Down On The Farm

We had a little birthday celebration "down on the farm" this weekend. I was in Bucharest to see Dr. Dan and then I headed up to Codlea. On Saturday Victor, Ica and I went to Ica's brother Tavi's farm. It was Tavi's wife's birthday (Vali) and we had a really nice time. The weather was beautiful and we did a little grilling - Romanian style (Mici, Chicken, mmmm).

That's Tavi in the second photo. The baby horse is about three weeks old. The baby cow in the first photo was born that day; just hours old and already walking! Tavi's farm is really cool. Lots of dogs, cows, sheep, goats, pigs, horses, etc. They even have bees to make honey. Tavi and Vali make awesome cheese as well. Sheep, goat, cow and mixtures. Cascaval and telemea are the names of the cheeses. All natural. I love it. I hope to visit the farm a lot this summer.

Something interesting has developed in the past couple of days. An Avian Flu outbreak was discovered on a chicken farm outside of Codlea. As a result, I cannot go to Codlea for the next three weeks. As of right now, they haven't identified it as the "dreaded" H5N1, it's just H5 (whatever that means). As the bus crossed the border from Brasov County to Covasna County yesterday, we came upon a roadblock. There was a team of people there that were disinfecting all of the vehicles leaving the area. Little did I know that it had anything to do with bird flu, let alone that it was in Codlea. Too bad I didn't get quarantined in Codlea...heh heh.

I'm sure that the situation will be resolved within three weeks. The authorities here are attending to the problem. I heard that they might have to euthanize about 500,000 birds. Apparantly, the company that owns the farm was not attending to their responsibilities and was dumping bags full of dead birds in a local garbage dump during the past month. Nice. There's going to be some heavy, heavy fines coming their way. This company produces chicken and turkey for sale in the Brasov area and other domestic markets. There's a lot of meat being pulled from the shelves right now. There are some other towns and villages in Brasov County that are having some issues at the moment as well. A few of these places have been quarantined. Let's just hope that this doesn't happen in Codlea.

So, looks like I'm not going to be seeing Ica and Victor for awhile. I'm going to try to go to some other places and visit some friends instead. Maybe Bucharest. We'll see. Weekends in Piatra Neamt are pretty lonely and boring. As you all know, I try to get out of here on the weekends as much as possible. I'll be soliciting some people this week for a visit....

We're definitely in countdown mode here at school. Only four weeks to go after this week. I'm pretty much set with what I'm going to be doing, so it should be pretty low-key and low stress. C'mon time and fly for me! U S of A six weeks from Sunday!!!

Signing off from the (as of right now) bird flu free zone of Piatra Neamt....

Scott