Pilgrims’ Progress

Brasov, Romania

You might meet a bear and you could go by cable car.
But true to our tradition, we walked.
And when you’ve walked to the top, you don’t want to take the cable car down; you want to run, trip and tumble your way through the brown leaves, across the stony ground, zig-zagging twenty-two times to the bottom. The path criss-crossed the mountainside, making a much longer path than a direct one would have been. We observed that the hills we climbed in Thailand were no less steep – but there our guide just led us straight up!

Threats of Bears Who Should Be Hibernating (but just might not be) kept us on the paths. We had watched a video of bears scavenging through the dumpsters not ten metres from Leo and Lili’s apartment, we had heard of the young man mauled to death by a bear as recently as last summer on the very hill we were climbing, and today we saw his memorial at the edge of the path.
Perhaps understandably, Bear Conversation accompanied us up up up to the top.

Wouldn’t it be cool to meet one? What if we DO see one? Should we climb a tree? Where do they sleep? How long do they sleep? Can you wake them easily? Would they be hungry if they woke up now? How big are they? When do they have cubs? Wouldn’t it be great to come back here on a day that we had lots of time and there were bears around and we could watch them and if they didn’t come out we could come back the next day coz we wouldn’t be in a hurry and maybe then we could watch them and it wouldn’t be dangerous because we’d stay at the bottom of the hill and we could get away if they came near and don’t you think that would be fun?

You should try walking a hill with a five-year-old!!!! Thankfully she then raced forward to Jgirl15 and the last thing I heard before I slowed my pace to put a few more footsteps between us was, “I was just saying to mum that wouldn’t it be…..” At that point Mboy6 returned to my last-man-on-the-trail position with the loving declaration that, “I like walking with you coz time goes so much faster when there’s someone to talk to.” I think what he really meant was, “No-one else grunts back at me when I chatter on almost as endlessly as my little sister, and they certainly don’t even *attempt* to answer my questions, especially the one about do raisins help ulcers get better, and if they do, how?”  
When we returned home we decided a google search was in order to discover whether it’s an urban myth that bears can’t run fast downhill and that you shouldn’t climb a tree. We are none the wiser. We read four websites and discovered five opinions. Bears have poor smell. Bears have excellent smell and sight. Climb a tree if you have time to get higher than ten metres. Don’t ever climb a tree, unless of course you wish to be stuck up there with two cubs while the Mama waits at the bottom for you all to come down. Fight back a black bear, even with bare hands if you have to, but don’t play dead. Website three says play dead. They all agreed never to make direct eye contact. That’s a start I guess! Good thing we didn’t meet a bear.

Not that they were hibernating. We have now discovered that they simply enter a state of “winter lethargy” – they do not truly hibernate. Real hibernators (like squirrels and frogs) zip into dream land quickly and drop their body temperature significantly (frogs can freeze completely). Bears doze off slowly, cool down only a little and are EASILY aroused from their zzzzzz-ing.

But our knowledge all came later.
For the better part of the day, we climbed the hill (3km to get to the base, an hour and a half to get up the two-and-a-half-kms to 960m, lunch at the top in the biting wind, views appreciated – Brasov town is so pretty from atop the hill and there was snow on the distant mountains – forty minutes to get back down, and then another 3km back home again. Only two kids had the energy to manage the trek to market for food, and although the Father boasted he could walk for another week, he was discovered prostrate on the couch upon our return <wink> )

We didn’t take a picture of the Brasov Hollywood sign from a distance, but that’s where we walked up to, and we DID get a picture to prove *that* - lucky for us some other traveller took a pic that we have commandeered:

up up up

up and turning another corner

and up some more

“Looks like a 3-D map,” one of the kids said.

If you’d like to see the bears foraging for watermelon and other goodies right outside Leo and Lili’s apartment, you can watch this video – it was shot by their friends just a few months back.

Brasov, Romania

…you end up with a lot of corn. A LOT!

Perhaps it all started last night.
Someone burnt the rice, but salvaged a fair portion of it.
En route to the table he dropped it.
Someone else put the oats on to soak for porridge in the morning. Being very chunky oats, they need to be soaked overnight – I don’t think even a whole day of boiling would soften them. That someone did not add enough milk or water and all was absorbed far too quickly, leaving over half the potful dry and tough.
So the mother decided to cook up the cornmeal she had bought. You see, she had noticed a phenomenal amount of the stuff at the market and in all the little supermarkets, and what’s more, people were buying it, so she assumed it was probably Very Romanian, and bought some herself. Besides, it was cheap! Mr Google confirmed her suspicion, provided some recipes and away she went. Only she misread the recipe and it did not occur to her until she was pouring in the two cups of cornmeal/cornflour (depending on where you live, you can choose which word to use – in any case, it’s the yellow gritty stuff) that six litres of boiling water was A LOT.
And two cups of ground corn did little to change the consistency of the water, let alone turn it into a thick bread-like substance. A quick re-search of yesterday’s computer pages revealed the magic water quantity to be six CUPS. Mother poured off three quarters of the water and added the rest of the packet of cornmeal, stirred like crazy, but not crazy enough and produced a barely palatable very bland lumpy porridge. Pouring over kefir and dolloping on jam improved the situation only slightly.
But we ate it. There’s a saying here about this dish (Mămăligă), which has long been considered the poor man’s dish:

He doesn’t even have a mămăliga on the table.

We did, and we will for a few more days yet! Leftovers from breakfast were turned into what is also apparently another Romanian dish – we took balls of the now cool mixture, stuffed them with cheese and baked in the oven. Crunchy on the outside and a bit like mashed potato on the inside, they were decidedly more of a hit than the breakfast gruel. They still lacked in flavour, but were promising enough that we decided Next Time (yes, there will be a next time!) we would fry up some onion, garlic, cumin and coriander, and mix that through before baking. A spicy tomato sauce on the side should do very well too! Here’s a pic, pre-baking:

 

But before we get to the next batch of corn-mush, we’ve got this lot to contend with. Upon our return from an afternoon stroll, we set to dealing with the remaining watery substance saved from the morning’s disaster. Waste not, want not.
Having learnt the lesson about adding the corn slowly, we added our newly-purchased bagful Very Slowly Indeed. I stirred, Jgirl15 sprinkled it over, one teaspoonful at a time. Painful, but effective – there was not one lump to be seen. And we also got it past the gruel stage, to a thick cake-like consistency. It was impossible to stir, but looked just like the pictures on our computer screen (which is not saying a lot – it really does appear none-too-appetising, but it’s cheap remember!) In fact, you can have a look if you like:

Now we need to decide what to do with it. Authentic local options include crumbling it into a bowlful of hot milk (we don’t have enough milk for that)….slicing and eating as is (we’d need at least butter and jam on top!)….eating with sour cream and cheese….slicing and frying with eggs and sausage. Ah yes, and we’ll drown it all in spicy chilli sauce. That sounds more like us.

But tomorrow morning we’ll be eating oat porridge – and it’s already nice-n-soft.

By the way, in the middle of tonight’s stirring, Mboy6 pleaded with us to look out the window. In spite of potentially condemning the corn to a final unceremonious death, and potentially more tragically, ruining our pot if it were to stick and burn, we took leave to follow the enthusiasm at the balcony window. And we grabbed the camera.

NOTE TO BE REMOVED LATER:
We have added a bunch of photos to this post. Feel free to click and look.

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