Bucharest Daily Photo

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About two years ago Bucharest’s water supply company, “Apa Nova”, initiated a social advertising campaign titled “Why we love Bucharest”, meant to make the citizens of Bucharest feel a little better about living in this crazy and chaotic city. As part of their campaign there were signs posted all over the city reading “This is where I went to my first party”, “The street where I first kissed Ana” or “The street where I rode my first bicycle” etc. Some of these ads actually looked like street signs and a friend told me that he saw a pair of confused Germans tourists trying to find the “Street where my grandma lived” on a map – without being successful, of course 🙂 I liked the campaign and meant to photograph some of the signs but I was away from Bucharest for some time and when I returned the campaign was over and the signs were removed. But yesterday I was strolling on Ştirbei Vodă Street and run into this sign, left here probably from two years ago. The sign reads “The way to my high school”.

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Paris has Seine, London has Thames and Bucharest has … Dâmboviţa. I live very close to its banks so I get to see it every day. I was actually surprised to see that Dâmboviţa has a dedicated, very nicely done, wikipedia page. To summarize the information that I read, the citizens of Bucharest used to drink water from Dâmboviţa but they don’t anymore because nowadays it’s very polluted due to the raw sewage that’s being dumped into it. Also, Dâmboviţa used to flood Bucharest quite often but it doesn’t anymore because it was channeled in 1970s (the second attempt, the first being done in 1883). It was never used for navigation.

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In quite a few countries in the world, particularly in Northern Europe and the USA, flying the national flag in front of your house is very popular. Romanians on the other hand are not flag enthusiasts. Last year the Romanian president asked Romanians to display the flag on balconies on the day of the national holiday but even with that occasion I didn’t see many of them. I believe that there are Romanians which own a flag because I see them surfacing every time our national football team wins some important game and people gather in the University Square to party. But we are probably very far from countries like Norway where, as I read on the web, according to a recent survey only 6 percent of the people sampled reported that they do not posses a national flag. For these reasons I was very surprised to see a few flags being flown in downtown Bucharest in what looked like private apartments. And they seem to be there permanently because I passed them quite a few times in the last month.

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I promised yesterday that I would continue the cables story and I’m doing it with today’s photo which shows a cable pole in downtown Bucharest. I can assure you that this is not an extreme example. Most of the cable poles downtown look like this. In fact I’ve seen a lot worse. Some of them look ready to fall down at any minute and I just hope nobody is around when that happens.