(OR: Can you buy ashtrays in Bucharest?)
A Bucharest ashtray, yesterday. Note how no cigarette butts are in it: they are all on the city's streets.
We live on the ground floor of a small Bucharest block. It has four floors in all, and while it’s not in the most salubrious or sought-after parts of the city, we’re happy here.
The neighbours are by and large fine. No noise (you can hear a pin drop in the evenings), and absolutely no manelisti, which is quite remarkable given president Traian Basescu’s statement on Monday that 99 per cent of the Romanian population likes listening to manele. (Basescu himself loves manele: and the manelisti love him: they came up with a manea for him during last year’s election campaign). Our block must be part of that one per cent of Romanians who do not like manele.
In fact, all is fine and dandy, with one exception, or but. Or, butts: cigarette butts.
If you walk in front of any block in Bucharest you will see a familiar sight: cigarette butts. Thousands of them. They litter the areas in front of blocks for the simple reason that far too many of the capital’s smokers eschew ashtrays, instead throwing their cigarettes (and their litter in general) out of their windows onto the street below.
The front of our block right now, however, is as clean as a whistle.
Why?
Because the same fellow who throws his cigarette butts out of the window comes and picks them all up again once a week. What you might call a nesimtit de bun simt.
We have tried pointing out that he could cut out the middle man as it were and simply stub his cigarettes out in an ashtray, but such advanced, joined-up thinking appears to be beyond him.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
I don’t smoke but since you reminded me of manele, here’s an old one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhYyvyk0odY
Nu sunt sut nici cutitas
Sunt un smecher de oras
Pe fraieri ii pacalesti
Daca stii sa le vorbesti
Bucuresti, Bucuresti
Oras plin de smecheri esti
Bucuresti Bucuresti
Toti jmenarii tu ii cresti
:X:X:X
~~”~~
sut [shootz] = pickpocket
cutitas [cootzitash] = a thug who carries a knive
Hahaa, Tudor may be right. You have a sick mind
Once you had an entire city as an ashtray is impossible to switch to a regular one. He is forever cursed.
Or maybe he throws each week the same cigarette butts, and that’s why he has to periodically collect them… maybe he stopped smoking five years ago when his wife left, and the cigarette carpet in front of the building is the last thing that reminds him of the last happy week of his life.