by I’m writing this from a guest house in the village of Prigor, but I won’t post it for a couple of days because I can’t get a signal here. (I could do it on my phone in the nearby town of Bozovici where I can get a signal, but that’s too much hassle.)
On Wednesday night Romania played Slovakia in their last group game. I had a lesson with someone who couldn’t have cared less about the football, so I didn’t see Romania scrape through with a 1-1 draw, thanks to a dodgy penalty. They’ve got the Netherlands in the next round. (We used to call that country Holland, didn’t we? Romanians still call it Olanda.) All the teams with a positive or level goal difference made it through, while the eight teams with negative goal differences all went home. I’m not a fan of the format, but that worked out neatly.
Yesterday morning I had just one lesson before getting on my way. It was a pleasant three-hour drive that (towards the end) retraced part of the route I did with Mum and Dad in 2017. I crossed the 45th parallel at Cascada Bigăr which I saw with them; the structure collapsed three years ago. This guest house is big on views but low on facilities. I could murder a cup of tea right now but there’s no way to boil water. Hordes of kids are arriving tomorrow so they’re getting the swimming pool ready for them. Last night I checked out a disused mill, built in 1858, that stands opposite this place. (It’s next to the River Prigor, but the mill race – I think that’s what you call it – no longer flows.) I then met Ilie, the man who lives in the house near the mill. He invited me to guess his age. I hate that, even though I sometimes ask kids to guess mine. He said he was born in Prigor 86 years ago; his first wife died in 1988 and his second in 2012. Ilie gave me a tour of his fruit trees and bushes and large vegetable patch, then a sneak peek of the inside, including his spanking new kitchen. (He lives with some of his children and grandchildren.) I had a beer outside, then nearly finished Christopher Robin’s book in bed.
This morning I had muesli and fruit (including some of Ilie’s strawberries) for breakfast, then headed to Eftimie Murgu, a small town that sits on the Rudăria River and is home to 22 mills, all still in working order. (The town is named after Eftimie Murgu who was born there. He was a radical 19th-century politician.) I grabbed a coffee before taking a look at the mills which are manned on a rota system. The lady at the Firiz mill twigged that I wasn’t from these parts and started communicating with me using hand signals only. I then asked her to speak Romanian. (The accent here is different. In particular, the d and t sounds palatalise into the equivalent of English j and ch respectively, before the vowels e and i. I think something similar happens in standard Brazilian Portuguese. Before e and i, the n sound also turns into the sound represented by ñ in Spanish mañana.) She poured in some grain and showed how the millstone could be adjusted to give coarser or finer flour. Later the old woman at the “Îndărătnica Dintre Râuri” mill insisted that I buy something bottled or jarred or knitted. When I reached the Tunnel Mill at the end, I came back and bought some syrup and jam from the Îndărătnica lady and some wholemeal flour from the Firiz lady.
After my mill tour I sat in the park in larger town of Bozovici (pronounced Bozovitch, the name sounds like a highly strung tennis player). It being Dad’s 74th birthday I gave my parents a call. They told me about Biden’s embarrassing first debate against Trump. I would be on board with replacing Biden at this point. Better late than never. I had a packed lunch and from there I drove around without really getting anywhere. The driving wasn’t easy. Roads were shingle, or riddled with potholes, or frighteningly narrow, or corkscrew-like, or on a one-in-five gradient, or some combination. The temperature climbed throughout the afternoon and I thought about a swim in the river, but nothing I saw looked very swimmable. All the while I saw people tending their tiny pieces of farmland, bare-chested men with beer barrels sitting on benches, old ladies hunched over, and dogs that were drawn magnetically to the centre of the road. So back to Bozovici where I got a quattro stagioni pizza and ate it in the car as it pelted with rain.
