The Klondike Shuffle

This is not only a page about travelling, but also about volunteering. The first 7 years of nomadism for me have been a consequence of operating in the humanitarian field.

This preface, believe me, is not to brag and show off so that you all can realise what a wonderful person I am. I have way subtler strategies to achieve that.

This is just to explain why in some posts I will not show beautiful, touristic places, but rather forgotten, sometimes horrible ones. Like the one from the very first post published in this blog.

In October 2010 I decided to join a project embedded in the frame of the EVS, the European Volunteering Service. And I ended up in one of the poorest areas of Europe. Southwestern Romania. In a specific region called Dolj (pronounced: Dolsh).

I was assigned to a rural village called Daneti. There was almost nothing there. The closest city, Craiova, was a good 50km north; the road that linked to civilisation froze in winter. When it did, no more goods came to the village for a week, in which people only ate old bread, cabbage and sausages (called Mici) if they had killed their pig before.

One of the saddest days in my whole life is when the temperature inside the house went below zero and my canned olives, which I forgot during the night on the table, froze as well.

I had to ask the neighbours for a shower as I had no heating in the house, and when they had problems with the water as well, I had to walk to the closest village, 9km east, called Amarastii de Jos, where other volunteers had a better house with hot, running water.

It was during these weekly (yes, I didn’t need to shower that often) trips that I discovered hitchhiking. The first things I hitchhiked were chariots pulled by horses or donkeys. But when the road became more trafficked some cars were passing and picking me. Often they were local Romanians from the area. Other times, I was helped by a red van driven by some Rroma people; those that in Romanian are called “Tigani”, gipsies.

On principle, one of the reasons why I was in that project was to facilitate the difficult coexistence between the two ethnicities; so one day instead of showering, I stayed on the van, passed Amarastii and went with the Rroma to their village: Ocolna.

When I had no hot water and no heating, I thought I was the most miserable person in the world. But then, visiting both local Romanians and Rroma, I realised I had a huge blessing: I could run away. At any point, I could have pronounced the magic words: “Fuck this crap!”, and a plane would have taken me back to my home country.

The people from Dolj didn’t have the magic words. Many of the Rroma kids from Ocolna didn’t even have a jacket or proper shoes for the winter. I started visiting the place with two other volunteers and we envisaged some activities with the kid. Some of them showed interest in card tricks so I taught them a bunch.

I shuffled, hid, turned the cards and all those tricks I showed them were… A failure.

It was too cold to manipulate the cards properly. When I wanted to lift two, I lifted five. When I was shuffling, they fell in the snow. So I focused on the only trick which didn’t require too much manipulation and was also easier for some kids who don’t share a common language with you.

It’s called The Kick-Ass trick and it only requires a child-friendly shuffling method called The Klondike Shuffle, which you can see here:

One card from the top, one from the bottom. I didn’t know at the time that this special move was called Klondike shuffle. I discovered it only later, and the origin of the name is fun: it was due to the same exact reason.

The miners and gold diggers who lived in Klondike loved to play cards but their hands were too numb to shuffle a deck properly, so they invented this slow method.

We kept going to Ocolna weekly until the end of February, when my usual hitchhiking session didn’t end up very well…

I hated Dolj at times during my staying there, but I also loved it. So much that when spring came I made an actual movie about that remote region. A documentary of 86 minutes. It could have been a huge success if YouTube didn’t keep deleting it every now and then because of Music Rights issues. At the moment though, it’s up.

The part about Ocolna is between the minutes 34:30 and 37:30.

PS: I just found out on Google that the average winter temperature in Klondike in winter is -15C (5F). In Ocolna and Daneti sometimes we had days with -21C (-6F), so I think this move should be rather called The Dolj Shuffle.