Day 7: Laziness

Day 7:

Lazy day today. We mostly just hung around the house. Out-of-town relatives arrived in preparation for the wedding tomorrow, bringing with them about 12 trout that they had caught and smoked in their village, so that was dinner.

We went out to the market to pick up some stuff for the wedding and for Emma to eat, so I managed to grab a few photos of the place now that it was actually open.

I did, however, in response to imagined popular demand, go back through all these posts and increased the size of all the photographs so they'd be easier to see. So if you were looking at them before and thinking "What the hell is he talking about, I can't see any paintings on there," now maybe it will make more sense.

Which leads me to a comment about Blogger, the website that hosts this blog completely for free. Yay for Web 2.0, where everyone gets to just put up their thoughts and photographs. Blogger is a pretty amazing thing.

But it also sucks. It's really difficult to manipulate photographs and so forth. If anyone knows some great Blogger tips or shortcuts, email me! Because I am hating this. You would not believe how many photographs there are on this blog, and each one had to be hand deleted, re-uploaded, re-dragged into position, and then all this extra white space that Blogger puts in around paragraphs and photos had to be deleted. What a pain.

Other than that, not much to tell. Ioana spent the evening on various hair, fingernail, and toenail-related tasks with Emma. I tried to stay out from underfoot. The out-of-towners and Io's parents went upstairs to the neighbor's apartment to party the night away. They took nothing with them except a two-liter bottle of Romanian bathtub gin called "tuica" and four glasses. No mixers, no chasers, nothing to eat. That's Romania, baby!

Fifty-eight. There are fifty-eight of them.

Days 5-6: The Countryside At Last

Day 5:

Lazy day today. We spent the morning sleeping and lazing around and eating. Around 11 we headed off to the larger of Bucharest's two airports to pick up Em, Io's friend from Boston. Everything went swimmingly on that front.

I couldn't help but notice, however, that the people who run the airport appear to be vampire sympathizers, possibly even collaborators. Hmmm...

We brought Em home and allowed her to collapse, while the rest of us headed out to the "Metro" hipermart to buy a bunch of miscellaneous stuff. I just want to take a moment here to thank the owners of Romanian hipermarts for naming their stores so confusingly. The first one we went to is called "Auchan," which I guess is the name of a type of bird but is pronounced like "Ocean." So the other day Io kept telling me that we were going "to the Auchan," and I was like, What the hell are you talking about? That's hours away. And she's all, No, it's right down the street, and I'm pulling up Bucharest on Google maps and going NO IT ISN'T, etc. Then today she tells me we're going "to Metro," and I assume that means we're taking the train somewhere because the subway is also called the metro. So then we get to do this awesome Laurel & Hardy routine: "Where are we going?" "To Metro." "Right, but where are we going?" "Metro." "I understand that. I mean what is our ultimate destination?" "We're just coming home afterwards." "What?"

Overall the metro was a lot like the ocean, except with better salami. I'm becoming quite a salami connoisseur since getting to Romania, because salami is very popular here. I never used to eat salami, unless you count pepperoni pizza, but now I eat the stuff all the time.

Day 6:

Today was finally the countryside day that I've been teasing since like Day 2. We were headed out to "the countryside house," the family homestead out in Letca Noua. It's a ways away, especially considering that Romanians consider driving 50 MPH to be a breakneck pace, so we all got up super-early and then promptly fell back asleep until 11. Whoops.

On the road! We had to make a couple of stops on the way out there, first at the butcher to get ingredients for today's lunch. Giant entire head of a pig split in half, anyone? Fortunately that's not what we are actually having for lunch.

Stop #2 is at Io's maternal grandparents' house. They live on the outskirts of Bucharest in a house that has barely any electricity or heat. They grow grapes and various gourds in their front yard (I guess), and then there's like a storage shed that is full of all sorts of old electronics (including an awesome vacuum tube radio) and various bits of junk, like something out of Fallout 3. The main house has just a couple of rooms plus a root cellar and kitchen. Ioana tells me it didn't have running water until a couple of years ago, when her stepfather insisted on piping water into the place for the grandparents since they're now over 80. As you can see, grandma isn't going to have any truck with running water that she's done without just fine for eight decades, thank you very much.

