Blog of Romania

Clear skies, sunny but cold weather and, like the song goes, blue sea. Deserted beach, frozen sand, waves breaking lazily along the shore. A dog runs away, scared by the ice cold water. This is how Vama Veche looked like on February 2nd. You almost couldn’t recognize the beach. Too few algae, almost no trash - Romanians aren’t suckers, of course they didn’t clean up the trash they left on New Year’s -, no open pubs.

The image of a deserted Vama Veche is weird. On one hand, it looks like one of the weekday summer mornings when the village doesn’t turn into a neigborhood of Bucharest. On the other hand, it looks like a picture torn out of a western, with a small town deserted because of the bandits, wind blowing along its streets, where the dogs left behind when the owners ran away rule the territory.

We got there on February 1st, in the evening. We stayed at Casa Nicoleta, the one before the last on the right, on the road across from the one going towards the sea. No one would be so silly to stay in a tent in the middle of winter.

Dogs, rulers of the wilderness

At 8.30 in the evening, we got restless: let’s see the sea! Our host had told us to be careful because there were a lot of dogs running loose. We agreed with him and did what we wanted, anyway. We met two packs, rocks flew, one dog ran away whimpering and another one followed it, scared.

Going to the beach was the most difficult, as when we came back we only saw one dog following us, a hundred or so meters behind. However, we weren’t spared the long barking of every dog in town and the haunted Wild West town look of the surroundings.

While in summer everything is lit up from all the bars, in winter the only light comes from the dim bulbs on the poles. When you get near Ovidiu’s only a quarter of a light can reach you, and when you set foot on the last piece of beach before the sea, it’s already dark.

Only the stars shed some light. Billions. You will never see something like this in Bucharest. In the capital, the sky is covered in smog. Here, the sky is as clear as the sea.

Our customer, our master

The Romanian who said that it’s better to build a carriage in winter and a sleigh in summer wasn’t wrong. To paraphrase him, I’d say that Vama Veche locals make money in summer and sources for the money for the coming summer, in winter .

On Satuday, our second day in Vama Veche, the first thing we saw on the way to the beach were the workers. They were building and hammering away. Vama Veche is literally being raised. New buildings are growing. A Mercedes is parked in front of Dambovita, where they’re building something. The village on the Bulgarian border seem to belong to investers now, not to the locals.

On the road parallel to the beach, where Club A is in summer, another building has appeared. A sort of motel which, I can bet, will be ready by the beginning of June. Let’s build! Let’s not leave one free inch of land! people seem to be thinking.

Silence

The sky is of a rare blue. No cloud in sight. Almost all my photos turn out too white. There’s no wind. The sea is surreal blue, I’ve never seen it so clear and calm. A corner of heaven at 12 degrees Celsius. No one to bother you, all your problems left behind, in the day to day world of concrete and dust, only silence.

On the beach, a handful of runaways from the city have stretched out a couple of chairs and built a fire. We are not the only ones who ran away from the stress of the city. Further away, towards Proplaca, a couple of kids came by car and have started on a bottle of liquor. In front of them, three guys are throwing sticks in the sea. One of them asks for a cigarette. I give him three. Further on, a couple is lifting their blanket off the sand. They’ve finished their picnic and are heading for the car.

Vama Veche is probably one of the few oasis of silence you can run to. Kill the stress, the week’s annoyances - although “the month’s” would be more correct -, get away from the worries. If it were possible, I would’ve stayed there for a least a week. As things stood, we came back to the same grey Bucharest, the same worries, same problems and same stress.

Other photos:

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