[HN Gopher] Walking the World: Bucharest
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Walking the World: Bucharest
Author : acsillag
Score : 47 points
Date : 2021-12-24 18:01 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (intellectualinting.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (intellectualinting.substack.com)
| 323 wrote:
| Just know that not all of Bucharest looks like this. Looking at
| his other entries, he seems interested in visiting the more
| poor/neglected places of a city, which is fair.
| beebeepka wrote:
| That's what I always do. I don't care about museums and tourist
| traps. No, I want to see the real thing, check out how people
| live.
|
| There's plenty of shit (literally and figuratively) everywhere
| I've been but I haven't seen northern Europe and Switzerland.
| bserge wrote:
| madflame991 wrote:
| I was thinking the same; they have a map of their route and I
| see they went through Rahova, Ferentari and they somehow missed
| Zetari and the cemeteries there on their way to Anghel Nutu;
| those areas are actually the worst off of the entire city -
| quite a coincidence :/
|
| I've been almost daily through these areas for years; used to
| actually live on str Anghel Nutu; finding this on HN on
| christmas day is a bit surreal. I come here for tech articles
| mainly
| Muromec wrote:
| Looks like pretty standard commie-block district to me. Outside
| is no man's land, it looks pretty dead and post-apocaliptic in
| winter, but with exception of few photos, it's all pretty
| livable and relatable.
|
| Last time I visited my parent's commie-block, it even looked
| lovely (during summer) with all the trees outside. It's insides
| of those housing projects, that are soul-crashing really.
| [deleted]
| ghiculescu wrote:
| > That, not surprisingly, isn't something the city wants to
| highlight. Lining the walls around Uranus, attempting to make it
| less dead, is a project called "1000 years of Romanian Culture
| and Civilization," which is comprised of hundreds of historical
| panels, none mentioning Ceausescu.
|
| It's even more stark inside the building. I remember doing a tour
| of it a few years back and the tour guide did his best to not
| mention Ceausescu or say anything not neutral. In his defense he
| looked about 22 and surely had a script. But it was very surreal.
| Zickzack wrote:
| I generally agree with the sentiments in the article. However,
| when it comes to the following, I beg to differ:
|
| > I always find it funny when people go to a place like Romania
| and then go out of their way to eat what is labeled as
| traditional Romanian food. So they go to some fancy place in the
| tourist district that serves expensive dishes nobody eats
| anymore.
|
| I find it funny when peple go to a foreign country and avoid the
| traditional food. It is one of the big mistakes. Yes, the locals
| will often - especially in Romania - point you to a pseudo
| Italian restaurant when you ask them for a recommendation. In the
| likely case that you like Italian food, do not go there.
|
| My first visit to a Romanian restaurant was a cheap place at the
| northern trainstation in Bucharest on my way to Transylvania. The
| other guests were working class people, half of them missing
| teeth. The toilet was a hole in the ground. The place served
| Romanian food only. It was the day when my love story with ciorba
| de burta started. This love story is not entirely mutual because
| my attempts to create something that tastes like the Romanian
| original are not satisfactory.
|
| I have travelled all over Romania in the following years.
| Restaurants in the center of known tourist locations are to be
| avoided. The rest is excellent.
|
| One of the secrets of Romanian food in the countryside is that
| there are still semi-nomadic shepherds taking care of herds of
| cows and sheep. Meat of similar quality is hard to find in
| Western Europe. These herds travel through regions where there
| are still bears and wolf packs, by the way. As for vegetables,
| the people in the countryside have not yet understood what glory
| Monsanto holds for them. This will change, I am afraid.
| csbartus wrote:
| Surreal and hallucinating, as in real life:
|
| "Meanwhile, a few yards away, a mother, dressed in leather pants,
| knee-high boots, and with bleach blond hair, oblivious to it all,
| supervises her kids, dressed in knock-off Disney snow outfits
| despite there being no snow, playing on an immaculately clean and
| neon bright playground set, while texting on a gigantic phone.
| All punctuated by the constant sound of the kids tossing
| fireworks into the cement blocks."
|
| Every time I visit Bucharest it fills me with such memories.
|
| If you want to immerse yourself into Romanian realism please
| enjoy:
| https://www.youtube.com/c/THECINEPUB_filme_romanesti_online
| paganel wrote:
| As a Bucharest resident I must say this is so cool on so many
| levels, especially glad that the author realised this:
|
| > and a poorer southern half, so I focused on the south, because
| wealthy neighborhoods, no matter the country, are pretty much the
| same.
