27 October: Suceviţa and points north cont'd

After spending a day the in town of Rădautz looking around aimlessly for musicians whose names I had but not their exact location, it got late and I had to think about a place to stay. A friend of a friend lived not too far from the area, but I had not been able to reach him. Bernard Houliat, an author living in Suceviţa with his Romanian wife Erevelen (please tell me I got that right), was someone Bob Cohen directed me to. I finally did reach him on this very day. It was his wife who answered the phone and when I told her we were in the area and were looking for a pension, she laughed. What I didn’t know was that they themselves had a pension, of sorts. The Houliat’s home was destroyed in the July and August floods, so they were staying in what normally would have been a pension owned by the family. They welcomed us very warmly; we had dinner and chatted late into the night. Bernard had a Maremureş trumpet violin whose bridge had fallen so I fixed it and had a little play on it. We talked about Mucea (sp?) and they said they knew he was not leaving town until a couple days later. They would try to organize a get together for me with them. The next day we drove out to a village to meet another fiddler they pointed me to but we ran out of time before we found him; I wanted to get back to the Houliat’s to meet Mucea, which actually didn't work out. We did see these two little kids in the village we went to.

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