American Travel Blogs (IV/V): “MY IMPRESSION OF BUCHAREST, ROMANIA”
Travel Blogger: Norbert from globotreks.com
Norbert seems to be the most academic of the bloggers, the most objective, considering that traveling is an inherently personal experience. However, he doesn’t have the same personal connection to Bucharest as Earl, who is in fact his friend and guide, nor is he smitten by the beauty as Silvia is, who met Romania from an aesthetic perspective. Rather, he seems to understand Bucharest, to discover its past, and to comprehend the space he is in. He thus does what Bellow tries to do, which is demystify or explain the context of the country (in Norbert’s case, of Bucharst).
As such, he is honest from the beginning:
“I have to be honest about my “extensive” knowledge of Romania. Dracula… that pretty much sums it all!’
This is where his interest in the genuine history of Bucharest might come from. Nonetheless, not knowing about a place one is visiting can provide with a much better platform for understanding it.
„As we walked around the city center I noticed it is not the usual touristy center you normally find in Europe. Where are the hop-on hop-off buses? Where are the souvenir shops? Where’s the tourist information office?” which let you know you’re in the “right spot, among other tourists’
One could conclude from this that Bucharest does a great job at assimilating tourists, normalizing the practice of tourism. The lack of a tourism industry seems to be an underlying theme found in all the blog entries. It is not so much Romania being unfriendly to foreigners, on the contrary, most bloggers have had great time in the country, as far as people go. Rather, it seems that Romania is unaware of its touristic potential. Could this be a masked attempt at simply falling in the ‘normality’ of the West?
„In my opinion, Bucharest’s city center didn’t feel like such at all. It felt more like a well-developed city rather than a capital city… Bucharest is all about the experimentation of the city and the discovery of the bits and pieces of its history scattered all throughout the city… Bucharest has a much shorter, and possibly a more calamitous history, that directly threaded the fabric of the city you see today.”
Just like Bellow, he understands the reason behind the city aesthetic, and he rationalizes it. He doesn’t keep to the superficial, and as such, he is able to experience the city, or any place, for that matter, in its real context. That is significant because instead of complaining about the smell on the train, or the pot-holes, or the buses forever late, he understands that he is a tourist, someone fleetingly in this place, and he can understand the pace he is in. Which in turn, gives him space to discover the place, instead of complaining, or focusing on the negative, with no context to frame it. He thus bridges the distance between him and the Other, making the Other accessible, and understandable.
He even provides with 250-word history of Bucharest, which is something quite unusual for a tourist blog. Again, it grounds the place in reality, and de-exoticize it:
„This history, still palpable in the city’s fabric, is what makes Bucharest feel like such an Eastern European city.’
He concludes that „Bucharest might be a young city in age, but in “experience”, it can show and tell more than you would expect.”, in effect, reinforcing the idea that knowing a place means knowing its people.
Original article: http://www.globotreks.com/destinations/romania/impression-bucharest/
