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Iezer Papusa

Last weekend I had the opportunity to join my friends from the Bucharest Muntenia tourism club in an escapade in the Iezer Papusa massif. We left on Friday evening and came back on Sunday afternoon. We went by bus and we stayed at the Voina cabin – which is more like a hotel than a cabin.

On Saturday, at 5 a.m., everyone who wanted to hike on the trail we had decided on (Vacarea summit – Vacarea sheepfold – Atheneum Cross monument – Rosu peak – Iezer peak) woke up, to leave in about an hour on the trail marked with a red line, hiking on Vacarea summit in a drizzle which later turned to snow. The trail starts on a hill and crosses a gravel road several times. Not long after we began climbing, at about 1100 m altitude, it started snowing with large flakes and the snow settled on the trees and the recently-rained on dried leaves. Read the rest of this entry »

Clear skies, sunny but cold weather and, like the song goes, blue sea. Deserted beach, frozen sand, waves breaking lazily along the shore. A dog runs away, scared by the ice cold water. This is how Vama Veche looked like on February 2nd. You almost couldn’t recognize the beach. Too few algae, almost no trash – Romanians aren’t suckers, of course they didn’t clean up the trash they left on New Year’s -, no open pubs.

The image of a deserted Vama Veche is weird. On one hand, it looks like one of the weekday summer mornings when the village doesn’t turn into a neigborhood of Bucharest. On the other hand, it looks like a picture torn out of a western, with a small town deserted because of the bandits, wind blowing along its streets, where the dogs left behind when the owners ran away rule the territory. Read the rest of this entry »

I was fascinated by the sea of people flooding the streets, swallowing you up and making you feel small and unsignificant, making you lose yourself and your goal. I was fascinated by the indifference hanging over each passer-by, the distance and the arrogance you were regarded with on the subway, or the reserved and superior smiles when hearing the Moldavian accent. Read the rest of this entry »