After showing you the photo of the she wolf braving the snow, here comes another animal, this time a mythical one. Now this golden dragon really seems to be jumping with joy at the sight of the snow. The dragon was guarding the entrance of a Chinese restaurant named – how else – “The Golden Dragon”. The restaurant is now closed and the building that housed it is up for sale, but the dragon’s still there.
I’m not sure if Bucharest has a law about sticking advertisement posters in public places, but if there is one, it’s being safely ignored 😉 In Bucharest you can find posters stuck on everything: on recycling bins or newsstands (as in today’s photograph), covering windows and glass doors of private buildings, on electrical panels and poles, on garbage cans, on bus stations, on all types of walls, on trees and fences. And the list can go on 🙂
Between two and three years ago Bucharest got its own bike lanes. And it wasn’t an easy birth 🙂 First the City Hall tried to ban bicycles in Bucharest using as an excuse the fact that there weren’t any bike lanes! Yes, we’re talking about the most polluted capital in Europe, where every citizen breaths in the air filled with the exhaustion fumes spewed by approximately 1.5 million cars. They met with protests, somehow things got to Brussels, who send back a notification, the authorities removed the ban and started to create bike lanes. And, of course, they did it like nowhere else in the world 🙂 Instead of creating the bike lanes in the first lane of traffic, they drew the bike lanes on the sidewalk, taking from the little space pedestrians had. Two years later, people have still to get used to the presence of bike lanes. Pedestrians walk on them, cars are parked on the bicycle lanes, trees block the way. Still, in my opinion, based on the exact and reliable method of visual observations 🙂 I can tell that the number of bicyclists in Bucharest grew compared to a few years ago. It looks like we’re slowly going in the right direction.
You’ve been warned 🙂 Here comes another snow photo. One that comes with a warning 🙂 The hanging piece of paper reads “Beware!!! Snow and icicles falling”. As you can see my fellow citizens don’t seem to be taking the sign too seriously.
I hope my dear visitors that you’re not already bored by my snow photos. This winter is proving to be one with a lot of snow so there are even more snow photos coming your way. Of couse I could post photos from my personal archive, taken last summer or last fall but it feels a bit weird to be showing clear blue skies and sunny weather when the city is all dressed in white. Besides, I like the city covered in snow. It’s been snowing since yesterday, calmly at first, more heavily today. Everybody’s been complaining about the state of the roads but I have to say that I’ve seen quite a few snow plows on the streets of Bucharest. Two of them are the stars of today’s photo.
During one of my walks around the city I was exploring the quarter behind Cocor store, when I happened to spot this Citroen ad up high on a building wall. It looked like an old ad, maybe one from between the wars but I couldn’t hope that something like this escaped without being destroyed during the communist years. Once home I searched the web, reading forums and found out that the add is probably from the 70s when it was painted for a movie that was shot at that location. Looks nice, nonetheless.
And Santa has left the building (or in this case the sleigh).
The attraction park that was temporarily installed in the Union Square Park gave me the opportunity to try shooting an “implying motion” photo, by using a slow shutter speed to shoot a moving object. The effect I was going for was a moving object that will appear blurred while the stationary objects around it will be recorded in sharp details. I tried this technique on a number of rides. The merry go round didn’t come out too well but the ride in today’s photo came out a little better. This was the best I could get without a tripod as I didn’t have one with me.
Today’s shot shows a representation of Virgin Mary and Baby Jesus on the wall of the University of Architecture, among different plaques in the memory of the revolutionaries and various stencil graffiti. Someone, maybe the author, drew a heart that surrounds the representation.
