Walking the World: Bucharest | Hacker News Reader

Walking the World: Bucharest

intellectualinting.substack.com

112 pointsacsillag49 comments

As a Bucharest resident I must say this is so cool on so many levels, especially glad that the author realised this:

> and a poorer southern half, so I focused on the south, because wealthy neighborhoods, no matter the country, are pretty much the same.

pretty early on, it took me a few years of living here to actually notice that difference, I used to be blind to it for one reason or another.

Also, for the people that really digged the photos with the apartment blocks I shamelessly leave a link with my IG profile [1], I use to post such photos in there from time to time (plus some other, mostly architectural stuff).

There's also a book written especially on the Southern districts of Bucharest (mostly Berceni), called "The Other City. Places and Stories from Bucharest-South" [2]. It's in both Romanian and English, I haven't personally read it even though it's somewhere on my book-shelves but it's written by people that deeply care about this city so I can vouch for it.

[1] https://www.instagram.com/mihaitc/

[2] https://carturesti.ro/carte/celalalt-oras-locuri-si-povesti-...

> As a Bucharest resident I must say this is so cool on so many levels

Here here! I was really pleasantly surprised to see Pardon cafe mentioned, it's one of my favourite places.

I generally agree with the sentiments in the article. However, when it comes to the following, I beg to differ:

> I always find it funny when people go to a place like Romania and then go out of their way to eat what is labeled as traditional Romanian food. So they go to some fancy place in the tourist district that serves expensive dishes nobody eats anymore.

I find it funny when peple go to a foreign country and avoid the traditional food. It is one of the big mistakes. Yes, the locals will often - especially in Romania - point you to a pseudo Italian restaurant when you ask them for a recommendation. In the likely case that you like Italian food, do not go there.

My first visit to a Romanian restaurant was a cheap place at the northern trainstation in Bucharest on my way to Transylvania. The other guests were working class people, half of them missing teeth. The toilet was a hole in the ground. The place served Romanian food only. It was the day when my love story with ciorba de burtă started. This love story is not entirely mutual because my attempts to create something that tastes like the Romanian original are not satisfactory.

I have travelled all over Romania in the following years. Restaurants in the center of known tourist locations are to be avoided. The rest is excellent.

One of the secrets of Romanian food in the countryside is that there are still semi-nomadic shepherds taking care of herds of cows and sheep. Meat of similar quality is hard to find in Western Europe. These herds travel through regions where there are still bears and wolf packs, by the way. As for vegetables, the people in the countryside have not yet understood what glory Monsanto holds for them. This will change, I am afraid.

> One of the secrets of Romanian food in the countryside is that there are still semi nomadic shepherds taking care of herds of cows and sheep. Meat of similar quality is hard to find in Western Europe.

I am taking my supplies from such a shepherd from the Jina village. The cheese and smoked meats are truly amazing.

I'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.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5JBFYLII4g

Would you say that the people unhappy in general to be Romanian are due to the economic situation in the country, from the breakup of the soviet union until now, as compared to some of the more prosperous/high-income countries in Europe? Or is it some sort of more generalized malaise?

It's obviously difficult to sum it up, but there are two main factors that come to mind. The first is the economic situation you mentioned, along with the fatigue that comes with the feeling of working a lot but still not being able to afford much. The second is a general feeling of distrust in the government and politicians, a sense that you're being ripped off by corrupt politicians putting money into their own pockets, and a lack of hope towards any of that getting better.

The knowledge that these problems are not as painful in more modern nations such as the US or Switzerland contributes to a feeling of "being left out". Not that the problems don't exist there, but the less you have the more painful they are. For example, old people in Romania often live on a pension of almost literally nothing.

I don't want to paint too gloomy of a picture though. There are definitely worse things than walking around Bucharest's old town with friends and a shaorma. :)

Agreed, it sounds like a romanticized version of what the author would like to be true. A bit like the 'noble savage' myth. Life in Romania can be pretty harsh. I lived for two years in Bucharest, have seen most of the larger cities and a good bit of the countryside as well. Romania has some incredible wealth, a very rich culture but also terrible poverty and with every change in government things seem to oscillate between bad and terrible.

