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Miccsoda?
What can you learn from a single line on a menu? Well, at times, quite a lot...The picture is the specials at the "grill" by the swimming pool at a hotel in Hungary. Each day a different location is...
View ArticleDemocracy and Rosia Montana
There has been a big story in Romania for years now - that of the proposed gold mining operation at Rosia Montana. Anyone in Romania can skip the beginning of this since you all know the ins and outs...
View ArticleRomanian Vignettes
There is a system of heating and hot water in Romania, whereby for the (many) blocks of flats, there is a centralised building where they heat the water and pump it around the buildings, providing hot...
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A 100 year old mirror
Recently, I started reading what seems to be widely regarded as "The Great Transylvanian Novel", which is Miklos Banffy's Transylvanian trilogy (or Banffy Miklos's if you prefer). Period literature is...
View ArticleLightbulbs
How many politicians in Romania does it take to change a light bulb? One or two to sign the contract handing over billions of dollars of taxpayers money to a massive multinational corporation to do...
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Health and Safety
One of the things that the Daily Mail reading knobheads who make up a dangerously large proportion of my countrymen moan about is "health and safety". You know, how people are much safer now and people...
View ArticleExtreme Mildness
That's about as oxymoronic as it gets, I suspect, but in fact it fits.We are experiencing a very very weird winter. As I may have gone on about at some length, Csikszereda is a very cold place....
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Sportopolis
I wonder if there is any town that is has produced as many successful sportspeople per head of population as Csikszereda.Novak EdouardI have gone on before about the ice hockey team and how they are...
View ArticleModern slavery in the free market
My neighbour has just come home from Sweden. She's been working there for a month or so picking asparagus. She came home early because she started suffering from a heart condition and basically was...
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Exams
This week is exam week for the 8th graders of Romania. Essentially, they have 2 (or 3 - see below) big exams, after which their futures (or the next 4 years of those futures anyway) are decided....
View ArticleRomtelecom, setting Romania back 30 years
Customer service in Romania is frequently (though by no means always) a haphazard affair, with there still being a significant number of places where your custom is seen as more of a burden than a...
View ArticleDay of the flag
Yesterday, I learned while watching the news, was "The Day of the Romanian Flag". WTF is that? There's also a day for the national anthem, and a day for the constitution. I am not yet sure if there is...
View ArticleTesting my patience
So, I wrote last week about the important tests for 8th graders which go a long way to deciding their next 4 years. I mentioned then that I don’t believe in testing in general, because I think it tends...
View ArticleMore collective punishment, more war crimes
There will come a time, in the not too distant future, when those who seek to justify Israel's destruction of Gaza will be looked upon as craven and disgraceful as those western communists who...
View ArticleOn pro- and anti-
Anyone who is connected to me on facebook will have noticed that of late my updates have tended to be ones of support for the people of Gaza, and horror at the actions of the Israeli state. There...
View ArticleRomania's Presidential Elections (2014 edition)
While the number of people in Romania continues to drop like a stone, the number of people who want to be the President of those who are left seems to be rising just as fast. At some point at this...
View ArticleWhy Romania is screwed
We are now firmly in the endgame of the presidential election, with Victor Ponta facing Klaus Iohannis. Regular readers of this bog will have a fairly good idea as to where my sympathies lie (or in...
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Walls of Disappointment
Lumme. I haven't posted here since the day I made it clear that Victor Ponta would win the presidential election. What a lot of water has passed under the bridge since then. I'm very familiar with...
View Article"Human Rights Fundamentalism": Orban makes it clear where he stands
I was away recently, and while I was away, Hungarian prime minister came to Tusnad (near where we now live) to make a speech at the annual "Tusvanyos" event. This was the venue last year for the...
View ArticleWhither democracy?
Romania has a new technocratic government. With politicians either corrupt or assumed to be, there is a logic to that, and the idea of having experts running the various ministries makes a lot of sense...
View ArticleA "terrorist sympathiser" writes
397 British MPs are so desperate to be seen to be doing something that they have decided to see how many innocent people they can kill in response to innocent people being killed. What's that Maslow...
View ArticleStanding Up
Sometimes I ask myself what I would have done if I had been German in the 1930s. I am imagining that most liberally minded Europeans have asked themselves the same (what they would have done, not what...
View ArticleSmall town Romania
I never write here any more, I guess I've run out of things to say, but from time to time I guess events still have the power to rouse me from my apathy...So, here's the story...I am involved in an...
View ArticleA citizen of nowhere checks out
I've reached the conclusion that trying to fight for and advocate what is best for the UK now has to take second place to advocating for what is best for the EU. And clearly what is best for the EU is...
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Fear and loathing in Harghita County
Some news stories are depressing in the extreme (and seemingly there are an increasing number of these). But once in a while one comes along that is so depressing that it makes me despair. So much in...
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