Romania - Tourist Destinations in B&W

A while ago I was invited to post a black and white picture from Romania, for 5 days in a row.

I accepted the challenge back then. Although the posts were public, they are accessible to people who already have a Google Plus account, so I've decided to post them on my blog. I must say that I am not a B&W fan, I like vivid colors of nature, unenhanced by software, taken on as is basis: I like what I see, I shot, I save on my computer, and, eventually I publish it...


Day 1: Peles Castle, Sinaia, Prahova county

The day 1 photo presented, was shot back in February 2008, at Peles Castle, Prahova county.



This is the official page of Peles Castle: http://visit.peles.ro/

If you are interested or curious about other pictures taken at Peles, you might like to take a look at my photo albums:
Peles and Pelisor Castles and
Peles - Interiors.

Day 2: Water/Arts' Castle, Drobeta Turnu Severin, Mehedinti county

I took this pic earlier this year, 2014. 2014 is its centennial anniversary.

There's no official website, but, after its rehabilitation, there are some facilities worth mentioned (everything reduced to the space of a level of this building):
- museum,
- literary cafe,
- exhibition areas,
- panorama point.

Back on the 10th of May, 2014, was the opening of Drobeta Turnu Severin Photographers' Council Photo exhibition at the Art's Castle (Water Tower) at 16:00, among them my daughter, Iulia Midus. Here's a link towards my blog post with their exhibition.

Also at Arts' Castle, back in July, a friend of mine, Paula Aldescu, launched her second book, Un Vis de O Zi (A One Day Dream), when her relatives, her uncle and his sons, Bogdan, Tudor and Gheorghe Mosorescu, had a family painting exhibition opening.

If you want to enjoy the panorama offered by this tower, you might either climb the winding stairs, or simply use the elevator. You might have a clue of how my city looks like from the top of this tower, simply by visiting my photo album called Drobeta Turnu Severin, or clicking this link.

Day 3: Reflections First, Dubova, Mehedinti county

This is the B&W version of the original shown in one of my blog posts, From Drobeta Turnu Severin to Dubova. Just read the post which is an enhanced version of my review on Tripadvisor.com!

Day 4: Hercules Statue, Baile Herculane, Caras Severin county

Legend has it that the weary Hercules stopped in the valley to bathe and rest. During the 165 years of Roman domination of Dacia, the Herculaneum Spa was known all over the Empire. Unearthed stone carvings show that visiting Roman aristocrats turned the town into a Roman leisure center. Six statues of Hercules from the time have been discovered. A bronze replica of one of them, molded in 1874, stands as a landmark in the town center.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C4%83ile_Herculane

There's nothing about it on any of my blogs, so this could be a starting point for a post on this topic! Instead, I have a photo album called Baile Herculane, and here's the link to it.

Day 5: Bran Castle (XIII-th century), Brasov county

With my brief comment that this was NOT Dracula's Castle, I invite you to discover it through its own website.

The photo is almost hypnotic…Gives me goose bumps…Murders, poison, betrayal…
- original comment by Lucie P. on Google Plus

Here's my Bran Castle photo album (including the original of the one depicted in this post).

Photos Hors Concours

Beside the above selection there were some three photos I wanted to present. They are among Top 10 (not completed yet), but not in Top 5. I've decided to list them below.

For any questions or detail (if I will be able to provide), please let me your comment below!

Hunyad's Castle, Hunedoara county

Densus Church, Hunedoara county

Fire Walk With Me - Medieval Festival in Drobeta Turnu Severin, Mehedinti county

Just Night

Reading Dunia's lines, a Romanian writer friend, my thought began their way, at a slower pace at first, then at a higher rate, towards The Sheltering Sky. There is a certain sequence in this movie which I consider like some sort of an inflection point of its action. It is not a peak of its action, and rather a scene that seeds the grain for further thoughts, for future reflections. The sequence itself is not an exceptional one regarding the technique, yet the simple fact that keeps on rising from the depths of the memory after so many years, contradicts somehow the appearances. What truly strikes is the dialogue between Kit and Port (Debra Winger and John Malkovich):

Port: You know, I miss times like this, places like this, more than anything in the world.

