holiday home: salt and trout

so from sovata we went to visit praid, specifically the inside of the salt mine there. if you ask my mum about this, she will complain about lack of parking as long as you let her go on. honestly, it was unpleasant, hot summer day, crowded place full of cars, no parking space in sight as we had to drive waaayy past the actual entrance to the mine. finally left the car in front of a block-of-flats, totally randomly.
which is even more irritating after visiting the mine and seeing that it does deserve proper parking built, especially with so many tourists. really.

anyway, this is us descending. we had to take a bus for part of the way (entrance into the mine, a dark corridor) and then there was an entrance inside and a bunch more steps down. ugh, my dad is hypertensive and my mum slightly claustrophobic. fun times.

there are other salt sculptures in there, but this one everyone remembers

most pictures came out fuzzy...salt dust in the air??
it´s hard to describe what it´s like inside. the main two (huge) halls at the deepest level we went were full of people doing various things: sitting at wooden tables along the walls reading, playing cards, using computers (there´s wifi down there!!). the ones walking around i supposed were tourists like us, but the rest, the ones actually doing activities, were patients doing treatment. there´s been a treatment center for respiratory diseases inside the mine for a long while, and my understanding is that patients have to stay in the mine for at least 4 consecutive hours every day for there to be any effect. so a lot of entertainment stuff has been built to distract them.
there´s the escalading thing you can see in the image (we watched children doing that for a while) then there´s playing badminton for example (everywhere!)

and some wooden swings and climbing toys

every thing here that is not made of salt is made of wood. the floors? salt, of course. they look pretty slippery.

there´s also a chapel. everything is carved pretty roughly, so yeah you couldn´t mistake this altar for one of a usual church, but that´s part of the charm. of course then there´s a little store by the chapel space, that sells icons and prayer books and whatnot

a wooden nativity scene in a corner.

 

and closer-up

 

ok, there´s a "hungarian side" of the chapel walls and a "romanian side". the hungarian side looks much sterner and more dignified, nothing much to see there. the romanian one looks like this: every posible prayer made concrete

 

ok, aerobics time: at one point, a guy with a whistle summoned everybody in the mine to follow him into exercise. whoever wanted to joined him, the others kept doing other stuff.

there´s plenty uncoordination here, at least there´s enthusiasm.

 

i like this toy train pic because it shows some of the structures along the walls. but of course there´s plenty more i didn´t catch: kiosks that sell...the ordinary juice and chips; a sort of a pharmacy

there´s apparently even a cinema (we didn´t go in), there are toilets of course, there are places where they display art created inside the mine

like this, but there are also some paintings in a corridor

and then on an upper level there is a restaurant, and a wine cellar. i´m not sure we were supposed to enter the wine cellar, but we did, and this is it.

and a perfect cap off to the experience, the statue of saint barbara, patrón saint of miners (accompanied by the anecdotics of her life)

so from praid, on the way home, my dad insisted that we stop in a village about 5 km off the main road (campu cetatii) where he´d found out there was some sort of trout farming going on.

whatever, my mum and i just walked around the inn - i suppose the main thing is an inn - and the small lakes/fish ponds, doing what we do best

i.e. taking gratuitous photos of pretty much everything. considering how isolated the place is and how bad the 5 km of country road, the place was actually full of people.

also, nice enough

ok, i think food potos are gross generally and i can´t recall if i´ve ever eaten trout before and i´m not a big meat eater or anything. it just seems so bizarre to me that people are ready to go a lot out of their way for a piece of food. in romania (where i have to remind myself that things like this one meal cost the equivalent of a good chunk of a teacher´s salary), and in canada, and everywhere. i don´t think of it much, just sometimes. then i eat and shrug and tell myself it´s holiday.
i mean, it was good.

we met this family we´d first seen at the small pool in sovata. moldavians. we´d noticed them because of their 4 adorable children. at this place, one can try to catch the fish straight out of the pond, and i didn´t want to post pics of trout in the ponds or of people fishing , but i want to post a pic of this family fishing, because it´s them, and we felt warmly for them from afar.