More stories from Turda... After the salt mine and a late lunch, Stefan drove us up to this amazing gorge outside of Turda. Stefan's Dacia ran up the quote unquote road up to the top of one side of the gorge. We actually couldn't get too close, so we jumped out and began our hike up to the lip of the gorge.

The landscape was straight out of what you'd expect from England. Rolling green pasture, with white rocks that you picture right around Stonehenge. Of course, this is the Romanian countryside though; so there's nothing wrong w/ a little free range roaming from the local livestock. The start of our hike began with the shepherd's yell on the wind trying to guide his animals home for the night.

On the way there were plenty of bushes with wild berries growing. Stefan and Cosmina showed us which ones you can eat, and which ones you shouldn't. I cannot resist an eating challenge, so I had to try the berries as well. Pretty starchy, but pretty good if you were on the verge of starvation. I felt like survivorman or something :)

After a good mile or two, we hit the edge of the gorge. It was kinda hard to get perspective on how big it was from the top, so I had to climb right down by the edge. It was a really long long way down the sheer cliff, let me just put it that way. I'm not sure how a river ran thru the middle of this large hill in the first place, but it carved a nice slot out of it that's for sure. There were lots of rock climbers that had clibmed up the rock nearly to our point. Pretty amazing. Those guys are crazy :) Anyway, we raced the cows back to the car and headed back to end a great day trip to Turda.

Turda. An unfortunate name for a town, but a great place for a day trip from Cluj. What does a town named Turda have to offer? My host Horia provided a few sayings about the place: 'Never take a pig or a wife from Turda', 'In Turda, even the chickens are horses'. Well I'm not sure I ever got to the bottom of those mysterious statements. But we did go to the bottom of an old salt mine.

When I say old, I mean really, really old. Like 500 years old. This mine has been pumping out salt for a long while, which means its has a pretty huge undergound chamber carvered out. And apparently, they don't like the idea of tourists going in and filling their table salt containers with a few whacks of the ole hammer -- or at least that's what that sign meant to me.

So when you cross through this door, you enter into a long tunnel. All ye who enter: Be Not Clausterphobic; it's a long way horizontally out of that mine that's for sure. It was very mesmerizing looking down this long tunnel with the lights every 20 meters. I thought that the white stuff on the walls was the raw salt that was being mined away, but actually it was not the same stuff that was being mined -- the raw salt crystals that were being carved out of the deepest parts of the mine.

The main chamber has been getting bigger and bigger for hundreds of years. They just kept cutting out new horizontal slices out of the ground every few years (until the mine closed in the 50's). The picture does not do justice to the size of the place -- to get from the roof where you enter to the floor of the chamber, you go down a rickety 20 story staircase (seen in the background of the picture). The strands of fiborous material you see hanging from the roof are actually salt stalagtites of sorts -- water has leaked into the chamber from the roof and has saturated the salt and formed those very dangerous stalagtites. They won't let you into the space underneath them because it would be quite dangerous. It was crazy to think about the walls being composed of raw salt crystals, but it was true! You can lick the walls and taste the salt to make sure...

And who could miss this record breaking salt crystal that was taken from the mine. It's a big load that's for sure -- a microwave sized, prefectly transparent salt crystal. I'll never look at table salt the same way again.

Thanks to Stephan for driving us out there and taking us out for a great day in Turda. And that was only half of the day...

What kind of foods do the folks in Cluj take in? The answer: any and all mixes of meat and cheese. In this picture, taken at 'Speed', a 24-hour diner just outside of Plaza Unirii (downtown Cluj), I'm taking in something called a caş (cazsh) sandwich. It's a sandwich, but instead of meat, it has a big wedge of fried cheese between the buns. Talk about cholestorol! Served with a fine side of french fries and cole slaw. And no 24-hour restaurant will serve food without a cappuchino accompaniment.

Next up (no photo) would be the appetizer tradition of meat and cheese. I cannot remember the romanian word for this assortment -- but its the closest thing I've seen next to my Mom's football gameday tray. There's usually an array of 5 different dried meats and 5 different cheeses and some fresh olives. Included in the meats is always some pork fat (really nasty stuff if you ask me). It may seem a little heavy for an appetizer, but in general if you're at a nice restaurant -- you're sacking it in for a 3 hour experience anyway so you have time to get hungry again. After the appetizer, you may like to burn off that food with a shot of Suica -- the local plum derived hard liquor.

What about the main course? Well I've had sll sorts of things. They're a big fan of soups here, including a soup well known for its hangover curing properties: 'Tripe Soup'. Tripe. Yes, that's right -- cow stomach lining soup. The texture of the floating bits in this delicacy are a little slimy, but if you can stomach raw oysters you should do OK with tripe. Usually, you'd have something more than just soup. Mabye a breaded chicken schniitzel. Maybe some meat and potato dish. I had something during this meal in Turda that was akin to an all in one breakfast casserole. The farming folks typically eat this dish when its cold, because its heavy and it 'sticks to the ribs' for sure. A pot of grits, 5 pieces of bacon, and a few fried eggs are baked in the oven and served in the baking dish. It seemed like a big breakfast to me, but here its a nourishing dinner.

