by It’s a wet old day here. Last night I tried the $11 WCOOP single draw tournament and it was a damp squib, much like it is outside my window. Bad table draw, bad hands, and whenever I got a good one-card draw it pretty much always turned sour. The table draw was the worst of all, though. At 10:45 pm I was still hanging on by my fingernails when I entered the pot-limit badugi, and that went much better. Within minutes of that starting I was bundled out of the WCOOP, and I wished I could have met my fate slightly earlier, in which case I wouldn’t have started another tournament and I could have gone to bed instead. It ended up being another late one – a third-place finish in the badugi, and although I did a terrible job of snagging bounties I finished the night up $19. My bankroll is $919.
I had four lessons yesterday. I was hopeless at the end of my two-hour session with the woman who sees our “lessons” as a form of therapy. She wants to speak Romanian with me when our allotted time is over, but yesterday I found her particularly exhausting, and I made errors in my Romanian one after the other.
Back, finally, to my journey through northern Romania. The next leg of my trip was best. I arrived in Vatra Dornei, by train of course, at around 4pm on Monday 26th July. I had a good chat with the owner of the guest house. She told me I needed to try balmoș, the local dish. (I could never remember the name. Bormaș, bolmaș, every combination except the right one.) I tried balmoș that evening; it’s basically the same as mămăligă, which is made from polenta. Just like at my previous stop, Vatra Dornei sits at confluence of two rivers, this time the Dorna and the Bistrița, and it’s also at the foot of some ski fields. It was a bustling town, without being at all touristy, at least not in the summer. (In winter it gets plenty of skiers.) Young people were taking the flying fox across the river, and the park was popular too.
The next morning – it was my brother’s big birthday – I was up quite early and I went out for some breakfast, which I bought from a patisserie. I got confused with all the keys and locked gates in the front yard of the guest house, and eventually thought, sod it, and clambered over the three-foot fence. When I got back I went to the kitchen and met a family (husband, wife, daughter) who had watched me from their room. The father was very in-your-face, and totally bald, and I found this sudden expectation to interact socially very stressful. He invited me for a barbecue that evening. Very kind of him, but a scary prospect. Later that morning I took a slightly rickety chairlift up the mountain. It was fun to do that. At the top I had a great panoramic view of the town and the hills. I found some wimberry bushes, just like the ones in the Welsh hills from when I was a kid, and set about gathering some berries. They’re tiny, so it was a painstaking process by hand, but they are delicious with ice cream or in a pie, if you can get enough of them. (Some people were properly prepared, and were armed with implements like rakes or combs.) On the way back down the cable stopped moving, leaving me suspended for a tantalising minute or so, at possibly the highest point from land of the whole trip (12 metres or so). There were 120 chairs and 40 pylons. It was a balmy evening but the barbecue didn’t happen and instead I just out in the garden and finished All the Light I Cannot See, before popping into town for a pizza.
The following day I went back to that same patisserie for breakfast. This was a delight: you could see all the beautiful pastries being rolled and glazed and baked. Then I went to the station and booked my train to Vișeu de Jos for the next day, before doing a spot of hiking. There are numerous tracks, clearly marked with varying symbols and primary colours, and I followed the track marked with the red cross. This took me past a graveyard and many small farms that were being busily tended, and up a hillside. When I felt I’d got far enough, I had lunch and started my Stephen King book, Mr Mercedes. (English-language books were three-for-two at Cărturești, and this was the third book I quickly chose.) I then set about picking another load of wimberries. It wasn’t any faster this time around. I climbed back down, and while I was in town I was caught in a storm. Dust from the road works blew into everyone’s faces. When I got back to my accommodation, I met the bald bloke who decided it was time for a barbecue, in spite of the weather. I gladly accepted his invitation, and we had the usual mici and pork chops. The fairly elderly woman next door joined in the conversation from over the fence – Romania is going to hell in a handcart, and what on earth possessed you to live in this terrible country? – and also provided barbecue advice which I’m sure the bald bloke could have done without. They were a nice family, I thoroughly appreciated the offer of food (all I did was buy drinks), and I misjudged him at first.
The next day I’d be off to Vișeu de Jos, and eventually de Sus, for the last leg of my trip and the steam trains.
The Covid numbers are whopping up here now; I’ll provide updates again soon.
