A series of pictures and factoids for Create's NaJoPoMo Challenge.

This town looks a little different now. Well, come on. It's got some paved roads. And buses. And internet and everything. And it's not that far from Gheorgheni.

But the burning question is, just how many names does one place need? To the Austrians, it was always Klausenburg, which is why the Library of Congress listed this picture under 'Hungary'. (That will cause a fight.) To the Romanians, it's Cluj. The Communists added the 'Napoca' bit, to make it Cluj-Napoca. Napoca was the Dacian name, before the Romans got there.

The Romans called it municipium Aelium Hadrianum Napocenses. The Hungarians called it Kolozsvár. The Jews? I can't spell Yiddish properly on this site, but it's pronounced 'Kloiznburg'. Why does it have a Yiddish name? A famous Chassidic dynasty comes from there.

In medieval Latin, it was called Castrum Clus or Claudiopolis. Maybe that's why I had to ask people to tell me when I'd got there on the train. They couldn't put all that on the railway sign.

No matter what you call it, this Romanian city is quite a nice place. I treasure the memory of the month I got to spend studying there. From the doctor who saved my life when I got Decebal's Revenge, to the motherly women in the cafeteria, to the rakish gypsies in the coffee bars, these people were warm and hospitable.

No, I don't know what the gypspies call the town. Go ask them. They'll probably offer to tell your fortune while you wait.

Oh, not far from Cluj – which, by the way, has a first-rate botanical garden and a museum of speleology (DON'T make bat jokes. Just don't.) – is Muntile de Gaina, aka Chicken Mountain. Romantic place. That's where the annual market took place, and marriages were contracted by villagers.

What? You think that's not romantic? You'd rather do it the right way? Like www.hookup.com?