Grandma and grandpa seemed super-nice, although like most older Romanians they don't speak any English, so our conversations with them were short semi-distracted translations from Io in between her Romanian conversation with them catching up for the past weeks. We said hello to them and picked up some stuff for the wedding, and then off on the road again.

After a long trip, we eventually arrived at the countryside house. This was like stepping back in time again, like going to the village museum. The countryside house has electricity run into it, but has no running water, no air conditioning, and no heat or gas. Warming and cooking is all done via a wood-fired stove, or outdoor wood grill. The house itself is beautiful from a historical perspective. It was built by Io's great-great-grandparents in the late 19th century, then renovated by her grandparents in the 1930's. They grow grapes and wax cherries, as well as hardwood trees for building. Nobody lives there now, though.

We spent basically the whole day out there. We got some stuff moved in there to get ready for the wedding, and then had a lunchtime barbecue of Gagi's famous mici, sausage, and mutton. Yum!

After lunch and a nap, we headed out to the local church, which is about a 10 minute walk away. This is where our marriage ceremony is going to take place. It's a beautiful old building with lots of amazing paintings, murals, and stained glass windows. The whole building is designated a historical landmark. On top of that, there's a painting of the Virgin Mary inside that supposedly started weeping one day, which led to the church also being designated the Location Of An Official Miracle (tm) by the Orthodox Church. So, they are pretty well covered against having the place demolished, is what I am getting at.

We went inside and looked at all the art, although this time I didn't even try to photograph anything, or wear my baseball cap, despite the fact that there were no gimlet-eyed babushka-wearing guards to be seen. I guess with the weeping painting and all, they figure there's probably someone else keeping an eye on the store and so they don't bother. I don't believe in any of that mumbo-jumbo, but, you know, why take a risk when you don't have to?

After a long lazy afternoon and evening out in the countryside, we eventually piled into the car and headed back home, where we all collapsed into bed. Tomorrow is the start of Wedding Madness. The actual wedding isn't until Saturday, but relatives from distant parts of Romania begin arriving on Friday. So it'll be 48 hours of madness. Fun!

Day 4: In Which We Travel Through Time Itself

Day 4:

I know I left off with this big cliffhanger about going to the countryside. Let me be right up front with you: there's no countryside in today's events. There is, however, time travel, which is at least as good. Going to the countryside involves a lot of chickens and whatnot, but traveling through time includes the possibility of accidentally killing your own parents and erasing your existence, or stepping on the wrong butterfly and destroying all human life. Since you're still reading this blog, you can feel safe that that didn't happen.

Today is our first wedding anniversary (thank you, thank you very much) and we had bold plans to do a lot of stuff that I totally spoiled by sleeping all day. But I'm pretty sure I'm over my jetlag now. We got a late start and headed out on the town.

Our first couple of stops were related to our upcoming Romanian church wedding that we're doing for Io's family. We stopped in at the cake place and then at the florist. I had what I thought was a pretty awesome idea for our flowers, but Io is apparently set on the idea of having blue flowers with regular flower petals and all. As my dad likes to say, "Happy wife, happy life."

After that, it was off to "the park," which you can say in Bucharest because it's like New York City and everyone will know you mean the gigantic park downtown. (Note: you shouldn't actually say "the park," though, because that is English). So we hopped on the subway and headed way north and west, including a train switch that was sure to throw off pursuit. The park turned out to be pretty awesome. It's humongous, and really pretty.

In addition to lots and lots of greenery with biking and walking paths, the park includes a giant lake where you can rent paddleboats or rowboats, or take a mini-cruise on a larger powered boat with a bunch of other people.

There's also a rose garden, a skate park, a bunch of playgrounds for children, and an awesome place where you can borrow bicycles for free. You just leave your ID and grab a bike for as long as you want, and then bring it back there when you're done. Pretty cool. There are also lots of monuments littered around, most of them to people who aren't Romanian (Mark Twain, Chekov (but not the one who piloted the Enterprise), and a bunch of other writers and artists, as nearly as I could tell). There's a museum and a sort of combination library and coffee shop. There's a big stone circle with about a dozen gigantic heads in it. There's a lake with about 400 billion swans of all colors and sizes in it. Overall, it's the sort of place you could spend a long time hanging out on your wedding anniversary and you'd enjoy every moment of it, which we did.

