Ken H. Posted Mar 18, 2008 10:19 AM
Something protesty was supposedly going on at Piata Victoriei on Monday because I was given a detour to commute to the office. Never followed up on why, because it was just another bloodthirsty crowd. Oh, I meant the commute, not the protest.
- K -
03 February, 2010
02 February, 2010
From the Vault: "Mr. Helpful" strikes again!
A former member Posted May 27, 2008 6:44 PM
I am an Architect from India relocating (within a month) to Bucharest on a contract of one year . I need to know everything there is to know about the place, the good , the bad and also the ugly. Please kindly take away a few precious moments to help me out.
_____________________________________________
Ken H. Posted May 27, 2008 11:25 PM
Architecture in Bucharest is the second best planned agency in the city, just after traffic control. Why, with the right bribes to the right ministries, you can build anything you damn well please, without the need for all that tedious research into the impact against public utilities or parking, let alone anything as intangible as quality-of-life. Will the land under the outgoing 1-floor house support the incoming 30-floor office? Will you sever the neighborhood's underground water and electric conduits to dig your foundation? Will the adjacent homes ever see sunshine again? What will 60 new offices do to the parking demand in the vicinity? Who knows? Who cares? Try it and find out! By the time anyone complains, the money's long paid and the addresses long changed.
"No, really, domnule, self-collapsing ceilings are the latest trend! Easy cleaning, and you should get to know your neighbors better, anyway!"
Your average new office building designed for 200 or more people usually contains underground parking for 8 cars, (if by "car" you mean "Vespa") and enough pressure for heat and water to reach nearly halfway up the building! Will your toilet actually empty when you flush it? It's nearly the same odds as Las Vegas, but without all those nasty free drinks and naked showgirls. So come on down and jump in, why let all the local designers have all the fun?
I am an Architect from India relocating (within a month) to Bucharest on a contract of one year . I need to know everything there is to know about the place, the good , the bad and also the ugly. Please kindly take away a few precious moments to help me out.
_____________________________________________
Ken H. Posted May 27, 2008 11:25 PM
Architecture in Bucharest is the second best planned agency in the city, just after traffic control. Why, with the right bribes to the right ministries, you can build anything you damn well please, without the need for all that tedious research into the impact against public utilities or parking, let alone anything as intangible as quality-of-life. Will the land under the outgoing 1-floor house support the incoming 30-floor office? Will you sever the neighborhood's underground water and electric conduits to dig your foundation? Will the adjacent homes ever see sunshine again? What will 60 new offices do to the parking demand in the vicinity? Who knows? Who cares? Try it and find out! By the time anyone complains, the money's long paid and the addresses long changed.
"No, really, domnule, self-collapsing ceilings are the latest trend! Easy cleaning, and you should get to know your neighbors better, anyway!"
Your average new office building designed for 200 or more people usually contains underground parking for 8 cars, (if by "car" you mean "Vespa") and enough pressure for heat and water to reach nearly halfway up the building! Will your toilet actually empty when you flush it? It's nearly the same odds as Las Vegas, but without all those nasty free drinks and naked showgirls. So come on down and jump in, why let all the local designers have all the fun?
01 February, 2010
From the Vault: Advice to potential Bucharest immigrant
Matt Posted Mar 11, 2008 8:22 PM
Hi All,
Currently in the US, I have a job offer in Bucharest. Any answer to below are appreciated.
How big is the expat community in Bucharest?
How are the gyms and nightlife?
How big is the city?
Thanks,
Matt
__________________________________________
Ken H. Posted Mar 11, 2008 11:10
Hi, Matt -
For a take-no-prisoners accurate description of Bucharest and its offerings, you could do much worse than "Bucharest In Your Pocket." It is almost like an anti-tourist guide, being written with much information which is more helpful to the poor suck- errr, distiguished expatriates who make Bucharest their home. It tells you what is truly worthwhile in this city and pulls no punches about what isn't. I am a big fan of the print version! It should answer most or all of your questions in a realistic, non "sponsored by Ministry of Tourism" way. But in the interests of instant gratification, my answers to your questions, off the top of my head are:
How big is the expat community in Bucharest?
Surprisingly big. Not without its share of near-criminal carpetbaggers who come here simply to grab what they can and run. Having said that, most are decent people and a very good representation are right here on this forum.
How are the gyms and nightlife?
Gyms are few and expensive. Very of both. I probably shouldn't speculate on this but I will anyway. Let's just say Bucharest doesn't share the US' 65% overweight rate. :) Therefore I submit that the few full-service gyms are targeted mainly to foreigners and under the assumption that their wallets need to lose weight as much as the rest of them.
