Expat In Romania

The snow crunches under the the sturdy Hucul's marbled hooves as fresh flakes drift all around, steady, fat, soon to cover the evidence of our mid-winter ride. I'm riding 'Cyklon', a 9 year old bay, bred for life in the mountains. He is calm and patient, but has a tendency to stop mid-stride for mouthfuls of sparse, dry leaves hanging from the shrubs and trees lining the trail. I  tsk, tsk  and pull on the reins to get us back underway, sympathizing with the craving for a snack. The landscape is desolate at this time of year. A  gusting wind whistles over the plateau as a white panorama stretches ahead and below us, peppered with brown and black copses of dormant trees, and dark woods in the foothills beyond. It is what sad, poignant poetry looks like. It is death. It is rest. It is a prelude to life. We're on a 'horseback hill tour' with a group, about an hour's train ride from Cluj, in the village of Stana. The guide told us the horses don...

Last night I came up on a marketing blog post . The author argues, correctly, that Toronto is badly in need of a consistent and powerful marketing message that can put the city on the travel map and attract more tourists. Since moving to Europe I've gotten a better feel for this Toronto-as-a-tourist-attraction conundrum, which is why I think that even if the city had that message out tomorrow, there would be little substance to back it up. 1. History - Toronto is badly lacking in anything of historical significance. Black Creek Pioneer village, the old firehouse on Lombard, and the first post office on Adelaide are pretty much laughable as historical artifacts to any European tourist. They're not particularly special by North American standards either. Unless the tourism board wants to rewrite it, that's about it for history. 2. Culture - A bright spot here as Toronto is coming along in many respects. But it doesn't stand above the citywide cultural events that take...

We left Cluj on a very damp Friday evening. The bus was supposed to leave at 8pm but it didn't arrive at the station until 8:15pm. Fashionably late, aka: Romanian Time. Roxana and I were lucky to get the two seats across the aisle from each other, it was a full-house otherwise. It wasn't a bad trip, but what sucked big-time was that the bus smelled as thought it was made out of a giant air freshener, the kind you hang up on the car's rear-view mirror. My brain was nauseated but otherwise we made it out fine after three hours of driving up and down serpentine roads in the fog. Ionuţ and his dad picked us up from the bus station in Baia Mare and took us home. It's worthy of note that up until a week before I'd never spoken to Ionuţ. Life has a funny way of bringing people together. A friend from Toronto put us in touch to discuss an initiative being carried out by a Romanian students association -of which Ionuţ is vice-president of development. We met to talk about ...