Kit: I know you do. 

Port: This is what I wanted to show you: this place.

Kit: Yes.

Port: Come on!

Port: Here... the sky is so strange. It's almost solid. As if it were protecting us from what's behind. Look!

Kit: What's behind?

Port: Nothing! Just night.

Kit: I wish I could be like you, but I can't.

Port: Maybe we're afraid of the same thing.

Kit: No. We're not! You're not afraid to be alone. And you don't need anything. You don't need anyone. You could live without me.

Port: You know that, for me, loving means loving you. No matter what's wrong between us, there can never be anyone else. Maybe we're both afraid of loving too much!

Kit: Let's leave here!

Port: Okay!

Kit: Okay! 

The breaks in the dialogue between the two travelers were left on purpose. Actually Port is a traveler, and Kit is a combination between a traveler and a tourist. The difference between the two is essential, being explained right at the beginning of the movie:

A tourist is someone who thinks about going home the moment that arrived, whereas a traveler might not coming back at all. 

Bernardo Bertolucci is the director, and the script belongs to the writer of the the book on which the movie is based, Paul Bowles, along with Mark Peoploe.

And because we can not skip the music, I will use it as an ending, but I will not end until I will make you aware of watching the clip (some sort of a trailer) right to its end, in order to discover something to make you reflect even more!

Colors of the Fall

The other day I went to a funeral service in a small village near my town. The atmosphere was overwhelming, and the weather was cold and cloudy. Gray, compact, stratus clouds. A heart attack; and he was not even old. Nor young, yet not old...

On the way towards the church and the graveyard, I've noticed many colorful chrysanthemum by the fences.

In a churchyard by a river,

Lazing in the haze of midday...

While on my way back, I've shot some of them because I saw pretty colors in a gray day.

Mr. President

Usually I stay out of politics. Only I just wrote a comment on G+ related to Ceausescu, the former Romanian communist president, which appears in the clip (at the end of the post) of a Romanian rock band, ALTAR (MIND THE VOLUME!: clicking the link opens their website, and also their audio player). I thought I should add it as a post on my blog, so here it is:

An "emblematic figure" of Romania, a living nightmare for years until the 25th of December 1989. I was almost 19 back then, and at my 18th birthday I've had not hopes for a better future till my 40s. Luckily a Wind of Change blew all over Europe, and my dream came true less than a year later!

Now, we are changed, but not as some of us have dreamed of!

There are so many Romanians to vote abroad because they did not feel comfortable at home in Romania, they had no other option for a decent living in the country they really love.

I've noticed that the majority of the voters outside Romania was made out of young people! And if you are looking at them, they are not beggars or prostitutes! I'd rather say that they have white collar jobs! Yes, Romania has this kind of people too!

And these people want change in order to come back home, to live happily together their families and to work in and for their own country, Romania, a beautiful country as one might noticed right here in my Google Photo Albums!

There's a word for the situation that these voters want to change in Romania: kleptocracy!

Kleptocracy, alternatively cleptocracy or kleptarchy, is a form of political and government corruption where the government exists to increase the personal wealth and political power of its officials and the ruling class at the expense of the wider population, often with pretense of honest service.

Mehedinti County Roads

After a rainy summer, I thought we'll enjoy a sunny autumn. I was pretty wrong. We've had our sunny days at the beginning of the autumn, only the forest was still green. I wanted some sunny days while there are a large palette of colors in the hills towards the Godeanu Mountains in Mehedinti county, Romania.

In between the above mentioned periods of time, I saw some interesting cloud formation near my city (or is it a town?! - I was always wondered), Drobeta Turnu Severin. So I drove that way, and I wanted a better angle, then a better panorama, then a higher ground, then a view after the next corner, and the next... So I've reached a higher altitude village (430 m asl) at some 30 km away from Severin, Ciresu (the cherry tree).

