Category: Our Story

Saturday morning. Mid August, the sun is shining and I step out of my home in Breb with my camera – detestation unknown. I see the neighbors and Georgy Pop making Horinca in Maria’s Casan. We say hi and Pertu our other neighbor appears and tells me to buy his land down at the cross. This is all before nine o’clock and within five minutes of leaving the house.

Only the day before we were stopped by a guy on top of his huge Maramures gate.
” Hey, English guy, I have to take down my gate, it’s going to fall into the river other wise. You buy it?”
“How much?”
He scratches his head and says “400 euro”
A 50 year old wooden gate, hand carved and over 7 meters wide… I mean, what else can you say “OK, will bring down the tractor and you can put it on there, will pay you next week.”

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I guess Petru had heard I was buying and wasted no time. Hill Billy turned up with his sheep, he was my que to leave and I said I would walk with him.
” Where you going?” I asked as we started to walk.
” Up the mountain, in the woods” he smiled threw his caner ridden lips.
I had no plans, so the woods it would be. We walked up and out of the village avoiding the fallen fruit on the road and into the hills above. Hill pointed out where every one was neglecting their land. Not keeping the trees trimmed the way they should and how it was all changing. I call him Hill and his wife Billy as they live 100% off the land, have done all their lives. We bought their house off them so they could move out this winter and stay in the town with heating and water etc. They want to retire and so this is his last summer of working the land and he was very reflective on the whole thing.

” Look at that, the grass has turned to trees! How can you keep your land like this? The kids, they want fast cars and a job in Germany” he says as he looks down slightly and shakes his head. His herd of 5 close by, following like… sheep.

We reached his land and he proudly showed me the prune trees he planted him self that are now 10m high. He rattles the branches so the sheep can eat the sweet fruit. I am given a guided tour or his lifes work and he sits down to role a cigarette.

I hear some giggling in the distance. ” I will investigate and come back” I said. Over the ridge I find two young girls picking berry’s from a tree. They become super self concise on my approach, but after 5 minutes they are once again start to sing and fool around. I capture the moment with my camera.

” We will be on the internet” they say to each other in Romanian, the giggles turning into pain of laughter. They explain how they get 1.5 ron a kilo for the berries and calculate with some pride, that if they work hard they will earn more than a grown man earns in a day.

I realise they will earn nothing if I keep taking pictures and say my goodbyes. As I leave, Hill Billy is ready to go on to his next piece of land. We walk across the mountain slope in the flickering sunshine through the leaves and come to Claudia’s rock. He poses for a picture so I can post it on Claudia’s FB to show her the carvings are still there.

Lunch time and home beckons.

” Drum Bun Domno” I say; he nods his cap and is gone -the sounds of the sheep bells slowly drowning out into the thick of the forest beyond.

“I rarely go to church at Christmas, but I always go at Easter”
This is what I was told when I asked “ How big a deal is Easter here in Romania?”
In the UK Easter is, 3 weeks off for the kids and you get the bank holidays, so prime time to bugger off. Here in our village of Breb, its Christmas all over again and every one comes home from their jobs abroad. Below is a set of pics I took over the Easter weekend in Breb.

‘So, being a God Parent, is there anything we have to do?’ I asked “Like say something at the speeches or something?’
‘Your going to be God Parent Duncan?’
‘Yes’
‘When?’
‘Tomorrow’
‘Tomorrow? And you don’t know what your supposed to be doing?’
‘…no’
‘Have you bought your candles?’
‘Why do I need candles?’

Watch the film of Măriuţa and Laurenţiu Şandor’s wedding in Breb and you’ll find out 🙂

It’s been an interesting summer here in Transylvania. The weather has been great. I have made a new video called ‘The House that Penny Built’ (Part 2). It show’s what we have been up to, why Claudia wanted to buy some Viagra in Sighetu and fellow’s Penny’s ever encroaching deadline of our first guests in October. Will she be ready in time? Click the link here watch it villa in breb maramures you need to scroll down the page a bit to see the video.

Penny and the kids have been in Maramures for the last few weeks working on the final finishes to Casa Mica, our first villa to open. Angus and Claudia have finished school for this year and are hoping to find a new teacher for them to start in Sept ready to fly south when they all go to Siwa.

