October update

---

Alecia: The weather’s starting to change here. We see frost some mornings, and are starting to think about purchasing winter coats. The stalls at the outdoor market are bursting with tasty seasonal treats - apples, pears, grapes, walnuts, dry beans, fall spinach and lettuce, potatoes, dry herbs, home made paprika, popping corn, tomatoes, onions, eggplant, garlic and the like. Since our last posting we’ve had some adventures with traditional food processing.

Two weekends ago, we spent the day with Zsolt - our host dad’s parents (the closest approximation of his name in English is Jolt - the ‘zs’ makes a ‘jza’ sound). It was a family affair, with great food and plenty of palinka. The purpose the visit was to roast 60 kg of eggplant, flake off the blackened skin, mash into a pulp and freeze it for the winter. This eggplant mush is later thawed, mixed with home-made mayo, salt, pepper and chopped onion. The end result is the most fantastic smoky flavored spread that I have ever tasted. This tasty concoction is simply called “vineto” the same word that people here use for eggplant.

In between rounds of roasting, we collected veggies from the garden, cabbage, herbs, carrots, parsnips - and don’t forget the penis jokes! What carrot picking party would be complete with out jokes about whose penis looks like which carrot - funny how some humor always translates.

We also collected the fallen plums from the small orchard behind the house - much to the surprise of our discerning American eyes EVERY plum had a use. The nice plums were reserved for cakes and gombots - a sort of fried dough ball with a plum on the inside and crumbs on the outside - delish! But even the knurliest, moldiest, most wrinkled plum you could imagine was still good for palinka. As I understand it, they ferment the fruit until about January anyway, so I suppose it doesn’t matter what the plum looks like - and the distilling process is bound to kill anything that might hurt you. We had the pleasure of being joined in the orchard by Zsolt’s brother’s son, Adam. Adam is wonderful - he just started kindergarten last month, and is especially gifted in finding the funkiest plums for palinka. He is also madly in love with Chris, who is more than happy to wind him up and then send him back to his mother. Between the two of them and the puppy, it was wild times.

The following week Chris had his first event in Romania. His organization organized Udvarhelyi’s very first Day without Cars. With out asking twice, they were able to get the main street of town closed and a whole day of events focused on bikes and car free commuting. Happily, it was a great success. The day started with approximately 500 school children decorating the street with green-themed chalk art. This was followed by bike races and obstacle courses. Next came the older kids with heavy metal music and an extreme bike exhibition. They were quite impressive - both in their skill and in that none of them died. You can see that some are wearing pads, but definitely no helmets. There’s talk of doing more with bike safety next year.

The crowning event was a bike parade across town. We were hoping for 200 people and would have been happy with less. We were elated when somewhere between 400-500 people showed up to hoot and holler and block traffic for almost an hour. We even had a bike caravan of 50 kids show up from one of the outlying villages. It was my first bike parade, and I have to say it was quite a feeling. All those people on their bikes, smiling, having a good time, not having to worry about crazy drivers in their cars. I’m sure people thought I was extra crazy, yelling in my horrible Hungarian, honking my little bike horn - what can I say? I was inspired!

Since then, we’ve calmed down a bit. We both submitted grants on Monday, and have our fingers crossed that they’ll come through. My grant is related to work I’ve been doing with my counterpart, Rozi, fine tuning the program she runs. It’s a training program that prepares community members lead community development in their villages. It’s quite a brilliant idea, very similar to what Peace Corps volunteers do - maybe I’m biased. The challenge is that she’s had a hard time getting the kind of results she wants from her trainees. Basically they get trained, but then they have a hard time getting the community on board. So, Rozi and I have been doing a lot of analysis and brain storming to find ways to strengthen the program. It is challenging work, but a lot of fun and it will be rewarding if we start to see some results.

I’ve also been doing a bit of work with Chris’ organization, and thinking about my secondary project. I’d like to create some sort of “local foods working group” something to bring food producers, retailers and consumers closer together. There’s a lot of traditional (read sustainable) agriculture and food production that goes on here and I think that with a little marketing it could help generate some needed income - especially given probable EU accession in January. Countries like Italy and France have made the most of opportunities with in the EU to brand products by region and character. Think cheeses, salami, chestnuts, wine, ham etc. There’s no reason Romania shouldn’t try and do the same. But, the increased opportunities associated with Romania joining the EU are balanced by significant challenges - especially in the food/agriculture department. Romania is behind where it should be in terms of food safety, labeling and quality assurance. There’s also the issue of the market being flooded with quality products from Western Europe. If Romanian products don’t measure up - there will be a whole lot more people headed for Spain and Ireland to work. I’d like to try and tackle some of those issues as well.

Chris: Alecia forgot to mention a wild ride we had to the top of the hill behind our town. From the bottom it does not look too bad so we decided to ride our bikes up the road on the side. While the vertical may have been okay, the road was ridiculously bad. Dodging bowling ball size rocks, on gravel up, up hill is not fun. The view from the top was great though and it made for a decent afternoons adventure.

and just for good taste - I have thrown in some pictures from Sighisoara. This is a medieval German town about 50 km from here (supposedly the only continually inhabited medieval citadel). Why Germans and Hungarians in the middle of Transylvania? Well, apparently 2006 is not the first time westerners were afraid of folks from the middle-east. So when the Turks kept rolling through, the Austro-Hungarian empire decided to export some good hardy folks (read German Saxons and Szekelyi Hungarians who were causing trouble at home) to the frontier. The Saxons made 7 fortified towns that are represented today by the seven black castles on the Transylvanian coat of arms.

Now that the history lesson is over - the town of Sighisoara is beautiful. Walking around at dusk is truly fairy-tale-esque as I hope some of the pictures will impart. They also claim the original home of Dracula - Vlad Tepes himself. This is somewhat dubious as though he may have been born there the “original structure” they claim sits on the site of one that was burnt to the ground after he was long dead. Oh well - keeps the tourists interested. To that effect, there was an effort to build a 50 million dollar land-o-the-dead theme park. Dracula (who’s long black cloak, by the by, was lined with red velvet depictions of the Passion) was to resurrect in coca-cola format. In the end it was not to be however and the whole thing just made some people a lot of money while sucking some others dry. Perhaps the essence survived after all.

And for those who are interested in the stork saga - since being in the paper with the original stork, we have worked on a second (currently making a short documentary with the local TV folks), had a reported sick raptor (it was a swallow and the folks who found it, after being told to feed it bugs, reportedly had a hard time deciding whether or not to feed it their pet spider Charlotte) and most recently a small water bird of some sort. When the last one was called in the folks said they did not know what it was, just “some bird with long legs.” I don’t even want to touch that one.

And to whet the appetite - as if talking about blood sucking did not - we will try to do a blog shortly on our town, a bit of a photo tour of our favorite spots.

---

Comments

[Nancy Bierma]

Thank you
Hi Alecia Thank you so much for thinking of me and sending me your travelblog! It was fun to read and I love your photos! Enjoy! Is there any acupuncture there? Take care! Nancy

[Steve Rice]

HappyHaloween
That seems appropriate given your location and the fact that Dracula might be seen strolling around on All Souls day. Keep up the good work and enjoy yourself. We enjoy your pieces and the pictures