All the exciting action (ahem) is now moving here — sorry, Romanian language only, automated translation available through Google Translate.

I will keep the content online anyway. Who knows, maybe I’ll even post now and then.

Cheers.

Edit: I have solved the theme problem mentioned earlier with Matt’s beautiful Comet. Check out his other themes as well at frostpress.com.

Everyday I’m a day older. Every week I’m a week older. Every month I’m a month older. So you’ve guessed by now that I don’t believe it’s anything special to be one year older. And indeed it was almost an ordinary day.

Everybody congratulated me. I even decided to put up with a tradition I hate and I bought cookies and refreshments to offer them at work. Of course, every woman that went by the office and saw the cookies, wanted to know how old I was. Most of them said I’m very young, some said nothing, but all of them asked. I wonder how old they thought I was.

So everybody congratulated me, except my father. I guess the big fight we had over the phone about 2 weeks ago is still bothering him. Or he simply forgot. Either way, I tried not to get too bothered by it. Since I’m mentioning it here, I guess it didn’t work. Well, I have warned him not to push all my wrong buttons the way he did… I even told him I’m in an office full of people so I can’t discuss the things he was bringing up. Nothing mattered for him, and eventually he managed to get me really mad. So I shouted at him, and cursed a lot, and got really really mad… I thought my mother alone had the gift to bring out the worst in me, but I was obviously wrong.

Crenguţa wasn’t feeling very well, she’s probably coming down with the flu (again), so we ordered a pizza and stayed home. We opened a bottle of wine, which proved not to be very good, and didn’t go too well with the pizzas, but we drank it anyway. Then we went to sleep.

There’s a superstition among some people I know that what you do the first day you’ll do the whole year afterwards. Let’s cross our fingers it’s just a superstition, or at least it doesn’t apply to the first day of work in a year…

I think it is another sign I should be losing some weight! God dammit, maybe one of these days I’ll get my thumb out of my ass and start exercising…

Yesterday…

Today…

And yes, I’ve spilled my coffee all over the keyboard when it happend, but it survived. A keyboard with 9 lives… 8 starting this morning.

Our vet told us once that he risks turning epileptic because of such great fear and advised to put him under anesthesia during hair trimming. So that’s how we did it the last 3 or 4 times, and it seems to work a lot better this way. He doesn’t get those horrible rashes anymore, his ears aren’t itchy for days anymore, so there’s no more head shaking, no more scratching his skin to shreds, no more sleepless nights for us .

And because I finally managed to get off my ass and buy a camera, today I can even post a “before/after” article . All images were taken today, and all of them show Dexter, you’ll have to trust me on this. See them below the fold…

Before…

… and after

Not much to say, really, because the show was indeed outstanding. Accompanied by (I’m sorry I didn’t get their names) an Italian on guitar, a Croatian on accordion and his old band matte Gumbi on percussion, Al proved again, although unnecessarily, that he is a great musician and guitar player.

Edit: According to this article in the online edition of Washington Post, they were Peo Alfonsi and Fausto Beccalossi:

In addition to his longtime percussionist Gumbi Ortiz, a master of Caribbean polyrhythms, Di Meola was accompanied by two Italian-born musicians: accordionist Fausto Beccalossi and guitarist Peo Alfonsi.

I don’t know where did I get the Croatian thing, but I stand corrected.

The guy on accordion was also brilliant. I wasn’t aware an accordion was capable of such things. And he was sometimes singing along too, which was touching me in unexpected ways.

Mike Joyce puts it better:

There were several moments, however, when accordionist Beccalossi nearly stole the show with his deeply soulful rhapsodies.

A very big surprise was also Gumbi’s instrument, something I’ve never seen before, literally a big crate that was also serving as his stool. Yet that crate sounded almost like a drum kit when pounded by his bare hands. Absolutely spectacular.

Edit: Thanks to the same Washington Post article and Wikipedia, I now know the instrument is called Cajón, the Spanish word for crate, so I was close.

I’ll leave you with these pictures taken with my (crappy) mobile phone, in which you will have to trust me there’s Al di Meola on stage, last night in Bucharest.

I just wish these things would happen more often than once a few years…

Her name is Anca. I think I almost had a crush on her for a while. She was so full of life, and so funny. And I was a kid fresh out of highschool, with little to no brains at all, feeling lost and alone in the big city, while she had already graduated medical school. So she was (almost) an MD, and she was taking another job while completing her studies.

