David Vetalau's "Farm", sheep cheese, riding a horse on wooden saddle, and scraping an old man's foot

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Sorry guys, I'm a bit behind on publishing my journal entries, but this is the last installment of my Eastern-Europe Romania journey:

So, started out with a 530am bus ride from Cluj to Abrud taking nearly 4 hours, where a pre-arranged taxi picked us up and drove us 12 km to the village of Bucium-Campani, where David Vetalau's farm is. Or should i say, "farm" as he had no garden, fruits, or vegetables , and no animals except a few dogs. We met a man they called "wolf" because he gets really drunk and wanders the mountain. He walked us in the middle of the tiny village, down the road to Vetalau's 'girlfriend', Luci... She was such an interesting character. A chain smoking, loudmouth who wouldn't let the cats leave the wood pile under the stove. She was quite mean to the dogs and cats, and to Vetalau's daughter, AnnaMaria. She didn't speak any English and watched Spanish soap operas with Romanian subtitles on a TV that didn't have sound half the time. But she made decent food considering what we ate at Vetalaus. After that, we hiked half of our belongings up the hill, a 2 km hike through the snow, to David Vetalau's farm.

According to Mihai, Vetalau applied to WWOOF to get volunteers to come help him at his farm and at his annual summer music festival but WWOOF turned him down as he wasn't actually a farm. So he planted a few onions. And *poof* he is now considered a farm. At Luci's house in the village was a half dozen chickens and 2 dogs. Vetalau had one dog. The property was on top of a hill, near the mountain Detunata, a popular tourist stop. Vetalau inherited his grandfather's property which included lots of land, a hand-built 2 room house which we shared with him and kept warm with fire ovens, a bar which he served tourists in the summer, and a barn with 40-year old hay that hadn't been changed since the last animals lived there 40 years ago.

First night, Vetalau and 'wolf' got us drunk on homemade wine and apple tuica. We talked most the night and as Vetalau didn't know English, it was a fun interesting time for me to practice Romanian. He gave us pork fat, raw onions, and homemade cheese with salt to eat for dinner... yum... Next morning, i was real hungover and sick from that really strong alcohol and he let me rest until lunch. We had to walk down the hill to get the rest of our belongings and get a few supplies from Luci, such as stale bread and she made us plăcintă cu brânză which are REALLY GOOD, fried pastry with a cheese mixed with some herb inside. SO GOOD!!! She also made us some sarmale too, which i was not so fond of. Rolled up cabbage leaves with meat and rice and cabbage inside. We took some food up the hill to Vetalau.

Next day was stale bread and cheese (real cheese from an organic farm neighbor) for breakfast and i got told i will be doing "woman chores" because we are in Romania and in Romania, women do women work/men do the men's work.. except, as he says, in Moldovia where the men just drink and women do everything. So basically my time there was spent sorting and cleaning the house and doing the massive amount of dishes that the tourists left from the fall. And it was using freezing cold mountain water, heated over a stove and washed in a small wash bucket. Not fun. Step and Vetalau cut wood a lot. Some days we all cleaned out the barn, getting all the old hay out and burning it outside, nearly catching his electricity cord on fire! He had to set up a way to get electricity from the village to his house a few years ago, and a way to channel water from the mountain to the sink to wash. Every few days, we had to walk to a mountain spring to get water to drink. That was real nice- to drink fresh mountain water everyday.

We were taken to the top of the Detunata mountain, with such a phenomenal view over the village below, the mountains in the distance, the snow-covered forests and hills below. He knew where all the best photo spots were, and had stopped Step every few meters to take another picture. He is quite a deprived dirty old man starved for communication at times it seems, as he chats for hours with us and tells dirty jokes in Romanian, trying to hook Step up with the village librarian! haha! Another day, Vetalau had Luci's neighbor bring some supplies up with his horse, and they pretty much forced me to ride the horse! That was really neat as the saddle was a carved wooden saddle with an old blanket draped over it. The horse was real calm despite a dog biting at his nose when i was on it! We also got to try sheep cheese, which is really strong tasting, and much better with salt sprinkled on it.

We are getting used to the routine of waking up every few hours to put wood on the fire stove, , wake up to have heated up left-over soup, stale bread to dip in it, and tepid coffee, before starting whatever odd cleaning or chores Vetalau had planned for the day. Lunch and dinner were whatever water-based meal with boiled meat that he had prepared for us. We quickly learned that toasting the bread made it a bit easier to eat, so toast accompanied many of our meals.

