Scoutmaster Europe Journal 2002

Report #4

7/19/2002 

Hi Everyone,

            My last message left you considering my family genealogy in Kisvarda.  Well after spending the day delving into my family's past, I decided to take advantage of the pool complex near the castle ruins.  It's called the Var Furdo.  I can't put all the proper accents on the words, but they mean castle baths.  Lots of people were there as it is still quite warm.  I sampled the warm mineral waters and the regular pool.  Just the thing on a hot day.  After an hour or so at the pool, I had dinner and started planning my trip to Romania.

In the morning I left Kisvarda and headed south.  The entire trip from the top of Hungary to the bottom took only about three hours on small farming community roads. One of the crops that seems to be popular is sunflowers.  There are fields of sunflowers as large as those for corn and other crops.  Crossing the border into Romania was uneventful, but both the Hungarian and the Romanian guards wanted to see the papers for the rented Opel Corsa that I'm driving.  I had to arrange in advance to have permission to take the car from Germany into the former eastern block countries.

About 10 km south of the border is the town of Satu Mare (Saint Mary?), where I spent the afternoon looking around.  My first job was to get Romanian money, called lei. There are 34,000 lei to the dollar!  I got 2,000,000 lei to start.  I have never had a million in any currency before.  Satu Mare actually has a very nice looking city center.  There's a large park with water fountains and flowerbeds.  A statue of some super human looking guy is in the middle of the place.  The statue reminded me of the Russian statues that make their leaders bigger than life, and very muscled.  The statue here is the same sort of thing.  Around the park are all the important buildings.  The Dacia Hotel is housed in a beautiful blue glazed tile roofed building with very fancy brickwork.  I was not disappointed with the grilled salmon, cream of potato soup, and a cucumber tomato salad I had for lunch in the hotel's restaurant.  All of the curbs on the streets are constructed with a yellow glazed brick edges, and with flowers everywhere, this is a very good looking place.

After lunch I visited the art museum, which had some paintings of the Hungarian cowboys on the Pusta in Hortobagy.  That's Texas in Hungarian, land of Hungarian cowboys.  Almost everyone I talked to speaks Hungarian in this northern Romanian town.  The written signs and printed material are in Romanian, and words remind me of Spanish.  So I can sort understand written material; however, the spoken language doesn't sound anything like Spanish to me.

It was time to travel on to Carei, only about 40 km west of Satu Mare.  The road to Carie is like a washboard.  It reminded me of the roads in Poland that I traveled on three years ago.  The road is used by horses and oxen/cattle drawn carts, cyclists, three wheeled cars, diesel trucks and regular cars.  Passing is a challenging task as there are often three or more vehicles abreast on the road.

Carie is definitely off the tourist route.  However, it's a bigger city than I thought it would be.  There are apartment buildings and some industrial plants in and around the place.  There is no tourist office, so finding a place to stay was a problem.  It turns out that there is only one motel in town, and I had some difficulty finding it.  The clerk was a very nice woman who gave me the best room in the place.  It cost about $12, and had a TV, private bath and a balcony.  I watched the discovery channel in English with Romanian subtitles.  The clerk also gave me directions to the synagogue, and told me where the city hall was too.

I drove over to the synagogue, where my grandmother's family went to pray so many years ago.  It's an enormous building, looks well maintained from the outside.  In the courtyard there is a memorial obelisk to those who were taken to Auschwitz in 1944.  People with whom I spoke to told me the synagogue is not in use today.  A lady working in the courtyard unlocked and let me into the building.  It was an eerie place because the interior is in bad shape, musty and deteriorating.  The chandeliers are just shells of their former glory, they hang like skeletons.  The ornamental frescoes would take a lot of work to restore.  However, I easily saw how magnificent this place must have been before the war.  I am glad that it's still here.

My dinner in Carei is worth mentioning.  The restaurant offered cherry soup.  That's a dish my mother made when I was a child, but it is not too common in America.  It was served warm, but I remember it as a cold soup at home.  The cherries are not large bing cherries, but smaller and rounder.  I will get a recipe for this when I return.

My next destination after Carie is Julc-Napoc in the heart of Transylvania.  I am looking forward to the mountains and cooler weather.

            Philip Sternberg