Nightlife? Don't ask me... mine consists mainly of stalking online forums like this one. :) Once again, BIYP to the rescue!
How big is the city?
I suppose you could get the geographical statistics from Wikipedia, but an answer which probably more suits your intention for asking is:
Imagine your foot is a size 12. Now imagine your shoe is a size 8. This will give you a functional, if not scientific, insight into the look and feel of daily Bucharest. The concept of "personal space" is completely unknown, and if you're in line somewhere and NOT tightly compressed between an unwashed laborer and a clueless geriatric, well you're just being downright antisocial. Rumor has it the current "baby boom" in Bucharest originated largely in the queues at the Carrefour checkout.
Romania's capital has its many good points, but I grew up spoiled by New York and Los Angeles suburbs. That said, with a bit of tolerance, open-mind, thickish skin and spirit of adventure, you could do a LOT worse than Bucharest. Lacking the aforementioned qualities, you'll still do quite well if you're merely a cynic like myself - this place is a wet dream for that!
So in summary: it's probably best to ignore everything I just said and wait for Jackie or Stefan [Forum moderators, Ed.] to answer you usefully. It's also probably best if I stop logging on here sober, but again I digress!
Best of luck to you whatever your decision!
- Ken -
Hi All,
Currently in the US, I have a job offer in Bucharest. Any answer to below are appreciated.
How big is the expat community in Bucharest?
How are the gyms and nightlife?
How big is the city?
Thanks,
Matt
__________________________________________
Ken H. Posted Mar 11, 2008 11:10
Hi, Matt -
For a take-no-prisoners accurate description of Bucharest and its offerings, you could do much worse than "Bucharest In Your Pocket." It is almost like an anti-tourist guide, being written with much information which is more helpful to the poor suck- errr, distiguished expatriates who make Bucharest their home. It tells you what is truly worthwhile in this city and pulls no punches about what isn't. I am a big fan of the print version! It should answer most or all of your questions in a realistic, non "sponsored by Ministry of Tourism" way. But in the interests of instant gratification, my answers to your questions, off the top of my head are:
How big is the expat community in Bucharest?
Surprisingly big. Not without its share of near-criminal carpetbaggers who come here simply to grab what they can and run. Having said that, most are decent people and a very good representation are right here on this forum.
How are the gyms and nightlife?
Gyms are few and expensive. Very of both. I probably shouldn't speculate on this but I will anyway. Let's just say Bucharest doesn't share the US' 65% overweight rate. :) Therefore I submit that the few full-service gyms are targeted mainly to foreigners and under the assumption that their wallets need to lose weight as much as the rest of them.
Nightlife? Don't ask me... mine consists mainly of stalking online forums like this one. :) Once again, BIYP to the rescue!
How big is the city?
I suppose you could get the geographical statistics from Wikipedia, but an answer which probably more suits your intention for asking is:
Imagine your foot is a size 12. Now imagine your shoe is a size 8. This will give you a functional, if not scientific, insight into the look and feel of daily Bucharest. The concept of "personal space" is completely unknown, and if you're in line somewhere and NOT tightly compressed between an unwashed laborer and a clueless geriatric, well you're just being downright antisocial. Rumor has it the current "baby boom" in Bucharest originated largely in the queues at the Carrefour checkout.
Romania's capital has its many good points, but I grew up spoiled by New York and Los Angeles suburbs. That said, with a bit of tolerance, open-mind, thickish skin and spirit of adventure, you could do a LOT worse than Bucharest. Lacking the aforementioned qualities, you'll still do quite well if you're merely a cynic like myself - this place is a wet dream for that!
So in summary: it's probably best to ignore everything I just said and wait for Jackie or Stefan [Forum moderators, Ed.] to answer you usefully. It's also probably best if I stop logging on here sober, but again I digress!
Best of luck to you whatever your decision!
- Ken -
25 January, 2010
New Low: Blog "Clip Show!"
Subsequent to this blog entry, you will find several "retro" entries entitled "From the Vault." These are actually old posts I wrote in a few user forums I infect frequent, dating back months or even years. But before they fell off the date stack there, I thought they'd fit right in here, and as a bonus, save me having to think up new material for awhile.
15 January, 2010
Apologies for the Delay
One of the things that makes this Blog so fun (and relatively easy) to write is my photographic memory. Literally. I keep my cameraphone at the constant ready, collecting visual non-sequiturs during my daily travels, which are the memory cues to the blog entry I've planned around them. Much of my rants could so easily be dismissed as biased by surliness, if not as outright fiction, without a photo to prove I can't make this stuff up. Since my internal, organic memory is a baby step away from "completely worthless," I've come to depend on my camera to serve as my memory. Hence, I have a "photographic memory." Hey, it impresses the girls when I say this and technically, I'm not lying. But I digress.
