Time for the second entry on our time in Breb. This one is going to be all about our work here and our life too. Perhaps I ought to talk about our hosts first and the people we worked with. They were such a huge part of our lives here that I'm going to end up dropping name all over the place and you won't have a clue who I'm talking about.

Colleagues (And Bosses!)

I guess you could say that we are working for Somewhere Different the company. This is run by Duncan and his wife Penny. Their family has quite an incredible story of its own which I won't go into as it's all on their website (www.somewheredifferent.com). But I can talk about our experience with them. Especially since it's all been brilliant.

We met Penny first at the bottom of Breb and she took us up to their house. This is where we met Duncan and their son Angus and we made our introductions. Nobody was quite sure at first what exactly we would be able to do for them, but Duncan was fairly convinced that we'd be kept very busy.

Our first real day after recovering from the travelling was spent figuring out exactly what work needed to be done and taking a tour around where we would be working. It was a fairly relaxed first week and the whole family really worked hard to make us feel as much at home as possible. All our previous worries about coming out here into the unknown were dashed aside almost immediately as we couldn't have landed in the company of any better people.

Penny was just such a lovely lady. She loved to show us around the village and introduce us to local people and each night she would cook a nice dinner. This would generally be a curry as Duncan loves her curries. Penny admitted that handing out tasks was really not something that she was good at. We could understand that. We were given six hour working days and once we worked our six hours it was a bit of a battle for us to convince her that we could help out with the dishes or the cooking. I think she warmed to it though and appreciated the little extra help. She was also fairly quick to take advantage of extra hands once she realised we were a pair of people that really wanted to help. She didn't think we would have much to do but she often found little problems that we could help sort deal with along with the rest of the work we'd figured out. Duncan was often busy working on the technical part of the company and also spent time in Bucharest working with the media down that way so we spent the bulk of our first few weeks with Penny and Angus.

Angus, ah. What can I say? We clicked very quickly. Angus seemed fairly neutral towards us at the very beginning. I believe a few people have come to Breb to help in the past but none that really paid much attention to him other than to hog his computer for the internet. He warmed up in no time at all though when Duncan asked if I was into computer games. I love computer games. Angus has an Xbox? With two controllers?! Friends for life! That gave us something very much in common and after that we talked all the time. I guess Angus has kind of been gagging for a bit of English company and we were just the right people. Its not just that I had that connection with him, but both Katie and myself were willing to give him all the time in the world for a good laugh. He's may only be 15 years old (about that) but he's grown up differently from a lot of other kids. He is a kid. He loves to joke around and laugh and just generally have fun. But he's also very grown up at times too. He came out and worked in the orchard with us and showed us around a bit of the village in the evenings too. And at night we would play a bit of Fifa or Call of Duty on the Xbox.

We were about a week or so into working in Breb when we found out that Penny and Angus were both going to be heading back to Egypt in a few weeks to look after the place there. That was going to stir things up a little. Gaming nights would be over and so would Penny's cooking. And we'd be left on our own with Duncan who up to this point we hadn't really gotten to know incredibly well. We chatted around the dinner table and had a laugh at times when Angus and myself were on the computer but Duncan was often very busy working on his own computer and seemed determined to remain quite hands-off with both of us so we could manage our own time. We knew we'd be able to get things done but we weren't too sure if it would turn into more work with less fun, in the evenings especially.

We needn't have worried. There's a reason Duncan is married to a lovely woman and has such an awesome son. And that's because he's a pretty bloody cool guy himself. He's got a vision for Somewhere Different in Breb and his head is full of ideas that come together to make him really excited about getting the place running at maximum. Breb holds a huge amount of potential for what people call Eco-tourism. It's close to losing a lot of its traditional values and perhaps Duncan is the guy that will help to preserve it. The local Breb people think it's crazy to hold onto such old things like traditionally built houses but people are not just willing to come and see it from abroad, they're crying out for this kind of thing. It may not even make him loads of money, but the rewards are far more subtle than that. He wants us to be a part of that too and we're happy to oblige him.

It's been pretty awesome working for Duncan. He was never quite so hands-off as we thought he might be. We knew what work needed to be done but he sometimes thought of other things we could do. He wouldn't come down to watch us or to advise us. He was willing to have faith in the fact that we were getting on with our tasks. He would often ask what we'd been up to for the day, but I think mostly out of interest rather than keeping check on us. We're hard workers. And we are proud of the work we've done. We'd talk about what we were doing. Duncan would sometimes offer advice or he'd just be reassured that we were enthused about working for him. It also helped that we could keep things sorted around the house. We (mostly Kate) made dinner. We washed dishes and did laundry for the guest-houses. The laundry was also mostly Katie. OK, all Katie.