It is frustrating because the country has enormous potential but unlike say Poland or Czechia it hasn't managed to really capitalize on that potential. Still, it is doing substantially better than its Southern neighbor.

For countries neighboring west so much, particularly Germany, neither Poland nor Czechia seem to have capitalized much. I find it more impressive how Romania progressed, given the cards it was dealt.

Yes, that is a good point, the further East the smaller the amounts of investment made. Of course Germany had its hands full with the reunification, which is effectively still continuing today. But Poland definitely benefited from its German proximity and Czechia to some extent (though less) as well. In part this is historical, the German territory used to run all the way to the Baltics (not quite voluntarily, Poland was frequently and heavily fought over by both the Russians and the Germans who used it as their personal stomping grounds).

Bulgaria is quite a nice country. I love it, love the food, the sights. Lots of virgin nature as people left for work elsewhere.

Surreal and hallucinating, as in real life:

"Meanwhile, a few yards away, a mother, dressed in leather pants, knee-high boots, and with bleach blond hair, oblivious to it all, supervises her kids, dressed in knock-off Disney snow outfits despite there being no snow, playing on an immaculately clean and neon bright playground set, while texting on a gigantic phone. All punctuated by the constant sound of the kids tossing fireworks into the cement blocks."

Every time I visit Bucharest it fills me with such memories.

If you want to immerse yourself into Romanian realism please enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/c/THECINEPUB_filme_romanesti_online

Thanks for posting this and all the comments. To those who thought I should have walked into the wealthier parts of Bucharest, that isn't really my thing. I try to treat each city I walk the same. Which is to just walk across town and usually end up in parts that many people live in, but few visit.

Chris Arnade (the author of this piece and a guy who likes to walk a lot)

Chris, I’m surprised to see (on your Twitter feed) that you didn’t know HN. You’ll like it, sometimes.

Dignity was a lovely book and a really nice counter-narrative to the Trump vs Dems story that was (is?) dominating the news.

Thank you so much.

And this will sound a little weird, but these type of forums (like reddit, with nested comments and listing of stories) I have a hard time reading. There is something about the layout that scrambles my brain & overwhelms me.

I want to like them, it is just hard for me to follow.

Just 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

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.

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.

Yeah, seeing how the poorest fare is the best way to judge the development level of a country.

Indeed, if you're wealthy, you're gonna be living great anywhere.

But look at the poorest people, are they homeless? Do they struggle to afford food and electricity? Do they have the means to get to work and back? Health care? That's the true measure of a society imo.

I'll also add that in this case the buildings may be old and look straight out of a post apocalyptic movie, but they can be quite liveable inside.

And there's more space and green stuff around, compared to the newer (car centric I'd say) blocks.

Wow he's really been around. I visited Bucharest a lot for work and as always on business trips I love walking around and exploring every night. And not just the center. I love seeing how people live and travel, to use local transport systems instead of sitting in the hotel at night and using taxis. The metro in Bucharest is much faster and probably safer than taxis anyway :)

However my local colleagues always cautioned me against going to places like Ferentari. I'm surprised the author felt safe there. From what they made it sound like I couldn't set foot there without getting stabbed :) I have to say I was also intrigued. But as a Western European I'm not sure if I would be able to accurately identify risks in a really bad area so I didn't go.

But perhaps even locals don't visit these areas much so they might not know what they're really like? It does certainly look like a place that would make most people turn around.

But I agree. The rich places always look the same. I don't want to see another mall or McDonald's :)

Would have been hilarious if we had run into each other there and never realized it :)

I've lived there for two years total, still have fond memories of all the parks and the beauty behind the grime.

> But perhaps even locals don't visit these areas much so they might not know what they're really like? It does certainly look like a place that would make most people turn around.

I think that's mostly the case. Ferentari is not really dangerous, just depressing and maybe dangerous-looking. I've felt significantly more unsafe in the banlieues of Paris.