It doesn't come without a price, as with most things. In this case, it was a one-two punch of both my cameraphone and my laptop deciding to fail competely within a week of each other. Of course, I diligently backup my phone to my laptop. So when on holiday my LG Renoir suddenly rebooted, in my hand as I watched, back to factory defaults with nary a contact, sms, or photo to be found, I was annoyed but not overly, since all but the most recent photos were safely stored on my laptop, along with all the other stuff.
My bad for not restoring it the second I got home. This gave my laptop a few days to run its automatic background defragment (Thanks, Vista!). Unfortunately, it does NOT first run a disk check for corruption, and since something had indeed slipped a cluster or index entry, defragmenting a corrupted disk is akin to ...well, doing something horribly destructive to your disk which kills it in the same way, but with less wait and effort, than defragmenting it when it's corrupted.
Upon reboot, oh, gee, NOW Vista wants to run the disk check. Thanks heaps. Oh, look, "operating system not found," what a surprise.
Of course, I dlilgently backup my laptop to an external USB drive. That is, at least the My Documents folder where all my personal data is. Um, except for the folder directly off C:\ where I store my cameraphone photos and videos. Yeah, that. Adding insult to injury is that my sms and contact databases were quite snugly backed up inside My Documents. Just not the multimedia. And for the geeks in the room, data recovery programs didn't do much because the good data had been overwritten with bad data, thanks to the defrag.
Well, in the grand scheme of things, no great loss. I remember some of the photos I took for blog purposes, such as my Asshole Driver entry of the Maxi Taxi with no brake lights. At all. Great fun to drive behind. Or the driver who absolutely needed to get past the traffic on DN1 at the underpass construction, and drove the car at a 45-degree angle by having the left wheels UP ON the center divider. All I remember is thinking of Shrek III where he says "Well, SOMEBODY better be dying!" And the photo of the Voluntari lady politician campaign poster where she bore a stunning resemblance to Jack Nicholson's "Joker" in the first Batman movie. All gone, and not worth the thousand words each that the photos would tell.
So we're starting off fresh and with a smarter data backup plan to boot! In the meantime, I'm hunting down some of my old posts on a few expat forums, from before this blog existed but which are definitely made of the same stuff and thus deserve a home here. Hey, it's (probably) new to you...
It doesn't come without a price, as with most things. In this case, it was a one-two punch of both my cameraphone and my laptop deciding to fail competely within a week of each other. Of course, I diligently backup my phone to my laptop. So when on holiday my LG Renoir suddenly rebooted, in my hand as I watched, back to factory defaults with nary a contact, sms, or photo to be found, I was annoyed but not overly, since all but the most recent photos were safely stored on my laptop, along with all the other stuff.
My bad for not restoring it the second I got home. This gave my laptop a few days to run its automatic background defragment (Thanks, Vista!). Unfortunately, it does NOT first run a disk check for corruption, and since something had indeed slipped a cluster or index entry, defragmenting a corrupted disk is akin to ...well, doing something horribly destructive to your disk which kills it in the same way, but with less wait and effort, than defragmenting it when it's corrupted.
Upon reboot, oh, gee, NOW Vista wants to run the disk check. Thanks heaps. Oh, look, "operating system not found," what a surprise.
Of course, I dlilgently backup my laptop to an external USB drive. That is, at least the My Documents folder where all my personal data is. Um, except for the folder directly off C:\ where I store my cameraphone photos and videos. Yeah, that. Adding insult to injury is that my sms and contact databases were quite snugly backed up inside My Documents. Just not the multimedia. And for the geeks in the room, data recovery programs didn't do much because the good data had been overwritten with bad data, thanks to the defrag.
Well, in the grand scheme of things, no great loss. I remember some of the photos I took for blog purposes, such as my Asshole Driver entry of the Maxi Taxi with no brake lights. At all. Great fun to drive behind. Or the driver who absolutely needed to get past the traffic on DN1 at the underpass construction, and drove the car at a 45-degree angle by having the left wheels UP ON the center divider. All I remember is thinking of Shrek III where he says "Well, SOMEBODY better be dying!" And the photo of the Voluntari lady politician campaign poster where she bore a stunning resemblance to Jack Nicholson's "Joker" in the first Batman movie. All gone, and not worth the thousand words each that the photos would tell.
So we're starting off fresh and with a smarter data backup plan to boot! In the meantime, I'm hunting down some of my old posts on a few expat forums, from before this blog existed but which are definitely made of the same stuff and thus deserve a home here. Hey, it's (probably) new to you...
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