Walking the World: Bucharest
intellectualinting.substack.com
Walking the World: Bucharest
1–10 of 54 posts
Re: Walking the World: Bucharest
#2Just 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.
Re: Walking the World: Bucharest
#3> 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 Ceaușescu.
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.
Re: Walking the World: Bucharest
#4Just 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.
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
Re: Walking the World: Bucharest
#5Just 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.
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.
Re: Walking the World: Bucharest
#6I'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.
Re: Walking the World: Bucharest
#7This 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.
Re: Walking the World: Bucharest
#8[deleted]
Re: Walking the World: Bucharest
#9Just 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.
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.
Re: Walking the World: Bucharest
#10This 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.
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.