If I shut my eyes and think of Romania, I smell apples and hear horses. In the mountains around Ariesen, winter lasts for seven months The steady clip-clop, but rather the more urgent clippety-clop, clippety-clop of a horse or two pulling a covered wagon down the homeward straight. On my atlas of Central Europe, published in Budapest on the eve of the World War II, there is even a horse map, each dot representing perhaps 100 horses. The dots, not surprisingly, become more heavily concentrated the further east your eye wanders. What would a horse map of Europe look like today, I wonder? A great white blank for much of the continent but still a healthy number east and south of the rusty old Iron Curtain, like red ants on the page, down over Romania and parts of the Balkans. There are still an astonishing 750,000 carts registered in Romania as a whole. Yes, carts, not cars.
If I shut my eyes and think of Romania, I smell apples and hear horses.
The steady clip-clop, but rather the more urgent clippety-clop, clippety-clop of a horse or two pulling a covered wagon down the homeward straight.
On my atlas of Central Europe, published in Budapest on the eve of the World War II, there is even a horse map, each dot representing perhaps 100 horses.
The dots, not surprisingly, become more heavily concentrated the further east your eye wanders.
What would a horse map of Europe look like today, I wonder?
A great white blank for much of the continent but still a healthy number east and south of the rusty old Iron Curtain, like red ants on the page, down over Romania and parts of the Balkans.
There are still an astonishing 750,000 carts registered in Romania as a whole. Yes, carts, not cars.
It would be ironic if they modernized just in time for it all to end. keep to the Fen Causeway