I lived for 6 months in what was easily the most violent neighborhood, in the most violent city, in the most violent country in the world at the time. After a while I came to an interesting insight: as a outsider, you don't really have to fear for your life. You might get robbed, potentially with a threat of violence, which can be a scary experience, but you won't get randomly stabbed or shot. This is simply because random violence is incredibly rare...almost all violence has a motive, and as an outsider, you're too disconnected from the world you're visiting for anybody to have a real beef with you. You're simply not anybody else's drama.

There are some places which are definitely unsafe as a tourist. In particular, post-colonial countries where your appearance might connect you to a long-held grudge, or places where the prevalent politics are threatening to people of your nationality, or active warzones where you might get caught in the crossfire. And admittedly, I experienced this as a male, and might feel completely differently as a female. But for the vast majority of places with violent reputations among the locals, you can visit for short periods of time without incident.

I think part of it is practice and part is being a big dude.

Check out his book, Dignity. Super good. He does this in the US, hanging in the “worst” neighborhoods. So he has lots of practice.

True, I'm also a 'big dude'. Some of my colleagues are often terrified when I tell them I walked late at night through an unknown city :)

But I don't scare so easily and I think I have a decent 'radar' for situations that are really not OK, from working in bars for a long time. Of course the first time I'll be proven wrong about this I'll regret this. But anyway. I need this to make me feel free on a business trip, when so much of my schedule is already set in stone.

Having said that I have seen some heartbreaking stuff in Romania. I saw a woman with a baby sleeping on the street (thankfully in summer). Another time one woman approached me offering sex just so she could stay in my warm hotel room (it was -15C at the time). I felt so bad she had so little she was willing to go that far (she was clearly not a professional, those tend to dress differently). Of course I didn't take her up on it but I gave her some money though I didn't have a lot on me. It really made me sad to see this.

And another time there was an old lady in the subway begging for money, with the usual accoutrements like a shopping bag with blankets etc. I gave her some money and spoke to her for a while and to my surprise she had excellent English. Turned out she wasn't homeless at all but she was a school teacher who was cheated out of most of her state pension by some privatisation scheme imposed just before she retired, and really needed money for her husband's medical treatments.

Sure she could have been scamming me but she was razor sharp and she could tell me exactly what was going on in the world. Not a typical homeless person on the booze. She told me a lot about how old people are getting the short end of the stick right now in Romania and young people get all the opportunities. She also didn't try to ask for more money at any point (though I did give her more after we'd been speaking so long as I felt really bad for "blocking" her chance of collecting more).

What shocked me a lot is that the benefits of joining the EU seem to be exclusively falling to young people and the old are completely left out. Right beside our fancy office tower there was a block where some people had plastic bags for windows. I would stand there at the coffee dock trying to look away. So sad. I think when they joined the EU we should have made more point of the benefits being spread fairly.

You can see the same on the streets. Brand new $100.000 Mercedeses and Audis among Dacias that have clearly been built during communist rule. There seems to be almost no middle class, with the exception of the upcoming young generation.

Looking for the worst in a city is an interesting option, that is fair. But comparing the slums of various cities in Eastern Europe is almost useless, they are very similar. Yes, they are different than the slums of Rio de Janeiro or New Delhi or Cairo, but I don't see it as value added information.

I remember well the Bucharest when all these ugly blocks of flats were almost new, clean and less ugly; it is not nostalgia, but in most places Bucharest was looking a lot better 30-40 years ago than it does today: the wealthy places are rare and very not original, the average new housing areas are beyond chaotic and the lower end places are actually new, they practically did not exist at that time (not in the current form or shape).

> 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.

There's a modern art museum inside the building. Possibly the only thing worth seeing.

The concrete apartment blocks in that region can look grim from the outside but are frequently well-engineered and nice to live in. The interior layouts are pretty decent with balconies and cross-ventilation, and the use of massive amounts of concrete make them much quieter than US-style wood frame apartments. I suspect one of the design strategies was to use more material to allow use of lower-skill labor under the communist central planning mindset (student work parties etc). The neighborhood layouts also tend to be walkable with shops, playgrounds, transit, libraries, etc all very close.

those ugly soviet standardized design concrete apartment blocks in bucharest have a cousin in Kabul, called the "macroyan". Some of them have now been fixed up and are part of the more desirable apartment/condo real estate because they're near the center of the city, and generally known as a nice community to raise your family.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/09/world/asia/kabul-afghanis...

https://www.google.com/search?q=kabul+macroyan&client=firefo...

