Munich’s Museum of Man and Nature scored Bruno the Bear’s taxidermied remains, displayed by taxidermist Dieter Schoen at “being disturbed by people while stealing honey from bee hives to show his potential danger” (as quoted from this BBC article). In 2006, I blogged about how poor Bruno, or JJ1, is the result of a poor candidate for motherhood. Bruno was shot dead on June 26, 2006.

This bear is not Bruno.

I knew that Bruno dabbled in sheep and rabbit menus. I had no idea there were other animals involved. Specifically, I didn’t realize there were Incan rodents with a penchant for timothy hay involved in the Bruno saga. Here’s Bruno’s more complete list of exploits:

He upset farmers, breaking into bee hives and eating 30 sheep, four rabbits and a guinea pig.

Chuy is disgusted.

We are happy to report that Paco has good taste.

He looks terrified in the above photo because he is offended by midi music.

Whenever we go to this site, he screams, his heart races and he tries to get as far from the computer as he can.

Ten years ago, on a hot spring night in Taiwan, I learned to play Koi Koi, a Japanese game played with beautiful hanafuda cards.

That first deck, still in my collection, is made of beautiful so-called flower cards; the game of Koi Koi is, however, mostly played by gangsters or inveterate gamblers.

The 48-card deck is divided into twelve suits of four cards each, with each suit representing a different month of the year with its signature plant.

January depicts pine trees (the first two images above are half of the cards of that suit); February depicts plum blossoms (the third card above); and so on. Some of the cards also have associated animals.

I’ve been collecting images of hanafuda cards for a while (the August susuki, or pampas grass, on a drawstring bag from a Japanese dollar store, a Gegege no Kitaro demon version of the cards, etc.).

My playing version of the cards are made by Nintendo, which started out in 1889 to manufacture and sell these cards.

Taking advantage of the Easter long weekend, I suggested Matt and I complete a long ago project I planned - to recreate our favourite cards in collage. We just happened to have some frames for which we needed artwork.

Here are my pieces:

January crane with pine trees.

February plum blossoms.

May irises along a pier.

Here are Matt’s versions:

January pine with scroll.

August pampas grass with geese.

August pampas grass with full moon.

And here are the finished product hanging on our wall:

Matt wrote more intelligently about it all on his blog.

A huge part of Matt’s and my relationship is built around playing boardgames. Knowing that there was an exciting world beyond Monopoly and Sorry, we started out three years ago with the
gateway drugs of the European boardgame genre, games like Carcassonne, Jambo and Ticket to Ride.

Like the increasing potency that drug addicts require for the next high, we’ve evolved from light strategy to heavy strategy games. I like to think my way out of problems - the problems usually being that I need to score more points and beat Matt. I’ve come to hate dice and the risks inherent in games of chance. Relying on one’s brains is less nerve-wracking than fearing a pair of dice that will determine one’s fate. When it comes to heavy strategy games, you have only yourself to blame for your losses, yet you can learn from your mistakes to win the next time. We’ve thus become big fans of games like Power Grid, Puerto Rico and especially Caylus.

The one remaining problem with winning at these games, knowing that I indeed have the brain power to beat Mr. Look-at-Me-I’m-So-Techy-and-Smart, is that I have no poker face. Matt can see me developing my strategy minutes before I unleash a castle-building marathon that would rack me up enough points to careen ahead of him on the scoreboard. Then he sabotages my strategy.

The only bright spot, is that he has no poker face either. So I can counter-sabotage his sabotaging.

This leads to a deadlock, like our last game of Caylus, where we both finished with a score of 131. We discussed how we could overcome our lack of poker facedness:

Maktaaq: I can’t help grinning every time I come up with a sure winning strategy.

Matt: Me too.

Maktaaq: We need masks to hide our smiles, maybe a mouth-covering niqab.

Matt: We’ll still be able to read each other’s eyes. Besides, when you smile, your cheeks lift up and your eyes get squinty.

Maktaaq: Oh yeah, well you always look guilty whenever you’re about to move the provost so I can’t get my resources. It’s really obvious even if you don’t smile.

Matt: We’ll need something that can cover our eyes.

Maktaaq: A burqa will do that - they cover the whole face and they’ve got a mesh covering for the eyes.

Matt: Yeah, a pair of gaming burqas!

Maktaaq: I wonder where we can buy those…

*Matt adds: “We used to make fun of people that were so anti-dice. But a recent revisitation of the Settlers of Catan, in which an unfailingly six-rolling resource hog dominated the entire game, gave us the final proof that dice are indeed the devil.”

