...continued

Well, it’s been a while and I’ve forgotten a lot of what happened that day. I do know that we met a lady who used to work in storage at the tool factory. I hadn’t seen her since I was 10, and only remembered her vaguely. She made quite an impression on me. I could easily tell that she had been the kind of working-girl who would do her hair in the morning even though she knew that the industrial safety helmet would ruin it. She must have been a pleasant sight back in the day ;). She was still quite charming, actually. My father later told me that she had been made redundant even before he himself was forced into retirement, her husband had recently died and both her children live in Spain.

It’s the kind of tale that leaves a bad taste in your mouth. So we went into a bar for a drink. I remembered that we used to do this from time to time, except this time around I could drink alcohol. It was a familiar thing to do with my father, even though I estimated that he hadn’t been to a bar in years. The bar however was very unfamiliar. I had seen it from the outside before, but it never deserved a second look. It was basically a neighbourhood garage with a few tin tables painted bright red, and some pseudo-Chinese ornaments on the walls. The population was comprised of a young bartender-girl and two sorry-looking seniors who probably had nothing better to do than to drink their remaining years away. At that point I wasn’t thirsty any more. The utterly sad nature of the spectacle had made me forget it, I guess.  So, my father got himself a glass of wine. I was abhorred to see that the glass was actually a pint. They usually serve beer in that sort of quantity and that sort of glass. The only reason I took a taste was to find out what places like this offer for half the price of a soft drink :)). Well, it was more or less a soft drink. The alcohol level was decent, but why would red wine taste like strawberries? We had serious doubts about the composition of the… liquid, but with a little effort he managed to drink most of it and we could move on. Success in finding what we had set out to find however kept avoiding us.

(the picture is from azivreau.ro)

Walking through an era…

 I've been meaning to share this story since December, but lacked the time, will and inspiration to do so. Time is ticking, and it’s not in my favour, yet it certainly seems to have an energizing effect, so here I go. J

Taking a long walk around town with my father reminded me of my childhood. We used to do that a lot, covering several miles in an afternoon, so that day in early December was quite a flashback in more ways than one, actually. We set out to look for a shop I had found on-line that sells binoculars. It was a little strange for such a place to be located in the vicinity of what was once the tractor factory, but stranger things have happened, and I was happy to help my father find it. The distance was meagre, but the weather was awful: sleet seemed to linger under a leaden sky, rather then fall from it. I hadn’t seen that neighbourhood for quite some time, and I expected to be surprised by the transformation. Well, I was surprised by the lack of it: blocks of flats from the late 70s, as grey as they were when they first came into existence as the result of some five-year plan, but a bit more dilapidated than they would have been at the height of socialist expansion.

Eventually we came to a small square, with a two-floor concrete building in the center: the commie version of a department store. It used to be one, at least. The windows were broken, the doors were nailed shut, the walls had bullet-holes in them, and pieces of the socialist realist mosaic that once adorned the façade covered the surrounding pavement. It literally looked like the 1989 coup revolution had happened the day before. I don’t remember that, but I do remember the 90s, when lots of buildings still shared this war-torn image. The primitive graffiti clearly defined the time period this capsule had come from: socialism was over, Coke was still a Christmas treat, Nirvana screamed from Russian-made cassette-players and I was finally out of kindergarten. The only thing missing was the thousands of factory workers on strike.

It was strange enough, slightly disturbing even, but more was to come. Having given up on finding the shop, we roamed around a bit. I was surprised to hear that my father had lived here during his school years, before he started work in the hand tools factory. We weren’t on 90s street any more and the air of the 70s was also blocked by a line of trees and a row of older buildings, much friendlier to the eye (but commie nonetheless.) The blocks of flats had roofs, there was some vegetation and a crooked little street lined with small houses. There were no communist posters or banners, and there were a few fancy suvs in the car park, but other than that the place was as it would have have been in the 50s & 60s. The weather certainly added to the effect, and the painted shop signs were totally authentic (and not because the owner was aiming for a vintage look), as was the old man in the overalls riding a rickety old bike. Both he and his bike were from the glory days of this place.  

[‘found a picture from the 50s on wikimedia – the basic features are identifiable]

Finally, we decided to walk across town to check out the flea market, like we used to, and ran into some interesting people. More on that later….