Dateline: BUCHAREST

Every day, you think of one word more than a hundred times. [ok...] And it’s not sex [actually, i dunno about that...] What is that word? [sex, you idiot!] It’s “Maybe,” [riiiight....]

Below is an ad. Your task is to establish:

1. The type of company the ad is for

and, more importantly

2. The nationality of the person who came up with the ad is.

The correct answers will be published in a later post. Maybe.

Bucharest, 1st of may, 24 degrees celsius, sunny, national flags hanging on all major streets and on buses, very little traffic. This afternoon in Bucharest had a lot, if not all, the ingredients, for a perfect afternoon.

And yet something was wrong. Do you remember that movie where the main character wakes up in NY to find all streets deserted and the city empty? Creepy huh? Well, Bucharest felt a bit like that today. Actually, I felt like being thrown back into the dark ages of the mid 90s. With virtually all the ‘corporatisti’ away at the Bulgarian seaside, all the semi-rural lower middle out in the woods for a nice ‘gratar’ with ‘pet’ beer and ‘manele’, it almost felt like the city was invaded by an entirely new category of citizens.

For the sake of simplicity, let us call them the underworld. They are made up of a number of subcategories:

1/ the cocalar [chav] teenagers wearing jogging suits, wearing tight white wife-beaters, wearing their cheap sunglasses on their forehead, blonde highlights in their hair.

2/ the rural fake prada jeans, Borat-style green-and-white suit fresh from the bazar.

3/ the elderly senior citizens, very modestly dressed, enjoying a day out in the sun. Otherwise a not so sore sight, if it weren’t for their obvious penury.

4/ the moneyed provincial fancy cars bearing outside bucharest license plates in for a tour of the city. lame.

Right. For one day, I felt like I was thrown back in the mid 1990s. And it was pretty depressing.

Just so you get an illustration of what I’m talking about, here is some photo evidence [albeit taken with my camera phone, set to a remarkably low resolution due to my stupidity]:

1. menu at ‘Tropikana’ casino/bar, smack downtown next to Architecture Faculty, who graciously serves Carlberg lager for a mere 13 RON [EUR 3.7] Perfect for the first-time visitor fresh off the plane.

2. concert ad for Ion Laceanu, the guy who shook hands w/ Kennedy [!] one month before he died. Mr. Laceanu is accompanied by his own personal band, aptly named ‘The Rhapsody of the Carpathians’. Still not convinced? You should know, then, that Mr. Laceanu has performed for no less than 17 heads of state.