Following up on my goal of reading all the Asterix books in order, I completed Asterix and the Golden Sickle and Asterix and the Goths a few months ago.

Since then I haven’t had a chance to write about these books, as I lost my notes on Toutatis (I just happened to read a book with a paragraph on gory Celtic practices around the same time). However, I find the names in Asterix amusing and am looking forward to reading more of the books to see who else shows up.

Asterix and the Golden Sickle presents only a few unusual names:

• Metallurgix (in fact one of Obelix’s distant cousins)
• Clovogarlix (clove of garlic)
• Navishtrix (knavish tricks)

The Romans are:

• Surplus Dairiprodus (surplus dairy products)
• Claudius Omnibus

Aside from the obvious Paris references (only a child wouldn’t know what Lutetia is), there’s Suindinum, with the ox-cart Suindinum 24 Hours (page 10, Suindinum is now Le Mans, where there is some sort of sports car endurance race) and the Lugdunum in the Lugdunum sausage (page 37). Lugdunum is now Lyon (and its cuisine has plenty of sausages involved). In Lutetia itself, one of the tourist sites is the Mola Rubra - surely this is the Moulin Rouge, while the dreaded “Forest over Where the Sun Sets” is the Bois de Boulogne, now as then a dodgy place of “wolves and bandits.”

The Gaulish gods by which Getafix swears are:

• Belenos (the Celtic god of the sun)
• Toutatis (there’s something about drowning sacrificial victims upsid-down in cauldrons of unspecified liquids)
• Belisama (the goddess of metallurgy and weapon-making, also Belenos’ consort)

I’ve also read both the Romanian and English translations of Asterix and the Goths.

The new Gaulish names appearing in this book were (Romanian first, English second - with the English translation of the Romanian in brackets and italicized):

• Șaptezecix (76) - Valuaddetax
• Cicatrix (scar) - Botanix
• Prefix - Prefix
• Barometrix - Suffix

Vitalstatistix, we discover, becomes Brațscutarix in Romanian. Braț means arm, but I have no idea to what the -scutarix may be referring.

The Romans were called:

• Eunupotus (I can’t do it) - Cadaverus
• Mamsăturatus (I’m full or I’ve had enough) - Cantankerus
• Marcus Cubitus - Marcus Ubiquitus
• Iulius Humerus - Julius Monotonus

Similarly, in their legionary disguises, Asterix and Obelix become Asterus and Obelus (same for both Romanian and English).

As for the Goths, their names ended in -ic. They were:

• Teoric (from theory) - Tartaric
• Pasdfric (anyone know what this may mean?) - Atmospheric
• Histeric - Prehistoric
• Periferic (from periphery) - Esoteric
• Cudetric (also unknown) - Choleric
• Teleferic (ski-lift) - Metric
• Cloridric (anyone?) - Rhetoric
• Electric - Electric (leading to the General Electric gag)
• Piticotic (from midget?) - Euphoric
• Satiric - Satiric
• Liric - Lyric
• Pumndeferic (a fist of something?) - Eccentric

The trivia concerning this book concerns the druid Șaptezecix, or Valuaddetax, using his pain-inhibiting potion to fish out French fries from a boiling cauldron of oil on page 12 and a wheelbarrow on page 43. Neither the French fries nor the wheelbarrow were around when this story was set.

I got the idea from Morbid Anatomy.

German Renaissance painter Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece was made for the Saint Anthony’s Monastery chapel. One of the things the boring aesthetic-based art histories never tell you is that Grünewald (not his real name) made this painting for a hospital specializing in skin diseases: its aim was basically to tell sufferers, “Shut up about your ailments, look what Jesus suffered.” From an article by Stanley Meisler in the September 1999 edition of Smithsonian Magazine:

The Antonite order operated the hospital in Isenheim largely for those afflicted by a disease known then as “Saint Anthony’s fire.”

That disease (now rare and called “ergotism”) struck down many in periodic epidemics during the Middle Ages. [According to the ergotism entry on Wikipedia, there was a 2001 outbreak in Ethiopia.] Saint Anthony’s fire set off painful skin eruptions that blackened and turned gangrenous, often requiring amputations. The eruptions were accompanied by nervous spasms and convulsions. Many victims died.

