This year's NATO Summit is being hosted by our newly adopted home-city, which means that within two or three days our neighbors will include Bush, Putin, Sarkozy, and Hamid Karzai. The highlight of the summit, according to the latest round-up of world news, will be discussions of Afganistan. The "Macedonia" issue is also slated for discussion (whether FYROM, the Former Yugoslav. Republic of Macedonia, whose very name the Greeks reject for complicated reasons, should be allowed to join the NATO party).
With the imminent arrival of so much blustery power in one city, here in the "age of Terror," things are feeling a little spooky. Our normally boisterous Piata Lahovari (just steps from the massive Howard Johnson's, where surely many dignitaries will be staying) is utterly empty, since the streets surrounding us have all been barricaded. Snipers are already practicing their drills and finding suitable perches on nearby buildings (not a comforting thought, or perhaps it is supposed to be a comforting thought...); stray dogs are being "removed" from their usual pooping and sniffing routes to who knows where; they are reinforcing the windows of the local McDonald's and KFC (American businesses are famous targets for protestors); and all the million man-hole covers in town have been sealed with bright rubber tape, to indicate whether or not they have been pried open. The reason for that last precaution is fascinating: Ceausescu and his evil Securitate forces honeycombed the city's underworld with elaborate systems of tunnels, primarily for the purposes of spying upon the citizens of Bucharest. Since these tunnels connect the most important buildings in town, they are an obvious security concern.
What does this mean for us? For the first time since we arrived in Bucharest, it was QUIET last night...almost too quiet to sleep. When we make our rounds to the nearby playgrounds, low-flying helicopters buzz overhead (are they watching us?). There are police of every variety huddled around walkie-talkies about every hundred yards on every sidewalk here in the city center. There are gangs of men in dark suits and dark sunglasses standing around very fancy cars with darkened windows. In short, we feel very much like we are being watched, like we might be under suspicion just for stealing out to buy another jug of drinking water and two more of the ever-insufficient containers of milk that we go through at an alarming rate.
It also means that our city is looking very spiffy all of a sudden: in a few short days of uncharacteristic efficiency, our square was dug up, landscaped, and festooned with shrubs and flowers. Everywhere you look there are fresh coats of paint, and supernaturally green sod where there was mud or dust just last week. There is the illusion of cleanliness where there was only a moment ago the reality of urban filth. In contrast, new kinds of graffiti (see a photographic example, above) are beginning to appear on the walls of just-scoured buildings.
Post-Communist Bucharest, we have seen, bustles with capitalist energy and its citizens now almost take for granted their personal freedoms...even if we do frquently note on the faces of the older citizens (those who knew the hard realities of the Ceausescu era) a hardened look of suspicion and weary stocism that just won't go away.
So this week's NATO Summit and the security explosion offers us just a taste of what it must have been like to live under constant surveillance. It's not a little ironic that the summit is being partly headquartered in Ceausescu's monstrous palace, now re-dubbed the "House of Parliament," or the "House of the People," which could only be built after bulldozing a huge portion of the old city, including monasteries and churches.
As for us, well we're heading out of town for the summit itself. If what we're seeing now is merely security "practice," we'd rather be storming the remote villages of Maramures in our rental car....far, far, away...where no dignitaries are likely to mess things up.
With the imminent arrival of so much blustery power in one city, here in the "age of Terror," things are feeling a little spooky. Our normally boisterous Piata Lahovari (just steps from the massive Howard Johnson's, where surely many dignitaries will be staying) is utterly empty, since the streets surrounding us have all been barricaded. Snipers are already practicing their drills and finding suitable perches on nearby buildings (not a comforting thought, or perhaps it is supposed to be a comforting thought...); stray dogs are being "removed" from their usual pooping and sniffing routes to who knows where; they are reinforcing the windows of the local McDonald's and KFC (American businesses are famous targets for protestors); and all the million man-hole covers in town have been sealed with bright rubber tape, to indicate whether or not they have been pried open. The reason for that last precaution is fascinating: Ceausescu and his evil Securitate forces honeycombed the city's underworld with elaborate systems of tunnels, primarily for the purposes of spying upon the citizens of Bucharest. Since these tunnels connect the most important buildings in town, they are an obvious security concern.
What does this mean for us? For the first time since we arrived in Bucharest, it was QUIET last night...almost too quiet to sleep. When we make our rounds to the nearby playgrounds, low-flying helicopters buzz overhead (are they watching us?). There are police of every variety huddled around walkie-talkies about every hundred yards on every sidewalk here in the city center. There are gangs of men in dark suits and dark sunglasses standing around very fancy cars with darkened windows. In short, we feel very much like we are being watched, like we might be under suspicion just for stealing out to buy another jug of drinking water and two more of the ever-insufficient containers of milk that we go through at an alarming rate.
It also means that our city is looking very spiffy all of a sudden: in a few short days of uncharacteristic efficiency, our square was dug up, landscaped, and festooned with shrubs and flowers. Everywhere you look there are fresh coats of paint, and supernaturally green sod where there was mud or dust just last week. There is the illusion of cleanliness where there was only a moment ago the reality of urban filth. In contrast, new kinds of graffiti (see a photographic example, above) are beginning to appear on the walls of just-scoured buildings.
Post-Communist Bucharest, we have seen, bustles with capitalist energy and its citizens now almost take for granted their personal freedoms...even if we do frquently note on the faces of the older citizens (those who knew the hard realities of the Ceausescu era) a hardened look of suspicion and weary stocism that just won't go away.
So this week's NATO Summit and the security explosion offers us just a taste of what it must have been like to live under constant surveillance. It's not a little ironic that the summit is being partly headquartered in Ceausescu's monstrous palace, now re-dubbed the "House of Parliament," or the "House of the People," which could only be built after bulldozing a huge portion of the old city, including monasteries and churches.
As for us, well we're heading out of town for the summit itself. If what we're seeing now is merely security "practice," we'd rather be storming the remote villages of Maramures in our rental car....far, far, away...where no dignitaries are likely to mess things up.
Christopher
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