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Bucharest In Your Pocket 63

Feb 9th, 2010
by Craig Turp.
3 comments

Is out and about on the city’s streets. Under a pile of snow, probably.

bucharest-guide

But panic not! You can avoid the snow and read it from the comfort of your desktop by downloading a PDF copy right here. (We fixed the mistake on the cover – can you spot it? – before it went to print, by the way). You might also want to avoid reading the Foreword, which makes us look a bit silly given we wrote about the snow melting…

We would instead point your way to a couple of other features we came up with for this issue, both of which are also online, at inyourpocket.com/bucharest:

A guide to Liverpool’s Europa League match in Bucharest with Unirea Urziceni, including a brief guide to the city for football fans.

A look back at the story of the Bucharest Earthquake of 1977.

A walk through Old Town/Lipscani.

Plus there are reviews of just about every hotel, restaurant, bar, pub and club in the city.

And do remember that you can comment on every venue in Bucharest by visiting the website. Live music club Mojo is currently generating the most interest and comment.

Posted in: Bucharest, Sport.
Tagged: · · · · ·

Lateral Thinking

Feb 8th, 2010
by Craig Turp.
12 comments

Romania specialises in many things; hairdressers, stray dogs and good, cheap, reliable motor cars are just three things that immediately spring to mind.

Another niche Romania has made its own is in broadcasting; namely, The Television Sports Channel That Shows No Sport Of Any Kind niche.

Instead of sport, which of course costs money, these ’sports’ channels fill the endless hours with ‘news’ and talk shows, in which sport is spoken about but rarely ever seen.

On Saturday, during its hourly news report, the channel Sport.ro (known to many people as No Sport.ro) covered the upcoming draw for the qualifying rounds of Euro 2012, which was being held the next day.

For once a real story, worthy of a mention on any sports bulletin.

Yet the news that ‘tomorrow the draw for the qualifying rounds of Euro 2012 will be held in Warsaw, Poland‘ is not all that long, and – until the draw has actually been made and opponents can be analysed – presents little scope for development in to more than a minute or so of airtime.

That’s where the utter genius and lateral thinking abilities of the Sport.ro team comes into play.

For after being told the draw was tomorrow, we were then told that the draw would be compulsory viewing for Romania’s footballers – not in order to find out who they would be playing – but because the draw was being co-presented by one of the Ukraine’s most attractive actresses.

We then got a good five minutes of soft-porn, with a full round up of this woman’s career, and were even told which Romanian players might fancy her the most.

How informative.

Posted in: Bucharest, Media, Romania, Sport.
Tagged: · · ·

Snow. Bucharest. Get over it.

Feb 8th, 2010
by Craig Turp.
1 comment

It’s becoming a bit boring.

Yes, Bucharest is covered in snow again, and no, nobody is doing anything about it. It will be days before we even see the car again, let alone drive it.

snow-bucharest

Yet it was always thus, and will remain so for years to come. This is a city in which it snows every year, and in which there is snow on the ground for weeks at a time. That really is all there is to it.

It has been a bit deeper this weekend than in the past, and in Bucharest the schools have been closed today: they may well be closed tomorrow.

So let’s take a couple of days off and enjoy it.

Life is too short to continually moan about nobody cleaning the streets.

Posted in: Bucharest.
Tagged: · ·

Dogs. Again.

Feb 3rd, 2010
by Craig Turp.
13 comments

We read this yesterday with much enthusiasm: Bucharest City Council has pledged to change the law so that all stray dogs it captures and sterilizes will no longer be returned to the city’s streets.

We take our hats off to the prefect of Bucharest, Mihai Cristian Atanasoaei, who said he supports “immediate, firm action [on the dog issue] even though it might be unpopular.” He said that more than 10,000 people have been bitten by strays since November.

We have been here too long though to get our hopes up too high, so we are not holding our breath. At least the issue is back on the agenda though, a year or so after Bucharest Mayor Sorin Oprescu had publicly stated that the issue was not a priority.

It is, and always has been.

Let’s now hope that Oprescu and the five sector mayors he has co-opted onto his anti-dog team now show backbone. Remember: Traian Basescu – when mayor of Bucharest – began a campaign to kill all of the city’s dogs in 2001. He backed down at the first whiff of bad publicity, however, revealing the spineless nature of leadership and obedience to blondes that he has since taken with him to the Romanian president’s office.

As for all you misguided animal lovers out there, a question: if the council does clear the streets of dogs without resorting to killing them (under the law it cannot kill them: it will need to put them up in kennels or such like), will you still complain?

Our guess is you will, for some of you simply want Bucharest’s streets full of dogs.

Posted in: Bucharest.
Tagged: · · · ·

Earthquake ‘77

Feb 1st, 2010
by Craig Turp.
3 comments

No, not a new disaster movie, but a feature from the latest issue of Bucharest In Your Pocket.

At 21:22, on the evening of March 4, 1977, Bucharest was hit by an earthquake measuring a whopping 7.3 on the Richter scale. It lasted for more almost a minute, during which time almost every building in the Romanian capital shook wildly. More than 1,500 people were killed by the quake, including a number of celebrities, most notably comedian Toma Caragiu, at the time the most popular actor in the country.

The earthquake – the epicentre of which was in Vrancea – was felt across the whole Balkan peninsula. The Bulgarian town of Svistov was badly affected, with three blocks of flats collapsing there: more than 100 people were killed. In Romania, it was not just Bucharest that suffered: the town of Zimnicea on the Danube was almost totally destroyed, and countrywide, more than 11,500 people were injured, and 35,000 homes destroyed.

You can read the full feature (and listen to a genuinely frightening recording of the deadliest quake ever to hit Bucharest) right here at the Bucharest In Your Pocket site.

Posted in: Bucharest, Romania.
Tagged: · ·

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