This park was also the site of a big event in Romanian history, which took place on August 24, 2010:

That's me holding my snack of donuts with chocolate sauce and raspberry soda, which I ordered by myself in Romanian. What what! It's a short step from this to the presidency, baby. Aw yeah. Ioana swears to me that these are called "Sassy Donuts," but I am starting to get really skeptical about whether this is some kind of gigantic practical joke designed to stop me from becoming President of Romania. Look, powerful majority: you couldn't keep Barack Obama down, and you're not going to keep me down, either. So stop trying.

The next stop in the park was what Ioana called "the village museum," although that's probably not its official name. It's a large medieval "village" made of ancient houses from all over Romania. These are the actual original constructions, although they've been uprooted and all moved to this big park so they can be cared for as historical monuments. Most of them dated back to the early 18th century, and some of them had some pretty incredible artwork preserved along with them. One of my favorite ones was this old wooden church from 1773, which included an illuminated front that I was, for once, actually allowed to photograph:

We spent a lot of time wandering around the "village," looking at different buildings with different styles of architecture from all around the country. Romanians consider their country the crossroads between East and West, and in a lot of ways they're right. So you get a wide variety of building types, colors, etc., everything from thatched roof mud-huts to stone buildings, stuff done in natural woods and stuff painted white and bright blue.

Ioana tells me that when the buildings were originally moved who-knows-when, the people living in them -- rural peasants who kept to the old ways -- were moved along with the buildings and allowed to continue living their lives in the "village," so people would go around raising chickens and planting crops and drawing water up from the well and so forth, dressing in their traditional dress and carrying out their traditional rites. Apparently this sometimes caused friction, though, because you had sections of buildings from widely separated areas of Romania now existing just down the road from one another. All of which got resolved naturally as those owners died off.

Each area still had informational plaques, though, including photographs of people wearing the local clothing and diagrams showing how various machines worked and the layouts of the interiors of the home and what each room was used for. A couple of the homes were open and you could go in and look around, looking at the period furniture and house decorations (all of which had been preserved). You couldn't take photographs inside, though.

Even outside, though, there were lots of old machines, tools, and devices on display, including an ancient still (Romania isn't really wine country, I guess, but every region has some sort of local liquor called "tuica," with every region convinced that their tuica is the Nectar of the Gods and their neighbors' tuica is swill that would perhaps be fit for the hogs if there were no sewage available).

One thing that was interesting: a bunch of the old Romanian housing types were actually built mostly underground, with just the roof and a couple feet of walls sticking up. I assume this was to keep them safe from vampire and werewolf attacks, but the informative plaques didn't actually say that. There was something about the carved horse-heads on the beams being there to "ward off evil spirits," which I thought was pretty close.

I made myself a new friend from among the dozens of stray cats that lived in the village, and after a few hours we headed off. By this point I was pretty exhausted; water and sassy donuts will only take you so far.

We headed out to the other side of town to meet our new godparents, Ovi and Kathy. I am probably spelling their names wrong. In Romanian tradition, you get a set of godparents when you're born but then another set of godparents when you get married. The marriage godparents are supposed to help you keep your marriage together. They're the ones you go to if you have any problems or rough patches, and they're supposed to keep an eye on both of you and make sure that everything is copacetic. Considering that neither of them has ever met me and only one of them speaks English, I thought it was pretty menschy of them to volunteer.

We met at a nearby restaurant for mici, which are traditional Romanian sausages, I guess I will call them. They don't actually have a casing like a sausage, but they're mixed ground meat and spices that are cooked on a grill, so whatever. I love mici and this place had great mici, so I was a very happy man by the time we got our food. And Ovi and Kathy turned out to be two of the nicest people you could ever hope to meet. I doubt I will actually call Ovi at 3am his time when Ioana and I can't settle whose turn it is to do the dishes or whatever, but they seem like good people to have as friends.

Tomorrow the big thing on the schedule is the arrival of M, the leader of Her Majesty's Secret Service. That's no Dracula, but still pretty awesome, right?

Day 3: Downtown Bucharest

Day 3:

Today we went to downtown Bucharest, where we found a vital clue in our hunt for the Dark Count. The day started out pretty normal: a merdenele pastry ("Just think of the French word for 'shit,'" Ioana told me when I told her I couldn't remember the name. Appetizing!), a stroll past the old church in her neighborhood, and then onto the 311 bus that goes downtown.

