Supermarket

Smells Of Bucharest

from left: rundown houses on Lipscani and Mosilor, Dimbovitza river from Hasdeu bridge, street in Cotroceni Bucharest smells exquisitely during the time of lindens and rain. Vigorously soaked for a half hour, the city heals even from the stenches that make you ill. Under

The History Of Nothing: Contemporary Architecture And Public Space In Romania

Richard Rogers Partnership proposal, 1996People's House (Parliament) After 1989: Methods of researching the built environmentResearching Communist architecture is a tricky endeavor in contemporary Romania, where some major actors of that era are still alive, some even

Memory And Strolls

If you read travel notes by simple tourists or people on journalistic, cultural or political assignments, from the 1920s or 30s, if you peruse recurrent images about a Bucharest imprinted with evil or good charms, equally decrypted and encoded, moving and repulsive, you

Alone In The Shower

excerpt  You haven't the slightest idea what sound the stopper makes when you hit it with that DAMNHUGEBOLT. Yes, that's the bolt I'm talking about, the bolt I'll never forget, as long as I'll live 'cause it was damn necessary to stop it without

Alexandru

excerpt The second time I went to Alina's parents', the neighborhood seemed too familiar not to imagine that my memory was playing a prank on me, and not a nice one. I had got off the tram a few steps away from the barber's called The Merry Whiskers, which

Turks, Germans, Americans... And Other Nationalities

An event that happened several years ago and has turned, in time, into an urban legend, goes like this: the employees of a German-owned media trust had become lazy and unruly, would come to work when, and if, they felt like it, and would actually work only between two coffee