Blog of Romania

Eliade’s novels fascinated me. I loved his way of describing the Bucharest between the World Wars. I hadn’t yet moved to Bucharest, I’d never seen the capital, but I knew for several years how some areas of the country’s biggest town. In the autumn of 2004, I was dissapointed: I got to the Basarab train station, I took the subway to Obor, and when I got out the image of the grey apartment buildings, as described by B.U.G. Mafia, hit me.

I had no way of knowing that one year later I’d be living in this crowd, living faster and faster. At that time, I was expecting that the first city of Romania to be different than the town I’d spent the first 20 years of my life in. But I wasn’t expecting all the buildings to look the same to me.

I got to the center, and the contract was weird to say the least. Carol Boulevard, full of buildings raised between the wars, wasn’t anything like I knew from Eliade. Dirty sidewalks, garbage on street corners, graffiti on all the walls, “Christian government!”, “Down with CeauÅŸescu!”. However, the next autumn I discovered Dacia Boulevard, Viitorului street from Lizeanu to PiaÅ£a GalaÅ£i, Vasile Lascăr, GriviÅ£ei and other dozens of small streets where you can find the architecture described by the writer.

Victoriei… a toast!

The most important boulevard in Bucharest, connecting the Arch of Triumph and the DîmboviÅ£a river, never looked like in Eliade’s descriptions. Not even in winter. The evening walks “to the boulevard” from the 30s, lit by lanters, maybe during a snow fall, passing by the fashionable locals of the time, with yellow lights, calm and tranquil… I can’t even imagine them. The walks in the Bucharest of Videanu, in 2007, are on crowded sidewalks, while trying to avoid the puddles and the heaps of garbage, while trying to bear the unceasing honks and the swearing of the car drivers.

“To swear like a sailor”, the phrase of Caragiale’s time, turned into “swearing like a cab driver”. Funnily enough, I’ve heard few cab drivers swearing - which I can’t say about the numerous drivers, hurrying like a certain black-robed character carrying a scythe was after them.

Calea GriviÅ£ei, back then a respectable area, is teeming with shady individuals with colorful skin or attitudes. Although the streets leading to GriviÅ£ei, between the train station and Dacia boulevard, are marvelous on a summer’s day, you wouldn’t dare set foot there after sunset.

[go to part 2]

Original post: here. (RO)
Alex is 23 and has been living in Bucharest for two years.