Duncan wasn't all about work though. He worked hard through the day and he wanted us to work hard too, but after we spent a little more time in each other's company over the next week Duncan really came out of his shell. He showed us a couple of nearby pubs first and then he'd start bringing a few bottles home with him so we could have a drink in the evenings. Most of the time that drink would turn into a total booze-up. We'd do a hard day's work and after tea Duncan would ask if we wanted a drink. Then we'd get drunk and spend an extra hour in bed the next day. Then he'd want to take us out to another pub. We rarely paid for our own drinks either. I think that Duncan, like Angus, was just very glad of some good company. He owns land all spread around Breb and we even had a couple of nights out beneath the stars on one of his fields. Our drinking nights with Duncan were awesome. It gave us a chance to really get to know each other very well. It got pretty heavy though. When Duncan had to leave for Bucharest for a few days it felt great to give our livers a bit of a rest and catch up on some sleep before he came back and we got into party mode again.

Duncan's been a massive inspiration for us this past month or so. He may have had a bit of money to kick off what he's now doing, more than us. But it's made us realise that this really is something we can carry on doing for as long as we like. Not just working for other people abroad, but setting up for ourselves and almost following in his footsteps. I kind of feel that he had an advantage leaving it until later in life, financially. But his opinion is that we are in a far better position than he was. By the time we're his age we will have acquired far more experience and could be far more set up, making good money while still having the freedom of youth. I'm inclined to agree. We may not have the funds right now, but we're picking up opportunities already. Duncan wants us to come back and help to build and manage the next stage of his business in Romania. I'm not sure how Kate feels about it in a long-term sense but maybe I can bring her round. To work a Summer season in one place while earning money to travel elsewhere out of season could give us a huge amount of experience for later on. I think Kate feels short on time though. I'm not sure why.

I could go on for much longer about how we got on with Duncan, but time is short and there's much more to talk about. It's enough to know that he really wants us to come back and I think he was sad to see us go. Those were our bosses I guess. Then there were those we worked with, some closer than others. Maria was closest of all.

Maria completed a law degree about a year ago and came back to her home in Breb needing work. She speaks good English, she knew law, and she was keen. Duncan hired her to help him out with managing the houses and now she does a huge amount for him. Buying houses in Breb is easy. The difficult thing is getting them legalised for use; and Maria's training in law as well as her native Romanian language skills is helping to make it possible for Duncan to set up. She deals with almost everything for Somewhere Different in Breb. She welcomes guests, shows them around, and she organises work-men to come round and work on the houses that are still being renovated.

It's going to be difficult for Duncan when she decides to leave. Which is why it's a bit of a bummer that she really hates being stuck in Breb. She spent years in university in the city and now she needs that little bit more. She just doesn't know exactly what it is that she wants to do. She doesn't want to go into law and she doesn't fancy carrying on with tourism. Duncan even asked if she wanted to go to Bucharest and work for him there. She's still quite young though. A little younger than Katie. So she has plenty of time to figure things out, so long as she can keep Duncan up to date as he would definitely have to replace her with another Romanian speaker. It just may not be easy to find anybody quite as good as her.

Maria may not want to be in Breb, doing what she's doing, but she's knows the work and she's really good at it. All the guests that have come through in the short time that we were there had a great time and I would say that that was partly due to Maria's great attitude. Duncan really pushes customer service and Maria understands exactly how to look after people. She looked after us while we were there too and I hope we were able to return the favour. Katie got on with Maria really well. They spent much more time together while working on the houses and I think that Katie has even been a bit of an inspiration. She's had very little direction the whole time we were in Breb, but it seems Katie has led her in the direction of travelling as a life experience.

Next door to us lived Duncan's web designer Costin. He hasn't worked very long on the website, but he is renting a room with our neighbours to work close to Duncan. He doesn't have a great deal of experience though and he's been going through a long learning curve to figure out how to give Duncan what he needs. Costin's a decent bloke. He keeps odd hours, like any web-techy, but he popped round once in a while for a drink and a few card games when he was bored or lonely.

