The day before yesterday I arrived back to Bucharest. From Sighisoara I got a lift with my host Tino to Timisoara near the Hungarian and Serbian border. Thanks again, Tino! At 2am I got to the squat / bar / social centre “INCA” in Timisoara’s centre. I opened the door and to loud drum and bass the last remaining guests were dancing on the benches. Wow, that’s my kind of place I thought. Claudia from Portugal welcomed me and showed me around. I met her and her boyfriend with the van before a few times in Bucharest and Sibiu in Transsylvania. I put my mattress and my stuff behind the bar into the big, cosy, rustic living part of the place with a lot of improvised contructions, a big painting, black-and-white punk and activist posters and a small kitchen corner. There was another five Portuguese people, an American, two Romanians and a dog as well. The jolly crowd was partying late.. The next night there was a hard-core metal concert in the concert room, which was packed with many, many young people. It’s kind of handy to have all this in one place and just step out of your sleeping room into a concert. ^_^ The night after was cinema night and because there was no movie scheduled I could put on 90 minutes of short movies, trailers, documentaries and music videos about alter-globalist activism that I had collected on my laptop. Brought to you by truely free software of course (Xine on Debian Linux)..
The morning after I got up very early, ugh, walked to the popular hitchhiking spot towards east. I knew I have 9 hours of driving alone infront of me, plus waiting for lifts. It was a few degrees below zero, thank god someone gave me a warm jacket the day before. It was like a bus stop, in fact it was a bus stop, people arrived, stood for a few minutes and got picked up. The people hitchhiking were students going home for the weekend, commuting or just coming from the open market. They saw my sign, looked at me again and wished me good luck. After an hour a man going to Craiova, that’s half the way, stopped, took another person with him and went on towards the rising sun. We didn’t talk much, every now and then he pointed out something along the road. My bits of Romanian were sufficient. I used the tram to get through Craiova to another busy, busy hitchhiking spot towards Bucharest. After half an hour a smaller truck stopped, the driver pointed at my sign and waved at me, sending away the other people that were quickly rushing towards the lorry. It was dark when we arrived and I had quite some problems orientating and finding a way from the big shopping centre outside Bucharest that I was dropped at to the centre. Monstrous Bucharest grunted and farted, infested by thousands of cars and ugly concrete structures. Big roads, bridges, trucks, darkness, city dirt, Romanian-style big unmarked gaps and holes in the paths – not a pedestrian-friendly place at all.