That turning off the lights for an hour has become such an acceptable (and, let’s face it, painless) way of protesting says much about the top down, elitist green movement’s world view, which sees deprivation and poverty as lifestyle choices, and thinks that people in the developing world should be spared the excesses of our [...]
Posts Tagged ‘Nicolae Ceausescu’
Bucharest Life 2009
A week or so late, here is Bucharest Life’s Review of the Year that was 2009. January A new government, led by Traian Basescu and Little Emil Boc, installed following parliamentary elections at the end of 2008, introduces, amongst other moves of sheer political genius, a compulsory profit tax for small companies (even those that [...]
Where all is rationed, but praise for the leader…
Raided the New York Times (NYT) archive again this morning. Found this, a very good despatch from the NYT’s man in Bucharest, Alan Riding, filed 20 years ago to the day: With foreign delegates and journalists in town for this month’s Rumanian Communist Party congress, it was standard practice for the Government to supply Bucharest’s [...]
Why monopolies are crap
The commercial arm of the state news agency, Agerpres, is the only archive we know of specialist stuff from Romania’s past. We really do wish there were other sources. We got in touch with them earlier this week, about a photo we wanted to use to help illustrate a feature we are running on the [...]
Most Bucharest restaurants seem unwilling to serve foreigners
As we are sure you already know, Bucharest’s Lispcani’s district was featured in the New York Times on Sunday, in an article which, without flattering ourselves, we would generously suggest is not as good as our vastly superior – in that we refrain from using words like ‘gritty’ and ‘artsy’ – article we wrote for [...]