One day was spent in the nearby town Bucium-Campani, first registering ourselves at the police station, which they found amusing we were wanting to work and farm in Romania for no pay. We visited the small school and were starred at by the children who kept leaving their classes to walk the halls to see the foreigners. We went to the 'general store' with the smallest selection of a few fruits, 3 juices, some meat, a few loaves of stale bread, and lots of odd things for the house, like plastic tubs and dish soap. Many people of the village go there to hang out and begin drinking beer, before 10 am! We got a VIP special tour of the museum, which we had to find the 'librarian/historian' of the villages in the city building who had to let us in to look at old objects from the area, including tools for mining or peasant life in the village. Lots of old pictures and a copy of the book a man from the area wrote called "Fefelaga", based on Vetalau's grandmother and horse. Very depressing story. We had to bring up some groceries from the village store the 2 km uphill to the farm. Also with us was a cat that was at Luci's that she stuffed in a zip hand bag and made me carry with us so Vetalau could have a cat at the farm! It was horrible for me and the poor cat to have to carry him all that way! But animals are not seen for anything except an object to hunt or guard or protect or eat mice.

Another task we had to do was clean out all the hay which hasn't been used in 40 years, sort out all the random old artifacts he has collected over the years, and sweep out the barn. The artifacts were old farming tools his grandfather used, old nails, furniture, junk he's stored, pots/pans/jars, bicycle parts, old tubing, broken windows... etc etc. He would sort out all the stuff and we would put it in the "museum stuff" room and other junk of his. But rather than doing anything the easiest way, he was stubborn and stuck on his way of making work harder and unnecessarily longer than it needed to be, thus annoying us a bit, as it was often counter-productive. But never mind.

One unfortunate day, Vetalau needed help with his foot, as he had gotten hard blisters on the bottom of his foot and couldn't scrape them himself. So, of course, i was nominated to do it. YUCK! i will spare you the details, but basically i had to use a small butter knife to carve out hardened skin from the bottom of his foot and apply an ointment, wait while he soaks his foot, and repeat, a few times... I did not sign up for that!! We also had time for a 'bath' which was interesting. There was no running water, so mountain water heated over a stove, with a tiny foot soak plastic tub that had to put water in and wash up in that. That is some rustic living...

Not every day was soup, boiled meat, and stale bread. Once we had macaroni noodles with real organic cheese and a few other days was cabbage-based meals and also Mămăligă, or corn meal mush with cheese.

When it got warmer out in the day, the ground started thawing, and we started digging a trench for the water pipes he was to install to get water from the mountain to come to his farm because in the future it was for running showers for the tourists. The trench was about a meter deep and about a foot wide and when Vetalau was around he made the work harder than it should have been, by unproductively knocking more and more dirt where we were working so all the time was spent moving dirt from one spot to another. But he kept telling us how he was a miner so he knows the best way to dig... ugh, frustrating!

But after a few weeks of that, we were ready to go. I had to go back home to get stuff sorted out and Step had a trip to Croatia to plan. Vetalau walked us to the only bus leaving his village at 4:30 am and we bused to Bucharesti, barely making it there before dusk. We spent a few days there, exploring Bucharesti a bit more, seeing the Arch of Triumph, an outdoor peasant museum , Old Princely Court , we enjoyed the hectic traffic jams at the Piata Revolutiei, which is amazing how scary Romanian drivers are! We saw the People's Palace from a far but didn't get the tour inside, unfortunately. We saw a few museums and our final day we watched "Shutter Island" at a movie theater.

The next morning we took a bus to the small airport, which is not very well organized and people wait in long lines crowded in areas waiting on broken-down computers to get checked in. The entire layout of the one-room waiting room for all flights was not very well thought of and caused massive crowdings of people who couldn't move.

I spent a few days in England again, to get the rest of my stuff and say goodbye to everyone. Definitely tons of stuff i hadn't got to see in Romania yet, i do want to go back sometime and see a few more things, explore more of the country, hopefully at a time when many roads aren't closed or blocked from the snow! Until my next adventure, whenever and wherever that is...



^Út Í Óvissuna^

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Comments

[Akina R]

The so called farm and Fefeleaga
I had fun reading your post :) On one hand I'm sorry you ended up working on Vetalau's "farm" (there are other much nicer real farms, with better conditions), but on the other hand it seems like you managed to have some fun, and I hope Vetalau also learned something from the experience (though I doubt he will manage to transform his bar into a profitable tourist business). I was amused reading how the policemen from Bucium-Campani thought it was funny that you went to volunteer on the farm - the concept of volunteer work is very new to Romanians :) (BTW, I hope that you have to submit a report of your experience to WWOO and that based on it Vetalau will not be on their list anymore. Other - real and serious - farmers could benefit a lot more from the volunteer work. As for the blisters - you should have said no!!!) "Fefeleaga" is a novel that Romanian kids have to study in school (all I remember is that it was sad and boring). You made me curious, so I Googled it: I found out that the heroine has a memorial house in Alba-Iulia and that the wife of Bucium's mayor counts herself as one of her great-grandchildren :) Other aspects rang unfortunately true: villagers drinking in the morning (yes, in some villages people lost their work ethic) or not treating animals very well (however, other people see things differently - as you discovered yourself in the ROLDA experience). I hope your next experience in Romania will be better (you should try one day rural tourism - at proper hosts :) - in Maramures and Bucovina, the most beautiful places of the country), and I hope Romanians will learn by example from the good work done by foreign volunteers in Romania :)