As I was passing by a church in my neighborhood the other day, I saw a woman beggar at the gate. Her face seemed familiar. I thought I had seen her before and, a few steps later, I had remembered where: she looked like an old woman – she seemed to be a gypsy - whose face had been all over TV in the days that followed immediately after the European Parliament elections in the spring of 2009. There’s no surprise I had remembered her: the image of this woman pushing her ballot into the ballot box was featured in the Der Spiegel German newspaper, which had in its turn taken it from the BBC website. It was part of the “Europe in Pictures” section, together with other images which were considered specific of EU countries, in which citizens were exercising their right to vote on that day. Austria, for example, was represented in photographs of students, and Germany through a group of men in Bavarian costumes. When Romania had its turn, the image of this lady voting, with the Romanian flag behind her, appeared together with the following explanation: Romanian lady voting. Two days later, the photograph was withdrawn from the site. I was then in for a shock, as I heard a Romanian journalist state that the selection of this photograph, which was meant to represent us, was realistic and correct: yes, it’s true, there are such people in Romania, therefore, this is Romania. Appalled, I asked myself how a journalist could ever reason this way. I am not saying that Romanians are well off; on the contrary, we are not doing well at all lately. Romania does not only have people who are very poor, but also people who are sick and who are not cared for by anyone. There are thieves and rapists and murderers as well - perhaps fewer than elsewhere - but to make them represent an entire country is either unfair and malevolent, or a dangerous lack of logic: not everything that exists in a country is representative for it.
A few months ago I was talking to our publisher, an American who has been coming to Romania every month for the last 17 years and who spends enough time here to know us, as we are, as a people, both good and bad. He is a frequent traveler, and he told me that all you hear and see about Romania abroad is bad. And he was justified in wondering why??  There’s no point in talking about our Olympics here, who win International Mathematics and Physics Contests every year, about the huge number of Romanian graduate and post-graduate students in Western universities, and particularly in America, about the Romanian artists, scientists, inventors or doctors - who are fully trained here and then imported into England and France on salaries that are 10-15 times higher. Each people has its valuable individuals and turning them into a symbol would be, perhaps, just as wrong as choosing the image of that lady. It is not that which is exclusively good or exclusively bad that represents us, but that which is truly specific, which you can only find here: a certain feeling in the streets, in the cities, people’s inner being, their behavior, the way they talk, dress, eat, enjoy themselves. The way in which they make friends or enemies, in which they believe in God, in which they prove their originality and in which they imitate, the way in which they innovate while still maintaining their traditions.
This is why we will present the six sectors of Bucharest in our editions which will follow: not only to remind you about the well known places, which you can find in any tourist guide, but especially to point out another type of attraction, which Bucharest can claim in full: that of small streets, parks or neighborhoods, forgotten by the world, lost in some hidden part of the city or sometimes not far from the center, but which are still “undiscovered”, meaning they are rarely visited and not integrated in any conventional tourist circuit. A stunning blend of primitivism and extreme refinement, such places hide the latent promises of many beginnings within them. By visiting them, the open minded and picturesque-seeking traveler will learn how to find the charm of our city and of the people who live here.
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