Mike Tomassen

The vibe of Bucharest

By Mike Tomassen

Romania is an ‘experience’ I will never forget. As one of the Buitex committee members it was nice to choose where to go this year. Also as a first year student this was a great process to learn a lot about the university in a short period of time. We had some suggestions of where to go on the first few meetings. Dubai, Russia, Northern-Ireland, Switzerland, a country in Africa, etc. I think we mentioned the whole world. After a few meetings we chose Russia. But then, after some research we switched to Georgia. What an experience would that be, Georgia! We were searching for information about this country and after this, we saw the ticket prices. Ok, this years Buitex will not go to Georgia. But what was clear about these two destinations was that we wanted to go to Eastern-Europe. Then somebody (I think it was Mart) mentioned Romania. Relatively cheap flights and stay. Why not?

Now I am going to skip a big part of the preparation and focus on the subject in this article, the vibe of Bucharest. As one of the responsible people for this part of the trip I had to read some things about the city. And at the end of the research I think I knew a lot of things about the city. (Thank you Iulian!) I heard some things about the city before visiting. My uncle, who visited Bucharest, told me how ugly the city was. He also told me how crazy Nicolae Ceauşescu must have been. Destroying a big part of the old Bucharest for his Palace of Parliament and the avenues. Bucharest was called Little Paris before Ceauşescu ‘modified’ the city.

To experience this, we took a taxi on the first day and drove through Bucharest. When we arrived at the Piata Alba Iulia, the roundabout at the beginning of the boulevard, I was surprised. I don’t know why my uncle finds this ugly. Ok, it is different and we are not used to these kind of buildings, but ugly? And the big roads where pretty handy too. You could move fast from place to place and it was very easy to navigate around the city. What Ceauşescu also managed to do was getting a lot of people on a small area. How big would Bucharest in size have been if Ceauşescu had not done this?

But after some driving and looking around, I saw that the work of Ceauşescu had been modified. Not by another dictator, not by the government, but by the big companies. And one of the companies was Grolsch! What the hell is Grolsch doing in Bucharest? Everywhere in Bucharest I saw Grolsch. I only knew Grolsch as the most popular beer in my region, the Achterhoek. Together with all the other companies like H&M, Zara, Berschka, McDonalds, etc. Grolsch was changing Bucharest in a way they want it to be. Why didn’t my uncle mentioned this in his talk on how ugly Bucharest was?

At that point it looked to me that the city had to suffer or was stimulated (depends on the way you look at it) by a lot of forces, companies and people. When I was searching on the internet for information I wanted to use in this article, I found the following short movie. The mayor or formal mayor, I don’t know, wanted to make the city one big forest. As there is said in this small movie, the green space in the city has declined since the fall of the communism in 1989. So this seems to be a good initiative to make the city more green again.

At this point, three groups are mentioned who changed or want to change the city. Ceauşescu did this in the past and the big companies and the government of Bucharest are doing it today. Probably there are a lot of groups who have their influence at the city, but there is one more special group for me. This group is the street artists. I’m a big fan of graffiti and street art and when I walked through the cities of Romania I saw a lot of it. For example, in Cluj I navigated through the city by remembering some street art. These street artists vandalize the cityscape according to a lot of people. But the wall on the picture would have been a boring wall without all the ‘tags’ on it. Another example is the picture of pink guy at the river. A boring, grey, concrete wall is now fun to look at. Why not ‘pimp’ this whole wall at the side of the river?

Concluding, I think the city is not just the buildings , because this is the only thing my uncle saw. Everybody can change the city in their own way. Some will change it in a legal way (companies) and some will not (street artists). Some will change by planting more trees, others will hang big posters of Bon Jovi on a building. All together they are ‘making’ Bucharest. A city which I enjoyed a lot.