holiday home week 1

i´m not even gonna comment on the plane trip itself and jetlag. truly the trip was uneventful in the sense that nothing bad and plan-altering happened: planes took off and landed on time, buses and taxis and trains cooperated, people were exactly where they´d promised they would be. yay. way to be happy that things went according to schedule! way to not even start thinking of the thousand of things that could have gone wrong and didn´t.

anyways. i´m in bistrita. my break in bucharest was super-short, then a night on the train and voila!

the most noteworthy novelty i found at my parents´ place

but seriously, the first day all i did was jump around the apartment and open and close drawers and eat an alarming quantity of eggplant salad (think baba-ghanouj) and of tomatoes and refuse to try to sleep.
then i fell asleep all of a sudden in the afternoon because it was rainy (it´s been raining every afternoon since, which i don´t mind: it´s exactly the kind of weather for spending time with family doing nothing

except fooling around trying on other people´s clothes/accessories

day2: giulia came from cluj to visit. 7 hours talking non-stop, some eating of good stuff, and some visiting my hometown. ok, the visiting took 2 hours and it was just a walk around the historical center etc.

i´m so taking these ostriches for granted already (emblem of hometown ) that i´m always surprised when other people find them funny.

ok, they are funny, i guess.

interior of our old gothic church

and so you can see where the ostrich concept comes from

 

we really could´ve not started taking potos of all the flower details on the wooden seats inside the church, it´s clearly a losing proposition. i blame it on giulia, of course. so, 657 flowery ...

...and other ornamentation-related...

...pics later...

we got out and among some blocks-of-flats next to the park, where all we managed to photograph was some grafitti

apparently it was bistrita that taught me the spirit: "it is not enough to succeed. others must fail."

also, apparently this is the realm of golden apples (or just apples - another town emblem gimmick - but the one we found was clearly golden. a fairy-tale place

it´s been very good to be here, but almost unsettlingly familiar. i can´t get over how quickly i got over being back. as if the last year hadn´t happened and i was still living in cluj and just visiting my parents for a while.
so next we went to their cabin at arcalia:

glad to see my mum has been reusing my handpainted jars for noble purposes

her flowers are doing great. here´s a tip for other potential flower-growers: she keeps talking smack about her roses, calls them stupid etc, in order to not jinx them. i´m being serious.

 

there was one moment when i offered to help with cutting off the wilted roses, all in earnest

but then everything degenerated into a quite silly photoshoot: "carmen picking veggies", "carmen with pitchfork and rake" (i was a bit over it by then)

culminating with "carmen watching the river at sunset"

the river is pretty

you can see part of why my mum has missed me: our relationship is only enhanced by my enthusiasm re: posing for her.

the focus of the photoshoot changed with the return of the cow herd to the village

quick shot of kid interacting with cow

and a family on their way to somewhere

better sunset light

and now the herd and minders leave us behind

next morning, still making fun of the fact that my sleeping space at the cabin is an actual closet. otherwise, i got busy re-unpacking all the clothes i´d left behind last year because they couldn´t fit in my suitcases. i can see another round of that coming up son.

mandatory picture on the steps of the big manor at arcalia.

and a thing i´ve only discovered now, what with my recent obsession re: house coats of arms and stuff - here´s the house symbol of arcalia´s former owners. nice.

and oh, more unintentional posing. all the posed pictures in this setting turned out ridiculous, but this one i love, despite the affectation of the head-on-hand position (not posing! i swear) and the weird hairdo.
the flower wreath...all romanians understand, so i´ll reexplain for non-romanians: as a girl, you make/wear a wreath of these particular flowers (truly on june 23, when it´s THE holiday for that) and then you´re supposed to throw it, aiming at the roof of the house. if the wreath stays up on the roof, the girl will marry within the year.

guess what.
this was such a cheat.
i threw it at the lower part of the roof, which, beside being very low, is also almost flat, so of course the wreath stayed there.

so yeah, i´ll be waiting for proposals now.
soon,
c