Romanian buses are quite an experience. Romanians have this inexplicable belief that air conditioning, and moving air in general, are the causes of most sicknesses. So even if it's 250 degrees Celsius and 298% humidity out, they like to keep everything closed up pretty tight. Although on the bus we were on, at least a couple of the small top windows were open. The bus ride was actually a cool -- in the sense of "interesting," not in the sense of "not stiflingly hot" -- way to see a lot of Bucharest. We got off the bus in the middle of downtown and started walking around looking at various sights.

Bucharest, once known as "The Paris of the East," is a great city. Like (I imagine) a lot of very old cities, it's got new construction mixed right up with ancient and medieval buildings. Apparently there was a big earthquake in the 70's that leveled a lot of stuff, but what old buildings are left are pretty interesting and just sort of stuck in the middle of a block.

Our first major attraction was the city's main university, where Ioana went to school and taught classes and so on before eventually going to America. It's a pretty, old building and the inside looks like it's all original construction, lots of winding stairs and tiny elevators that travel in open shafts and are held up by thin, fraying cables. They didn't like us taking photographs inside. I don't know if they were afraid that photographs would capture part of their souls, or what, but I only got like one picture before the guards forbade me from using my camera anymore.

From there we headed over to the University Square. It was, for me and Ioana at least, a pretty solemn place. In December of 1989, dictator Nicolae Ceacescu called a massive gathering of roughly 100,000 Bucharest citizens in a nearby square. From a balcony in the Communist Party building, he gave a speech denouncing antigovernment protests in the city of Timisoara. In what was to Ceasescu (and probably a lot of other people) a shocking turn of events, the crowd's initial applause and cheers turned quickly to catcalls and people yelling antigovernment slogans. As the crowd grew more and more angry, Ceaucescu was forced to flee the balcony and take refuge in the building. The crowd exploded into a near-riot of protest and refused to disperse, eventually gathering here in University Square.

That night, the government sealed off the square as best they could with tanks and troops. After full dark, they cut the electricity to the area and began shooting people down. Police also beat protesters and firefighters shot them with water cannons. Over 150 people died and the crowd fled. The next morning, though, an even larger crowd returned, and Ceausescu was forced to flee the area by helicopter.

"Thank you heroes of the revolution of December 1989. Tears and flowers on their graves."

"Hero of the revolution 21-22 Dec. 1989"

There were elections in 1990, and a member of the Communist party was elected president. That led to further protests, including another demonstration in University Square and violent clashes between demonstrators and the police and military. My wife, who was 13 at the time, was there. The new president, unable to get the crowds to disperse, bussed in large numbers of coal miners from outside the city, and turned them loose as shock troops with orders to destroy the protesters. There are disputes about the number killed in the "Mineriad" incident, but most NGOs put the number at over 150. Hundreds more were beaten, paralyzed, had their teeth knocked out, etc.

As of today, a democratic president is in office, after a razor-thin election in 2010 that hinged on last-minute absentee votes of overseas Romanians (including Ioana), desperately cast to tip the scales when the Communist candidate was leading. The democratic candidtate won 50.3% to 49.7%.

But what, you are thinking, does any of this have to do with Dracula? Good question. So after taking in that history, the hunt resumed. We scoured several old buildings, including this church that was built in 1722. We went inside, where some wizened old woman in a babushka yelled at me in Romanian until Ioana explained that I wasn't allowed to wear my baseball cap inside, even though it was for the world-champion Chicago Cubs. I grudgingly took it off, because it was worth it to see the inside of the church. No photos allowed -- I guess it's that whole capturing-the-soul thing again -- but trust me when I say that the murals inside the church were really amazing. I love this old artworky sort of thing. Most of the paintings were just generic pictures of what I presume to be saints and other holy people that I don't know anything about, but the amount of work that went into this stuff is just amazing. The entire interior is covered with pictures. We bought some candles to burn for the living and the dead (although I kept in mind that Dracula isn't either one) and headed off. As we left I snapped a quick photo of some of the murals on the outside of the church. Suck it, Jesus.

Will I go to hell for this?

We headed out and saw many other cool medieval buildings, which I took pictures of but if I put them in this blog it's just going to be like, "Old building, another old building, here's an old building, this building was pretty old" and nobody wants to hear about that, am I right? This blog isn't called One Man's Search for Old Buildings. It's One Man's Search for Dracula.