Most Communist countries had these.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_planning_in_communist_co...

I think many times, what effect on people it will have, if those grey facades will be painted in bright positive colors (tastefully chosen).

Of course it is only painting over the problems, but it could give people energy to care about the surroundings, encourage change. Perhaps there are more effective city planning initiatives, but paint is relatively cheap.

Not related to Bucharest, I heard a story where during WWII liberation, an officer has packed lipsticks as an aid for concentration camp survivors. Restoring human dignity seem to have had a greater effect, than just to receive the necessities (food and clothes).

I see in Africa and India people are throwing garbage onto streets, they do not care about immediate surroundings. How helpful it would be generally for the health of a nation, if people would clean up just a little bit around themselves?

How difficult is it in fact to implement the "No Broken Windows" policy?

> I think many times, what effect on people it will have, if those grey facades will be painted in bright positive colors (tastefully chosen).

Ah, you mean this? Similar renovations have been applied to most apartment blocks.

https://www.nwradu.ro/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/bloc_nou_ve...

This is a pretty okay piece and it reflects the truth. But it's rather too focused on Ceausescu's regime and its brutalist architecture. I just want to point out that many buildings were destroyed in the '77 earthquake and prefab rectangular apartment buildings were built in their place according to the dictator's grand vision. Of course, in order to materialise this vision, he just had to demolish lots of other stuff. To reflect the past and present cozy relationship between the church and the state, a cathedral of the nation's deliverance is being built near the people's house.

Nice article overall, but worth mentioning that the Romanian nationalism the author finds so endearing also has a dark side that is often directed against the Hungarian minority.

It's mirrored by Hungarian nationalism. The Hungarian minority has a party in the current government coalition. It's also not their first time in a coalition. There were tensions in the 90's but in general they're well represented and treated. They've got state education in their own language, schools, Hungarian departments in several universities. Also the Romanian far right was pretty much off the radar after admission to the EU and until last year. I believe it's actually Russia backed and has brought ultra nationalists and anti vaxxers together, pushing nationalist, conservative and eurosceptic rhetoric.

This 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.

I have found them both fascinating, the city centres are beautiful and the soviet era hoods also have their own charm and it is very interesting for someone who haven't seen it before. It is just natural curiosity and has nothing to do with political affiliation.

I’m in this camp, so I can tell you one perspective. It’s got nothing to do with political persuasion. It has everything to do with novelty and curiosity of the strange and different.

The guy is not doing a piece on Romania on national TV. Photos look like they could've been made in any eastern block country.

I don't understand the conscious need to present your own at its possible best at any opportunity. It's good that seeing the ugly make you feel uneasy. Ignoring it serves no good purpose

Looking at the pictures it looks like Bucharest to me. At least it looks like the Bucharest my friends are living in (not the downtown Bucharest that tourists might stay at)

I spent a few weeks in Bucharest and many other parts of the country about 10 years ago. Also spent a day wandering around this building learning everything I possibly could about it. Truly enjoyed the trip, the people, the culture, the history and the food. Amazing place and people.

Great newsletter, have enjoyed a lot of his previous posts on walks through rust belt cities

Why is the Uranus neighborhood abandoned? Those buildings don’t look half bad.

There was a major push to flatten that whole neighborhood at some point during the Ceausescu regime, churches were demolished, and lots of other buildings too. There are to this date a lot of legal disputes about people whose land got stolen, formally the government owns it but there probably isn't a building there that doesn't have at least one claim against it. It is a huge mess, both legally and socially and I highly doubt it will be resolved in time for the people that suffered from it to be compensated, if that will happen at all it will be their children or grandchildren (assuming they keep the claims alive) that will benefit.

> It is really hard to look at it and not see it as a physical manifestation of all that was wrong with Communism.

This strikes me as a limited way to perceive things. History is complex, and the conditions leading up to the construction of such buildings deserve a bit more consideration than "yup that communism sure was bad" by an American tourist.

Flaneuring at its best.

Wonderful article

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