Just back from my Romanian trip. Some thoughts and photos, since I haven't written in this blog in ages.

The first thing upon landing in Romania: the light in the Cluj airport bathroom not working. A woman was having fun next to me about it and when we both got out of our dark cubicles, she told me, as a form of explanation: 'Romania!'. It's just that I used this excuse so much, that I don't believe it anymore. True, maybe in other countries light is provided to find your toilet, but I wasn't so ready to use the name of my country in a complaint tone as an excuse this time. The flight was on time, we landed at a European looking airport, and my luggage, as always, was on time and untouched. True, it took my brother an hour to cover the remaining 50 km separating us from him, but well, Romanian roads are, as we'd like to call them, 'work in progress'. I would complain more about Romanian drivers and impatient overtakes on curves than that.

First stop on our Romanian tour - Cluj Napoca. Busy, filled with cars, communist blocks in the outskirts but some beautiful Austro Ungarian buildings in the Centre. My brother liked the theatre, while I tended to see it as too much of an eclectic mix. I would like to mention at this point that it rained buckets the first two days, and although the photos won't show it, we were usually under an umbrella or avoiding a water-filled hole...

Our guide, Luana, took us to a hidden canteen around the centre where they served good and cheap Romanian food. Hungarian-run and Western-looking, it was nice to see such a place in downtown Cluj. They turned the inner Courtyard of an old building into a restaurant by covering it with a pyramid shaped glass cupola.

We stopped at the birth place of Matei Corvin, son of Iancu de Hunedoara and it was strange to connect facts that students learn during their history lessons to the real places and names of that era. We are taught to do it for international history (what happened in Europe when the Chinese invented paper?) but not enough for our own history I believe. Cluj is nice, clean, but extremely hectic. Beware...

We played the Romanian Loto - no I'm not rich, we did not win, unless you think I'm writing from the Bahamas. We stopped at a library where a national newspaper was displaying books and CDs that are usually sold with the newspaper itself - a wonderful occasion to discover the whole collection of Jules Verne in the format I read it in my childhood.

And that is it for Cluj. Provided I do not start work soon, I will try to share some thoughts on the rest of the country...

The curse

In the Early Ages of Humanity

I must have been one of those weird creatures

who died for love.

A rather strange adaptation

since my brain

has always deemed love

a peculiar disease.

I have this mental image of myself in another life,

building the Taj Mahal for love.

Starting new religions and fires

In the name of the unnamable feeling

That hunts my thoughts

...do I have to carry this curse

in every life that I go to?

When the world stood still

I was in Piazza Unità last night, waiting for friends. I was looking at the fir trees, new Christmas additions to the imposing square, the families, the beautifully lit buildings, the people walking slowly, the dogs, the kids running around. It was a perfect moment.

The mist was covering everything in a glow of mistery. And the laughs around me, happy laughs of children chasing dogs no bigger than a small pocket rat, the happy chatter of teenagers and adults, the comprehensive smiles from silver haired grandparents, they were all part of something, bigger than me, the square, the people.

I would not say it was a scene from a film, for films are not real. However, the scene in front of me had something surreal to it.

It was peace. It was beauty. It was happiness.

The Dance

Why did I make you dance this dance?
You did not even know the moves

You stood there still
The world passed by…

(Till I stormed in)
strapped you from you
Add one plus one
Never made two

And crashed
my whirl
your time
my will
your love

the Dance floor clean…
I am alone.

Why did I make you dance that dance
You’ve never even known the rules…

Some of the things I write....

Trust

And then they told her

trust the Son of Man

And no harm shall come to you

And so she did

Lions were stalking her steps

from the shadows

and the winds were getting ever stronger

And they told her

Jump straight into the fire

And no harm shall come to you

And so she did

In the end, when the world had stopped spinning

The lions had fed

the winds had stopped 

she was no more

but a sad pile of misplaced ash

(that's why when you tell me

Don't worry, no harm shall come to you

I laugh

For I think I heard those words in another life

And I shall not listen to them no more...)

I realized I did go somewhere recently - Treviso, for an exhibit on Canaletto and other artists who painted Venice.

It was nice to find out what people did when there were no postcards available. They bought paintings - the English were great fans of the Italian style and showed the paintings to their friends when they got back home from their voyages.

It was also interesting to look at the people. What they were wearing, what they looked like, what they did in the past. And how the artists decided to show them, and to show what. Stray dogs existed back then too, it seems.

All in all, it was an interesting trip and a great way to get out and explore. The weather was on our side too...

Book for thought and book for women

Since it has been a while since I've published something, and I haven't been traveling a lot since my heroic adventures... back home to Romania, I'll write something about a book that I've just finished and I liked a great deal.

It's written by Natalie Angier and it's about Women. The title? Well: 'Woman, An Intimate Geography' and it's a glorious trip through all things female.

One of the best books I have ever read, I must say. There were things I never knew about the way my body functioned, about reproduction in nature, about variety and about hormones and love.

I strongly recommend it!

This is where you can find and read some pages: http://books.google.it/books?id=GuFz4r64ETkC&dq=natalie+angier+woman+an+intimate+geography&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=it&ei=7OmRSc_4DpWA_gaSvuGmDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=4&ct=result#PPP1,M1