Badphone Does Bucharest

 Last month I spent three nights in Bucharest. Beyond the flight times in my diary and the self tape I'd made pretending to look sad at a dog, I knew nothing about either the job or the city that I was heading to. It was only on the plane that I looked up which country I'd even be in, but I didn't know anything about Romania either. Something to do with vampires? I just knew everything would be taken of, which it was. And Vlad the Impaler was on a mural outside the hotel, so yeah, something to do with vampires.

 

  As I hint or mumble in the video above, heading out onto the streets that first evening after a heavy make-up test – (I'm not sure I can say too much about the job, but it was my first professional experience of waiting two hours for glue to dry: proper acting) – felt pleasantly like taking pot luck through a portal, except the changes this multiverse threw up weren't just that the traffic lights are a different colour now and there are more trees, although there were more trees. God, one month on, does that reference make any sense? Did "Multiverse of Madness" even happen?

 

  It's not just my bad phone's fault that this shoddily-ratioed video is so inadequate a record of how thrilling I remember the place. Also partly to blame was my lack of confidence at filming stangers, and the fact that I was normally out after midnight, so of course some of the city was "surreally deserted". For every empty street I trained my camera on though, there were equally cobbled quarters still bustling and pumping with colour, fresh techno and al fresco you name it, down which I idled avoiding eye contact, and enaged in perhaps that most subconscious-baring of games: making up new titles for Bond films.

 

I still know very little about Romania. I don't know whose any of those heads are in Cismigiu Gardens for example. But I do know the country's a member of the EU, and that the victory mentioned in the place names was over former dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, which might explain all the trees – I was thinking of something Helen Czerski had tweeted about an aspect of twentieth century totalitarian civics I'd never considered.

 

 

 Also, I can now say "Oh, I discovered this DJ in Bucharest," which sounds cool, doesn't it? Why not bung this in your ears next time you fancy a strut?