How we're Living

When we first got into Breb the guys moved us straight into one of their guest-houses. That was a nice surprise, but they warned us not to get too used to it. They would need it for paying guests! I'm glad we did get to use the house though. It allowed us to live in luxury for a few days before settling into the caravan. It also gave us an idea of what the guys were providing to the guests in terms of accommodation. The normal guests in these houses weren't really the backpacker types. They were generally a good bit older and quite well-off. That's not to say that this was 5-star accommodation. The houses are lovely. They are traditionally built and they have great facilities inside, but the prices aren't too much more than what you'd pay in a hostel in a big city. We certainly enoyed our few day sleeping in there.

Penny soon had the campervan ready though. It's an old Mercedes camper with a huge double bed and a kitchen. It was great to live in a camper, but it had its issues. The bed was so big that there was barely any room to move about in the cooking area and it had a big hole in the middle of one side where one of the boards had broken. After over a month we were quite happy to move out. If only to save our necks from the bed. I may have had it worse than Kate though. She always got the good side. The kitchen size wasn't too much hassle. We thought it would be but we ended up using the house most of the time anyway. The camper just became somewhere to sleep and store our stuff. So, besides the camper, Duncan's house pretty much became our home. It would never have been such a perfect experience if Duncan hadn't been so welcoming as to have us pretty much living in with him.

So that was the sleeping arrangements. We slept in the camper but lived in the house. The house did come with issues of its own. For several weeks we had no water at all. We had two big bottles for drinking water and two buckets for flushing the toilet. We would fill these from the neighbours' hose across the road which would become a daily task. Sometimes twice daily. You've got no idea how much water a family can get through until you spend the time lugging it all into the house yourself. And that was without washing. We could splash our faces in the morning and brush our teeth but showering wasn't an option. Once in a while we'd get a shower in one of the guest houses but we were generally quite smelly by then. We had what we called the Breb Smell and that probably lingered even after we managed to have a long hot shower. We had to try to time it well too. At times we felt we didn't really need to wash ourselves. It had been a couple of days since the last time but we were used to it and we possibly hadn't been doing anything to strenuous with our working hours. Then we would have guests stay in the houses for close to a week and there was no chance at all of getting clean. No matter how bad we smelled!

Things came to a head when the houses got busy. Duncan sometimes had to go to the city and he didn't want to smell like a peasant while he was having meetings with people. We needed water in the house. So he took action and talked to the landlords. He pays them quite a high price compared to hat a local would pay for rent and if the water wasn't fixed he'd just have to move out to the other house which he did actually own. The only reason he hasn't moved there so far is that part of the deal was to let the old couple stay there until the end of this year. Duncan would have to move them on to their children. The landlords would have to get things sorted if they wanted to keep earning and to give them their dues they were straight on it.

The problem was that the water supply was downhill and there wasn't enough pressure to get it into the house. They would have to dig a ditch from the back of the house all the way up to the pipeline before the main supply. From there they would attach another pipe diverting some water away. This would possibly have worked fine back home, but here in Breb they don't bother to bring in professionals. They found a guy with a digger and got straight to work. They were at it the whole day and right through to midnight in the pitch black. They had bottles of beer and plenty of Horinka to keep them going and booze plus industrial machinery is a terrible idea. The very next morning none of the neighbours had any water at all and they knew why. The landlords in the middle of the night, probably a little worse for ware, had hit the supply pipe and put a huge crack in it! Water was spewing out the side and there was no pressure left to get it into anybody's houses. I'm glad we didn't have to deal with the aggro. It might have been done for our benefit, but hey, the work was nothing to do with us. Take it up with the landlords.

I'm not sure how things were fixed but eventually all the work had been completed. The ditch was filled in, the pipe was installed under the house, and we had lots of running water. We had hot too! Showers all round. And everybody else got their water back along with us. It was great to finally get a steady supply of water. Simple things like washing dishes or just brushing our teeth became far more convenient. It wasn't perfect. There were some days when the water just ran out. There were several reasons. There were workmen on the roads putting in a huge pipeline from the mountain to Ocna. Sometimes their work would affect the entire village. Or sometimes there just wasn't enough water coming into the village at all.

