I've already mentioned a little bit about my new town, Recas, which sits on the rolling plains of the Banat, in western Romania. While I have a few minutes though, I thought I'd fill in the picture a little more: Recas is actually a collection of a few villages (Recas being the largest at 8500 people, and in which I live) that were only incorporated into "localitatea" (i.e. town) status two years ago. It is a town that sits among vineyards and substistance farmlands. Every morning I am awakened by the crowing of roosters, the bleating of sheep, the mooing of cows, the strangely abrasive chatter of goats, and of course the song-birds. You constantly smell the barnyard and the animals, and the fresh air from the hills. It's wonderful. When I jog, I dodge cow-pies (and what, from Romanian, literally translates as "vagabond dogs"). Recas is a town, like so many, wrestling with itself over its place in the new world -- a stronghold of rural tradition on the one hand, and a modernizing commercial district on the other. Recas is already home to Cramele Recas, one of Romania's most well-known wineries, and it will soon be home to the oddly named "Eurocheese" factory, exporting dairy products all over the continent. And yet we still buy our fresh bread every morning from the local bakery. Everyone lovingly tends their own garden plots during the warm months, saving and preserving all that they can before the cold sets in. In the past, I suppose, one's garden was one of the few sources of sustinence over which you had (relative) complete control...which leads back to the homemade liquor discussion.
All of this and I'm only a 30-minute train ride from the beautiful city of Timisoara! Gotta run--
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