Balkan Portrait 4: The Signalman

The overnight sleeper train from Cluj-Napoca to Brașov was one of the highlights of my Balkans trip. It was a beautiful old train, straight out of a Hercule Poirot story – dark wood panelling, brass fittings and spotless linen sheets. They gave us our own coupé, even though we'd bought a cheap second-class ticket. All night the train rattled through Transylvanian forests and mysterious Romanian stations, and at daybreak the sun rose over the Eastern Carpathians.

We pulled into Brașov early in the morning. After the signalman had flagged our train off, I asked to take his photo. I like railways, and by extension railway employees. My grandmother's brother was an engine-driver, and I regret not having asked him lots of questions about life on the railroad when I had the chance.

Balkan Portrait 3: The Cyclist

Piaţa Muzeului in the Romanian city of Cluj-Napoca is a popular haunt for university students, so fashionable bikes are no rare sight. Even so, this one stood out. The owner said he got it second-hand at a great price.

When I asked if I could take his photo, he not only assented, but put his foot on the bench, deliberately took out a cigarette from his satchel and lit up. I took several photos, of which this one is my favourite.

Balkan Portrait 2: The Watermelon-Sellers

This family was selling watermelons by the side of a highway in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. I think they are Romanies, but I didn't ask.

They offered to sell us watermelons, but that was almost by way of a lead-up to their real request: would I take their photograph? Of course I was more than happy to oblige.

Balkan Portrait 1: The Dancers

This is the first in a series of six photos of people I encountered on my travels in Romania and Bulgaria.

On the fringes of the supposedly haunted Hoia-Baciu forest in northern Transylvania, we chanced upon a Hungarian festival. People of all ages were dancing to Hungarian folk tunes, whirling in a hand-clapping, tap-dancing frenzy. Between performances, I asked three of the oldest dancers for permission to take a photo, with the grand-daughter of one of the dancers acting as interpreter.

Seal! Seal!

When there is a cold autumn wind blowing in from the North Atlantic and the ground is wet from last night's rain, there are few things which can make me scamper out of my tent first thing in the morning, barefoot and without a jumper, but Saha shouting "Seal! Seal!" is certainly one of them.

Spotting a family of grey seals was the highlight of our hike in Pembrokeshire, Wales. They were basking on a pebble beach below the cliff where we had pitched camp, and seemed unconcerned by our presence.

An Introduction to Scrabble Terminology

This post will introduce two oft-used Scrabble terms: "phoneys" and "bingos". For readers who thirst for more, Word Buff has an entertaining Scrabble glossary.

A phoney is a non-valid word, i.e. a word which does not exist in the dictionary being used for a given Scrabble game.

Lately I have been playing more Scrabble online than on a physical board. The online games are set up so that every word is checked against a dictionary, making it impossible to play phoneys.

In general this setting suits us best, but I miss the fun that would often ensue in a physical game when someone played a phoney and tried to convince the rest of us that it was a valid word. This was especially fun with Priyanka, who made up sentences to make her phoneys seem more convincing. Two examples from a game last year:

Agraze. As in, the hills are agraze with cows.

and

"Zanshir" is a middle eastern beverage. You know Omar Khayyam's famous lines: "I sat beneath the olive bough / Zanshir in my hand."

Efforts as good as these probably deserve more points than real words.

A bingo is a word which uses up all seven letters on the rack and earns 50 bonus points.

The two people I play most often are both slightly better than me. They know all the two-letter words and most of the threes, rarely waste a blank for a play of less than 50 points, and structure their game strategy around the formation of bingos. When playing against them, it is rare to have a game with less than two bingos.

But games like the one which finished today are rarer still: my opponent and I made four bingos in five consecutive plays ‒ an occurrence sufficiently unusual and satisfying (at least for my level) that I deemed it worth posting about.

The bingos were RECOuRSE (77 points), DOUBLiNG (72 points), RESIGNER (72 points) and EMENDATE (86 points).

Obviousness

Some things are obvious to nerds, but less obvious to the rest of us. From two recent coversations:

me:	Some guy did a 24-minute loop of Manhattan in a BMW Z4. But he got arrested because he made a dashboard camera recording of the ride and uploaded it to YouTube.
Anasua:	It is no longer necessary to say the words "to YouTube".
Surya:	Obviously I am acquainted with the Scandinavian genre of crime of fiction...
Saha:	Surya, there should be no "obviously" before that sentence.

The 1/27720 Sheppey Asparagus

It is said that Jiro Ono, perhaps the finest sushi chef in the world and a fanatical perfectionist, always uses his own palm to measure the quantity of rice for each piece of sushi, because an assistant's palm would introduce inconsistency.

My approach to cooking is far less exact. Onlookers are often alarmed to note that I don't bother to measure out spices and condiments, preferring instead to pour apparently arbitrary quantities from the containers directly into the cooking pot.

However, following the introduction of a new cutting board in our kitchen (a standard Sainsbury's cutting board, which Anasua engraved with a laser from her lab), guests can be sure that their food will have evenly-chopped ingredients.

This asparagus tip, for example, is 1/27720 of a Sheppey. As Douglas Adams fans may know, a Sheppey is a unit of length, defined as the closest distance at which sheep remain picturesque.

Below left is a photo of sheep grazing on snow on a Himalayan hillside, taken at ~1 Sheppey. Below right is a sheep seen on a day walk in Kent at a distance of much less than a Sheppey.