Piatra Neamt Film Festival

A great time was had at the first Piatra Neamt Film Festival held last week. New friends were made and some great films were watched :)

Warming Up For Croatia

Well, tomorrow night we set off on our intrepid 2,400km road trip to Croatia to spend a week on the beach. I was last in Croatia 3 years ago where I spent a fantastic 3 weeks island hopping. As a warm up to the week ahead here a few pics from the last Croatia adventure.

London chilling

A relaxing start to the week in Hyde Park and the Serpentine Gallery.

Transylvanian Tour

Last weekend my folk's were over for their second visit to Romania. Last time we didn't venture outside Bucharest, so this time I thought i'd show them the real Romania, so we left for a three day drive round Transylvania, taking in the towns of sibiu, Sighisoara, Brasov, Sinaia and all points in between.

First up, Sibiu:




Next stop, Sighisoara.

Going Downhill Fast...

After being in Romania for a year and a half I finally got around to going skiing, and what a buzz it was! Although it can't compete with the established european ski resorts, it's cheap and there's snow on the slopes. Ski hire was around 12 euros for the day and a day pass was around 30 euros to go skiing in Predeal (about 2 hours from Bucharest). Apparently the weekends are packed, but midweek the place was almost deserted which meant no queues and maximum fun. Photos courtesy of the crappy camera on my mobile.

3 days in Iasi

To see in the new year we went to Iasi for 3 days and stayed in the Grand Traian Hotel which was designed by Mr Eifel, the same guy who designed the Eifel Tower.

Iaşi, is a city and municipality in north-eastern Romania. The city was the capital of Moldavia from the 16th century until 1861 and of Romania between 1916-1918 during World War I.

The third largest Romanian city, after Bucharest and Constanţa, Iaşi is the economic, cultural and academic centre of the Romanian region of Moldavia. The city, home to the oldest Romanian university, accommodates an annual count of over 60,000 students in 5 public and 3 private universities, it is home to more than 50 churches and hosts 5 cultural centres: British, French, German, Latin American & Caribbean and Hellenic. Cultural life gravitates around the National Theater (the oldest in Romania), the Opera House, the Iaşi State Philarmonic, the Tătăraşi Atheneum, a famous Botanical Garden (the oldest and largest in Romania), the Central University Library (the oldest in Romania), an array of museums and memorial houses, an independent theater and several student organizations.

text from wikipedia.

Fashion East Transylvanian Tour

For the next 8 days i'm driving around Transylvania, promoting our new website Fashion East, that we created for Amigo Coffee. I'll be making a full report on the Sector 7 site (www.s7.ro) when I get back to Bucharest, but for the moment here's a few pictures from Sighisoara, our first stop.

Fashion East - www.f-east.ro

Delta Music Festival

After another grueling drive of 10 hours it was a quick sleep back in Bucharest before heading off to the Delta Music Festival in the south east of Romania. The Delta is an entirely different proposition to Maramures. The festival was being held in a tiny village called Sfantu Gheorghe which is quite literally in the middle of nowhere, where the Danube meets the Black Sea. The only way of getting there is by a four hour ferry ride down the Danube from Tulcea, the nearest town. The festival was a three day affair with acts such as Coldcut, UNKLE and Shukar Collective.

We had booked a room in the village and were quite apprehensive about it as we hadn't actually seen any pictures of it. We were to be met by it's owner on leaving the boat, and sure enough there she was. The signs weren't good. The lady in question looked like a warty witch, and she even brought here broomstick. Our fears worsened as we followed her to the opposite side of the village from the festival. We arrived at her house, which looked ok, only to be ushered past it, to a room in the barn behind it! No toilet, no bathroom and a smell that reminded us of dead people greeted our unsatisfied glances as we walked into our home for the next three days. Suffice to say we waited for the lady witch to leave before picking up our bags and hot-footing it out of there as quickly as we could.

We found alternative accomodation pretty easily, and at half the price, so it was off to the festival. I won't bang on too much about it as it wasn't very good. The music was below par, the place was half empty and the storms came, which kind of took the fun out of it. The saving grace was the beach where the Danube meets the sea. An utterly amazing place... oh, and the fish was a welcome sbstitute for Romanias staple diet of meat.

Mocanita

Maramures has it's own Thomas The Tank Engine in the guise of Mocanita, a narrow gauge railway track that winds its way through the valley at the breakneck speed of 15km/h! We spent 6 hours on one of the trains and came across a few customised vans which had been converted to run on the railway, as you can see in the above movie. Health and Safety regulations are non-existent on the train with people jumping from carriage to carriage, gates flying open at any given time, and carriages derailing at every other sharp bend in the tracks. This of course all adds to the fun.

We spoke to some of the passengers who take this train to work up in the forest. They leave there homes on a monday morning, spend the week in the forest, sometimes working alone, only to return on saturday to their family. They have done this every week since they became an adult and are familiar with nothing else. Many have never left their village, let alone been to a town or city.

Marajuana in Maramures

Today we visited a traditional village house in Ieud, which has been preserved in an authentic manner. Inside it's basically one room where the family eats, sleeps and works. Outside I was surprised to find a garden full of marajuana from which hemp is taken and woven into clothes. Unfortunately it hadn't been cross-bred so it didn't get you high, but I suspect from the general 'trippyness' of the area some people may have acted differently in their cultivation process!

Marriage, Virgins And A Well Stocked Kitchen

Whilst on our travels around the villages we kept spotting the occasional tree decorated with pots and pans in people's gardens. Our hosts explained this weird sight to us. Apparently tradition goes that when the clean living daughter of the house is ready to marry pots and pans are plaed on the branches of a tree in the garden. This signifies that the daughter is a virgin, has a well stocked kitchen and she is inviting prospective grooms to come and knock at her door.

If there is a red pot at the top of the tree it means she's really desperate to get married, and probably a bit of a moose! They must be doing something right here because in our village of Ieud there has never been a divorced couple since records began!

A Village Celebrates

As I said before this part of the country is like stepping back in time. Horse drawn carts and wooden houses are the order of the day, with grown-ups and children still favouring traditional costumes over westernised attire. We were fortunate enough to stumble upon the tail-end of a festival which had been going on day and night for two days. It could only be described as 'very trippy'!

The Churches & Monasteries of MaraMu

Well daylight didn't reveal too much, as the village was covered in thick fog creating a somewhat eerie vista. We were awoken by cocks crowing as we made our way down to the terrace for a breakfast consisting of eggs, bread, tomatoes, cucumbers, battered pumpkin and some kind of hamlike sausage. After filling ourselves up we jumped back in the car and set off to explore the churches and monsteries of the area.

BARSANA

Barsana was our first destination and it was like walking into a fairytale. Wooden churches with tall pointed roofs greeted us as the fog evaporated in front of our eyes. This is what a travel guide says about the place.

"Barsana can trace its history back to the Bronze Age. Documents dating back to 1391 make mention of a monastery and a wooden church named for St. Nicolae.

The monastery was abandoned and the small church was removed in 1720. The church was later returned and additional painting was done in 1806 in the baroque style by Hodor Teodor. He used predominantly white, blue and red in his palette. The church is also home to several beautiful wood and glass icons.

One of the loveliest faces of faith and wood can be found in Barsana. The 57 m. high church of Barsana monastery ranks first among the wooden construction of Romania. The foundation work was started in 1993 and by now the church is one of the most beautiful structure made by peasants in the country."







Next we visited some other local villages, finding many more examples of great churches that really identify the area. These were less tourity and somehow made them seem more authentic. The one you see below was deserted and as we opened the creaky wooden door of the church we heard the scampering of mice receding into the darkness... or was it something else!