While cleaning out my hard-drive, I stumbled upon this article written all the way back in 2018 – Theresa May was Prime Minister and I had all-too-suddenly reached the age where I no longer had any idea which songs were in the charts. I had also just joined PA and, shortly after, applied to take on a side-gig as a travel journalist. In order to be accepted, I was asked to first write a short sample piece, ideally something about a past holiday or travel experience, and so I submitted this piece about Bucharest, Romania, a city unlike any I’ve visited before or since. At the time, I really didn’t know what I was doing – had no idea how to write in the travel style du jour. Truth be told, I still don’t. Anyway – here, for your enjoyment, assuming you derive enjoyment from reading Jonjo Maudsley’s from-the-vault, unreleased articles, is my first ever travel piece. I present to you…
If Dadaism and communist austerity produced a city, it would be Bucharest, Romania
“It is rare you see tourists here,” are the first words I hear in Romania.
The taxi driver is old and gruff, the ride into Bucharest swift and terrifying. There are no illuminations, not even traffic lights. It’s 9.30pm on a Friday, but the Romanian capital has already gone to sleep.
We arrive at the Hotel Sarroglia, a chimera of antique brick and modern plastic cladding, plonked in the middle of a jungle of fractured tile roofs and crumbling aggregate walls. From the top floor, you can see brutalist Bucharest sprawled out like a fog. You are never more than a 20-minute walk to the city centre, the receptionist tells me, but you are better off taking the metro, lest you find yourself lost amid the crusty concrete, the Dacia 1300s parked nose-to-tail along every road, the dusty asphalt, the signposts written in a language that is like Latin but not quite, the beggars and the street dogs and students and the monumental tricolours of red, blue and gold that float in the tailwinds of speeding traffic.
I awake the next morning to the sounds of shouting and revving, a post-Communist symphony.
At the reception, I find the same woman from last night, she hasn’t gone to bed, and I ask her, “Things to do?” Follow the guidebook, she says, plain and simple. So I do.
I start with the Arcul de Triumf, a harrumphing adage to Paris (Bucharest is often compared but rarely equated to the French capital), on the edge of Herăstrău Park where I also find a curious, isolated memorial to Michael Jackson; then to the Palace of the Parliament, the largest government building in the world and a living museum to tragic dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu whose maniacal influence still lingers over the city like a hot stench; next, the National Museum of Art, its atmosphere not dissimilar to the art department of your local comprehensive school, its collection so breathtakingly beautiful that you start to feel it belongs to Bucharest only out of irony; and finally the Carturesti Carusel, a must-see on the way into the Old Town and the best extant remnant of Bucharest’s pre-Communist past.
The sun starts to set and I retire to the Upstairs Rooftop skybar just in time to watch a 100,000-person strong anti-government march in the adjacent Piața Victoriei (there’s never any shortage of culture in Bucharest).
Food and drink are not for indulgence in Bucharest and my lack of choice reflects this: simple nutrients designed to enhance the body for late-night drinking and deep, meaningless conversations. I avoid restaurants and settle instead for street food on the Strada Covaci as I flit in and out of dark and drafty Communist-era hallways, gazing out from second-floor balconies onto the bazaars and bustling alleyways. Beer, pork, cabbage and potato – it’s all I find, but then again it’s all I need.
Everything is abstract in Bucharest. Even the pavement slabs leave me guessing. And at any moment, as I’m caught ruminating on just how weird and hip this city is, I sometimes feel the sudden, jolting realisation that I just… fit in, somehow, as if I were always destined to become a part of this futurist fresco, as if I could just exist here, forever, in the midst of it all, never standing out, living out my metaphysical Bucharest existence. Perhaps I always have been here? No, I mustn’t get carried away, must keep my British sensibility, must remember that I’m as much an oddity to these citizens as they are to me, and besides there aren’t any home comforts, heck, I can’t even find seatbelts in the taxi home. No one cares much for health and safety in Romania, but then why would they? After all, it is rare you see tourists here.