Pilgrims’ Progress

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.

Brasov, Romania

We arrived in Romania knowing how to say “Praise the Lord!” in Romanian and that we had once known how to say, “I love you”. Both have fairly limited contexts for use.

Quickly we learnt:  
yes
no
thank you
is
good/fine
a few numbers
Guten Appetit
hot (which sounds like *cold* just to confuse you)
cake
goodbye (it’s a pity we forgot how to say hello and therefore couldn’t say anything meaningful until *leaving* each stall at the market)
Having failed with the first form of hello, next we learnt how to say it in Transylvania – useful because that’s where we are. But maybe not so useful after all; turns out it’s just for use with good friends. Note to self: make more of an effort to learn *hello*

By today (and a morning spent at the market saying “da” to everything and having no idea what was being said, we decided it would be prudent to learn how to say, “I do not understand. I do not speak Romanian.” Leo and Lili and their four children came for dinner and we quizzed them. Thankfully it’s easy! In the course of trying out some phrases we even learnt our first conjugation. And we have started coming to terms with dots and squiggles put in funny places, the hard sh sound and more vowels than we realised existed. 

Picking up language in situ is easy. Just by listening to the Romanians we have been hanging out with (or eavesdropping on conversations at the market) you pick up so much (like BUT, REALLY!, CHURCH, BLACK, SCHOOL, BUS, TAXI). And by reading packets of food we’ve bought, we’ve learnt more. And by googling white cheese, we’ve learnt oodles – there are over a dozen sorts here! We have had the added advantage of having a television (never thought I’d say *that* was an advantage!) and with most of the programmes being subtitled, you learn. Reading song lyrics and following a written discussion outline have also added to our informal “lessons”!

I say it’s easy, but maybe that’s an oversimplification. For example, I have picked up some contexts in which to use a particular phrase/word (see I don’t even know if it’s one word, or two – and as for the spelling, who knows? – this is just what it sounds like to my untrained ear) “HEI-DE”. When your kids are standing in the way of someone on the street, you say it. When you are ready to leave someone’s house, you say it. I guess it means something like “Come here” or “Go now” or “Move”, but I’m not certain. I can, however, use it and make our Romanian friends smile!

I say it’s easy, but that’s not entirely true. Yes, you learn more Romanian living in Romania than you would living at home with no exposure to it. But it still takes effort. And I have to confess I think I might be suffering from end-of-trip-itis. When I compare my language acquisition in Laos to here, there’s definitely some enthusiasm lacking. Before heading out to the market tomorrow, I will forget to re-read the phrases jotted down tonight – oh, I’ll think about it as I trot down the stairs, but I won’t be bothered going back for the scrap of paper. Pity, coz it would have meant I could get half a kilo of cheese *easily* instead of causing the poor shop assistant to explain that I have to buy a block and she cannot slice it!
Perhaps motivation was higher in Laos, because we didn’t want to get ripped off and the language was so different that there was no way we could just guess. Romanian is a Romance language, which naturally means it has a lot in common with Italian (not that we’re experts with Italian either, after just one month there!), but it does provide a bit of wriggle-room for making slightly educated guesses. There was no chance of guessing in Laos!
Possibly we’re getting lazy. Tomorrow we’ll go in to a travel agent to find out about tickets to Istanbul. I still won’t have remembered, “Hello” (lazy), so I’ll just launch in with “Do you speak English?” (lazy) and when she replies, “Yes”, I’ll be relieved (lazy). She won’t be able to help, but will point us up the street to another agent. We will KNOW he can help, but he will not speak a word of English. Not One Word. With lots of gesticulation and pointing-at-map-and-calendar and throwing round a few random words from various languages, we will spend a good half hour just to find out the cost of a bus ticket, where the bus leaves from and how long the journey takes (19 hours aaagghh). I realise we’d do well to return with our phrasebook, but in the end, we decide to get Leo to ring and confirm the little we have learnt (lazy again).

Must say, though, that when you make an effort, it is richly rewarded here. Even saying one Romanian word brings broad grins onto withered old wrinkled faces, young make-up-ed faces and stubbly-bearded faces alike. People are eager to help you learn and willing to repeat things until you get it right. One small effort to learn one word today resulted in the lady at the next stall asking (I think) if all those children milling around were mine. You could just tell she would have launched into conversation if we had possessed the ability. Must be time to learn one of the phrases that we usually pick up very quickly in a country: eight children!

Or maybe the novelty of learning something that you’re only going to use for a short time has simply worn off. Hard to say.

Krakow, Poland What do you do when you turn up in a country where you don’t speak the language and very few people speak English? Well, I don’t know what you would do, but we went from door to door in ... [Continue reading this entry]

Berlin, Germany by Rob - because only he was there It was time for one final skirmish with the German Bureaucracy machine. Having successfully abmeldung-ed (de-registered) one van the previous day without any real problems, I was anticipating my trip to ... [Continue reading this entry]

Biser, Bulgaria We’ve been here a week and haven’t even walked through the village. Unheard of for us! But in some ways it didn’t matter where we were right now – just had to be off Schengen territory and preferably ... [Continue reading this entry]

Biser, Bulgaria

We’re supposed to be having a quiet relaxing stay here on the outskirts of a small village. So how is it that there is so much to say about it? It all started with bicycle-horses being manoeuvred around ... [Continue reading this entry]

Beach Number 1, Greece

 

Being able to recite the Greek alphabet, a feat learned almost three decades ago and for some reason retained ever since, is of little help when your feet touch Greek ... [Continue reading this entry]

Brindisi, Italy For the second day in a row the warm wind was howling, stirring up the ocean to waves too fierce for the little kids to venture into. At sunset the night before last, the sky had turned ominously ... [Continue reading this entry]

Capitolo, Italy We cut the breakfast rockmelon into eleven slices. Rob ate two, as Grandpa was out of reach, somewhere over the Indian Ocean. He joined us for lunch though – we discovered two emails from Dubai in the inbox just as ... [Continue reading this entry]

by Rachael Nyons, France We haven’t exactly left France yet, but our tiny taste is drawing to a close. We were just contemplating (read: blog post author just grilled everyone for ideas <wink> actually, the contributions flowed thick and fast and ... [Continue reading this entry]