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Yesterday, in my car, on my way to school. I was listening to the radio when I suddenly heard a song so dear to me. It sounded different somehow, but still, the same song I came to love. Ten Sharp, You, a remix of some sort.
I did not know if I liked it more ore less. I felt its change, the fact is was no longer how I used to know it. Someone had altered it. And I got to thinking of relationships. They do to us what had been done to that song: they change us, adding their mark, some of them forever.
When a relationship has ended and you indulge yourself in extensive self analyzing, born out of anguish, fear, self-doubt, the feeling you need to find the weak link in your soul and remove it, that is the moment when you realize you only partially recognize yourself. Parts of you are altered by the experience, someone else has left their traces in your spirit and mind. Do you like yourself more? Do you like yourself less? Do you feel like rejecting the change altogether because most of us fear it? The reaction depends on personal circumstances. But the reality of the metamorphosis cannot be denied.
That is what people do to each other. When close, they touch each others souls, they borrow and lend certain traits, stain and are stained. Something alien finds its way in and starts altering what it encounters. Repeated experiences with people take us from one stage to another, pushing us to evolve in a certain direction. The evolution is compulsory, all we can choose is the direction.
Yesterday I came across another online magazine for women. I browsed through it, as I usually do with such magazines, and then I never return. Unless I am really bored and there is nothing else to do.
Their attitude does annoy me. Even if they are aimed at career women, the attitude is a bit wrong. They still promote diets. None focuses more on careers, on experiences, on real accounts on everything. They still all make a purpose of discovering whats behind the masculine mind. Well I dont care about that when reading such a magazine. I want to read about women. How they handle stuff. Not a psychologists opinion on how men think.
Anyway, back to the respective magazine. I loved the slogan: for women who successfully combine their career and family life. Great! I need some advice on that. Then I saw the sections. Career is fourth, after Home, Family and Beauty??? And the square in front of it has the ugliest, least attractive colors of all: a gray of some sort.
Then I read this article in the Lifestyle section. About successful business women in a mans world. OK, enough of that. I am tired of people talking about how women become more and more like men when they handle important affairs. How the eternal feminine might be lost on the way to prove their independence, their leadership abilities etc.
Just because women want to do what men do does not mean they wont bring in their own style. Yes, they might experience lack of time and everything, but as Cris said at a certain point, they still have similar issues when it comes to relationships and life in general. They wont turn into copies of men in their field. Not all of them anyway. Some might!
So maybe a HowTo on how to stay a woman when doing a mans job? That would be an interesting subject for me. Or maybe an extensive article about day care (or the lack of it) in Romanian companies? Or more statistics or employed women vs housewives. Or womens salaries vs mens salaries. Or Queen Bees in Romania. Do they exist? Single women and single mothers. How to handle all lifes responsibility on your own when clearly the stay at home option is not available? Maybe we should focus on that more and less on pathological fights within a relationship.
Every once in a while I amaze myself with how much I dont know about my country. What is even more amazing is that some truly appealing travel destinations are never promoted. Thus, lots of Romanians dont know about them. So it took a visit to CNNs Travel Section to see this:
There is only one count in this remote Transylvanian village of 512 souls nestled in the wilds of the Carpathian Mountains -- and it isn't Count Dracula.
Meet Count Tibor Kalnoky, a dashing 40-year-old entrepreneur and son of Transylvania descended from a noble family which settled in these misty lands in the 13th century and lived there until communism forced the family to flee.
Kalnoky's manor, which opened in 2001, lies deep in southern Transylvania, an area where myth and reality are loosely entwined. But you'll hardly hear a word here about Dracula, the Romanian warlord Vlad the Impaler or Bram Stoker's novels.
Instead Kalnoky lures guests with the old world of Transylvanian customs.
Many visitors come from Britain and the United States to feast on tasty fare of pork or chicken stew, mashed potato tinged pink by paprika pepper, home-baked cakes served by women dressed in traditional costume.
Dinner is washed down with red Romanian wine and guests are warmed by a roaring log fire in the wine cellar before snuggling into decades-old goose eiderdowns in rooms decorated faithfully in the style of the Szeklers -- the ethnic Hungarian minority to which Kalnoky belongs.
(Photo from here)
Take a hike in the hills and you may come across bears and wolves. Bird lovers can look out for eagles, black storks and woodpeckers. You can also travel in a horse and cart for a mountain picnic, cycle to nearby Transylvanian towns or visit the Kalnoky family hunting lodge. Just north of Miclosoara, there is the cave where the legendary Pied Piper lured the children of Hamelin.
When visitors return to the manor at sundown for dinner they are serenaded by Szekler music in the soft green drawing room, with antique furniture and dark wooden floors. It's low-key and relaxing.
I wanted to learn more about Miclosoara and the manor, so I did a little research. Not much to find on Romanian sites though. But I did find this presentation of the Kalnoky hotel. Take a peak, its all fascinating. And a 49 Euro price for bed and breakfast is really cheap by Romanian standards, given there is no real competition in the area.
So, my immediate plan is to get there sometime soon. And then keep recommending it to Romanian and foreign tourists.
Photo credits
I got to Belgrade Trilogy by mistake. It was the diploma project of young graduating actors/directors and one of them happened to be a friend of Cris. Therefore I found out about it. No tickets, no invitation, just people wanting to see their work and what theyve learned.
Connected only be a feeble line, the three stories present lifelines of people leaving Belgrade to look for a better life someplace else. The ever tempting grass is greener on the other side. Two brothers making a living in Prague so that one of them is not forced to perform military service, two married couples living a dream of fortune in Sidney, Australia and a young actor and a pianist meeting all the way in America
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K is not the type of guy that calls several times a day to talk to me. Hes quite the opposite, I am the one who needs to hear him more. Therefore, I was quite surprised when he called, the second time that day. I picked up the phone thinking theres something important for me to know.
It was, in a way. He told me to change channels and watch AXN. It was the Amazing Race and the teams were going to Istanbul. More than that, they were going to a specific place where we had been together: Kiz Kulesi or Maidens Tower. Dating back from 341 BC, in 410 BC it became a customs area on the Bosphorous, but the tower on this structure was built only in 1110. In 1719 it was burnt down by a fire and then repaired in 1725
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The Anonimul (Anonymous) International Independent Film Festival takes place every year in August on quite a beautiful location, the Danube Delta. Cris and I were planning to go this year, but we missed it. Therefore, we were pretty pleased to take part in two of the three days of festival retrospective organized in Bucharest at the Sudio cinema.
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September 26th 2006 10:34
The online edition of the Evenimantul Zilei daily newspaper will host climber Constantin Lacatusus blog. The new featured blog will describe his ongoing expedition in the Himalayas.
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September 22nd 2006 07:26
Capital of the Walachian and Moldavian region united under the name of the Romanian state since 1862, Bucharest celebrates for three days 547 from its first mentioning in an official document.
Vlad Tepes, also known as the Impaler or Dracula (lets thank Bram Stocker for that), mentioned Bucharest in a letter dating from 1459. He built a fortress in Bucharest to hold back the Turks threatening the Walachian state. For more historical details, visit this link
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Comment by Alinas_Stories
on Is the Eternal Feminine at Bay?
Alina's News and Stories
Women working towards a career are happy doing their job, maybe they would move to a part time for more time, true, but you cannot give up a job you love and not feel something is missing.
Having money and not working? Well, that is how twisted kids appear. Too much money to know what working for it means. If I had that amount of money now, I would choose what to do to make more. True, but I would not stay home all day because I would go crazy in two months. And partying and shopping do not qualify as fulfilling time wasters.