We saw one of the new, much-touted automated metro ticket machines this morning, at the newly opened Parc Bazilescu station.
We decided to test it out, delighted to discover that you can now buy your tickets in English and French as well as Romanian. This is a good thing, and shows that Bucharest is finally beginning to think about visitors who might not understand Romanian.
So impressed were we that we decided to take a photo of this eighth wonder, only for a security guard to appear from nowhere in order to stop us. The usual trick of playing the dumb tourist didn’t work. ‘Yu tak no fotto,’ he said a few times while standing between us and the ticket machine.
So, this was how the photo turned out:
Protecting state secrets
And that’s how what would have been a post full of nothing but praise for Metrorex became a rant about how they should have their security guards worry more about, you know, things like security rather than harmless tourists like us taking photos of a ticket machine.
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A couple of years ago a German friend came to visit Bucharest and the fact that she wanted to be a cliché tourist and take pictures of every single thing she found interesting turned out to be very expensive and also a little dangerous.
First day, she paid four times as much as a local had to in order to see the Casa Poporului (I was in Uni back then and could go in for free which made the thing even more cringe-worthy for me). And that was the “no pictures!” ticket; the camera-friendly one was not at all budget-friendly.
A couple of days later, in Tineretului Park, she got yelled at by a guard because she wanted to take a picture in front of one of those ancient canons. She asked why she couldn’t take a picture but the guy kept yelling “no pictures!” and gesturing wildly.
Then we went to the Bran Castle where she paid that ridiculous ‘camera fee’ and no one even checked her ticket. Everyone else took pictures without a worry in the world and no one bothered to check their tickets. Money well wasted.
Romania is definitely not a camera-friendly place, it seems.
And I agree, Metrorex should flaunt their successes not guard them from the eyes of the world who most likely have no idea what they are.
Romania may be corrupt and still run by second tier Communists, yet it creates wonderfully amateur music videos. From 2003: Blondy’s “Iubeste-ma bine” one of the finest songs Romania–or Europe for that matter–has ever produced:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V26CQWojhWc
Bucharest still suffers the legacy of Nicolae Ceausescu and the Securitate. Nowhere else in the world have I encountered such difficulty shooting in the public space. I just spent part of the summer in New York City and not once did I encounter ANYONE calling out to me to stop taking pictures. In the subway, in front of skyscrapers, in Harlem, the Bronx, NOWHERE. Bucharest will forever remain a city at the sidelines of the world with its mentality. It simply is not like this in the West.
Yes sir, thank God it isn’t!
Hopefully the West will collapse soon as it’s becoming a threat to freedom on earth.
The West does have its problems right now. . .
You should done either two things. Firstly offer him a two litre bottle of local gut rot beer or secondly, just simply tell him to “Sugi pula mea fiul meu”!
If you tell him “sugi pula” he’s gonna beat you with that stick so you gotta do it from distance =))
I would be more afraid of getting his stinking scanky uniform brushed against me than his glorified rubber dildo beaten about my ringpiece!!!
You could always use spy glasses
Buy these: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4n18Bmjp-8
Or make your own: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iygrNjQ7Cdc
“what possible secrets could be given away by publishing a photo of a machine that is in the public domain and free for all to use?”
That’s what happens when you go out to kill people in Afghanistan. You have to be afraid, you are supposed to be afraid for the rest of your life, when you kill you also risk to get killed yourself and the relatives of the people you killed will get revenge one day.
I should take pictures of Palatul Cotroceni with a hidden camera and post them on Islamist forums, who knows – maybe we can get rid of Basescu.
What’s a ticket machine in some grotty metro in Bucharest has got to do with slotting rag heads in Afghanistan fiul meu?
Well, it’s simple daddy’o:
Because they were too lazy to define what can and what can not be photographed in the metro, they just put everything (including the ticket machine) in the “can not” section.
Or maybe the security guard just did his job, given the fact that no one is allowed to take photos inside metro stations as a possible terrorist attack prevention measure. Not that any terrorist would want to target Bucharest metro stations, but still…
Max could have told you this:
20. Fotografiatul si filmatul in incinta metroului nu sunt permise fara acordul administratiei Metrorex.
Well it’s a crap law.
But why don’t you ask for permanent accreditation? After all – you run a tourist guide and tourist guides are part of the media too.
Shouldn’t have to. Taking pics in public domain – and public transport counts as public domain – should be a legal right. It’s about transparency.
I did hear once that there was a terrorist attack in Bucharest some years ago, yeah apparantly it did 15quids worth of damage?
There were only 2 attempted murders of embassy officials: in 1984 the Abu Nidal organization targeted some obscure worker from the embassy of Jordan in Bucharest (which succeeded, he was killed) and in 1991 a sikh paramilitary group with turbans targeted the Indian ambassador in Bucharest but they did not succeed: out of 3 attackers – 1 was killed, 1 was injured and sentenced to jail and 1 got away, while the Indian ambassador was uninjured.
http://www.amosnews.ro/2002/19_august_1991_atac_terorist_impotriva_ambasadorului_indian_la_Bucuresti-2023
Here’s the report, pretty interesting fact – that when the Indian investigator arrived from India he asked for barbed wire and crowbars in order to continue the investigation on the suspects =))))
I really doubt that’s a company policy, makes no sense whatsoever. The guy must’ve been an idiot craving for attention or maybe just bored.
It is company policy, you’re not allowed to take pictures inside the trains either.
So that you won’t be able to do this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarin_gas_attack_on_the_Tokyo_subway
I just love chemical and bacteriological weapons, if I ever start my own Al-Qaeda franchise I’ll use them.
That attack is one of the reasons I don’t take the threat of bio/chem attacks too seriously. Aum Shinrikyo was a group that had the money, resources and scientists necessary to obtain chemical and biological weapons, yet that’s the best they managed to do. Seriously go and research how far their connections reached. They made Al Qaeda look like the Peckham Massive.
Yeah, I know Al-Qaeda is rudimentary. I like to keep an eye on them because they justify their attacks with those Qur’an readings (which make me drool when I hear them in Arabic although I can hardly understand Arabic) and they’re not afraid to detonate themselves together with a truck full of explosives
We would classify that as insanity here in Europe. And the study of what we call insane minds has always fascinated me ever since I started reading when I was a kid (psychiatry, read a few books on that; when I was 7 I got so scared by reading one of those books that I kept it shut for 13 years; it was a time of heavy news and explicit pictures in the Romanian press and most of all – reading the press was all that you could do back then).
If I had access to weapons like Al-Qaeda does, I’m sure I would do better.
I’ll read more about Aum Shinriyko, but given the fact that they did manage to lay their hands on a few litres of Sarin, I would say the only thing that sucked was the execution.
The only thing that sucked was the Sarin. It’s just not a great thing to use as a weapon. Firstly it degrades VERY quickly (it’s good for a few weeks before expiring), secondly there’s the problem of getting it to disperse over a large area in a concentration that’s still lethal.
They actually used Sarin twice, once a year before the subway attacks, and it was also a damp squib.
The same thing was tried with cyanide burners, and they also had stocks of anthrax, ebola and other nasties.
The fact remains that WBC’s are just not very good weapons.
Impressive language skills from security man though. The paranoia and suspicion of the Turp seems familiar. Maybe it was clau2002 or that other div from a couple of weeks ago.
=))
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