Bucharest, ROMANIA – It’s January 30. In Bucharest it is snowing like hell. It has been snowing for the last 48 hours. Buses are going slowly and the metro is coming one at 15 minutes, because it is Sunday. I should write something for Mary Beth, one of my teachers, and I am not in the mood to do it. At all (the mood!). All I wanted when I woke up was to stay in on line or to see movies. Of course it was not so.
Anyway, I got out from the house and I took a bus drove by a maniac. How is it possible, when the roads are full of ice and snow, to drive as it is summer. The result? The bus was shaking in all the directions and at a moment it skated a bit.
Then I had a nice trip on the metro. In front of me a 6-year-old child. Maybe he was 7, but not more for sure. He was alone. Ok, not alone. With a bag. A small bag. A very small one. One of those little bags the grocery vendors are using for coffee. The child didn’t have coffee or something else that is sold at kilogram. In there, there was a chemical liquid, a hallucinogen substance. I’m asking myself lots of questions. Where is this child coming from? Who are his parents? Does he have parents? (Stupid question! Of course he has!) Did he ever have sex with an occidental pedophile?
When I am taking the metro for the trip back there is another child. This time a girl with a violin and a bag. She started playing a song. It was a very short one. She is taking out from the bag a glass, the kind they use for drinks at McDonalds. She is going trough the wagon waiting for money. I’m putting 10.000 lei in the glass, which means 38 euro-cents. I will not suffer for this financial effort, but other questions are coming into my mind. Does she really use this money for the good of her family? Does she have a family? Does her father/mother use this money for getting drunk? Is the little 12-year-old girl beaten often? Where did she learn to play the violin?
I’m getting out from the metro. It is still snowing. I am putting a hat on my head. I forgot to do this thing. In the last years I haven’t done it anymore. But today I was feeling the cold of the Romanian winter. I think I feel this cold in my bones, all over my skin; all my hair is feeling the cold. The cold Romania is giving you on air a real reality-show.
I don’t want homeless children in the metro. I don’t want violin children-singers. I don’t want that fucking park from the Bucharest North train station where everybody can buy for 5-20 euros a one-night-child to play with. I want to see all these children playing with toys, watching Tom & Jerry cartoons, going to the sea side in the summer time. I want to take the plane for Italy or Greece or another country thinking that Romania is not everybody’s bitch.
Why not clean the “spots” and make a clean Romania, with sea side and mountain resorts very popular among the foreigners? Why not make Bucharest famous for the House of the People? Why not make Dobrogea famous for its Delta of Danube? Why not make foreigners know that in Moldavia there are over 40 monasteries, veritable masterpieces, built by Stefan cel Mare?
