Colours are often faded here, since there are a lot of gray areas around. Literally. It’s so gray and dusty that every time I stumble upon something colorful, I smile a wide smile. I found around 10 colorful things today, and from all of those, these two had the best contrast. 

Torn tape and a scarred heart. Cars and ducks, all asleep. Overall, a nice Sunday in the grayest area of Europe.

These two historical sites - the restaurant on the lake Cismigiu and the Victoria Casino - surprised me today after a long time, as I noticed they have something in common: patches.

Barely functional, the restaurant lost its oldschool glamour years ago - its windows broken, its waiters desolate, its prices underwhelming - so it has no choice but to wait for a good man to revamp it and use it like its architect intented to. 

The casino is as run-down and dysfunctional as any other splendid old villa on the main boulevard. That aluminum door is scary to behold. It’s crazy how sad these houses look like, it’s almost like they were alive and ashamed of their patches, or I’m just really good at anthropomorphism.

Filth and its deep traces are the vernis of every outdoor object in the city. Grime completes the already sloppy-looking phonebooths, newspaper-stands, benches, taxis and tram stations and gives a remarkable twist to the way the city feels - like a tangled web of hair, mud and slime that will make you dirty no matter who you are. The heavy air, the dust that I breathe in every day with a strange delight go together perfectly with these evergrowing colonies of bacteria that have taken over entire buildings and sometimes even parts of nature.

Interestingly enough, these two photos above seem to share a phallic motif, one that is ever-present on the walls of the city - by which I mean that there are a lot of pricks of all shapes and sizes in Bucharest.

It’s been a long time since I last held a camera in my hands. Having one with me for the past few days was quite rewarding, even if only 2 days have passed so far - I abused this little camera with my unquenchable hunger for good shots and somehow chance turned on me and stopped me from finding the real treasures. As I was walking down the streets of Bucharest I felt more and more like a hungry animal that, after weeks of searching, randomly stumbles upon food and eats and eats until it can’t eat anymore, fearing that will be its last meal in months. I did not yet dare venture too far into the city, so I settled with whatever my neighbourhood presented me with, ignoring the gray clouds and limits of an 18-55mm lens.

I found these two very baroque-looking buildings that share a wonderful centerpiece - a door and a window - and some nasty little bites of time and decay. There’s no two buildings in Bucharest that look alike, but what most do share is an advanced state of degradation. Decay can be wonderful though, I imagined wet, dark, cave-like apartments behind these doors and impressive pieces of furniture that have merged with the organic walls of these half-abandoned structures. 

I felt a tingle of pleasure at the thought of nature taking over this city like it did in Angkor Wat hundreds of years ago. Nature would do a great job restoring these facades, unlike the blind, spineless, limbless people I share the city with.

I wonder how long my shift of perspective will last, once I get used to this city again. The impact its changes have on me is very rewarding, I see nothing but improvement everywhere, and I suppose it’s by contrasting it to the various sorts of human settlements I passed through recently. Leaving a place for a while gives you an incredible view of the larger scheme of things - even the city itself seems smaller and easier to navigate through. 

I’m living a new type of reality these days, one sprinkled with all sorts of brief or very long encounters with the kind of people I’ve been missing all this time. I probably won’t start telling you stories about the ways of the Romanians from now on, but do expect more eventfulness.

This is a collage of my first few days back here. My closest friend Bianca is a constant presence in my interactions with Bucharest, so there will be a lot of her over here. And buildings, there will probably be a lot of those too. 

My trip ended abruptly a month ago. Abruplty is kind of a big word though, since I always knew it was bound to end, I almost even knew how. I left Bangkok, after having spent one month there, in that apartment I was telling you about in that previous post - whimsically entitled “awe”, which is exactly what I’ve been experiencing ever since I came back to Romania. 

This sort of ending up/beginning in Romania comes after 4 years of not having any real contact with my place of birth - other than daydreaming over the internet, that is. Being in Asia for 7 months was of course the highlight of these years and also the reason I started my travelogue, which I don’t want to stop writing on just because I’ve settled in an old (yet unfamiliar) homebase. 

I guess you can live an adventure anywhere, really. Let’s see how that goes without a good camera.

And another set.

Here’s another round of photos to reenforce the idea below.

What I want to show from the photo chain above is that in Laos, no matter what you do, at some point you will certainly end up in the water.

The flooded rice paddies, the tubes and the giant water slide, they all work with water from the Namsong river, the main reason for wasted white people to invade the eversosplendid landscape of Vang Vieng.

The weather was always the same in the afternoon; it is, after all, the rainy season in Laos, and the Mekong is fat and strong. I like these two photos a lot, their mood perfectly reflects the wet afternoon feeling on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere. It’s a particularly quiet feeling.

Here’s some statues and religious carvings from the Buddha park near Vientiane, the capital of Lao PDR. This is a place some Lao animist shaman/Buddhist monk built in the 50s, carving most of the statues with his own hands. The statues look ancient and their strange faces and quirky decorative motifs might puzzle the visitor at fist sight. I felt like in a tiny amusement park made out of stone, I just couldn’t halt my impulse to climb, sometimes even crawl all over the pieces of stone and strike a pose.

There’s quite a few things going on these days in my life, and the Lao People’s Democratic Republic is one of them. As soon as I get to a more evolved form of internet, I’ll sum up the past three weeks of virtual inactivity. I’ve been lacking proper internet for quite some time, which made me certain of the fact that internet should be right next to food, sex and shelter on Maslow’s pyramid.

Until then, here are some photos of nature and such.

I’m back in Kuala Lumpur, the place I started this trip 4 months ago. I retraced my steps; everything is the same here, but things have shifted in my mind. Some time needs to pass until I’m able to rearrange them, allow them to make sense. Some of them already make sense, like these two very important things I’ve learned while traveling:

1. Always lower your expectations. If it sucks, you won’t be surprised, if it doesn’t, you’ll be in for a treat.

2. It’s always harder to go down than up. Much harder, since it can get slippery and wet and you might just land on your head.

There should be more - they don’t spring to mind right now - but I’ll make sure to write them down when they come to me, along with all the silly ideas for apps I get these days. (Like an app for recognizing trees or some way of projecting text onto and out of your mask underwater, oh they’d be so useful, both of these.) Meanwhile, we’ll be hopping on a train to Bangkok, embarking on a very long journey, a 2000 km journey that should give us enough time to ponder and devise ways of turning ideas into more money for traveling and whatnot.

+ These photos are just random shots of KL, sharing no pattern, just summing it up neatly and cohesively for the purpose of this journal. It’s a pity I didn’t have the camera with me today, while visiting the brilliant museum of Islamic arts and then walking for hours on the edge of highways, (since KL has the suckiest pedestrian walkways in Asia), that would’ve helped with the ensemble.

Here are a few animals we got to hang out with in Indonesia. Dolphins in Lovina, Bali and then tarsiers, black macaques, tarantulas, some sort of an isopod and mousedeer in Tangkoko, Sulawesi. This time, photos both by myself and Psalmplasma.