Saint Anthony’s fire came from the poison of a fungus that clung to rye and was inadvertently pounded into the flour used to make rye bread. The cause, however, was not known in Grünewald’s time. The monks treated the sick with a balm made from herbs and other plants and with prayers to Saint Anthony, who was believed to possess miraculous curing powers. The monks also tried to bolster the faith of the sick by reminding them that Christ - and Saint Anthony as well - had suffered even greater torments. Grünewald’s altarpiece played an important mystical and psychological role in the Isenheim treatment program.

The chapel burned down during the French Revolution, but not before some government officials saved the art. The painting is now in the nearby town of Colmar, where it is displayed in pieces.

Originally the crucifixion image you see above was the two top wings that opened to reveal another painting composed of two wings which themselves opened to reveal Niklas Hagenauer’s sculpture. Luke Ulrich shows how the painting originally worked in this very short video:

This other website explains the subject of each of the panels.

The top wings, or the crucifixion scene, has Jesus just off-centre, with his right arm crossing to the right wing of the altarpiece, in effect, amputated from his body, much as the hospital’s patients often suffered amputation of their gangrenous limbs.

Fun. Now eat your rye bread and be thankful no pus-boils-and-gangrene fungi is clinging to your grains.

A few days ago I heard or read someone make mention of WWII having been a 6-year vacation.

I had heard that that particular generation was special in a way that those of us born afterwards would never know - it wasn’t just the hardship from fighting and supporting the homefront - it was born of the camaraderie developed from hundreds of young people dealing together to address unique situation.  Certainly, I bet the losers in the war, the Germans and their allies, the civilians over whose lands soldiers crushed their way, the Red Army POWs, the Allied casualties and their families, would not really agree.

But if you talk to North Americans of a certain age, you’ll hear how, despite everything, there was some fun involved in the war.  Dances, group outings, foreign travel; these coupled with a common purpose everyone shared (beating the Axis powers), plus the chance to work at something besides “work,” is this the vacation to which my unknown quote referred?

Has anyone else read about this?  Have you heard your parents or grandparents talk with happy nostalgia for the war years?

What’s not to love? We’ve got stuff stretching back to pre-Roman times - the most famous being the Dacian Sarmizegetusa - to cool medieval (that’s Bran above, close to the city of BraÈ™ov), eighteenth and nineteenth century dwellings and official buildings to awesomely picturesque Communist-era beauties.

Yup, you heard me right. I happen to like the Communist buildings.

I was reminded of what glory we Romanians must share with the world, when I read Kit’s post on BucureÈ™ti’s hugging apartments. I have to politely disagree with commentator and designer Iancu* - this is not an abomination.

Here’s a cute little house from somewhere along the Prahova Valley**:

Not only is this single-family home on a coquettish slant, check out the medley of grey walls, white details and green trim, the masterful sense of asymmetry, and those three round windows softening the angular lines of the entire building. I would also like Martha Stewart types to make note of the pine branch hanging on the middle window. This is a great Christmas decorating idea we saw all over Romania.

Let’s move on to the great works: apartment buildings.

From afar, this is what you get:

But it’s not all grey.

They may look the same all over the country to the untrained eye. Yet, strangely enough for those of us who are North American and are used to our architectural individuality being quashed by strata bylaws and landscaping municipal ordinances, these buildings fully celebrate the dwellers’ particular quirks. Here you see two BraÈ™ovean neighbours, the ones in the upper righthand corner, have enclosed their balconies which were, as the other balconies show, originally uncovered.

Similarly, a few hundred kilometres away in Alba Iulia, here’s a seemingly similar facade:

There’s the old-fashioned balcony enclosure, followed by a Termopan balcony, then an almost completely closed-off balcony with a spunky diamond-shaped window, and finally, more Termopan at street level.

This photo shows even more variety:

The best thing about Romanian apartment blocks are the grape vines:

In the summer, those vines flourish with leaves and sour curlicues, shading the apartment during abysmally hot Romanian heat waves. All neighbours, sometimes many storeys up, can harvest the grapes outside their own windows.

Or, if you’ve got a roamer of a cat, how about constructing a ladder to the third floor for it?

It’s also pretty exciting on the inside of these buildings. For example, an exciting door off the stairwell:

Inside is probably last summer’s pickled vegetables, jars of homemade jam, and the odd bottle of plum brandy. Truly a place where you wouldn’t mind being stranded in case of a zombie invasion.

You definitely want to watch your step as you walk down these stairs - the steps vary in size. But this way, thinking about the process of walking, that putting one foot in front of the other, one can appreciate the act of living and its simple attendant details. We have it so easy here in Canada, we tend to take much for granted.

