A few days ago, seeing a black dog in a parking lot I've said to a friend — I bet that dog is actually white.
She blinked there and a second later got the joke and replied laughing — Yeah, Bucharest can do that, honestly!

We love to blame Bucharest for all kind of random things: white snow turning black, complete lack of any trace of decent shoes to buy anywhere in town, honking cavemen drivers in video-game-inspiring traffic, food courts in the malls looking like brothels or spooky taxi drivers voting for illiterate president wannabes, to name only a few.

Nevertheless, when foreigners comes to the country we rush them sightseeing a couple of beautiful places and we proudly point at nice old architecture while serving them "Little Paris" stories. We feel lucky that it was not obliterated during the war then rebuilt awful and soulless, like Warsaw. They remark that Balthazar or Uptown restaurants, for instance, look just like the cool fusion restaurants in London or elsewhere and we nod. They laugh and chat and make friends. They feel good and they return. — It's a normal city, they say, and it's also kinda cool, really.


writes a friend in an e-mail. Contradictory alright. This post is actually inspired by the comments posted by Mihai a couple of days earlier:


What do you think of Bucharest? Living here or just visiting, Romanian or foreigner, loving it or hating its guts? White dog? Black? Hit the comments!