I got the pleasure of being the illustrator for the second number of Literary Resita, this being also an anniversary edition since Cenaclul Semenicul (Semenic writer's guild) celebrated 70 years of activity. 
There's also a short article on me and let me tell you, they wrote such nice things that even I am impressed by myself! 

It's Friday, after 7 p.m., and we're getting all settled down in our train seats. The train is kinda empty and we have a compartment all to ourselves. The plan for the weekend is to just goof around in Timisoara. I used to live there. My friend had only visited the city for short errand and such. We're gonna sleep at our friend's place.

I had a lot of stuff. No, really. Lots of crap. My family has always had hoarder tendencies. It's understandable looking at the conditions they had grown up and such, but we're past those conditions. Yet I was brought up to hold on to all sorts of old, broken, duplicate stuff just in case. Not only that, but if you get something new, keep it in pristine condition and never use it ... use the old one.

This is not a Halloween post!
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Seriously. Had to go see the state of our family spot and took the opportunity to take some pics. This place is not the most well maintained cemetery in town, actually is quite delapidated and dealing with robbers. Kinda sad, but surely atmospheric. The weather helped with the atmosphere...and the industrial setting right at the foot of the hill is always a added bonus.

My dad hung up the phone. Our friend invited us on a short drive to a nearby village. He heard there's a spring that flows through a gold mine and wants to taste the water. We'll pop a visit to the old mineralogy museum as well. It's in the owners own house. 
​We met in the parking lot...

Hedgehogs make my mother smile. Seriously, they do! So we have a bunch of hedgehog themed stuff around the house. Sometime ago she found two of these sorta round and crudely made plushies in a second hand store, she bought them for basically nothing and brought them home. Something about them made the whole family love them, they were small, cute....and perfect for just throwing at each other. Shortly after that we fell on hard times. (I won't go too deep into that) the situation affected my mother even more than it affected the rest of us since she already was dealing with depression and severe anxiety. ​

If you're from this town and you like to hike you're probably really familiar with the hill we like to call Stema....or the Empty Hill (Dealul Gol). If you're not....hey, welcome to Resita, we have a hill in the middle of a city! Anyway, being easy to walk up on it and because it's so "close" to town, it makes it a very common "lets go have a short impromptu picnic" spot, and a lot of people tend to think that if you've seen it once there's nothing left to see....at which point the hill goes "hold my beer." Here's a flashback to one of these impromptu picnics:

​Once upon a time, a group of mountain vagabonds restored the old travellers rest place known to the villagers as Franz's Spring. They covered the spring so the mountain water would keep clan and fresh, they turned old fallen trees in a table fit for a forest feast, complete with log chairs sturdy enough to hold any who had feasted too much, and they installed a mirror.....because why not?

We came. We saw. We feasted. 

While the insanity that was Custom Resita took most of my time this week I managed to sneak in a nice Sunday hike. Nothing long and eventful, just a stroll uphill from lake Secu, up to an old railroad track foundation that we were supposed to follow back to the lake. The said foundation was so overgrown with vegetation that we had to climb down of it after about a quarter of the way and go back by the same dirt road we got there. 
Check out all the pictures I took below!

​​The trip started at 8:30 AM, in the Doman Valley bus station. The plan was to take the bus to Doman village and return to Resita taking a few old routes that used to be for horse drawn carts. The estimated distance was 16 km, but we were expecting it to be more due to changing altitudes and general goofing around and getting distracted.

​An hour later we were still in the bus station... ​

Last weekend....wait, last weekend!? It's already been a week!? I'm still tired! Or am I just lazy? lazy or tired, I can't decide. Probably both. Ok, back on track - last weekend I did my favourite thing in the world: woke up ridiculously early to get on a bus with a bunch of people and be on a schedule made by someone else...wait....no, that's not my favourite thing in the world. That's my least favourite thing in the world. I hate travelling, especially with groups of people I barely know or don't know at all. But I like visiting place so it's a necessary evil, I suppose. Anyway, I went on a field trip thing. Got to visit a few cool places in SW Trasylvania, took some pics, heard some inept remarks and ate questionable food.