But you also want to watch your step as you gawk at the unexpected beauty:

What icy beauty!

Romanian cities still follow the model of residential zoning mixed with commercial zoning. Need a loaf of bread? Just run downstairs. Ran out of sugar for the cozonac? You can buy it from Mariana’s counter. Every apartment building has stores attached to it.

Here’s a neighbour that turned their living room into a coffee shop, complete with extensions poking out of the main apartment:

Alba Iulia now even boasts townhomes:

Unlike what you’d find in Canada (where you can’t even hang a bird feeder on your balcony or repaint your house another shade of white), Alba Iulia’s townhouses come in an assortment of colours. You can also bet that in two years when I next visit Romania, the white houses will sport new colours to match the owners’ wives handbags.

I am a little snarky about property rights - our strata council threatened to ban gnomes. Suddenly, those weird little garden statues obsessed me and I want to defy any anti-gnome legislation by cluttering our balcony with as many gnomes as possible. I have a model to work from:

*I’ll have to keep an eye on Iancu’s blog. Nice stuff. More photos of BucureÈ™ti, please.

**If any Romanians read this, please let me know if this was in Sinaia or farther along. I edited my photos about two months after passing through and I can’t recall the exact town.

Update: Not only does Kit’s building squashing happen in Romania, it happens in Paris too.  Polly-Vous Français shows how the Église St. Thomas d’Aquin got squashed, or rather “Tetris-ed into the landscape.”

I said no more of that YouTube crap, but this video is 40 seconds of rather pretty bat flight.

Apparently a bat aerodynamics study at Brown University, credit goes to K. Bruer (via Skullring).

Sometimes I forget that people have no idea that I am Romanian and I make a joke referencing my supposed vampiric ethnicity. Everyone stares at me and the feeling that I am one step closer to being fired oppresses me like a roadrunner’s anvil.

…according to Anthony Bourdain, in a blogpost about his recent, evidently unfavourable look at Romania on his tv show:

But to describe Romania as particularly friendly? Not really. I’ve been all over the world. Over 50 countries. On the friendly scale? Romania not exactly in the top 40.

He also complained about the food and the bad service. While the service has a way to go, I was amazed how good it was when I visited a few weeks ago. I’ll concede that he may have a point with the fear of cameras:

WITH cameras–asking if we could shoot was an invitation to either an instinctive “NO” or an invitation to gouging. As waiters and hosts it seems, work on salary–rather than tips, no one really seemed to care about more business, promoting their business or even making more money. People are still uncomfortable in general about being filmed. Understandable, given Romania’s history that many would be reluctant to have their picture taken–as this rarely led to anything good back in the bad old days.

We had a similar experience photographing this weird menu in Cluj:

The cranky chick you see in the photo about to open the door began yelling at us moments after this photo was taken. Who did we think we were and why were we taking photos. We didn’t tell her that we mostly wanted to photograph item 14 on the menu (the mysterious Chinese pizza), but I told her that we’d delete the photo (and I immediately told Matt not to in English). For twenty minutes afterwards, I regretted not letting my Romanian sailor’s language come out when I had the chance.

Should filming make Romanians ecstatic? Maybe it would have good publicity for the store, what with getting a mention on the internet. Personally, I am a food snob. I even refuse to eat at so-called sushi places that are owned by Koreans. Why would I eat at a Chinese place run by white people who’ve never left Europe? In a way, this bitch had the right to protest our photographing; unfortunately, it just made me more determined to piss her off.

Is this nasty fast food worker indicative of most Romanians? Of course not. It’s easy for the west to point out that Romanians are photography jerks, that they should lighten up. Perhaps in the west, we’re a lot more accustomed to being narcissistic, despite the media catching us at inopportune moments with cellulite, illicit lovers, collapsing noses, bad fashion, and female moustaches. Why can’t those other people just get used to having cameras shoved in their faces?

Certainly there have been a few filming scandals lately in Romania. More recently, people have discovered that you can’t really trust anyone with your photos. Last year, two young Alba Iulia women made the news when, after a falling out, one put on the internet the nude photos she took of the other girl. Most well-known is the deceit used by the Borat crew to satirize Kazakhstan, while using Romanian villagers as the butts of the joke. Sure, all the lowest common denominator Americans thought the filming was actually done in Kazakhstan, but for the Romanians slapped with names like “the Village Rapist” and “the Village Whore,” it wasn’t pleasant. Also at stake is the fact that the Romanians pictured in the film happen to be, I was told, ethnic gypsies - in Romania, a group of people often vilified and made the subject of other jokes on this racial pecking order. A few years ago, while wandering around Alba Iulia, I saw a horse, photographed it, then was accosted by a stream of gypsies from the house behind the horse.