At work, there is no cafeteria (never thought I'd miss Sodexho) but that doesn't mean you go out for lunch all the time. With the heavy traffic in Cluj and the shortage of 'fast' lunch options, you're looking at a 2-3 hour adventure for lunch. The NI-Romania guys usually have a catering service deliver food the office at lunchtime. I've had quite a few 'Menui Zillei's ('menu of the day') in my stay here. They're usually 2 items: a bean/vegetable soup and some sort of meat/rice dish. Not too bad really, but a far cry from the ole Mopac Theme Cuisines.

Of course, no one goes out to eat all of the time. So sometimes you gotta suck it up and find the nearest 'Hypermarket'. The supermarkets here have all sorts of goodies, though it can be a very intimidating experience w/ all of these foreign items and no english descriptions attached. Here's a picture of my shopping trip to Cora's -- where I picked up the necessary items for my kitchenette in order to make pasta, cook up sausages, and boil water for tea. The biggest difference (aside from the tubs of 'Crap' in the seafood isle -- yes the container says 'Crap' in big red letters, it's the name of a local fish) would be the enormous selection of meats and cheeses. I still haven't found the brînzá de conşuleţ that was recommended to me, but I've seen every other type of cheese imaginable. The hardest part of the Romanian shopping experience is transporting the groceries back to your apartment -- if you don't have a car -- like me. I have been packing up the ole trusty backpack to the brim with food for the taxi home, or calling Dan P for a ride to the store (thanks man!). Anyway, speaking of all these groceries, they won't eat themselves. Time to mix up a hotplate dinner...

I'm staying in Cluj in the Babes University Housing Room 708. Babes is pronounced 'babesh' and is one of the 2 big universities in the city. It's about 10 min (by car) from downtown, and right next to a pretty sweet park with running track. For long term housing, it makes sense to have a place with a little kitchen rather than the very hotel like experience I had for the 1st week of time here -- Hotel Centraal right downtown Cluj. The main difference is that I'm a cab ride from the bars/coffee shops rather than a 5 minute walk. But I'm closer to other practical things like a place to exercise and a place to get groceries.

I'm not really close to work, but everyone at NI-Romania has been beyond accomidating by picking me up all the time. I tend to get two rides a day, with Rares taking me to and from work (thanks man!) and someone else rotating and picking me up for dinner/trips/etc. The folks at work have been awesome, awesome hosts -- they have made me feel very welcome and gone way way out of their way to make sure I'm comfortable and happy and entertained while staying in Cluj.

Funny that last night they had live music in Cluj -- probably the first name a big name musician has come to the city. It was Beyonce. She played in a old soccer field pretty near to the old apartment, and I could hear the concert decently well by just opening the windows. Pretty good, considering it was a crappy cold and rainy night; so I got to enjoy the quote unquote music in the background while studying up on my Romanian. Here's a video of what I could see from the apt -- you can kinda hear the end one of her big hits in the audio though you cannot see much of the lights from the show...

Arriving to Cluj Romania was a little more interesting than I had pictured. I had been told of some oddities with the local airport -- where they have a bus drive you 20 meters from the plane to the front door. In other words a tiny airport. But what I wasn't prepared for was the surprise in my carry-on luggage.

It all started the day before in Amsterdam. Wandering here and there, heading out to the Van Gogh museum and checking out the sweet green grassy field in the museum area there... Well I guess it started earlier than that. The story really begins when Fido was eating his kibbles n bits that morning; and then proceeded to drop a nice, stinky poo somewhere in that park in Amsterdam.

Suffice it to say that I had no idea what I had stepped into. You know how it goes -- usually you don't know that you took a stinky step until you take those shoes off. In this case, I was blasted drunk by the time I squeezed out of those sneakers back in the hotel room; and I certainly didn't notice anything was amiss.

Getting up at 6am, hungover, I spend 15 minutes decided if it was the right time to wake up and get moving to the airport. Oh wait, gotta pack real quick. Getting the medicine bag put away, check. dirty clothes, check. running sho--oh yuck, what haenous shit did I step in yesterday !?! Well there was no time to worry too much, I was nearly late for the train to the airport. I searched thru the hotel room looking for anything remotely resembling a stink-proof bag. couldnt' find a damn thing. Best I could do was a piece of plastic wrapper from the bag of hotel slippers that i had foolishly torn in half. Good enough, i figured. Just slap that plastic strip on the bottom like a second sole and pack those shoes away and deal with it later.

