Balkan Portrait 6: The Weaver

Plovdiv in Bulgaria is one of the oldest cities in the world, where 7000-year old Thracian settelements rub shoulders with a 2nd-century Roman amphitheatre and gorgeous 19th-century national revivalist architecture.

Wandering the cobbled streets of the Old Town, I looked in through a window and spied a weaver working at the loom. I asked if I could take a closer look at the loom and maybe a few photos, and she graciously allowed me into the workshop. She even thanked me for asking her permission, saying, "Most tourists just take photos through the window. We don't like that, we feel like animals at the zoo."

This is the final post in the Balkan Portraits series. Regular posting (or what passes for regular posting on this blog) shall resume from tomorrow.

Balkan Portrait 5: The Potter

Outside Bachkovo Monastery in Bulgaria, potters display the colourful ceramic wares for which the region is famous. From this lady we bought a custard-yellow sugar-pot which may one day feature in the Household Objects series.

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).