Nov 2014 – Kerk Boon Leng Photographs & Notes

bucharest

If Bucharest were located anywhere in the world but Europe, I am sure planeloads of people would travel all the way there to see it and find reasons to describe it as interesting, grand and maybe beautiful.

Many would no doubt delight in its hectares of parklands and lakes and architecture that is an eclectic mix of styles, madness and concrete.

But Bucharest belongs these days in Europe. As a poor new member of an elite club in a continent brimming with magnificent historic cities, it is seldom given the respect and praise it deserves.

In fact, Romanians have grown used to their capital city being from time to time mistaken for a famous Hungarian city further up the Danube and overlooked by tourists eagerly rushing to Transylvania to see Dracula and his doubtful castle.

Most tourists spend hardly any time in Bucharest fearing that the city is destitute, dangerous or too drab a place to linger.

Quite remarkable for a people with a not so distant memory of deprivation, schizophrenia and collective trauma, Romanians especially the citizens of Bucharest are an honest, hardy and heartwarming lot with a noticeable fondness for large canines.

Bucharest’s love affair with animals especially dogs may be linked to the city’s legendary founding by a shepherd named Bucur. The city’s streets had a reputation for its stray dogs that made rare front news for biting their victim occasionally to death. Even so, all the dogs I saw there were happy hounds either tugging on a leash or busy retrieving a stick in the park.

Bucharest ( population 2 million ) is the biggest city in the formerly communist part of Europe, an area roughly between Berlin and Istanbul, known at one time as the Eastern Bloc.

In greatness size matters but what makes Bucharest a great European metropolis is its raw spirit and authentic atmosphere.

It is self-deprecating but hopeful. It is a real place where people have faces, food tastes like it should and young people eloquently share their views with total strangers in flawless English. It is a city that doesn’t see the need to put on any make up for visitors.

For this reason Bucharest is less a city to sightsee than one to fall seriously in love with and to return to even during its cold snowy winters.

All images copyright Kerk Boon Leng October 2014

Nov 17, 2014Nov 25, 2014 by dkwts Categories: ROMANIATags: Bucharest Photograph Blog, Bucharest Travel, Bucharest Travel Advice 3 Comments

priponesti

A few hours of sleep after we arrived by train in Barlad we put on old overalls and went with Alex’s parents to Priponesti. It is a village 24 km to the south west where the family keeps a small vineyard for both commerce and consumption. It was wine harvesting time. The mainly white and some red grapes must be hand picked before rain, cold and frost arrive later in the month.

All images copyright Kerk Boon Leng October 2014

Nov 16, 2014May 31, 2015 by dkwts Categories: ROMANIATags: Moldavia Romania, Moldavia Travel Blog, Moldavia Vineyard, Priponesti photographs, Priponesti Romania, Priponesti travel, Romania vineyard photographs

tiraspol

Intriguingly, one of the top tourist attractions in Moldova is not a place inside Moldova.

Transnistria or the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic, is a confetti strip of Russian-speaking territory on the left side of the Dniester River that declared itself independent in 1992 after fighting a brief but bloody war to break off from Moldova.

No country has so far recognized Transnistria as a sovereign nation, not even Russia which underwrites the territory’s de facto status by protecting it with its army and supplying it with money and free gas.

Today all visitors (even Moldovans) need to have a passport and fill out a simple form at the border to get into Transnistria. No entry stamp or visa is needed nor given as under international law and treaties, Transnistria does not exist.

Even so, the country has its own currency, president, army and a fiery flag.

Although the country occupies the region in Moldova where historically factories and industries are located, it now survives mainly by selling cognac, smuggling and on Russia’s goodwill.

Transnistria’s existence as a political terra nullius surrounded by unfriendly neighbours has allowed organised crime to flourish within its borders.

Many Moldavians blame Transnistrians for the bad publicity their country is getting overseas. They say that most of the smuggling of weapons and women people say are coming out of Moldova happen in fact in Transnistria.

On their part, Transnistrians (almost in equal numbers Russians, Ukrainians and ethnic Moldavians), are aghast at the prospect of being swallowed up by Romania as part of Moldova and have clung on to the security and nostalgia of the old soviet system. They held a referendum in 2006 in which they voted overwhelmingly (98%) to join Russia.

Not having visited Russia before and excited to visit what I had read on the Internet is the world’s last slice of the USSR, I half-expected to find in the capital Tiraspol, matryoshka-like matrons forming queues to buy bread, goose-stepping soldiers in huge grey public squares and rusting hammer and sickle signs everywhere.

Instead when Eugeniu drove me across from Chisinau in a red rented Chinese-made sedan on a warm and sunny afternoon a month ago, I found a surprisingly pleasant and ordinary place. Tiraspol looked to me, a spic, span and spacious place perhaps more like a New Zealand town on Boxing Day than the capital of a renegade Soviet-styled republic