I thought maybe I could write something about this Romania trip, because it was really very good.First time in a while that I have been on holiday just being on holiday and not doing something else then holiday-ing, and that was excellent.
We flew to Bukarest from a very sleepy Leipzig airport where Lufthansa gives you free coffee and newspapers, not even I could stress enough to be afraid of flying, the whole thing just being incredibly relaxed.
From Bukarest we took a train to Craiova from the impressing trainstation, three hours of trainride over complete flat landscape, the slowest train I think I have ever been on, had time to fall asleep and wake up a million times. We went to Craiova because Timo has made the graphic design for a new exhibition space opening there called "Club Electroputere". A friend of ours, Alexandru Niculescu and his friend Adrian Bojenoiu are in charge and the first show was called "the Romanian Cultural Resolution", it was previously showed in Leipzig this spring and now they have taken it back home, the Club Electroputere was in an old building strangely fitted for an exhibition space with an old extremely hot cinem
a room, where they showed a brilliant film about the rise and fall of the Dacia cars, "My Beautiful Dacia" great film, see it if you can.We spent some lazy days walking around Craiova and helping Alex with the show, we lived with his mum in one of the big blocks of flats so present in the city, sometimes with one floor painted or one balcony at the time. Alex's mum cooked us an incredible amount of food and we looked at street dogs and took taxi's around the place since Alex insisted taxis was to best way to travel, more taxis and more food then I have had in my whole life probably. The opening was nice too and afterwards we left for the country side, a small village called Cetate which means little castle, and there we stayed in a little castle, an empty one a bit outside the village. It is meant to be turned into a residency space sometime soon but now it only has madrases inside and we slept outside on the beautiful balcony. That place was amazing, would love to go back there! Joachim and Timo went swimming in Donau and I made images most of the time, the place was just great, big empty stables, rabbits, two horses, a little crow, dogs and big deserted gardens.Happy days.
Then we got on a train back to Bukarest to see some of the city, Ceauşescu's mad palace that now hosts the parliament for example. This palace is huge, we walked around in ball rooms and congresshalls, in long corridors and one room more decorated then the other. The guide unfortunately only told us about how much marble had been used in building it, how many meters of red carpet (lots..) an how heavy the curtains were (500 kg) rather the actually telling about the fact that Ceauşescu ha
d torn down a huge part of Bukarest in order to build it, and how much it had cost to complete and where on earth he got the money from and what actually led up to his execution, I reckon that would have interested people more but I suppose that's the class in Romanian history and not in that of the palace. But he started building it in 1983 and that's so odd, the house is so "young" but because it's made up mainly of red carpets and marble it really doesn't feel like something coming out of the late 80s... Standing on one of the balconies and looking out on the "Champs Elysees" he had built in front of the palace gave me a very creepy feeling. Just mad.Apart from that I think we mainly walked around and drank coffee and ate aubergine most of the time. We went to a bar on the top of the National Theatre and in the elevator saw a woman embroidering the Dacia cars, she had stepped right out of the film from the other night and now she was sitting in this elevator just like in the film, taking the beautiful young Bukarest crowd up to the top floor for the bar. It was great walking around all the streets of Bukarest, all the houses in different sizes and colors and the labyrinth feeling of the old parts, but the best part was being in that small castle on the country side seeing all the people on their horses and eating such delicious vegetables..i mean, they taste so good..but maybe everything tastes good when eaten on the Romanien countryside next to a long abandoned little castle where I never thought I would find myself. As we left the whole city was covered in rain rain rain rain and it felt rather good to be on a plane going above the clouds although I hate it and now we are back in Leipzig again. Tonight I might go and see a film about Wolfgang Tillmans in the great Luru Kino.
So, that was a small tale from Romania.
