Merry Christmas from Transilvania
After a [delayed] one hour flight from Vancovuer to Calgary, a [delayed] 10 hour flight from Calgary to Frankfurt, and a [delayed] 90 minute flight from Frankfurt to Vienna, then a 4 hour drive from Vienna to Budapest and a 6 hour drive from Budapest to Alba Iulia, Romania, we've reached our destination.
Jetlagged and tired from the long journey, I'm ultimately thrilled to be here.
Some of the highlights of the trip so far:
Authentic goulash dinner in Hungary, including another dish of grilled turkey cutlets with baked apple slices and smoked cheese. Wow. Who knew Hungarian food was so good. I need to learn to make this stuff.
Creepy abandoned border crossing from Austria into Hungary (former iron curtain crossing, way back in the day) and from Hungary into the recent no-man's-land between Hungary and Romania. You can really see a lot of change in these small places.
Passing two Borat-style horse drawn carts with a cartload of hay within 5 minutes of entering the country. They were the simple horse and wagon kind, not the horse dragging the chassis of a car kind, but apparently those can really be seen around here from time to time too.
My father in law casually pointing out, "How yeah, if you look, there's a big castle on top of that hill over there." Reminds me of that Eddie Izzard bit about Disneyland Europe: "Oh, and about the castle — you're going to have to try a little harder. They've actually GOT them here."
Lots of animals. I saw chickens and turkeys on the road (I don't think I'd ever seen a turkey just walking around before), sheep, street dogs, and the best: a person driving their tiny Dacia car pulling a tiny 3 foot x 3 foot trailer with a live pig sitting calmly on top of it.
My in-laws' apartment: you enter the building through this giant iron door off a dirt-paved alley, into this communist-era concrete jungle of a hallway and stairs (along with the most frightening two-person capacity electric elevator I've ever been in), only to reach a beautiful apartment directly overlooking the main city square with its huge churches, and millennia-old ruin of a giant Roman fortress, and other city square things like an ice rink and a big fountain plaza. Such a contrast. You can tell there's a culture here of worrying much more about internal contents rather than external appearance, at least as far as homes are concerned.
It seemed unfortunate to me that a lot of the smaller towns in Transilvania had replaced their quaint, atmospheric, centuries-old churches with these brand new cathedrals, which, although pretty nice to look at, all looked exactly like the one in the next village over, and kind of had this pink stucco appearance happening which makes you wonder if they're going to all fall apart in 20 years when the construction developer is long gone. And it's just sad to see Progress embraced that blindly (and presumably at such expense), especially when some of the homes were lacking front doors or had huge holes in the roof. First things first.
We also had some gypsy Christmas carolers and some gypsy . . . uh . . . knock on people's doors and wait for them to hand out money and generally look sort of creepy-ers, so that was a mixed bag.
Oh, and Romanian gypsy music videos on TV — I can't really explain in words, so maybe I'll just have to find one on YouTube and send a link. Manele music can be pretty catchy at times, and you'd think if anyone were excited about it, it would be the performers themselves, but it makes you realize just how high our expectations have gotten for how polished musicians' performance should be. Many of the women in these videos can't even dance — they sort of rock back and forth and limply gesture with their arms, while making bored expressionless faces and lip-syncing to their own song.
Jetlagged and tired from the long journey, I'm ultimately thrilled to be here.
Some of the highlights of the trip so far:
It seemed unfortunate to me that a lot of the smaller towns in Transilvania had replaced their quaint, atmospheric, centuries-old churches with these brand new cathedrals, which, although pretty nice to look at, all looked exactly like the one in the next village over, and kind of had this pink stucco appearance happening which makes you wonder if they're going to all fall apart in 20 years when the construction developer is long gone. And it's just sad to see Progress embraced that blindly (and presumably at such expense), especially when some of the homes were lacking front doors or had huge holes in the roof. First things first.
We also had some gypsy Christmas carolers and some gypsy . . . uh . . . knock on people's doors and wait for them to hand out money and generally look sort of creepy-ers, so that was a mixed bag.
Oh, and Romanian gypsy music videos on TV — I can't really explain in words, so maybe I'll just have to find one on YouTube and send a link. Manele music can be pretty catchy at times, and you'd think if anyone were excited about it, it would be the performers themselves, but it makes you realize just how high our expectations have gotten for how polished musicians' performance should be. Many of the women in these videos can't even dance — they sort of rock back and forth and limply gesture with their arms, while making bored expressionless faces and lip-syncing to their own song.