Sept. 13: The magical quiet of Maramures

[EK]:
We had another day of quiet, magical bicycling in Maramures. We went from town to town, visiting the dark and cool wooden churches. In Poienile Izei, we followed other tourists and their guide into the church. This is because the churches are often locked and so we have several times waited for the others to call the holder of the key, usually a neighbor. The church walls were covered in frescoes, some of demons and some of stories from the Bible, and some of saints.

One reason we are riding bicycles in Romania: the horse carts ensure that the roads are inherently multimodal.

The Romanian cooking-pot tree. Rare but still in existence.

Woodsworkers still live in many of the towns, to build and fix the elaborate gates and fences (and probably to repair the churches)

Church door: every surface covered with a message.

Ouch...

As we biked, we passed little towns with wooden houses and the kitschy concrete houses paid through remittances and chickens and dogs and haystacks... the life of quiet Maramures. Occasionally a fast car driven by a young man would pass, sometimes with a German or GB license plate. The older people are clearly keeping tradition and many of the young men seem to be bristling against it.

One of the half-finished modern houses.

The older people here display exceptional fashion sense. The ladies wear pleated skirts, sometimes floral and sometimes taffeta. They have tights, occasionally bright. And they wear cardigan sweaters in autumn tones. On their heads are floral kerchiefs. This is a uniform but it is unceasingly interesting to me, especially when they gather to talk, a flock of floraled ladies in knee-length skirts.

The men, too, are often fetching. At their best, they wear the traditional Romanian caps, or snappy fedoras. We have seen many in sweater vests and a few in the traditional heavy sheepskin vests. Some wear the ever-popular track suits, but the older the man, the more likely he is to be dressed well.

Man, dressed well.

These clothes were worn in the field, by people carrying scythes and pitchforks. They were also worn to church and around towns. The younger people wear cheap western knockoffs, often with unintentionally funny English phrases.

We spent the night in Glod, a little town up a valley. It had fields ringed with trees and we found a market to sit at and drink beers. We are probably scandalous, two women drinking beer in public. It seems to be a male pastime.

At our guesthouse, we ate ridiculous amounts of food and drank some vichinata at the insistence of the hostess. Emily sat outside for a while after dinner and listened to the noisy creek, which flowers quickly from the mountains. In the creek, earlier in the day, we had noticed free-flowing washing machines, tubs with openings where water flowed in and circled vigorously to clean laundry using hydropower.

Drinking some health tonics. Horinca = plum brandy. Afinata = wild blueberry liqueur. Visinata = sour cherry liqueur.