrology and numerology.
One young guy from the French contingent celebrated his 17th birthday yesterday. They celebrated with breakfast birthday cake. I was thinking back to the day he was born, 5/8/01, when life had turned into a disaster zone for me. After breakfast I gave my hosts some money for meals, said goodbye, and then the French group kindly drove me to Sighișoara station. I had about two hours before my train left, so I called my parents on FaceTime. Nothing of note happened on the trains back. At Aiud I avoided that very unwelcoming bar like the plague, obviously. We clattered through five județe, or counties: Mureș, Sibiu, Alba, Hunedoara and Timiș. This reminded me of my train trip through five states from New York to Chicago. Late morning turned into afternoon, then evening and finally pitch blackness. We pulled in to Timișoara a few minutes before midnight.