Nick, a reporter from the Daily Mail came out to spend last week with us writing a piece for the Saturday Travel section. It will be in the paper in a month or so he recons. The pics below are to go with the story. We took him to the Merry Cemetery, the Communist Museum, up the mountain to have lunch with the shepherds and spent lazy days walking around the village meeting the locals and drinking the Holinka 🙂

A friend of mine come over to Bucharest last weekend. We did as we always do, and said we’d have a quite one.

Around 8.00pm we headed out to check out the London Pup, a large establishment out of town a bit that has a huge permanent sign over the door saying “Party animals welcome”. The bar fit for a rugby club.

‘Ah’ my friend said on entering it ‘ there is no one here’
I have lived abroad for 7 years now and I still suffer from the licensing law habit of the first world war and feel I need to have filled my boots by 11.00pm.

We sat at the bar and as I had an important meeting the next day, I ordered mineral water. My friend spotted a bottle of Rum above the bar and ended up ordering some sort of a cocktail in English, to a guy who spoke only Romanian. We caught up on what was happening in our lives and the time flyed by.

A young woman wearing a pair of tartan shorts that stopped a few centimetres below her perfectly shaped butt walked in and sat on a bar stool near to us.

My friend could not help but notice her ‘… and so um yeah, work is going well and..’
The woman heard us speaking and eventually asked ‘ unde este?’
‘ We are from London’ I said
It appeared to be the magic word as her reply was ‘ I cannot hear you from here, I will come and sit in between you both’.
Our conversation changed from family and work to…
‘ I like London, I want to go, I like rum’ she said, as she ordered the same drink as my friend and put it on the same bill.

I could see my friend assumed she was a prostitute looking for work, but I was not so sure: she had necked three shots in about 10 minutes of arriving in the bar and when she went to the toilet we did not get a warning signal from the bar staff to stay away. I told my friend that it is common in Bucharest: skint students will latch on to foreign guys as they are assumed to all be rich and there goal is free drinks all night and if their lucky, a wedding ring.

‘You smoke?’ The girl asked me looking like on of Dracula’s wives.
‘No’ I said.
She noticed my drink ‘ You drink?’
‘No’ I said smiling
She leaned close to me and asked ‘Are you married?’
‘Yes’ I said still smiling
She instantly shifted in her seat facing directly towards my friend and asked him the same question.
‘No’ he said.
She did not move her position and honed in. ‘ How old are you’ she said sounding like Borat’s sister.
‘ We’re 40….’ my friend said not bothering to add the word six to the end of his sentence.
‘I am 23, I medical student, I have no money, I loooooooove English man’

My friend caught my eye with a, is she for real look as they both drank their matching cocktails.

The London Pup stayed more like the Nags head in Daganem for most of the evening and so it was decided to go to Lipscani, the old centre that rocks till the early hours.
‘ I come… with you’ Alexandria said as we now knew her.

We grabbed a cab and she sat in the front smoking whilst hitting on the driver. My friend was still convinced she was a working girl, but I persuaded him she was not and that this was the correct way for a foreigner to experience Bucharest. Being a traveller and all he agreed to go with it.

‘ We go Mojo’s, but you pay’ she kept saying
Shit, is the hustle not by the hour but by commission, from the dodgy nightclub owner? I thought to myself. We arrived; it was quid each to get in. We relaxed. There was only one table left, right in front of the karoke stage and in full view of the entire bar.

‘I like to sing, I looooove to sing… with you’ Alexandria said to my friend as she got up to dance to an out of tune version of Your Simply the Best. She moved around the table and parked herself on me. I managed to move her to the end of my knee and stop the lap dancing but didn’t notice a few moments later that she had her tongue down my friends throat, whilst still sitting on my knee.

Jesus, what will people think, to old English guys hitting on a poor defenceless Romanian girl. I thought

I managed to move her to a stool next to my friend and she started to climb on to him. I could see we were the karoke show now and not the main stage.

This looks so bad; have to think of a way out of this I thought.

Alexandria’s song came up and my friend thought he was going to be dragged on stage, but instead went up with a woman sitting at the table next to us and did a very hot number with her. On sitting back down, my friend was not sure what the night ahead had planned for him.

Alexandria looked into his eyes ‘I like women’ she said ‘I looooooove women… I want her’ and pointed to her duo singer who was waiting for her.

We started to role about with laughter until we noticed our own song was queued and so jumped up on the stage doing a very ad lib version of Bufflo Solder whilst dancing to the reggie beat. The crowed loved us, we loved it, Alexandria loved her new friend and we took our moment of fame to be seen leaving the building on our own – our ambassador reputations in tact 🙂