In Tibru
We took a break from our urban exploration today to do some wandering in the countryside, visiting the tiny Transilvanian village of Tibru, where O's mom grew up.
We got to talk to sheep (and call them by their correct names this time, I might add), chickens, ducks, a turkey, and a pig, and met some pretty interesting villagers, my favourite being an older couple who had been out chopping wood and were fully armed with an axe each, and the woman had a small chainsaw.
"A man up the hill is dead," announced the old man somberly, and seeing the man's huge axe and his wife's chainsaw, I had to assure myself that they had nothing to do with it.
We also had special access to the village cemetery (to pay respects to the family members there) and the bell tower of the church, which I'm glad to have climbed up and back down without serious injury. In the cemetery, some of the oldest tombstones were quite interesting, one of which was written in the Old Church Slavonic alphabet, and proved quite a fun puzzle to decipher, especially since the words on it were badly eroded and seemed a little telegraphic in syntax.
I remembered to ask about the location of the house of the local priculici (werewolf — it's a long story, but one which made for one of the more surreal moments of our early relationship), but the house had now been torn down (possibly because werewolf houses have terrible resale values?), so we could only look at the place in the snow where an alleged werewolf had once had a house.
From Tibru we made our way to Cricau, a slightly larger neighbouring town, and dropped in on Gigi "The Italian," a man in his early 70s from northeastern Italy who married a Romanian woman and settled here. He filled us up with top quality prosciutto crudo, salami vecchi, montasio cheese, and parmesano grano cheese, sliced up a panettone cake, and he cracked open a bottle of prosecco and a bottle of moscato asti — to say we were spoiled was an understatement.
No explosions, plane crashes, or nut donors today, but perhaps that's not entirely a bad thing.
We got to talk to sheep (and call them by their correct names this time, I might add), chickens, ducks, a turkey, and a pig, and met some pretty interesting villagers, my favourite being an older couple who had been out chopping wood and were fully armed with an axe each, and the woman had a small chainsaw.
"A man up the hill is dead," announced the old man somberly, and seeing the man's huge axe and his wife's chainsaw, I had to assure myself that they had nothing to do with it.
We also had special access to the village cemetery (to pay respects to the family members there) and the bell tower of the church, which I'm glad to have climbed up and back down without serious injury. In the cemetery, some of the oldest tombstones were quite interesting, one of which was written in the Old Church Slavonic alphabet, and proved quite a fun puzzle to decipher, especially since the words on it were badly eroded and seemed a little telegraphic in syntax.
I remembered to ask about the location of the house of the local priculici (werewolf — it's a long story, but one which made for one of the more surreal moments of our early relationship), but the house had now been torn down (possibly because werewolf houses have terrible resale values?), so we could only look at the place in the snow where an alleged werewolf had once had a house.
From Tibru we made our way to Cricau, a slightly larger neighbouring town, and dropped in on Gigi "The Italian," a man in his early 70s from northeastern Italy who married a Romanian woman and settled here. He filled us up with top quality prosciutto crudo, salami vecchi, montasio cheese, and parmesano grano cheese, sliced up a panettone cake, and he cracked open a bottle of prosecco and a bottle of moscato asti — to say we were spoiled was an understatement.
No explosions, plane crashes, or nut donors today, but perhaps that's not entirely a bad thing.