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Shop front in Brasov

This article was translated by Iulia Marusca and published in the Hotnews  blog “Contributors”.

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I’m reading a book that has helped me crack a mystery that has troubled me for 20 years: why do I live and work in Romania?  People have been asking me this question since 1990 and my answers – “the people…the warmth…the challenges…” – always sound a bit unconvincing.  I am strangely unable to explain what it is that keeps me here.

Anthony Bourdain, author of Kitchen Confidential, which is one of the funniest books I’ve ever read, gave me the answer even though he doesn’t mention Romania once in the book.  He describes the madness of investing in the restaurant business in New York City: read more…

Nicolae Gheorghe

This article was first published on the Economist’s website Eastern Approaches. It is worth looking at the Economist’s version of the article as it has been quite well edited, tightened up and de-personalised and made suitable for the Economist’s more anonymous style.  I intend to print out both versions and compare them as this will enable me to better understand the kind of article the Economist required (this was how I learned journalism 20 years ago: I would analyse articles I really admired and try and work out the style of the publication I was targeting. Easy.  Many years passed before I found out that you could actually study journalism. Back then I don’t think I ever met anyone who had. read more…

photo by Elizabeth Ungureanu

This article was first published on www.time.com

One day in 1941, Vasile Enache was tending his cows in the forest of Vulturi, near the city of Iasi, 260 miles (420 km) northeast of Bucharest, when he heard people sobbing. He went to investigate and saw hundreds of civilians being marched through the forest by Romanian army soldiers. Enache didn’t know it at the time, but he was witnessing part of Romania’s “Iasi pogrom,” which resulted in the deaths of an estimated 14,000 Jews. read more…

www.guardian.co.uk

An edited version of this article was published by Time (see their version here).

On Sunday October 4, 2010, the small Hungarian village of Kolontar was evacuated.  Local officials had been warned that the dam at the nearby Ajkai alumina plant was about to be breached.  The following day over 700,000 cubic metres of caustic red mud burst out of the storage reservoir and a two metre toxic wave devastated Kolontar and two other villages, killed 8 people, hospitalized 150, contaminated over 1,000 hectares of farmland and polluted 3 river systems. An intense political drama about responsibility for the spill is being played out in Hungary, with furious statements by the Prime Minister (“This should have been  detected”), the nationalization of the operating company (MAL) until compensation is paid and the temporary arrest of its CEO, Zoltan Bakonyi, a controversial figure whose father ran the Environmental Department at the Ministry of Industry around the time when the alumina plant was privatised. read more…

It was an odd little car, very small, rather like a Smart car but without the style. Maybe it was a Russian version, or Indian.  But what I was sure about was that the car was registered in Bulgaria (the ”BG” sticker was a dead giveaway). read more…

Over the last year I’ve become a keen user of Twitter.  My friends and family make disparaging remarks such as “Twitter is for self promotional egomaniacs” and “Why don’t you use Facebook like the rest of us?”  But I don’t mind such criticism as most of those who make them have either not used Twitter or are not suited to it.

Everyone’s heard of Twitter but not everyone knows what it is. A two word definition is that it’s a “Micro Blog”, in other words a means of publishing short statements.  Its unique feature is that you can only write 140 characters (about a line and a half of text on a Word document). And that’s it. The discipline and challenge of Twitter is to read more…

After The Revolution was recently shown at the One World Romania Documentary Festival and we’ve also made new DVDs with the film, available upon request. Below you can read and interview with Laurentiu about how it took him 20 years to make this film. And this is our cool DVD cover, by Tudor Matei.

To see the trailer on YouTube please click here

What follows is an interview with the director of this documentary (Laurentiu Calciu), first published by the Marseilles Film Festival where “”After the Revolution” was launched.

The origin of the project?
The origin of the project is as obscure as the origin of the revolution itself. I had been saving money for a video camera for about ten years, hoping to make independent films one day – fiction, as documentary would have been impossible under Communism. It was dangerous even to take photographs in the street in those days, forget about filming. I had sent the money through somebody to a friend in Berlin, in the autumn of 1989. He bought me a VHS Panasonic M7, which was the only consumer camera at that time. It arrived by post the week before the 21st of December, when the revolution had already started in Timisoara, a city in the West of Romania. read more…

You can see Rupert Wolfe Murray’s photos of his cycling journey here.

There are certain places in Europe that are known to be great for cycling. Amsterdam has been pro-bike for generations; in Copenhagen they say over three quarters of all journeys are made by bike; in Paris they developed the mass-bike-hire system and even London’s bouffant haired mayor, who cycles to work, is trying to improve that city’s reputation as the worst place to cycle in Europe. read more…

The best way to get round Bucharest is by bike. Bucharest has no ring roads and the result is gridlock. Getting anywhere by car is slow and frustrating. Public transport is good but very overcrowded.

Non cyclists tell me that cycling in Bucharest is dangerous, that Romanian drivers are crazy and that there are no proper bike lanes. But even the most insane speed freaks can’t do much in Bucharest where traffic moves at a snails pace (but watch out for the sons of the Nomenklatura who come out at night to race on the Boulevards). And if you keep your ears open you can hear the motorbikes and Kamikaze BMW drivers from miles away. read more…

Something strange happened to me last week.  I was at the recycling bins with my 7 year old son Luca (who likes to practice karate chops on chunks of polystyrene) when a garbage truck pulled over. Two fat guys got out, wandered over and helped us to load our Ikea waste into the containers. I couldn’t understand it, what on earth had got into them? I’m used to garbage men being morose and sarcastic, reluctantly moving the waste they’re hired to shift but never lifting a finger to do more. Why were they suddenly being helpful? Could it be because of the crisis? Are they afraid for their jobs? read more…