Sept. 10: Through fields to oaks

[ES]

Today we had a shorter bike ride so we took our time getting out of bed. All our laundry had dried overnight which was a pleasant surprise. We were a bit worried about how the ride would go today but it was surprisingly nice. We followed a dirt/grass track along the Mures River and through fields planted in crops most of the day. We only saw a couple fisherman and shepherds with their flocks. It is amazing to me that these tracks are not only on our offline mapping program, but they are continuously open without fences or no treaspassing signs. Most of the travel on these tracks must be by farmers to reach crop fields, shepherds with their flocks and the occasional fisherman.

The couple towns we did go through had obvious Hungarian heritage. In Glodeni, there was a sculpture garden built recently celebrating all the most important Hungarian princes in Transylvania dating back ventures. It seems that Transylvanian Hungarians like to construct giant busts of men which fancy hairdos.

Monument to Soviet soldiers in WWII. Romania was on the Axis side until... it wasn't, then it was "rescued" by the Soviets. There was not a lot of evidence of this, but we found this small, abandoned memorial.

For the most part cars in Romania are newer (and therefore some a bit larger) than in Serbia. Being in the EU must allow for greater access to car markets and other goods. Also a lot of people in the populated areas of Romania seem to smoke, like in Serbia, but less in more rural areas. This might just be an economic factor though. 

In the last couple days we have ridden through some parts of towns that appear to have very high levels of poverty. Each time these groups of houses or neighborhoods are clustered at the far edge of the town, some without running water. Many shacks are very roughly built with whatever materials can be afforded, cheap thin brick and scrap metal or mud and wood. I expected that we would see some extreme poverty in Romania, and it is difficult to travel through in person. I think I expected to see more people in poverty camping, but we haven’t seen this - just several places that are more akin to shantytowns and some villages disadvantaged as a whole. 

We are staying near an ancient oak forest, Mociar Secular Oak Forest, but our place for the night is nestled within a nice mid-age oak forest on somewhat sandy soils. We got to go for a walk this evening through the forest and got view northeast across a big field towards Mociar before resident shepherd dogs encouraged us to turnaround.