“Who do you think you are? What newspaper are you working for?” They yelled at me.

I apologized and asked them what they were talking about. I explained I was merely a Romanian-Canadian visiting my home country and how, in Canada, young women go through a stage in their development where they like horses, starting with plastic My Little Ponies and extending into horse literature (beginning with, but not ending at Black Beauty), and that that was why I was taking a photo of their very lovely specimen.

Finally, the gypsies became my friends for the next few minutes, I took their photos on and off the horse in their yard, answered questions about whether or not the teeth in my mouth were all my own, and whether or not I would consider marrying the young bearded bachelor little brother. They explained to me that journalists have a bad habit of photographing, then captioning the photos with “human misery” or “uncouth barbarian thieves.” Sure, quite a few gypsies are unfortunately involved in the darker trades, but there are also others who go about their lives on the legal side of the law. My brief gypsy friends were understandably miffed that I might be one of the jerks who would go on to proclaim them unfit morons staining the neighbourhood. On a more international scale, the western media often accompanies stories on Romania with the grubbiest, most miserable-looking “ethnic type” they can muster, fuelling the idea Romania is a Stalinist backwater and hiding the fact that the most beautiful women in the world come from Romania.*

Poor Romania. Always in the West’s dung heap, never to be recognized as a cool place regardless of how many more castles and ruins we have than the Czech Republic or Hungary. Anthony Bourdain is just another white person who’s entirely missed out on Romania. In a way, I think Romania is the Philippines of Europe: most travellers who head for Asia, immediately think of Thailand and a long list of countries, at the end of which may lie the Philippines just a smidge above Mongolia; likewise, many people just read the papers and think the Philippines is all slums and terrorists, not friendly folks who’ll pay for your jeepney fare and invite you to parties to have first pick of the lechon. It just seems as if the west is hell-bent on ignoring the Philippines and Romania as much as possible unless there’s a negative story tied to it.

I’ve extended so many invitations to friends to visit Romania. My parents are there, I tell them, you already have a place to stay. Free food, free transportation, castle ruins you can just wander into, strangers sharing their moonshine with you. It doesn’t matter with what I try to bribe foreigners. None of them want to visit. Sometimes my friends get caught up in Scotland, or they make it as far as Budapest. None has made the step to discover Romania or even shown they really care. Though I am offended that my friends have refused mine and my family’s hospitality, I console myself that Romania doesn’t really need another spoiled westerner who’ll complain about the plumbing. Perhaps Romania is better off with only having rugged visitors who’ve seen worse and can appreciate that Romania has much to offer. I’ll try to keep thinking that Bourdain’s arrogance will serve us some good.

In the big picture, Bourdain went for a tourist experience and got it. He didn’t go with a Romanian, he stayed in hotels, went to restaurants.

The way to visit Romania is not by “surface tourism” (staying in hotels and eating at restaurants). You visit Romania and stay in people’s houses. I avoid most restaurants in Romania unless they are the street mititei truck stops in DeduleÈ™ti.

Even there, one has to carefully select the mititei. You visit each stall, see how long the mititei have been on the fire, then ask the mititei cook to grill you up some fresh ones. Ideally, mititei should not be well done.

Otherwise, I avoid restaurants in Romania. They’re for tourists who have no access to Romanian kitchens. I prefer my mother’s cooking far too much to ever be disloyal. The only exceptions are when family friends make something traditional, like the Transylvanian dill-and-cheese crepes.

As for the few tourist traps that there are in the country, too bad for you if all you’re after is Dracula. (And most westerners know of only the fictional Irish Dracula.) It serves you right for wanting a pre-packaged itinerary like you do in London or Paris. In Romania, you need to do a bit of homework, get out to the smaller cities and towns, and keep your eyes open for all the castles and forts along the way.

PS Mr. Bourdain and the suckers who eat them at Vancouver’s rip-off places, crepes anywhere - except for Romania - suck. Even in France. Sorry to disappoint all of you that think otherwise: our crepes are soft, not crispy like yours; they taste marvellous because we use vanilla in the batter; and we don’t hide the flavour behind a screen of what you call “whipped cream.”

* Yes, this is a fact. There is a scientific study somewhere out there, but I don’t have the time to look it up now.