A year, almost a year. So much has passed since I left Cluj to move to the Little Balkan Paris: Bucharest, a place that, at first you pass through trying to understand it, then you try to "get over" or simply through, trying to ignore it and to love him at the same time. In other words, an amalgam of love and strife.
My experience related to Bucharest started from the postponement two years later, through a "block" on Facebook, of a love story, and it materialized in an autumn, after 8 hours and 450km of driving to Cluj- Napoca.
In fact, the real experience started with the queues I always followed behind me in Bucharest, wherever I went. The most handy example is on the street corner when you cross that morning when you have to pay a visit to MegaImage to get your breakfast ingredients. If you're from Bucharest, you wouldn't have wanted us to meet at the cash register at the same moment. Why? Because that "I'll give you 50 pennies?" followed by "could i give you help?" and later followed by the actual search for the small red wallet with change in the large bag, usually caused a queue of at least 4 people behind me, and by the time I told you this, the fifth had already lined up, and I had barely thank you have a nice day to the cashier lady.
Once I noticed the "subtlety" of the accent strongly impregnated in the enunciation, but especially in the intonation of an idea, I understood that in the dynamics of a conversation between the citizens of Bucharest, the feeling that you are about to witness a revolutionary social movement, in which you don't want to take part, it's just a feeling.
The surprise doesn't come when you get the impression that surface public transport can be a good way to get to know the city, but when you test this way by referring to your previous experience in Cluj.
Taxis can be an alternative, if you don't have a prominent Transylvanian accent and if you don't want to be proud of being from Transylvania. The pride that you come from Transylvania, or even from Ţara Oaşului, could cost you more than you think, and here I mean money. Instead, you can have interesting conversations with SRI agents who Uber instead of "secret protocols" in their spare time.
"I'm sorry, please" could get you into big trouble! The same if you have a temporary address in Dorobanti. An explanation can be found for the first, but not for the second. In Bucharest, stereotyping is often a reflex. Where you live instantly gives you a label, an emphasis of nuance and, more often than not, creates barriers or disjunctive relationships in relationships with others.
If you come to Bucharest accompanied by common sense luggage, you have two options: throw the luggage away or you can return home with it the same way you came.
The experience I had, in less than a year, extremely intense and vast, taught me that the rules are different from what I knew until that moment: the attitude is negotiated.
Alone, I would not have been able to understand the conditions of life in the capital, which forces and teaches you to make quick decisions, to be committed to the end, most of the time to give up emotion and, above all, not to take anything personally.
Cluj? It exists in me and I find it every time I want a "coffee", a good one. For me, the quiet "Paris Ardelenesc" is about friends, studentship and the best coffee.
Bucharest? A mosaic of magical and vivid experiences, which I discover day by day and about whose whole picture I could not speak. Instead, I could try in a few words to describe the fragments that I believe inspired the interwars to write, sing, paint or simply look.
Even if I wanted to compare the two cities, I couldn't even in terms of the activity of the local administration, the infrastructure and the urbanization process. They cannot be compared because they are two cities from different worlds and cultures.
An exercise of imagination tells me that I could not live in Cluj-Napoca again, not now that Bucharest has only just started to mean "home" to me, after almost a year. And I barely managed to get into the tempo of his dynamics.
About Bucharest coffee shops... I can say that we would like to have more Olivo Bakery coffee here as well. But I know that what belongs to Transylvania, she belongs to Transylvania.
If you're wondering, I couldn't for one moment regret any of the above experiences. If I could do them all over again, I wouldn't, except for one. And you are probably wondering "what keeps me in Bucharest?". The answer is exactly the exception: the reason that brought me here.
About Anamaria: Her first love was music, with which she still hopes to return to the original relationship, followed by photography and then writing, which has always existed, about experiences, people and life, from a philosophical perspective. He calls all these "passions put in a drawer". She is fascinated by clothes and ancestral stories, the contrast between shadows and lights, nature and visual arts and their authors. At the same time, Anamaria is interested in politics, which is why she occasionally makes political analyzes on Instastory.