It's been a long dry summer in Breb this year and there are people a lot more concerned than ourselves. The people rely on their livestock through the winter period for their milk and their meat. Cows drink a lot themselves, as do sheep and pigs. The biggest concern is the lack of hay. The villagers feed hay to the animals all year round and attempt to stockpile as much as possible for winter. This year there may not be enough to feed all the animals. Especially if it's a particularly hard winter. This means that some animals will have to be killed off for meat. And that of course means less livestock for the next year. It's a pretty big deal.

Our Work

So what were we actually doing this whole time? We certainly haven't been doing sight-seeing like we were before! We've been on a few very nice walks into the countryside and to the next couple of villages but our purpose here now is to work. To work hard and to play hard as they stay. We are living pretty much for free now and we're paying our way while we're here. Here is how.

For the first few weeks our main job was harvesting. There was an orchard full of plum and apple trees and the crop this year is amazing. Thousands of plums and possibly even thousands of apples and we had to pick them all up, bag them and get them to the house where they would be stored in huge half-ton barrels to ferment. This was hard work. We spent many days bent over picking up everything that had fallen to the ground. We shook the trees too to get as much up as possible in one shift. There were many shifts. Plums often took a while to ripen up and come off the trees and they kept on growing for a long time. It was a massive relief when we finally picked up the last of the plums and filled up the last apple barrel. We got about two and a half tons of fruit in total. Maybe a bit more. Its sitting in the barrels right now; rotting to stinking juices and being eaten up by millions of fruit flies. Looking into the barrels it's hard to imagine that that is what we've been drinking as a pure clean alcoholic drink. You open the lid up and get covered in flies and the stink really hits you. I can't wait to come back and sample a bit of what we helped produce.

One of our other big jobs has been to insulate one of the houses. Duncan wanted to do this the traditional way by putting moss between the logs and using a mud mixture to cover over the top of that moss. Gathering the moss took a day by itself. We wandered around the village with big sacks trying to find stone walls with plenty of growth on them and we just tore it all off. A fairly satisfying task that earned us many strange looks from the locals. They don't really use it anymore. One guy saw us doing this and pulled us into his house for a break. It was 10 in the morning and he was completely sozzled! He sat us down in his kitchen and gave us a couple of coups of awful cold coffee. He sat down himself and poured a huge glass of horinka. He babbled on and on in Romanian and gave us the full tour of his house, which was fairly tall. He had trouble keeping himself upright on the stairs. Almost gave us a heart attack when he started to topple backwards at one point, but we grabbed him and he laughed it off. Then it was back down to the kitchen where he gave us a massive 3 litre bottle of his horinka and just kept talking to us. It got to the point where we had to call Maria to help decipher what he was trying to tell us. Duncan had given us a pair of work phones to stay in touch. All she could tell us over the phone was that he was incredibly drunk (like we hadn't figured that out) and she told us to just get the hell out as quickly as we could. That wasn't very quick at all. We just inched our way towards the door and he finally got the message. A few weeks on we probably could've managed the situation a little better with the little extra Romanian we had learned.

Putting the moss into the house took a week or so after that. We really stuffed it into the cracks. Once the moss was finished it would have been good to get straight onto the mud, but we were kept busy elsewhere. By the time we got onto mudding we only had a couple weeks left in Breb. And the under-floor insulation still had to be done. Katie got onto doing the mud. I'd dug up the mud long before with one of the local boys. We took the tractor up to the site of an old oak forest and dug into a deep hole, filling the tractor's trailer. That took us the entire day and it was sweaty, back-breaking work. I felt great afterwards though. It was good to be doing something physical. And it was good to work with one of the local guys too.

Putting the mud onto the house was initially a case of mixing it with sand and water to a good consistency and spreading it over the moss. Katie did most of this while I was under the house drilling in more modern glass wool insulation which was a hell of a task itself. We managed two whole walls before we realised that the mixture just wasn't working. We had to take everything out and try again with a mud/hay mix. Even that was just drying up without sticking on to anything. We did another two walls, but we were getting to the end of our time in Breb and it just wasn't working. Duncan had a look and tried a different technique. It was far more time-consuming, but it seemed to work a little better than our faster one. Unfortunately our time was up. We wouldn't get to see the whole house mudded up. What we did do actually looked quite nice. I think rustic is the word. And hopefully it will help to keep the house warm in the colder months once it's finished.