So for a few months we digitally painted cartoons together. But when we all decided to leave after two or more months without payment (a long story, no place for it here), we kept in touch… sort of…

Although we were living in the same city, we didn’t see each other very often. First because of me, the perpetual student who didn’t seem to be able to graduate, then because of my countless jobs with long hours, many times late into the night, somehow this shitty everyday life always seemed to get in the way. But we occasionally spoke on the phone and payed each other short visits.

We eventually met her family and discovered that her husband, Sever the surgeon, was just as funny, and decent, and hard working and dependable as she was. A few years down the line came their son, Victor, which was by far the funniest and the smartest kid I have even met.

Then they had to move to the opposite corner of the country, because they couldn’t find the money needed to ”grease” the wheels in the system. They couldn’t get jobs as doctors in the capital of this fucking country, so they moved somewhere else. I know both me and Crenguţa were saddened by this, but I also felt rage because I knew the system and I knew there are very few chances to fight it and succeed. For a while I had suspected them of choosing the easy way out, but now I know better.

So our already not-so-often visits disappeared altogether; we kept in touch on the phone, but this is hardly a relationship. Our feelings (mine, at least) never changed, though. Once in a while I would think of them, so distant in that obscure part of the country, and my heart would fill with a painfull mixture of fondness and sadness and sense of loss…

Then came Crenguţa’s health problem and the sky collapsed on both our heads… There were many things we did wrong or we didn’t do at all, one of them being not keeping in touch with almost anyone, including Anca and Sever. But we owe them a great deal, they always helped with medical problems when we didn’t know which way to turn next, by recommending us to fellow doctors, or questioning around about this or that doctor on behalf of us…

Anyway, this morning I got an e-mail from Anca. It had no subject line, and the body had only a few lines, saying:

My dears,
We are leaving for Lille, France, to work there. We hope everything will turn out allright, and that we and Victor will be able to adjust. Stay safe and be sure to visit us when in the area.

With love,
Anca and Sever

I immediately tried to call her on her mobile but got no answer, and she never returned my calls. I was finally able to get her on the phone and find out more about what’s going on. So they got really good job offers in Lille, which I’m really happy to know. They don’t have a place to stay at the moment, so they will be living in a student campus. Only Anca and Sever are going for now, and they’ll bring Victor and Anca’s mother when things settle a bit.

It’s moments like this when you realize how stupid you can sometimes be… Yes, they were far away, but that shouldn’t have been a problem. We should have visited more often, we should have spoken more often, we should have been there for each other.

I don’t want this to sound like it’s the end of the world (although it surely feels like that now), but let’s be frank: we couldn’t manage to go see them in their new home a few hundreds kilometers away, inside the same country. How often are we going to see them now that they are thousands of kilometers away, and in a different country?

This is what really saddens me the most, although I’m very happy for them and I pray that things turn out very well for them. It feels like I’m loosing them all over again!

OK, I’ll cut my whining short now, and leave you with a beautiful song and a couple of old pictures (they were taken 3 years ago) of Anca, Sever and Victor.

Best of luck to all of you! We love you. We’ll surely miss you.

Anca, this song is for you:
Long Nights, by Eddie Vedder

Note: I had to change the file’s name and the player plugin, because the jerks at beemp3.com were hotlinking to the .mp3 on my server, there were roughly 15 hits a day at 6MBs a piece…

But it wasn’t very bad, really. There were lots of small little things that ruined it for me, but not any major issue, fortunately. Just the next day after our trip to Luxor (ancient Thebes) we saw the news about a bus crash that killed 9 people on their way to Cairo. Not that our trip was event free, but it was a smooth ride compared to this.

Photo 1: Buses fanning out the entire road width, including the opposite lane.

For example, the resort was OK, but not exceptional. It was fairly clean, the room was big but the bathroom was quite small. Especially the shower booth was really small, but this was no longer a surprise after the first trip out of the resort… these people are incredibly filthy!

What was not OK about the resort was that it was literally filled with Russians, most of the families having at least one small kid, but many of them having 3 or 4! Especially during meal hours the situation was getting hairy: on top of the normal chatter noise of so many people there were the very frequent hysterical cries of small children, all rounded up by the waiters running in between the tables, stacking up huge piles of dirty dishes and eating utensils on platters the size of a big truck wheel.

