Yesterday, during one of my long weekend walks through town, it occured to me that it's been a while since I took the time to document this kind of thing. So since I had already taken a few shots up to that point, the first one as early as ten in the morning:
I decided that well, I might as well do it! As the reader can readily observe, yesterday, unlike today, was quite a beautiful, sunny mid-to-late autumn day, with leaves falling all around and the time for me to be on my way, as the poet used to say. Meanwhile, elsewhere:
On a secondary street near the Arc de Triomphe, someone sported a 1966 Cadillac De Ville convertible -- as per Google, since I'm really not too knowleadgeable in automobilistic matters. Regardless, it was quite a beautiful piece and a testament to the fact that Romanians are still trying their hardest to relive their American golden age.
Below, coffee. I stopped for a few hours at a place called Custom CoffeeShop, where I also wrote an article (another one, not this one). I'm not really a coffee aficionado, but I know good coffee when I taste it and really, the host and beverage experimentalist Paul knows his shit.
Above: Calif; or, the death of a brand. And speaking of brands:
A view from the Victory Square, towards the Nicolae Titulescu boulevard. The keen viewer may spot the following: BCR/Erste, McDonald's, BRD Group Société Générale, ZoomSerie -- a local hipstery confectionery -- UniCredit Bank, and First Bank -- an "American" bank nowadays owned by some Italians. Truly, from this picture the naïve would believe that Romania is a sort of Eastern European Switzerland.
Anyways, I took a left on Victory Avenue, then after walking for a while I did a right on the Lutheran Street near the Radisson, heading towards Cișmigiu, when I stumbled upon this:
So it looks like stuff's actually happening over in Bucharest for a change, only in this case by "stuff" I mean a rally going round the Palace Hall. I sat there for a while, where I enjoyed the view (and the noise), then I headed over to the park where I sat for a while. After a while:
Loosely translated as the State Archives, or rather the Archives of Sitting, moar liek. Anyways, below, a bunch of visionaries:
Seriously, I don't know any of the good folks in that wallpaper. So either they're a bunch of quacks or I'm living in a cave for most of the time.
Either way, it was three and a half in the afternoon already, so I headed over to the Izvor Park, where people were holding a sort of a fair with mici, bere & manele (tm). I would have sampled some of the Romanian products were it not for the loud music and the smoky atmosphere, owing to a bunch of grills filled with various meats. What can I say, Romanians like their fairs.
Above: to the left, the House of Parliament; and to the right, the freshly inaugurated Orthodox Cathedral; further to the right, not pictured for reasons of sekoritee, lies the building of the Ministry of Defence. Supposedly, these three form a stable foundation for Romania, as the representative political organ, the representative institution of faithhood and the representative bearer of armed forces. In reality, the Romanian Parliament has very little power nowadays, seeing as how most political decisions are made through executive orders, subsequently voted by parliamentaries as a sort of afterthought. Meanwhile, the Orthodox Church is slowly perverted from the inside through the usual pantsuit divide et impera scheming, while the army... let's not even go there, lest we disturb the feelings of useful idiots/neocon proxies who believe the Romanian people could really withstand a war with Russia.
Above, two takes from a building hosting the decaying remains of businesses: one the late Dinu Patriciu's Mic.ro chain of minimarkets, a market meanwhile dominated by the Delhaize and Carrefour groups; and the other, Cinema Lira, where a couple of decades ago or so one could still watch movies other than mainstream Hollywood garbage. Below, a late afternoon view from another park:
And since I've mentioned war:
Behind the tree, a blown up apartment block. No, this wasn't due to a Russian kamikaze drone that got spawned in the area -- although maybe in a year or two from now, the local propaganda will get the public to believe even such nonsense. Anyways, it's not yet exactly clear how this occurred, but the most probable cause is a gas leak from a nearby underground pipe that was melted by a shortcircuited wire. The event was all around the news in the last one to two weeks: somehow enough gas accumulated between the fifth and sixth floors so as to completely blow up that part of the hruscheba, and even though it didn't cause a fire, it did blow up some people to pieces, and one of them was even projected fifty meters to an opposing wall. If nothing else, I think this provides enough evidence to the fact that Romanians, especially southerners, are absolutely fucked in the head. After failing to prevent this small disaster, folks from the gas distribution company were swarming the streets last evening. Last I heard -- I grew up in that hood, so I know people -- a bunch of streets in the area, meaning maybe a couple thousand inhabitants, still don't have any access to gas to this day.
Huh, I suppose this is is one way to witness the crumbling of this civilization. But sure, sure, maybe I'm just slipperying my slope, let's review this again in another three years or so.
Anyways, in closing, let's take a look at the pre-urban Rahova/Ferentari border at around five PM the same day:
By that point I'd had quite a long walk, so I stopped and met with some folks. We ended our day discussing Chinese mores, martial arts, stochastic processes, database models and other various subjects.