Welcome to the baggage check at the Amsterdam airport. Hello ma'am, yes you speak English great! Wait what do you mean my checked bag is too heavy? There are 5 people in line behind me and I've been here for 20 mintues. You want me to repack it quickly here you say?... So I take out the obvious heavy things, and remain a few kg over the weight limit. Only thing left was those damn stink shoes. So I reluctantly open that part of the bag, letting lose the odor, and snatch those shoes out of there. Great, the bag is now light enough to check. and there it goes. And here I am w/ some stinky carryon luggage.

So I carry the stinky shoes thru security (thank god they didn't ask me to go thru the bag). I put them in the overhead compartment. I could smell a bit of a waft of poo from time to time, though I'm sure the other passangers assumed that it was just one too many chili dogs from the guy sitting in front. Guiltily, I pretend not to know a thing.

One plane down, one plane to go. Welcome to Budapest. So we grab a bite to eat, with the striped, stink-bombed laundary bag far enough away to avoid causing a stink. From there, to the next gate. At the gate, my nightmare.

The lady says that I can only take 1 carry-on and I must check the other one at the plane. While I'm digesting this information, she instinctively leans down to tie off the 'extra bag check' tag to the bag. I didn't know what to say. Her nose was right down in it. Then she couldn't get the tag attached, and waved the other girl over to see if the way she'd tied it on was good enough. I was bright red. I grabbed the bag, and was off and couldn't look her in the eye.

And that was how I arrived to Cluj, and my 4 weeks in Romania began. Gotta be my worst slash funniest baggage story to date.

Well here I am. In a (pretty nice) hotel room in Cluj, Romania. Its pretty cold outside, one has to wear a scarf in the night breeze. I haven't been drinking for 24 hours or so, which is easily the longest stretch of time in the past week I've pulled that off.

So why hasn't he blogged before now you may ask? Well from the second i've arrived in Cluj I've been taken from place to place, from 2 hour lunch to 3 hour dinner to bars and so on. Free time is time one should be sleeping. I'm not complaining, I have the best hosts in the world here in Horia, the head honcho at the NI-Romania office. You name it: taking the dinner tab, hooking me up with a more permanent apartment w/ a kitchen, and providing hilarity at every turn as well.

Whoooppps will write more and post some pictures next go round, i'm being called down to one last group dinner before the big NI-Romania soccer game. the majority of the Austin work people are back on the plane to Texas. I think I may get some time for my own exploration in the very near future!

And if you haven't picked it up from this -- I think Cluj is freaking awesome. I miss my girl, but other than that life is pretty damn good. Vive work travel.

The trip has begun! On the way out to Romania, it seems appropriate to stop for a 2 day layover in Amsterdam, so that's what we are doing.

Omid and I pulled in around noontime here yesterday, and we've just sorta been wandering the streets since then. It's a pretty sweet town, with bars and coffeeshops all over the place. The urge to get a beer is instantly satisfied at all times. The red light district is a sight to behold as well, never seen anything quite like that... Literally window shopping. Nuts.

This morning, at Claudia's advice, I'm popping off to the Anne Frank house. This afternoon I think the Van Gogh Museum is in order. Really I don't know what else we'll do. All i know is many coffees will be consumed, and many beers will run dry. Maybe even a geocache found if I can stay motivated... Having a blast so far!

Well there you have it, the quietest month of blogging by yours truly. One may ask why -- well here's a long overdue update:

1. Work has been crazy. I know its cliche, but its true! I recently have decided to change roles at NI by moving into Project Managment from development. It's an unexpected move that I hope will hold off the burnout that can set in by sitting at a desk all the time. The process of moving to this new role has been painful, because it pretty much means I'm doing two jobs at once (old job responsibilities winding down, new job responsibilities torquing up).
2. Heading to Romania in a week. I'm leaving for a month long work trip to Romania, in 7 days! This I've been looking forward to for almost a year, and I'm really excited to get a chance to go over. Whenever you leave for a month, there's a long laundary list of things to take care of. Also, I have to get a bunch of work stuff together for the trip. Best part will be - weekend beforehand in Amsterdam! What a layover :)
3. Got a new Mac. If you haven't seen the new redesigned iMac, you are really lame. It's got a dual-core Intel based chip, and gobs of RAM -- but the most impressive thing is just how it feels. It's like straight out of Star Trek - a single, sexy flat-panel screen with wireless mouse and keyboard. Now I've just gotta find the time to set it up.
4. jumphook.com is censored in China. What did I ever do to the Chinese Government? So lame - but they've got my site on the blacklist it seems. Justin (who has arrived in Shanghai for his 7-month work-stay) just reported this to me from China. Is this site all about free love and democracy and capitalism or something?

Anyway, be sure to note that blogging will ramp up when I leave for Amsterdam/Romania :) Much love to my dedicated jumphookers out there that still occasionally check.