On Friday morning I went to Turda, where I'd arranged a couch surf with a girl. Honestly, I decided to go to Turda largely for its name, but it's got a really cool salt mine. The air is supposed to be really healthy inside, and there were a bunch of families with children playing football in the huge excavated cavern or digging in the sand while dressed up in parkas (it was about 55 degrees inside). There was an awesome echo chamber.
There's also a gorge that we hiked in with a couple caves that the locals once used to hide from the Turks.
To get to the gorge we had to wander through a village which was really interesting. (Pictured: onions drying in someone's back yard.)
I was going to leave Saturday morning, but then the mother of my host started talking about all the food she wanted to cook me, and that convinced me to stay another night. We've been stuffed with fresh mozerella from their grandparents' farm, fresh homemade jam on bread or crepes, several varieties of soup (one of which contained what I swear were matzoh balls), meatballs, and these pastries that have cheese and raisins in them or chocolate. We went to the salt lakes yesterday, the last of Turda's three potential tourist attractions. There's been a festival this weekend so during the day the center of town is crowded with food booths and gypsy stalls selling various things. At night Romanian bands have played, and I'm sorry to say we never made it to see them, because my Romanian host has been hanging out at night with a bunch of Air Force soldiers who are on some sort of NATO mission here. That in and of itself has been interesting (army culture = a strange study), and solved the big mystery for me of why I've seen and heard military planes flying overhead for the past five days or so.
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