|
| pretty early on, it took me a few years of living here to
| actually notice that difference, I used to be blind to it for one
| reason or another.
|
| Also, for the people that really digged the photos with the
| apartment blocks I shamelessly leave a link with my IG profile
| [1], I use to post such photos in there from time to time (plus
| some other, mostly architectural stuff).
|
| There's also a book written especially on the Southern districts
| of Bucharest (mostly Berceni), called "The Other City. Places and
| Stories from Bucharest-South" [2]. It's in both Romanian and
| English, I haven't personally read it even though it's somewhere
| on my book-shelves but it's written by people that deeply care
| about this city so I can vouch for it.
|
| [1] https://www.instagram.com/mihaitc/
|
| [2] https://carturesti.ro/carte/celalalt-oras-locuri-si-
| povesti-...
| drclau wrote:
| This creates an incredibly unbalanced view of Bucharest,
| honestly. Bucharest is a very diverse city, with a rich
| architecture, and the authors of the post seem to have focused
| strictly on poor neighbourhoods and communist-built apartment
| buildings.
|
| Such a missed opportunity.
| Veen wrote:
| I've never understood the fascination with communist-era and
| brutalist architecture among Western Europeans and Americans of
| a particular political persuasion. There's so much more to
| Middle and Eastern European architecture than that. But I guess
| it's not cool to go around photographing the beautiful 18th and
| 19 century architecture all the capital cities in that region
| have.
| golemiprague wrote:
| oblak wrote:
| The guy is not doing a piece on Romania on national TV. Photos
| look like they could've been made in any eastern block country.
|
| I don't understand the conscious need to present your own at
| its possible best at any opportunity. It's good that seeing the
| ugly make you feel uneasy. Ignoring it serves no good purpose
| baby wrote:
| Looking at the pictures it looks like Bucharest to me. At least
| it looks like the Bucharest my friends are living in (not the
| downtown Bucharest that tourists might stay at)
| walrus01 wrote:
| those ugly soviet standardized design concrete apartment blocks
| in bucharest have a cousin in Kabul, called the "macroyan". Some
| of them have now been fixed up and are part of the more desirable
| apartment/condo real estate because they're near the center of
| the city, and generally known as a nice community to raise your
| family.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/09/world/asia/kabul-afghanis...
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=kabul+macroyan&client=firefo...
| hiidrew wrote:
| Great newsletter, have enjoyed a lot of his previous posts on
| walks through rust belt cities
| vladharbuz wrote:
| I'm from Bucharest, and I've always felt like, if you ask
| Romanians whether they're happy to be Romanian, most will reply
| in the negative, and describe being born in Romania as a
| misfortune. There's a popular song from a while back that goes
| "we weren't born in the right place". [0]
|
| The author describes the feeling of unity amidst unfortunate
| circumstances as bringing the Romanian people together and giving
| them "a sense of place, meaning, and pride". I've never thought
| of this way, and I'm not sure just how true it is, but I'd like
| to believe there's at least a bit of truth to it. When I lived in
| Romania, I can't say I got that impression most days, but I'd
| like to be wrong.
|
| [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5JBFYLII4g
| walrus01 wrote:
| Would you say that the people unhappy in general to be Romanian
| are due to the economic situation in the country, from the
| breakup of the soviet union until now, as compared to some of
| the more prosperous/high-income countries in Europe? Or is it
| some sort of more generalized malaise?
| vladharbuz wrote:
| It's obviously difficult to sum it up, but there are two main
| factors that come to mind. The first is the economic
| situation you mentioned, along with the fatigue that comes
| with the feeling of working a lot but still not being able to
| afford much. The second is a general feeling of distrust in
| the government and politicians, a sense that you're being
| ripped off by corrupt politicians putting money into their
| own pockets, and a lack of hope towards any of that getting
| better.
|
| The knowledge that these problems are not as painful in more
| modern nations such as the US or Switzerland contributes to a
| feeling of "being left out". Not that the problems don't
| exist there, but the less you have the more painful they are.
| For example, old people in Romania often live on a pension of
| almost literally nothing.
|
| I don't want to paint too gloomy of a picture though. There
| are definitely worse things than walking around Bucharest's
| old town with friends and a shaorma. :)
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