But first, lunch. We stopped at a cool cafe place where Ioana got traditional Romanian "mamaliga" (polenta with cheese, egg, and who knows what else) and I had chicken in a delicious gorgonzola sauce that Io mostly ate, and potatoes au gratin. They also put a single leaf of lettuce on my plate. This is a cuisine that a man like me could really get into. Ioana wouldn't let me order the lemonade I wanted because she said it would be too sour for me. It sucks when only your wife speaks the waiter's language. I was like "NOOOO I WANT THE LEMONADE!" but to him it was like when your dog is desperately telling you not to throw out the table scraps and all you hear is "woof woof woof."

We walked around the old downtown area, which is still what Simon & Garfunkel memorably described as "narrow streets of cobblestone," although I don't think the rest of that song was about Bucharest. In an interesting tie-in, though, we saw some busker playing S&G's "El Condor Pasa" on the pan-pipes. I am not joking. This really happened. I didn't take his picture because I didn't want him to be self-conscious. Like, I would imagine you would think to yourself, "Wow, that tourist in the super-hip World of Warcraft T-shirt is taking my photograph. He must really like my rendition of 'El Condor Pasa' on the pan-flute. Wait, what the fuck am I doing?"

We continued on and I got a delicious Romanian pastry, this time with chocolate inside, which I am told (I'm not sure whether I'm being punked here) is called a "furious donut." Whatever the name, it was hot from the oven and filled with gooey chocolatey goodness. Yum.

"I shall strike down upon thee with great vengeance and FURRRRRIOUS donuts!"

We went some other places and bought a couple of things, and then started walking down another older district in Bucharest.

And that's when I saw it:

True vampire-hunters would recognize that face anywhere. That is the Great Dragon, Vlad Tepes, a.k.a. Count Dracula! It turns out that Dracula had a palace right here in Bucharest,

which was preserved as a historical site. As with every other person, building, monument, or thing of any interest at all in Romania, you were not allowed to take pictures of it (probably to hide the fact that none of it will appear on film). Actually, technically you were allowed to take pictures of it for $15, but I am a notorious skinflint and decided that my powers of description are better than any photograph anyway. So we walked around the curiously coffin-free basement of Dracula's summer home, and up onto the ramparts and so on. It was pretty cool. I snuck this picture of Dracula's stove, though:

I didn't know you had to cook blood

So there you go. Our second vital clue. After that, we just headed through the rest of the city, eventually ending up at the "People's Palace," an enormous building that Ceacescu had built at the expense of people having any food or medicine or other things you need to live. It was promptly taken over by the government after his execution, and Ioana tells me it now serves as the home of the Romanian Senate and that the other part of it is "a parking garage," although I think she was kidding. After that we caught the subway back home and I took a giant nap. Tonight it's traditional dinner with the in-laws and then early to bed, because tomorrow we explore...the Romanian countryside. You won't want to miss it.

Days 1-2: Arrival

Welcome to Romania.

Day 1:

No Dracula sightings, but I did see lots of other interesting stuff. Due to physics and the Earth's rotation and lots of being on airplanes, Day 1 lasted something along the lines of 48 hours for me. For further explanation, I highly recommend the movie Primer.

Anyway, somehow I started out the day doing closing arguments in a trial (note to jurors: the correct vote is guilty). We finished at 3:30, with a whole hour to spare. I then rushed home, showered, threw the last few vampire-hunting implements into my luggage, and headed off to LAX.

My super-friend Mal was kind enough to give me a ride to the airport. Thanks Mal! Major props! Shout-out! The weird framing in that picture makes it look like I am sticking my finger towards her, ET-like, while she recoils in horror. That's actually her giving me the thumbs-up as I head off to fight Dracula. The flight over here was pretty uneventful. International flying has improved a lot since I first started doing it. Yay for movies on demand, and another shout-out to British Airways, my new favorite airline.

After a short layover in Heathrow Airport, during which the authorities nearly arrested me for trying to bring water through the security checkpoint (I tried explaining to them that this was the same water I just took on a ten-hour transatlantic flight on one of their national airplanes, but the RAF (or whatever) people were, as the British like to say, not amused), I headed off to Bucharest. My wife and father-in-law picked me up in some car called a "Dacia," which seems like a pretty obvious obfuscation of Dracula, so here we have our first clue. But I couldn't really pursue it, because we just headed back home and everyone was very happy to see me but also very awake past midnight local time, so they all went to sleep. Including me, since I had slept maybe 3 of the past 48 hours.

