by I slept better the second night. It rained all through the night and didn’t stop for most of the next day. I read, and we ended up playing a card game a bit like Last Card but with a Hungarian deck which made the whole thing more confusing. “But you said I could play a seven at literally any time. And now it’s the only card I have left. So doesn’t that mean I win?” “Ah, literally any time except the situation you find yourself in now. I should have specified that. Now pick up four.” “Cheers.” If you failed to say “last card”, you had to draw five; that seemed excessively harsh, but then again I was playing with people who had grown up having to queue for four hours just to get a loaf of bread. After our games, of which I didn’t win very many, Florin pointed out a large yellow mushroom that had grown on the side of a tree. He called it a iască galbenă. “You can eat that,” he said. No, you can eat that, I thought. A YouTube video convinced him that it was safe. He chopped it up and cooked it with onion and garlic and other bits and pieces, and we had it as part of our dinner. It tasted fine. Mushroomy, in fact. And none of us suffered convulsions or hallucinations. In between times I had a tour of their extensive garden and all the fruit trees. Florin even described and demonstrated a traditional Romanian outdoor game involving wooden sticks that were pointed at both ends, to be launched as far as possible.
In the evening we were joined by metallic blue fireflies – licurici – and other flying insects. Călin and I then watched the start of the semi-final between Casper Ruud and Karen Khachanov. It didn’t start until 10:15, and by this point the crickets – greieri – were chirruping away. We only watched the first set which finished in most extraordinary fashion. At 6-5 in the tie-break, they played out a 55-shot rally which Ruud eventually won to give him the set. That exchange even outdid – by a single stroke – the one that Djokovic and Nadal produced in the final of the same tournament nine years ago. Ruud went on to win the match in four sets, and will play Carlos Alcaraz in tonight’s final.
After another decent sleep, it was my last morning there. I gathered some peaches that had fallen from the trees near the house, and also picked some apples, then we had a late breakfast. Florin made mămăligă, which we ate topped with smântână and crumbled cheese, along with eggs. Soon it was time to go. Călin and I carried our bags down to his car, stopping once again and Neluțu and Mariana’s place where we had coffee and more cakes. We left at around 12:30. It rained heavily during the first half of our trip back, but then it cleared. We got back to Timișoara at 3pm, and in the evening I played tennis. I hope I get the chance to escape from the city and return there one day, because it is a lovely spot. I managed fine with having to speak Romanian all that time, but listening to it became quite tiring. Florin is both talkative and softly spoken; that makes for an exhausting combination. I learned several new words that I will probably soon forget, such as izmă, a type of mint, and zămătișă, a regional name for that crumbly cheese we ate on the last morning.
I now need to recover from eating all that rich food. This morning I spoke to my parents, then went to Dumbrăvița to give Matei a maths lesson. He’d only just received the results of a so-called checkpoint test that he sat back in May; he’d done rather well. This morning I showed him that a parallelogram really doesn’t have any lines of symmetry. I’ll give my brother a call tonight. My sister-in-law is just about ready to pop, though it’s now highly unlikely the baby will be born on September 11th. Both my brother and his wife are more royally inclined than me, so if it’s a girl I wouldn’t be too surprised if they call her Elizabeth. It’s a nice name after all, and it’s versatile: Liz, Lizzie, Libby, Beth, Betty, Bessie – the possibilities are almost endless.
I’ll put up some photos of my trip in my next post.
