Weekend at the Mayor's house

Last weekend also happened to be election weekend here in the village. My counterpart got 761 votes, I think it was, and his closest competitor got 660 votes.
5 people ran for mayor in this comuna, and 49% of all possible voters voted (you have to be over 18 to vote).

For the mayor to win this round of elections, he/she had to get 50% of all the votes, so that didn't happen.

What does this mean? This means that 2 weekend from then (next weekend, not this one) they're going to do elections again (all the schools in the comuna are voting stations, with cops and stuff, and 2 people are assigned to be "president" and "vice president" of the committee in charge of the votes and counting the votes etc...).

Anyway, I spent Friday-Saturday at the Mayor's house, at the invitation of his wife Sarita, so I could learn how to cook traditional Romanian food. This is her in her work house clothes, and I asked her if I could take the picture before I took it. We're in her yard.


Here we made Sarmaleluti [s-are-mah-laiy-loo-zee] which is one of my favorite foods. It kinda reminds me of potstickers or dumplings, in that you mix veggies with ground meat and you wrap them in something.

These are wrapped in grape leaves (wine grape leaves) and the leaves taste good.

Almost every home has a vinyard, but not mine, I have a vegetable garden now =)

Here are 2/3 photos and old man attempted to take. He couldn't get our heads in the pictures, and after 3 tries, I patted his hand and said "foarte bine" (very good/well).



Here's Sarita's mom chopping green onions with an axe...cause it's faster. She's good too. They have gas stoves inside the house, but they also have a pit to cook outside using fire.

The granny didn't mind me helping out, even though I was a guest, so she let me walk into the "cage" of corn knobs to refill buckets for the fire (felt kinds scared in a cage), and she let me help carry shoots of stuff to burn, and =) I got to help chase and catch middle sized chickens.

That was fun! but hard work!! There was this small agile one that took me 10 minutes to scare out and to catch. I had to use sticks to poke it out from under the cage, throw bricks to block exits, etc...
One stupid chicken puked all over my arm while I was trying to get one for this picture.
It was like rounding horses actually...something I learned at Cal Poly.