Home Sweet Home

Day 2:

Still no Dracula sightings, but the hunt goes on. Io and I took a lovely walking tour of the nearby city. It seems like everyone here lives in a "bloc," which is a huge drab apartment complex built during Communist times. The outsides are grim and awful looking, but the insides are really nice and homey. Just like the communists themselves! That makes it sound like I have cut open a communist or two in my time, which I assure you is not true. I was speaking metaphorically there.

The in-laws' place is about the same size as my condo in LA. Io's mom and stepfather, Tania and Gagi, have graciously gone to stay in another apartment while we're here, so during the day Io and I have the place pretty much to ourselves.

Our walking tour of this part of Bucharest was nice. The weather is good, a bit hot and humid but fine if you're out in shorts and sandals.

Parking is in such short supply in front of the blocs that everyone just double-parks. The people who park in front of the spaces leave their cars in neutral, and if you need to get out you just physically push their car in front of your neighbor and then drive off. Hysterical. Luckily, Io and I are on foot.

We walked through the local market, which is sort of a collection of permanent booths selling all sorts of stuff -- you'll have a food both next to a plumbing-supplies booth next to a cell-phones booth, etc. I didn't grab any pictures because most of them were closed on Sunday afternoon, but I'll get some soon. We stopped in at a bakery place and I had my first street pastry. I forget the name -- starts with an M -- but we will just call it Pastry Ambrosia. I suspect I will be eating at least one of these pastries every day. They come hot out of the oven and they are so good.

We checked out the local square, and walked some of the streets. I guess this area is technically not a suburb because it's inside the city, but this isn't the downtown area either. Sort of the outskirts of Bucharest.

That is a map of Bucharest, with the route we walked highlighted in red. I actually have no idea where we walked and just made that all up, although I think it is generally in that area of the city. We checked out the local subway and did some people-watching.

It's a curious mix. You've got old folks out playing chess and backgammon in the People's park like something out of an old movie, and then on the next corner you've got young kids wearing American-slogan shirts trying to learn to Ollie on their skateboards. There are lots of trees and plants around, but garbage collection is indifferent at best so lots of times as you're walking along you'll get assaulted by this horrible stink. Overall it seems a lot like many other cities, which is sort of too bad when you're trying to write an interesting blog about all the cool things in this distant and foreign land. Small world, I guess.

One thing that is different, at least from America, is all the stray dogs. I guess there's no Romanian word for "dog catcher," and dogs are just left to roam around at will. They all seem fine. None of them were mean or anything like that. But the city is rife with them. I don't know who feeds them and so on -- maybe they just make use of all the handy garbage -- but I did see a few times where people had left bowls of water out for them, usually by cutting off the bottom of a big plastic jug. This photo to the left goes with the comment about skateboarders, though, not stray dogs. That's probably pretty obvious.

We ended our walk at the local "hipermart," which is the Romanian version of a giant Wal-Mart style department and grocery store. The hipermart was itself set inside an even larger mall, making it the sort of hiper-within-hiper construction that could lead to wormholes and the ripping open of portals to other dimensions. Maybe all those people worried about the Large Hadron Collider should turn their attention to eastern Bucharest.

The mall was very similar to the same things in the US and presumably the western world over. English is considered very cool and youth-oriented, so a lot of the signage and stuff is in English in an attempt to be cool. Younger Romanians tend to wear clothes with English slogans on them, which means that the assortment of old ratty T-shirts I brought on this trip has suddenly transformed into club-worthy hipster wear. That's the magic of culture.

We came home and had traditional Romanian dinner of schnitzel and fresh bread from the hipermart, saved the world...of Warcraft...with what I now call "our American friends" until Ioana accidentally dumped an entire cup of water into the keyboard of my laptop (it's fine now, thanks), and went to bed. I took a giant nap during the afternoon and now hope, foolishly, that I am totally cured of my jet-lag. Oh fragile hope. Day 3 has dawned, and I have high hopes of finding more clues to the Prince of Lies. Or at least getting another one of those awesome pastries.

Io assures me that this is the name of a type of fish