I did, however, finish insulating the floor. It was difficult work. The floor space was really small and I had to crawl around under there through dust and old pieces of wood and stone, dragging big rolls of the insulation which dropped a lot of horrible dust of their own. I needed glasses to keep my eyes safe and a head torch so I could see what I was doing with the electric drill. That job took me about a week to finish, but I think it made a pretty big difference. There must have been a lot of cold air coming up through those floorboards.

We did a good few other miscellaneous jobs. I went up to the forest at one point to help cut down trees that would be used to fuel the Cazan once our fruit had fermented (you have to provide your own firewood). Another good physical job. I also helped the carpenter to fix somebody's fence for a day. Katie spent a lot of time helping to clean out and prepare the houses for guests. We both helped strip lime off of some walls and we also spent a few days cutting bracken away from one of Duncan's other houses. We managed to break the scythe while doing that. I don't think it was designed for such thick weeds.

There were many other things that we did to help out in Breb. I can't remember them all but we have come away feeling incredibly satisfied with what we've done. We're looking forward to coming back next year and becoming even more involved.

One More Bit!

Oh man, we're in Egypt now and it's a crazy place. I just wanna finish off writing a couple more quick things about some people we met in Breb and some things we saw.

We met a couple of foreigners that have helped inspire us to keep on travelling for starters. Huw was a guy from Wales who bought an old military ambulance and modified it as a campervan. The thing was built like a tank and looked incredible. He's spent a long time travelling around in that, doing some IT work while he was going. He told us how easily we could do something similar and we've taken what he said very seriously. We won't be doing it for a little while yet, but caravanning around the world is a real possibility. Hostels are apparently more than happy to allow you to use some of their facilities for a small sum of money. Sometimes they don't bother to charge at all if you got some stories to share.

There's also a young Dutch couple in Breb. They have bought some land in a lovely spot. They've got a couple of buildings; one is their house and the other they've set up as a hostel. They've also got an acre or so that they've turned into a campsite. And this campsite has one of the most beautiful sunsets I've ever seen. I think it has become our ambition to do something similar. We just need to find a good place for it like these guys.

We've had a lot of guests come through in the past few weeks too. We've managed to have conversations with most of them and, as I said before, they are generally older couples. A lot of these guys are very impressed with what we're doing and that kind of attitude is quite life affirming for us.

Leaving Breb

As we got into our last weekend in Breb Duncan wanted to show us a good time (like he hadn't already!). We had one last big night out and got fairly drunk as usual. Maria was driving so no drinks for her. She still got up and danced with Kate though. We'd only been to one or two places in Sighet before, but this time we hung around for a couple of clubs. We finished our night hanging out in a bit of a gypsy club. Got home, went to bed and got ready to do a little more work in the morning. Guests were coming to stay again so we ended up working a weekend just to get things ready. It wasn't a long day.

That next night was going to be our very last. Duncan had arranged with one of his neighbours to make a local dinner for the guests so we decided to gate-crash the meal. We pulled up to the guest-house and got out the car, Duncan hitting the horn while he was at it. Obviously this attracted a bit of attention, the guests popped their heads out the window and told us they'd already done dinner. b*****! They were on their way to bed too. We had a good giggle about the horn and Duncan had a brainwave. We all jumped back into the car and he drove us up a random hill where we hung out and drank a few bottles of beer. It was a really nice last night.

The next morning we left Breb. Duncan and Maria took us into Baia Mare where we'd get the bus to Cluj. It was quite sad. I didn't really feel like leaving Breb at all, I loved the place. We all hugged and Duncan jumped in the car so's not to drag out the goodbyes. I hate long goodbyes too.

Next came the hangover. Bus journeys and more hostels and planes and more bus journeys. Getting into Cluj was fairly uneventful. I wasn't looking forward to spending the night there really but we got into the centre of town and it was actually quite nice there.

The students had started to arrive again so it was more lively and we ate out at a nice Italian place for really cheap. The hostel was fairly standard but we left at 4 in the morning. The taxi arrived real quick and got stopped by the police even quicker! God knows why, but the cop took our driver out the car, chatted a while, took his papers and allowed him to take us to the airport before coming back. Our driver had been quite chatty before this and suddenly went very quiet. Ah well, he got us in on time and we paid him.

Back In Luton

Ah England! So many nice things, but so expensive. Screw it though, we had hungers. We each had a massive full English breakfast. We had a Starbucks and just chilled around the airport for a few hours. I even went outside for a bit to check the weather. I couldn't believe how wintery it felt! Bring on Cairo!