The villages we crossed on our way to Luxor were very poor, with a depressing gray look. Most of the buildings are left unfinished to avoid some taxes, and this gives them an almost bombarded look. In front of most buildings there are stables with skinny cows or goats. The desert looks eerie, it’s almost like the surface of the moon except for the red color of the mountains and the sand.

Photo 2: Stables for animals in front of unfinished buildings.

But everywhere you looked, clusters of men sitting down at road crossings or building corners, smoking and chatting, or just sitting there. Being poor is nothing to be ashamed of, especially if you at least try to do something about it. But they seemed to be perfectly happy with the situation, and they were just sitting there, doing absolutely NOTHING!

Photo 3: La dolce vita, the Egyptian way.

The roads were surprisingly good (a lot better than Romanian ones, that’s for sure) and thank God for that, ’cause the way they drive is bad enough. They form convoys of dozens (even hundreds) of buses, with police or military escort, then they speed like hell — 120-140 kmph — leaving only 2-3 meters between vehicles. On top of that, they don’t use the headlights during night time, except for brief periods of time. A ride on a bus there feels really like extreme sports.

Photo 4: Military escort.

Photo 5: Their understanding of safety gap between vehicles: no gap! During nighttime and with headlights off, it gets really scary, especially at speeds over 120 kmph.

Fortunately, the temples of Luxor and Karnak were truly spectacular, so the effort of those long ours on a bus seat was not in vain. Karnak impressed me the most, I was amazed by the sheer scale of it and the fact that so much of it survived some 5.000 years. There are places where the original paint is still visible! For fuck’s sake, our contemporaries are not able to make something last for 10 years, never mind 1000!

Photo 6: The Hypostyle Hall inside the Karnak Temple Complex, begun during the reign of Ramses I

Photo 7: Original paint can still be seen in some places.

The so-called trip on the Nile was almost a bad joke. Packed in some funky looking boats that possessed a close resemblance to gypsy tents in our own country, we traveled for 10 minutes from one bank to the other.

Photo 8: A ‘trip’ on the Nile River.

On the same lines, the sea trip organized by our agency was a waste of time and money. The schedule was briefly mentioning a visit to the Paradise Island. Our imagination was filling the gaps with beautiful scenery, corals, exotic vegetation and fauna. Only once arrived there, and when we specifically asked, we were told the reason the island is called like that is because it hosts a bar/terrace called Paradise! And the ‘island’ was in fact a small piece of reddish land protruding from the deep blue Red Sea, and the terrace was in fact a shaky construction all covered with reed!

Photo 9: The ‘Paradise Island’.

So if you are perfectly happy with sun bathing and swimming and never leaving the resort, then you should be just fine and have a great time. Of course, you should still be able to ignore the Russians and their small kids, the planes constantly flying over the resort, the drinks that had only a vague resemblance to their western originals and sometimes even side effects, like getting your tongue a bright orange color for a while.

Photo 10: Every 10 minutes there was a plane on its way to and from Hurghada Airport.

Photo 11: The sodas served had funny side effects.

Oh, and despite the fact that everybody in the resort was an ‘all inclusive’ customer, we were still forced to wear these silly plastic bracelets that read ‘all inclusive’. But I wouldn’t have missed the opportunity to scratch my sun irritated skin wit it, not for the world!

As a conclusion: I will think very very well before going to another Muslim country again, and especially in Africa!

Starting today, we’ll be in Hurghada, Egypt for a week. I’d love to keep you posted or at least upload some pictures, but Alina, Crenguţa’s sister has lost the data cable of the camera. And I’m not sure the hotel has an Internet connection, although it probably does. We’ll see.

Happy Easter everyone!

Anyway, I didn’t forget about it (well, I did, we both did, but I was reminded by my mother-in-law, who called that morning to congratulate us), so we properly celebrated it that night with a romantic dinner in a very chic restaurant. I just didn’t find the time to write about it. After years of retirement for medical reasons, Crenguţa started working again this January (in an office environment and on a schedule, that is, ’cause she never stopped working. But it was about time she had a break from translation work…). This meant we had to ask her mother to take Dexter back with her to Buzău, because we didn’t want him all by himself all day long. It’s been two months already since their departure, and we miss him like hell.

So I dug up some slightly older pictures (December 2007 – January 2008). Boy, the apartment is so empty without him!