Trip to Capalna

The Thursday and Friday before Easter (April 1-2) finally took a bus for the first time and all on my own and went out to a village in the countryside to visit a friend.  On Thursday afternoon I headed over to the bus station and eventually managed to find the correct bus.  Anyone planning to take a bus here, be warned that it is very difficult to tell which bus is which.  They are just parked all over the place, and only some have small signs on the dashboard saying where they are going.  And, here is the really strange part -- I pay for my ticket on the bus, but there are no more seats!!!  So, I have to sit in the aisle for the 2 hour ride.  In fact, the aisle was packed with people sitting and standing.  How strange is that?  It definitely got the trip started on the wrong foot for me, that is for sure.  It seems that if you don't have a seat that you shouldn't have to pay full price for your ticket, but I guess that is how things work here.

My view on the bus.  So much for watching the countryside roll past.

Let's see, what all did I do when I got there?  Simona met me at the bus, and when we walked through the little village (around 200 people - the vast majority over 60 yrs), I got to meet her much older sister and cousin and her mother.  It is pretty neat because her sister lives in the house they all lived in for a while growing up.  Then, Simona's mom lives on a plot of land with the house where Simona's grandparents' lived and another where her great-grandparent's lived.  Simona actually owns the house that had been her grandparents and is fixing it up.  We slept out there, and it was pretty chilly because the heating is not yet fixed.  I might have to come out sometime when it gets warmer!!

The land behind's Simaon's sister's house.  See all the beehives??

Some of the corn used for the pigs and mamaliga (polenta) during the winter.

That evening was a Maundy Thursday service at her church (her family is all Baptist), so I went with her to see what it would be like.  It definitely was very different from the Baptist churches in my town, but I still need to see an Orthodox service.  The story about the churches in her village is very interesting.  Unver Communism, the Orthodox church is the only one that was allowed, and the Orthodox church in her town took over the Catholic church's building because it was nice.  When Communism ended, the Catholic church took their space back, and for a while the Orthodox church met in one of the rooms at the school before they built their own church.  Today there are three churches (Orthodox, Catholic, and Baptist) in the town of 200.  Sounds like a similar person to church ratio to that in my hometown....

Picture of the Baptist church.

And, because I know that you are dying to see more of Capalna.  Here are a few more pictures of my time there:

Finally, a picture of me in front of some of the big Romanian haystacks!!

View of part of the village and landscape.

More of the village and a local kid.

A local shepherd picks up the sheep from all the villagers in the morning and drops them off at night (most people own just 3 or 4).

The local school, up to 4th grade.  Pretty depressing outside, but fairly normal inside (but with two grade levels in each room!!).  Simona and I went there Friday morning to give an English lesson.

The wood burning stove that Simona's mom uses.

Some gypsies that came by the house, asking for food.

One of the really neat things that I got to do was learning how to dye Easter eggs the traditional way. To do this, you use onion peels, but you want a lot of the purple skins to turn the eggs red. in order to get enough of the peels, Simona and I walked all over the village and visited her sister and cousin to take all of the peels they had! If you want to red about why it is traditional to have red eggs on Easter, read this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_egg

The relevant part talks about the Orthodox and the red eggs and the story of Mary Magdalene. This isn't a great version but it is the best I could find easily. Then, for Easter, people in Romania do not hide the eggs for Easter egg hunts. Instead, the put them in a bowl on the table, and visitors are supposed to take one.

All of the yellow and red onion peels.

Simona and her mom, adding water to the peels.

Make sure they all are submerged in the water and let it steep over night.

The next morning we prepared the eggs.  You gather flowers and leaves that will make a nice outline on the egg, arrange them on on the raw egg, and put them into pantyhouse.

A leg of panythose and eggs ready for the water and natural dye.

The eggs boiling away.  Leave them in there as long as you would to boil the eggs.

Take them out and then cut open the pantyhouse and peel off the leaves.

The eggs before we rubbed them with fat to make them shiny.

Here I am taking another leg of eggs out of the water.

The nice shiny eggs.  Aren't they great? 

I hope you enjoyed getting to learn about this kind of traditional egg dyeing.  It was fun to do even though it was hard to get those leaves arranged nicely when you are stuffing and tying an egg inside of pantyhouse! They are so much better than the commercial dyes because the dye from the onion peels and even the fat soaks into the egg peel and doesn't come off on your fingers. 

And, trying traditional egg dyeing was not the only thing I did in Capalna.  I also made salata de vinete (eggplant salad - most similar to baba ghanoush) from total scratch, meaning that I had to chop the grilled eggplant until it was soft enough while Simona made mayo with eggs and oil.  Wow.  Talk about way too much work!  Interestingly, I usually do not like the salata de vinete with mayo, but this one was great.  Maybe homemade mayonnaise is completely different than the store-bought stuff.  One thing is for sure, this stuff definitely was yellow, not white.  I do not even want to know what it is put in it to make it white.

Chop, chop chop.

I also (sort of) learned how to spin wool by hand.  Talk about hard work!!!  It looked so easy when Simona's mom did it, but trust me it is crazy hard.  I have no idea how you pull it out and make it stay in this nice thin strand.  Who knows.....  I think that this takes much more time to master than I would ever be willing to devote!

Simona's mom, spinning away.

Me, trying to spin - ha!

All in all, it was a great trip.  Lots of fun to get out of town for a while, and I got to try and do all sorts of things that I definitely would not get to do in Cluj.  The bus ride home was much more pleasant.  I think it was so packed on the way out because all the students from Cluj were going home for the holiday and the break.  On the way back, the bus was pretty empty, and I did get to look out the window!  I kept seeing the cutest little herds of sheep on the hills, but the bus was zooming along like a rocking horse, so pictures were impossible.  It was pretty neat, though, because I got back into Cluj around 7pm, and all of the Orthodox churches were having their services for Good Friday.  I got to see a couple of churches with people walking outside with candles, and I could hear someone hitting a piece of wood (maybe this is discussed in the Easter article that I posted on a different day? - something about calling someone to do something - clearly I do not remember).

Not the best picture because it was getting dark and I was across the street.