The Wrong Turn

The road is winding among forests, meadows and grasslands.

Sometimes a calf is just sitting in the middle of the road like a veritable statue.

But the best pictures were the flora ones! In order to enjoy the beautiful autumnal flowers, one might want to pull over and make a few steps in the surrounding forests. He or she will be enchanted by a wide variety of colors and sounds! I leave you with the colors, and invite you to listen the sounds by yourselves!

Thistle flower

Clover flower

Thistle flower

Golden Rain

Purity or... Innocence

Little Sun

Rainy Clover

Illusion of Time

Stories within books are an illusion.
Printed images are an illusion.
Movies are an illusion.
Life is real.

How about time?

We perceive time through movement. We define time through movement. We relate time to events.
But how about the existence of time in the Universe?

We go from one point to another and we say we will reach the destination in time, or we will be late.

We tell stories about our history and we link an event to a fixed dated or period back in time. We can not change that date or that period.

We do something right now. We can change whatever we do now and do something different, but not very different, or not very far from our actual place. So we can not change time very much.

We say we’ll have a meeting at a certain date and time. We can postpone the event during the same day, the same week, or the same month... Or we can even cancel the event. So there’s a wide time margin change.

I imagine time as a long flexible blade tighten from one end until the moment that have just passed and free at the other end. The tightened end has no movement at all, the part representing the actual time has a limited movement, and the future, the far it is, the larger movement it has.

Now how about a reverse thinking: a tightened blade at the future end, and free at the opposite one?
The blade will look the other way around.

Taking those two blades and joining them together, their movement will froze. A frozen movement of time will be the equivalent of the past, or the fixed future, so there will be just moments on a scale, like coordinates on a 3D map. Time being the fourth dimension could be considered like any other dimensions. If we consider a point fixed in space, having the very same coordinates, no matter the time, the fourth dimension, time, could be tight as the previous three, so it will be like the time has stopped.

The result of combining the two blades will be a fixed blade (our conventional shape of time). Now we are looking at it like at a 2D shape from above. How about looking at it from one end? It will be a point! Yes, a point like any other 3D points in the space that we easily could imagine (with x, y and z coordinates).

What is time? Why the 20th Century was the Century of Speed? Why are we in such a hurry to solve more and more things? Is it the time, or is it all about our perception of a slippery dimension?

Fall. Fall in love.

A few weeks ago, a menu plate at the entrance of a terrace displayed an interesting text related to the newly coming season.

Autumn is the hardest season. The leaves are all falling, and they're falling like they're falling in love with the ground.

Today, after suggesting a title to a photo, I've remembered the above lines. Curious about who would be the author, I did a quick research on the web. I've discovered a name: Andrea Gibson. As stated on her website, she is a poet and an activist.

If you like the above photo, you might like the other ones from the very same album!

Full of Magic Brew

In a recent conversation I was asked about how people prepare coffee in my region. After quite a long answer, I decided to write a few lines on the blog about this. I am specifying "a few lines" because there were written thousands of pages on the subject, and there are so many ways and techniques to prepare coffee that a simple blog post will not be able to comprise all of them. The title of this post was proposed by my conversation partner from NYC.

I've started to drink coffee many years ago, and I was aware about the coffee drinking habit since I was a child. My grandparents (may them rest in peace!) slowly drank their coffee, and they seems to really enjoy drinking it. It was some sort of pleasure for them. And they were talking about "big men" issues (at least I thought so at my little age).

At that young age, my grandfather used to take me to buy coffee beans from a coffee shop downtown, placed at the corner of Dimitrie Cantemir and Traian streets. We were going there by car; he owned a Dacia 1100 (Renault 8). I remember that over the entrance, the shop had some sort of minaret tower decorated atop with the crescent moon and the star (as Turkish symbols). Nowadays there's only an orange cover and a banner holding a shop name. And the building facade looks awful.

The former coffee shop was located at the ground floor of this building, with the entrance on the corner.

On the counter were two similar metallic towers decorations, and behind them were the coffee grinders. Every time my grandfather used to buy only 100 grams of coffee beans at the price of 11 lei (Romanian currency). He explained to me that if he would buy more, the coffee would lose its aroma, not necessarily the taste, but its aroma, its flavor! After weighing the coffee beans, the seller grind it, and packed it in a light brown paper bag.

Back home with the small coffee bag! He took a kettle sized according to the number of cups of coffee to prepare. For every cup, he pour a cup of water (approx. 100 ml) in the kettle. Then he filled a teaspoon with ground coffee and pour it in the water (one teaspoonful for each cup of water). He put then the kettle on the stove and turned on the gas on the lowest position of the flame. The fire slowly heated the water so it could absorb the entire strength and aroma from those tiny coffee particles. When the water boiled for the first time, and the level of the boiling liquid started to raise into the kettle, he removed it from the fire, leave it for a couple of seconds to calm down. In each cup of coffee, he put a teaspoonful of the cream (caimac in Romanian) formed on top of the magic liquid. Then he put it back over the burning flames. After the second raise of the brewed coffee, he turned off the gas. A few drops of cold water were poured over the hot liquid inside the kettle in order to clear the brewed coffee of the particles remained in suspension. The coffee is now ready to be poured in the coffee cups. After this final operation, sugar is added to taste. A cigarette seemed to be a must among the adults while they are enjoying the steaming coffee.

As a parenthesis, I would like to insert some info about the coffee grinders.

Sometimes the coffee beans were grind at home using, of course, a coffee grinder. There are manual grinders and electrical grinders. In my collection I have one French and two Turkish genuine coffee grinders. I couldn't help myself to buy a couple of years ago, a brand new one with almost the very same design of the French one.

The French coffee grinder was made by Goldenberg & Cie, a tool manufacturing company. This company was started by Gustave Goldenberg, who built his first factory at Dorlisheim back in 1835, then another one in Zornhof près (near) Saverne in 1837, both in Alsace, France. After a few changes during the years, the company was purchased in 1986 by the British arm of Stanley.

Considering the information provided by a Fine Woodworking forum member, Charles R. Smith MD (crsmith), in one of his comprehensive history of Goldenberg et Cie, I believe that this coffee grinder was manufactured prior to 1870.

The Turkish ones have a similar design and decorations. In addition, one of them has inscribed the year 1924.

Many years after, I saw an interview with the Turkish owner of Ada Kaleh cafe in my town. A few detail have drawn my attention, and I want to share them here in order to complete the above description.

The Kettle must be made of copper. And the shape of its bottom must be conically shaped.
The stove is the closest replacement for a tray with hot sand. The kettle should be placed in hot sand in order to obtained the best brew! The flame should burn at its lowest intensity. It will be a long process, but you will get the best taste! A tray of sand would bring the process closer to the original, even when using a stove!
Don't put the coffee in water after the water is boiled! Put it right after the water was poured in the kettle! You don't want a tea infusion using coffee instead of tea: you want coffee!
Don't let the water boil more than two times!

If the coffee is too strong, next time you can either reduce the amount of coffee, or increase the quantity of water!

All the above information were confirmed by a very small tab on the back of a 100 grams coffee pack, containing a brief translation of the best way to prepare Turkish coffee.

Since I am drinking coffee, this is the way I am preparing it at home!

For now this is just the text. As soon as I'll be in the proper mood to take some appropriate photos of this process, I'll insert them within the text! (Edit: some of them are already added! Stay close for more!)

Prepare your coffee with this method, and let me know if you like it!
Don't worry it won't take as much as it took me to describe it here!

To enjoy it even more, turn on your favorite music! You might want to listen to it using an assorted pair of custom "coffee speakers"!